Be Here to Love Me: A Film About Townes Van Zandt

As a teenager, Townes van Zandt wondered what it would be like to fall off a balcony. He leaned backwards, let himself go and landed flat on his back four floors below and survived. However the shock therapy that followed his escapade was nearly fatal for Van Zandt. When he left hospital three months later, his memory was almost completely gone and he didn’t even recognise his own mother. Be Here To Love Me is a tender homage to the man who is known as ‘the world’s greatest songwriter’ but couldn’t come to terms with life. A born hobo who wrote a collection of bitter-sweet jewels between three failed marriages, gallons of alcohol and tons of drugs. Despite countless covers by artists from Emmylou Harris to The Meat Puppets, Van Zandt himself never scored a hit of his own. His greatest success was Pancho and Lefty, which made it to number one in the American country hit parade in 1983, performed by Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard. Plenty of nostalgic archive material, rare concert recordings, home videos, interviews and sound fragments help turn Be Here To Love Me into a very rich and personal documentary. The typical southern front-porch mood is augmented by the musical Alabama origins of film maker Brown – daughter of country songwriter Milton Brown. Visually, the film bears the fluent signature of cameraman Lee Daniel, well-known from his work with Richard Linklater. (SdH)