Townes Van Zandt - Live At The Old Quarter CDs • Vinyl Records • LPs • Music Albums

when Van Zandt performed at a legendary Houston club in July 1973, the album features the singer alone with an acoustic guitar doing twenty-three of his best songs. These versions of "If I Needed You," "No Place to Fall" and "Tower Song" are as charged with emotion as they are rigorously unsentimental. "Everything is not enough/ And nothing is too much to bear," he sings; the stoic idealism of those lines sums up all his best work.

Onstage, Van Zandt would often seem to disappear into his songs, as if he were at once completely united with his listeners and a million miles away. He maintained concentration that way, and you can feel the stringent force of his focus here, all the more strongly for the coughs, chatter, shuffling and clinking of glasses in the tiny club. His singing likewise is simultaneously laconic and intent - a style that suggests there is no truth so harsh it can't be stated plainly and beautifully.

ANTHONY DECURTIS
(RS 911 – December 12, 2002)