Black Widow Blues. Townes Van Zandt. 2003. TVZ Records.

Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 video document of Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of England, features a musical exchange between Dylan and Donovan, who’ve only just recently met. Much has been written of the filmed encounter, with a clear consensus declaring Dylan the obvious winner, as if the two had been filmed sparring. Yet what we’re watching is little more than a demonstration of musical traditions, albeit one of them by an artist who clearly understood how traditions can be manipulated and exploited by the steadfast refusal to enslave yourself to their often unstated rules. Over the course of the next two years a similar meeting was made possible by two recordings, the first by Townes Van Zandt in a Nashville recording studio in 1966, followed by the second recording, the release of Dylan’s eighth studio LP, John Wesley Harding, in 1967, also recorded in Nashville. Van Zandt’s record is an exhilarating blues that employs standard rhetorical tropes—“Got a black widow spider for a mama, Lord”—to justify a lover’s outrageous qualifications for an imminent on-the-go seduction. Drifter’s Escape, the Dylan number, is an exhilarating ballad that, like most of John Wesley Harding, allegorizes the theme of freedom as the necessary, but often elusive, complement to justice. Both songs, rhythmically driven, are motors of locomotion carrying forward and redrawing, broadening, the contours of the American musical past and its mythological history in the ongoing effort to further pop music’s undeclared attempt at a redefinition of the increasingly accelerating present. The focus of Black Widow Blues is its sexual tension, fiercely ratcheted up by the psychological menace in the young Van Zandt’s drawled delivery. Given his personal history, it’s the sort of artistic aggression that rings so true it becomes perversely, compulsively listenable, the record collection equivalent of knowing that someone among you on the dancefloor is crazed enough to brandish a weapon, and this only adding to the evening’s excitement. For a generation who grew up reading Hunter Thompson’s account of the time he spent with the Hell’s Angels, or Helter Skelter and Ed Sanders’ The Family, or the Tony Sanchez book about his history spent procuring illegal drugs for The Rolling Stones, Van Zandt’s broken mirror perspective is like a consolation that grows increasingly tender the further from the beyond it has to reach us. And the harmonica on Black Widow Blues plays like the memory of a loved one’s sharpened fingernail running from your tailbone to your neck in a darkened room after you’ve both sorted the lies from the truths and the whisky has only just started to pulse.

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