Townes Van Zandt: the self-destructive hobo saint

There are a couple of things that I have never seen written about Townes Van Zandt:

The first is that Towne’s talking voice and the lyrics of his songs seemed to be one and the same. I’ve spent hours in conversation with other songwriters, Jerry Jeff Walker, Guy Clark, Lightin’ Hopkins, etc., and yeah, occasionally their talking voice crept into their lyrics too. But in Townes’ case, there seemed to be no difference. In casual conversations with Townes I regularly had the same “where in the hell did that come from?” feeling that I experienced with his lyrics.

The second is that Townes lied all the time. He knew it, he knew you knew it, and he even believed you expected it of him. Others who knew him might say this better than I, but I just don’t think Townes, drunk or sober, felt there was much difference between fact and fantasy.

Restated – Townes was in “story-teller” mode in every conversation I ever experienced with him. If he was explaining something (which he always was) and he could embellish the story with some wild assertion, he did it – and without hesitation. This was not an infrequent thing – we’re talking every few sentences or so. And after a few retellings, Townes’ fabrications and exaggerations seemed as real to him as anything he had ever actually experienced.

Those of us who spent considerable time with Townes saw his stories grow or even take on new directions. We were not only aware of this but gave him license to do so and even expected it of him. It was an integral part of his character and his songwriting. We expected the color in his stories and his lyrics, he knew it, and he rarely failed to deliver.

Now here’s an article about Townes from Sing Out! June 22, 2004, that does a pretty good job of describing Townes. Another excellent article appears in Kathleen Hudson’s chapter about Townes in her book, “Telling Stories, Writing Songs.” Read her interviews with Townes in that book and note how similar his conversational voice is to his lyrics.

Townes Van Zandt: the self-destructive hobo saint.
Article from: Sing Out!
Article date: June 22, 2004
Author: Kruth, John
COPYRIGHT 2009 Sing Out Corporation.

Wherever the road led him on his brief fifty-two year tour of this sad and beautiful planet, Townes Van Zandt’s reputation had a way of preceding him. He was a living legend … albeit, more often than not, a lesser-known one. Van Zandt was a rambler, gambler, hell-bent drunk and arguably the greatest American songwriter of his day. The first time Emmylou Harris laid eyes on him in the late 1960s, at Folk City in Greenwich Village, she swore Van Zandt was the re-incarnation of Hank Williams “but with a twist.” That “twist” to which Emmylou referred was Van Zandt’s incandescent lyrics, which he expressed with pristine imagery and harrowing honesty.

John Townes Van Zandt came kickin’ and screamin’ into this life on Marcia 7, 1944 in Fort Worth, Texas. A true Texan, Townes’ kin were both oil barons and cattle rustlers. He wasn’t born to money as much as history. Van Zandt County in west Texas had been christened in honor of his father’s illustrious ancestors (Isaac, who was sent by Sam Houston to Washington to cut the deal to annex Texas and Keebler, a general who built banks and brought the railroad to Fort Worth). Townes was named in honor of John Charles Townes, his great-grandfather on his mother’s side, for whom Townes Hall, the main building at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law, was memorialized.

Old snapshots of Townes as a child reveal a Cub Scout with a mischievous look, and dark sparkling eyes. “I had a nice childhood and all that. I don’t remember it, but that’s what I’ve been told,” he once joked. Van Zandt’s remark is not as flippant as it might seem. During his first years at college, Townes was diagnosed as manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies and his memory would soon become fogged by a series of electro-shock treatments. But before the evils of modern psychiatry took their toll, something just as powerful had zapped him. On September 9th, 1956 Townes Van Zandt suddenly came down with a serious case of rockin’ pneumonia. Like the rest of his generation, he sat before his TV set mesmerized by the sight of Elvis Presley in a loud plaid jacket and shiny pompadour singing “Don’t Be Cruel” on the Ed Sullivan Show.

“That just flipped me out!” Townes later exclaimed. “He didn’t quite seem real you know?” Watching “The King,” Townes had a sudden revelation–“I realized you could make a living just playing the guitar. Elvis had all the money in the world and all the cars and girls he wanted.”

Van Zandt soon became infatuated with a slew of rock ‘n’ rollers from Ricky Nelson and Jerry Lee Lewis to the Everly Brothers and hard knocks country crooner Johnny Cash. That Christmas his father gave him a guitar under the condition that Townes would learn the old folk chestnut “Fraulein.”

He spent his youth moving around the country with his family as his dad went from job to job–Texas, Illinois, Montana, Colorado … until his last two years of high school when his parents sent him to the exclusive Shattuck Military Academy in Faribault, Minnesota, where Townes got what he later described as a “real serious private prep school ivy-covered education.” In actuality Van Zandt was a hell-raising punk with a reputation for tossing cherry bombs down dormitory toilets, causing the pipes to burst and freeze over in the dead of a Minnesota winter.

Discovering the blues as a teenager most likely saved Townes from juvenile delinquency. He soon became obsessed with Texas blues masters Mance Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Although they both hailed from the Lone Star State, their music was as different as night and day. Lipscomb was known for clean picking and a humble, earthy delivery while Hopkins’ fiery style seemed inspired from a hotter, more supernatural place than the Piney Woods. Townes hunted down Hopkins’ obscure recordings and played them repeatedly in hopes of learning some of Lightnin’s’ slippery licks. It wasn’t just Hopkins’ guitar that spoke to Townes, but the raw poetry of his hard life as a sharecropper and a gambler that inspired him like the mystical scripture of a forgotten religion.

Townes’ influences were literary as well as musical. He voraciously read poetry by Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost. “Townes was a genius,” with an IQ “way above 140,” claimed Fran Lohr, his first wife. But like the parents of most geniuses, Townes’ folks hoped their son would settle down some day and have some sort of “normal” life, which in the Van Zandt family meant becoming a lawyer or politician and living in Texas. Thankfully, that was never meant to be.

In 1962, Van Zandt enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder majoring in economics–particularly ironic, as throughout his life Townes had an apparent disdain of money, with which he freely gambled or gave to the homeless. As a college freshman in the early ’60s, Van Zandt began to display some rather strange behavior. He often locked himself in his apartment for days at a time. Taking the phone off the hook, he’d down a bottle of Bali Hat wine and play his guitar for hours and hours. Repeatedly spinning records by Lightnin’ Hopkins, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan, Van Zandt would study his heroes’ every nuance. After a week in isolation he’d be ready for some action again and would throw a big party. At one particularly wild shindig Townes sat teetering on the edge of his fourth floor balcony, leaning over backwards, “just see what it fell like all the way up to when you lost control and were falling,” he later recalled.

“I realized that to do it, I’d have to fall. But I said I’m going to do it anyway. So I started leaning back really slow, and really paying attention. I fell over backwards, and landed four stories down flat on my back. I remember the impact and exactly what it felt like and all the people screaming. I had a bottle of wine, and I stood up. Hadn’t spilled any wine. Felt no ill effects whatsoever. Meanwhile all the people jammed onto the elevator, and when the doors opened, they knocked me over coming out. And it hurt more being knocked over than falling four stories.”

Any party animal with half a brain could see that Townes had taken things a bit too far. Fearing he might not be so lucky next time, a friend secretly called his parents and informed them of their son’s excessive behavior.

By the spring of his sophomore year, the Van Zandts flew to Boulder from Houston to retrieve their wild child. Townes soon wound up with a case of the sanitarium blues, committed to the University of Texas Medical Branch Hospital in Galveston where he received three months of insulin shock therapy. Fran considered this treatment “an extreme measure” for what she maintained were the pranks of “a normal college student.”

Downplaying the story, Townes later told journalist Robert Greenfield he had staged “a student breakdown” in order to dodge the Vietnamese draft.

Back in Texas in the spring of 1965, Townes enrolled at the University of Houston in pre-law, pledging at a frat that he would later satirize unmercifully in a hilarious talking blues number called “Fraternity Blues.” But he didn’t last long with the preppy crowd. Much to the chagrin of his frat brothers, Van Zandt failed to “bubble with enthusiasm.”

Townes found himself torn between an overwhelming sense of obligation to finish law school and lead a “normal” life with Fran, and his romantic dream of becoming a folk troubadour. He began playing local bars and coffeehouses like the Old Quarter and Sand Mountain Cafe. Rex (AKA Wrecks) Bell, Van Zandt’s friend of 30 years and an original co-owner of the Old Quarter, first tact Townes on-stage one night at the Sand Mountain. Bell remembers Van Zandt artfully dodging the club’s no alcohol policy by tying a jug of wine to a rope and dangling it out of a nearby window.

Townes admitted his early songs were basically humorous ditties designed to keep the drunks at the bar happy. Numbers like “Talking Thunderbird Blues” and the aforementioned “Fraternity Blues” are tightly knit narratives reflecting his life as a floundering student and an aspiring derelict. His lively guitar picking and tongue and cheek delivery was clearly inspired by the talking blues of Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and early Bob Dylan.

“I started writing funny songs, not dirty songs, but funny barroom types just to get the audience,” he once recalled. “I was playing beer joints and used to play folk songs and it got a bit rowdy. They wanted some funny songs and I hadn’t got any, so I wrote some. Then I wrote serious songs. It used to be a problem that they were too serious for a lot of people.”

Van Zandt’s songs soon began to mirror the down and out drifters he befriended. “Waitin’ Around to Die,” a stark Appalachian style ballad sprang from the lonely drone of an A minor chord and the experience of spending an afternoon drinking with an old man at the Jester Lounge. A few weeks later Townes wrote the lovely, lilting “For the Sake of the Song” by candle light in his lonely room above the Sand Mountain Cafe, where proprietor “Ma” Carrick let musicians stay for five dollars a week.

But it was Bob Dylan’s defiant anthem of the new generation, “The Times They Are A-Changin'” that inspired Townes to take his job as a songwriter more seriously. “That did it to me,” he exclaimed. “I realized, man, you can write songs that really do make a difference.” Suddenly Townes devoted himself to the idealistic mission of saving the world with a song. “I’d like to alter the course of the Universe, make it a happier place,” he once mused. “No death. No disease. No depression. Nobody getting older … All the babies would get older, but once they start getting too much older they die. I’m not sure how exactly to do this. 1 haven’t made my move yet.”

Townes soon found himself opening shows for musical legends like Doc Watson and Lightnin’ Hopkins. While his peers sang old English folk ballads and wrote glorified visions of the driftin’ way of life, Townes dove in headfirst, experiencing that life first hand. He thrived in living on the edge and miraculously survived longer than most people expected to sing about it.

“I thought his songs were great! He was a cool guy and a definite nudge in the right direction. I figured if he can do that, so can I, and I started writing,” Van Zandt’s old pal Guy Clark recollected.

Clark credited Townes for single-handedly transforming Houston “from a town filled with folk musicians doing traditional songs and Kingston Trio hits into a town of original songwriters.”

But Townes was always quick to credit “a greater power” as the source of his songwriting abilities. He truly believed that his songs came from out of the sky and would suddenly shoot through him like a lightning bolt. Van Zandt merely wrote them down as they occurred.

“It just goes from the top of my head out my right arm,” Townes once explained, attempting to describe his supernatural inspiration. He often felt “slammed upon, hit between the eyeballs, out of the blue” by the muse. “Some of my songs, I just felt like I had nothing to do with. It was like, god, my arm’s tired, what did I write?”

Lauded as “the James Joyce of Texas songwriters” and “the Van Gogh of lyrics” by Billboard Magazine, Townes Van Zandt lived the life of a wandering bard, scribbling down lyrics on placemats and napkins in coffee shops and old truck stops. He wrote sitting by the side of the road, in train stations, airports and taxicabs–some of the loneliest places on Earth. There was a certain kind of purity to his lyrics, an underlying formality that few of his peers possessed. His songwriting often evoked old English ballads and employed double prepositions like “for to go,” giving an Elizabethan touch to songs like “If I Needed You.”

Guy Clark also believed his friend’s lyrics transcended the function of songwriting and achieved the stature of literature. Jerry Jeff Walker noted that “Townes’ writing style was really clean, whittled down to the bone. Every word bad a purpose, there were never any throwaway lines. He had a knack for finding simple melodies.”

“Some of them are easier to understand on paper than they are listening to them,” Clark added. “But they work both ways. Nothing was thrown away in his writing just to get a rhyme. It was pretty stream of consciousness. It was coming from a place that’s really hard to get to.”

Dreams have always been a reliable resource for writers, musicians and painters. But it’s rare when the gift is carried across the threshold fully intact from the dream world into our waking reality. All too often upon awakening we are left with fragments and meaningless images that, although glowing with inspiration from another dimension, are for the most part useless on the Earth plane.

Van Zandt claimed to have written his hit song “If I Needed You” while sound asleep, waking up just long enough to scribble it down and then pass out again. The story goes that after coming down with the flu while staying at Guy and Susanna’s humble Nashville abode, Townes was elected, after drawing the short straw, to amble down to the corner drugstore for a pint of codeine cough syrup. The trio soon polished off the sticky narcotic cocktail and retired for the night.

Stretching out on his mattress in the closet-sized guestroom Townes immediately zonked out. Stumbling down the sidewalk of his subconscious, Van Zandt had a remarkable dream that night, “in blazing Technicolor” as he later recalled it. He was a folksinger on stage, singing a strange and beautiful new song. The dream was so vivid that he sat right up in bed and wrote the lyrics down just as they had come to him only moments before. The melody rang in his head so clearly he knew he’d have no trouble remembering it the following morning. So he pulled the blankets over his head and tell back to sleep.

The next morning Susanna and Guy sat around the kitchen table in a fog, sipping coffee. Eventually Townes sauntered in, disheveled, with his guitar. “Hey y’all, listen to this,” he said as the song just rolled off his tongue and fingers as if he’d been playing it for Of course they loved it. “When did you write that?” they asked. “Last night,” Townes replied. The bemused couple looked at him doubtfully and explained it wasn’t possible as he’d gone to bed before them and in their tiny house they surely would’ve heard him working away in the middle of the night.

Five years later, in 1982, Emmylou Harris and Don Williams’ lilting cover of “If I Needed You” shot to number three on the country charts.

“Townes was a completely ornery guy,” Joe Ely said with a chuckle. “He didn’t seem to do anything for any reason except for the purpose of writing another song. He came on this earth to play music, and it didn’t matter what shape he was in, he always damn well fulfilled his goal. And he affected a lot of people by doing it.”

No matter what condition he was in, Townes had the songs and was guaranteed to move his audience. From Austin to Amsterdam small crowds sat entranced, hanging on every word while he sang, deep in concentration with his eyes shut tight.

“Anybody who can’t recognize the genius of Townes Van Zandt, I don’t want to spend more than five minutes talking to them,” legendary songwriter Mickey Newbury put it bluntly. “How could it get much better than ‘No Place to Fall’ or ‘Our Mother the Mountain’? He’s the real deal. Townes’ songs contained some of the most beautiful imagery I’ve ever heard in my life!”

The flip side of all that beautiful imagery would often rear its ugly head in the form of bouts of debilitating depression. Van Zandt would suddenly feel overcome by a “total loss of meaning and motivation.”

“Townes carries the terror and the sorrow of a sensitive man who has looked into the abyss and seen … the abyss.” Lola Scobey once observed. Donna (Van Zandt) Spence believed her little brother’s problems stemmed from his extreme sensitivity, “You and I would hear about a starving person and go about our lives, but it would just break his heart,” she said.

Eric Andersen claimed that Townes’ battle with addiction (tobacco, alcohol, cough syrup, heroin, gambling, you name it …) went far beyond rowdy parties. Eric believed it was inherent to Van Zandt’s persona. “If you take a look at most creative people, whether they’re writers, painters or musicians, any incandescent talent or anybody who really feels deeply or sees far, within three feet of them you’ll find a bottle or a vial. From Proust to Baudelaire to Rimbaud to Hemingway or Fitzgerald. Take a look at Charlie Parker, John Coltrane or Mozart,” Andersen said. “None of these people could take it straight. They all did drugs just to attain equilibrium, just to feel normal. In Townes’ case, it was about maintenance. He wasn’t getting’ high. He didn’t enjoy it.”

“Townes has really inspired me to become a better songwriter. He really had his antennas up!” Chris Robinson (former singer of the Black Crowes) exclaimed. “There’s an intimacy with his songs, like he’s standin’ up there naked with just his guitar, doin’ it like he said, ‘for the sake of the song.’ Townes really knew how to break it down to its most honest and human level. His sad songs are the most beautiful ones. In writing those songs Van Zandt helped many people deal with their problems and sorrow,” Chris said earnestly. “They’re just part of life, whether you choose to deal with it or not and writing those kind of songs is a great way to deal with it. You have to have them.”

In 1990, the laconic rockers the Cowboy Junkies launched an extensive four-month tour of North America taking Townes along on their bus as the opening act. “We’d been touched by his music long before we ever met him,” Michael Timmons confessed. “He was a huge inspiration to us as a songwriter. There’s so much poetry in his lyrics yet at the same time they’re really down-home. He’s got a beautiful use of words and at the same time he really cuts to the bone. That’s what I’ve always loved about Townes’ work. The weird thing is, I have so many favorites, there’s at least twenty or thirty brilliant songs. ‘Flying Shoes,’ ‘If I Needed You,’ ‘Tecumseh Valley’ are all real classics. As a person he was a real complex guy. He carried a lot of demons around with him. At the same time he was a really, really gentle soul, a gentle character on many levels. He was a very unique spirit. I talked with Jimmie Dale Gilmore about him and we both agreed the only reason Townes stayed alive as long as he did was that he had more songs to write. That was the only thing that kept him on this earth. He had this spirit that really shouldn’t have been here. He was much too sensitive for this world. The (universal) power kept him grounded here so these songs could be channeled through him and given to us. When those songs were done it was time for him to go.”

Townes’ songs have a subtle way of sucking you in. You suddenly realize you can’t read the Sunday paper and listen to “Tecumseh Valley” at the same time. You can barely even sip your coffee. Townes demands your complete attention, and a live performance was like doubling the dosage. On stage Van Zandt had the magnetism of Bela Lugosi’s Dracula, beckoning his hapless victims to come. Listen to his classic album Live at the Old Quarter–not to Townes but to his audience. He put a pack of wild hell-raisers under a spell and kept them there until the last note rang from his guitar. At the end of his first song, a gentle reading of “Pancho and Lefty,” Van Zandt commented, “I’ve never heard it so quiet in here,” sounding astonished.

Townes had dozens of stories about how his famous outlaw ballad “Pancho and Lefty” came about. In one version Van Zandt couldn’t find a motel within thirty miles of Dallas because the Guru Maharaji and Billy Graham, along with thousands of their faithful flock were both in town at the same time and there was no room at the inn for the weary Texas troubadour.

Although it was years before he saw any royalty checks, Townes reaped the benefits of writing the song when he got nabbed speeding through the small town of Berkshire while driving from Houston up to Austin. A pair of state highway patrolmen pulled his old hippie-hauler over to the side of the road to give it the once over. Van Zandt couldn’t remember if he had anything questionable in the car but as a rule of thumb he always considered himself “felonious when moving.” They soon discovered Townes’ inspection sticker had expired and his driver’s license, although miraculously up to dale, had the wrong address. Van Zandt suddenly found himself in the back seat of their patrol car playing twenty questions, when he noticed his captors were different as night and day. One was a blue-eyed Aryan with a short blonde crew cut while the other was Mexican. Townes suddenly felt like a guest star on an episode of Chips.

“What is it that you do for a living?” the cops began to grill him. “I’m a traveling folksinger and songwriter,” Townes replied, knowing it was tantamount to a plea of guilty. Then taking his best shot Van Zandt inquired if they were familiar with a song called “Pancho and Lefty?” “I wrote that song and gave it to Willie,” he said proudly. They looked at him incredulously. But their doubt soon melted away as Townes began to sing the first verse, “Livin’ on the road, my friend, was gonna keep you free and clean.”

The two cops began to grin and then turned around for another conference in the front seal. Meanwhile Townes waited quietly, “tryin’ to be as nice as possible, not sayin’ a word and twin’ not to even smell bad.” A moment later the Aryan announced that the speeding charge had been dropped, but reminded Townes to file for the address change as soon as he got back to Austin. “We’re gonna have to get you for an inspection sticker, cause we’ve already written it down,” the cop apologized. “But that will only be about five bucks.”

Grateful, Townes thanked the officers for letting him off. Van Zandt knew well the old code of the road, that once a cop lets you go, you say thanks and keep your mouth shut and split before you stir up any more trouble. But he just couldn’t leave well enough alone. Townes had to know why they dropped the charges. It turned out that their radio code names were Pancho and Lefty.

“Well, that sure is nice,” Townes said, grinning as he walked away. But just before he reached his old heap curiosity got the best of him again. Knowing he was playing with fire, Townes turned around and asked “Which one of y’all is Pancho?” The Mexican pointed to the Aryan and said, “He is!”

Van Zandt knew it’s what’s left unsaid that often haunts us most. He never divulges whether Pancho and Lefty were friends or a pair of desperados bound together by some ill-fated scheme. Their relationship is purposely vague. Some speculate that Lefty turned Pancho in, but we never find out anything more than what he tells us. Pancho bites the dust in the cold, quiet desert while Lefty lives out the rest of his life in a cheap Cleveland hotel after doing whatever it was he had to do. The tale clearly implies a betrayal. The song forever remains an enigma, which is essential to its enduring beauty.

“You won’t find a song that’s better written, that says more or impresses songwriters more,” Steve Earle claimed. According to Townes, “Pancho and Lefty” just floated in through a window one day after he made himself sit at a table until he wrote a new song. Van Zandt believed anybody could’ve done it. They just had to be sitting in the right chair.

Whenever an aspiring songwriter questioned him about his artistic process, Townes jokingly suggested they get themselves a guitar as it’s much easier to carry around than a piano. Then came the rap that had most neophytes quickly searching for the exit sign. “You have to blow off everything else,” he explained. “You have to blow off your family. You have to blow off comfort. You have to blow off money. You have to blow off security. You have to blow off your ego. You have to blow off everything except your guitar. You have to sleep with it. Learn how to tune it. And no matter how hungry you get, stick with it.”

The level of Townes’ commitment to his art frightened most people. “Townes was a brave soul,” Guy Clark said with a sigh. “Very few people are willing to go that deep and take a hard look at the darkness. Nobody cut it that close to the bone. He went for the passion, not a bunch of clever bullshit.”

Perhaps the greatest praise for Townes came from Steve Earle, who as a young kid was in so awe of Van Zandt he carried his guitar case just to be in the man’s presence. “Townes Van Zandt’s the best songwriter in the world and I’ll stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that!” Earle declared. Townes appreciated his friend’s sentiment but after seeing Bob’s bodyguards he assured Steve he didn’t think it would be such a good idea.

“It makes me nervous,” Van Zandt once quipped. “I’ve met Bob Dylan’s bodyguards and if Steve Earle thinks he can stand on Bob Dylan’s coffee table, he’s sadly mistaken.”

Accolades aside, Townes knew very well where he stood in the big picture. “I’m in competition with Mozart, Beethoven, Lightnin’ Hopkins, The Rolling Stones, and the Lord. I can’t just make up some silly song and put it out there,” he once said.

“That was another mystery to Townes,” Jimmie Dale marveled. “He had this tremendous output even when he was completely dead drunk around the clock. I don’t know how he did it! How could he write those songs when he was so drunk all the time?”

Like his hero Hank Williams, Townes predicted he would only achieve fame after death. Proving himself a master of divinity, Van Zandt died on New Year’s Day, 1997, on the 44th anniversary of Hank’s passing. Most of Townes’s friends were surprised that he made it as far as he did.

“Both men live in their music, as if singing and writing and being human were the same thing and as natural as breathing,” wrote Townes’ friend journalist Robert Palmer. Palmer felt Van Zandt’s songs, like those of Hank Williams were “the direct, untrammeled expression of a man’s soul.”

“I think that Townes Van Zandt will eventually be recognized as one of the great American poets of the 20th Century,” Jimmie Dale Gilmore proclaimed. “It’s a shame that he died too young to see that.”

Ten months later in a tribute, journalist Jerry Leichtling of the Village Voice compared Townes to author James Agee, whose poetic text complemented Walker Evans’ stark photographs of depression era farm families in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Leichtling described Van Zandt as “a self-destructive hobo saint–Woody Guthrie on a grim drunk with Hank Williams. He is truly one of a kind, possibly the best writer in his genre. Though he’ll probably never be famous, praise him.”

Geoffrey Burbidge, Who Traced Life to Stardust, Is Dead at 84

The New York Times, February 7, 2010 

Geoffrey Burbidge, Who Traced Life to Stardust, Is Dead at 84

By Dennis Overbye 

Geoffrey Burbidge, an English physicist who became a towering figure in astronomy by helping to explain how people and everything else are made of stardust, died on Jan. 26 in San Diego. He was 84. 

His death, at Scripps Memorial Hospital, came after a long illness, said the University of California, San Diego. Dr. Burbidge was a physics professor there for more than four decades and lived in the La Jolla neighborhood of San Diego. 

A large man with an even larger voice, Dr. Burbidge was one of the last surviving giants of the postwar era of astronomy, when big telescopes were sprouting on mountain peaks in the Southwest and peeling back the sky, revealing a universe more diverse and violent than anybody had dreamed: radio galaxies and quasars erupting with gargantuan amounts of energy, pulsars and black holes pinpricking the cosmos, and lacy chains of galaxies rushing endlessly away into eternity. 

As the director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, Dr. Burbidge pushed to open big telescopes to a larger community of astronomers. As a senior astronomer at the university in San Diego, he was, to the consternation of most of his colleagues, a witty and acerbic critic of the Big Bang theory. 

In 1957, in a long, groundbreaking paper in The Reviews of Modern Physics, Dr. Burbidge; his wife, E. Margaret Burbidge; William Fowler of the California Institute of Technology; and Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University — a collaboration noted by their initials B2FH — laid out the way that thermonuclear reactions in stars could slowly seed a universe that was originally pure hydrogen, helium and lithium, the simplest elements in the periodic table, with heavier elements like oxygen, iron, carbon and others from which life is derived. 

Stars like the Sun burn hydrogen into helium to generate heat and light for most of their lives, until they run out of fuel and fizzle, or so the story goes. But more massive stars can go on to ignite helium to produce carbon and oxygen and so forth. Eventually the star explodes, tossing the newly minted atoms into space, where they mix with gas and dust and are incorporated into future stars. Successive generations of stars that coalesce from cosmic dust, burn and then explode would thus make the universe ever richer in heavy elements.

Allan Sandage of Carnegie Observatories, an old friend of Dr. Burbidge’s, once explained it this way: “Every one of our chemical elements was once inside a star. The same star. You and I are brothers. We came from the same supernova.” 

Or as the singer Joni Mitchell put it, “We are stardust.”

 In a recent interview, Dr. Sandage described the B2FH collaboration’s work as “one of the major papers of the century.” 

“It changed the whole landscape of the chemical evolution of the universe,” he said. 

Geoffrey Ronald Burbidge was born in 1925 in Chipping Norton in England, in the Cotswolds hills halfway between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father, Leslie, was a builder. His mother, Evelyn, was a milliner. He was an only child and the first of his family to progress beyond grammar school. 

He attended the University of Bristol intending to study history, but on discovering he could stay in college longer if he enrolled in physics, he did, and found he liked it. He furthered his studies at University College, London, from which he received a Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951. 

Another turning point for him came when he befriended a recent Ph.D., Margaret Peachey, in a lecture course in London. An assistant director of the university’s observatory at the time, she would become a prominent astronomer in her own right. They married in 1948.

She survives him, along with a daughter, Sarah Burbidge of San Francisco, and a grandson. 

It was under his wife’s influence that Dr. Burbidge became interested in the physics of stars, tagging along on observing trips as her assistant. He always joked that he had become an astronomer by marrying one. 

On occasion the roles switched. Margaret’s application to observe on Mount Wilson, the mountain overlooking Pasadena, Calif., where modern cosmology began, was turned down on the grounds that there was no separate women’s bathroom. Dr. Burbidge booked the telescope time himself and his wife posed as his assistant, but they had to stay in an unheated cabin on the mountain, away from a dormitory housing other astronomers. 

After stops by the Burbidges at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Cambridge University, Dr. Fowler arranged for them and Dr. Hoyle to go to Pasadena to complete the stellar nucleosynthesis work, for which Dr. Fowler was later awarded a Nobel Prize. Margaret Burbidge obtained a post at the California Institute of Technology, while Geoffrey Burbidge got a job at the Mount Wilson and Palomar Observatories. 

After yet another stop, this time at the University of Wisconsin, the Burbidges landed at the University of California, San Diego, in 1962. 

By then astronomers had been riveted by the discovery of quasars: bright pointlike objects that were pouring out radio waves and whose visible light was severely shifted toward longer, redder wavelengths, like the sound of a siren going away, indicating that they were moving away at high velocity. According to the standard interpretation of life in an expanding universe, these redshifts, as they are called, meant that quasars were at great distance.

As a trained physicist, Dr. Burbidge was one of the first astronomers to investigate what could possibly be supplying the energy of such objects. At a meeting in Paris in 1958, he pointed out that the energy requirements for radio galaxies were already bumping up against the limits of known astrophysics. 

“That was a very important development,” Dr. Sandage said. In time, that line of thinking would lead to the idea that quasars and radio galaxies were powered by the gravity of supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies, a widely held notion today. 

Dr. Burbidge, however, soon parted ways with his colleagues on quasars and indeed on the Big Bang itself. The great energies required to produce them and their smallness led him to question whether quasars really were at cosmological distances. His doubts were buttressed by observations by Halton C. Arp, now of the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Munich, suggesting that quasars were concentrated around nearby active galaxies and might have been shot out of them. 

A debate ensued, and almost all astronomers agree that it was one that Dr. Burbidge and his friends finally lost. The overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that the redshifts are what they appear to be, said Peter Strittmatter, director of the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona. 

Dr. Burbidge’s skepticism extended to cosmology. In 1990, he and four other astronomers, including Drs. Arp and Hoyle, published a broadside in the journal Nature listing arguments against the Big Bang. 

Dr. Burbidge preferred instead a version of Dr. Hoyle’s Steady State theory of an eternal universe. In the new version, small, local big bangs originating in the nuclei of galaxies every 20 billion years or so kept the universe boiling. To his annoyance, most other astronomers ignored this view. 

In a memoir in 2007, Dr. Burbidge wrote that this quasi-steady state theory was probably closer to the truth than the Big Bang. But he added that “there is such a heavy bias against any minority point of view in cosmology that it may take a very long time for this to occur.” 

Despite his contrarian ways, Dr. Burbidge maintained his credibility in the astronomical establishment, serving as director of Kitt Peak from 1978 to 1984 and editing the prestigious Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics for more than 30 years. He was “a very clear-thinking heretic,” Dr. Strittmatter said. 

Dr. Strittmatter recalled that as a young astronomer he was terrified of Dr. Burbidge. “Then I learned that what he liked was a good argument,” he said.

The Kitt Peak observatory had been built with support from the National Science Foundation as a sort of counterweight to the famous observatories in California like Mount Wilson and Palomar, whose giant telescopes were privately owned and available to only a few. Dr. Burbidge believed that Kitt Peak should act more as a service facility for all astronomers. 

“His idea was to open up astronomy to all qualified astronomers,” Dr. Sandage said. 

Dr. Burbidge never lost what Dr. Strittmatter called a “rebel’s instinct.” Dr. Sandage said Dr. Burbidge had called him up three times a week for 40 years to argue about the Big Bang. 

“He delighted in bringing up all the details that didn’t quite fit,” Dr. Sandage said. In recent years, he added, as the evidence for the Big Bang mounted, Dr. Burbidge held his ground. 

“I just didn’t understand that,” Dr. Sandage said. “I often wondered if he was just arguing with me to keep on the phone.”  

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/07/science/space/07burbidge.html?scp=1&sq=geoffrey%20burbidge&st=cse