Townes Van Zandt is the epitome of a cult musician. He spent most his life playing at dive bars and his record sales were dismal throughout his career. Yet the fans he does have — like the exalted Bob Dylan — are obsessed with his music. When a tiny ad was taken out in Rolling Stone for “The Official Townes Van Zandt Fan Club,” hundreds of people wrote back, quoting his songs, saying the music changed their lives and gave them hope.

I feel the same way.

To fill you in, Van Zandt is a pretty traditional folk singer-songwriter. His lyrics are pure poetry, which leads him to a “sing-talking” thing. His voice isn’t for everyone but his songwriting is peerless. On acoustic, he does everything: from classical finger-picking to speedy folk strumming. In the words of famed songwriter Steve Earle, “Townes is the best songwriter in the whole world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that.”

So why haven’t more people heard of Townes Van Zandt? For starters, his music is too heavy for some. You can’t really play it at a party. I wouldn’t even sit with a couple friends and drink beers to it. It’s lonely person’s music. It’s the kind of thing you could play at 3 a.m. while passing out alone in bed.

A reporter once asked Van Zandt, “Why are most of your songs sad?” The singer replied, “I have a few that aren’t sad — they’re like hopeless, totally hopeless situations. And the rest aren’t sad, they’re just the way it goes kinda.”

Indeed, songs like “Nothin,” “Marie” and “Lungs,” while hauntingly beautiful, are pretty hopeless. But it’s no wonder the music is full of sorrow. The man’s life was pretty heavy.

At 20, he was given insulin shock therapy to “treat” his bipolar disorder. As a result, the man lost all of his childhood memories. After the surgery, Townes spent most of his adult days getting loaded and occasionally shooting heroin.

In a way, Van Zandt was the essence of a “self-destructive” personality. His biography A Deeper Blue reveals this all too well. When an ex-girlfriend asks why he left her, he says, “Because I was falling in love with you.” He even sabotaged his musical career by playing drunk, gambling away money on tour and shunning the media.

But really Van Zandt’s self-destruction was more an act of asceticism. He needed to be broke, lonely and miserable to write his “sad and hopeless” tunes. If he had a fatal flaw, it was this blind devotion to music. Van Zandt once said his decision to pursue music meant “blowing everything off — family, money, security, happiness, freedoms, blow it off.”

A steep price, yes, but hearing his music, I wager Van Zandt made a good decision by dropping out of the world.

In a weird way, I regard Van Zandt as a messiah. I quote his little proverbs on a daily basis. When he sings, I can’t help but feel a holiness to his words. With other musicians, even really talented ones, I often wonder, “do they really feel that way?” But I never doubt Van Zandt is speaking from the heart.

But the purity of his music was often meddled with by music producers. Most members of the Van Zandt cult agree his studio albums are wildly overproduced. When he wrote songs, he clearly envisioned them to highlight his sleepy voice and acoustics — nothing more. But most of his recordings feature bombastic instrumentation.

Van Zandt was made for live performance. Live at the Old Quarter is Van Zandt most in his element. The album features the singer playing live to a dusty bar in Houston. It’s a scene most befitting the hard-drinking outlaw.

Van Zandt died before he saw most of the praise he now regularly receives. He died of cardiac arrhythmia on New Year’s Day, 1997, at the age of 52. While the death was “natural,” Van Zandt predicted he wouldn’t outlive his career, explaining, “I’ve designed it that way.”

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Graphic: Brianna Whitmore/The Sheaf