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Flyin' Shoes

Flyin' Shoes
Flyin'.jpg
Studio album by Townes Van Zandt
Released 1978
Recorded January 1978
American Studios, Nashville, Tennessee
Genre Folk, country
Length 33:24
Label Tomato
Producer Chips Moman
Townes Van Zandt chronology
Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas
(1977)Live at the Old Quarter, Houston, Texas1977
Flyin' Shoes
(1978)
At My Window
(1987)At My Window1987

Flyin' Shoes is an album released by folk/country singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt in 1978. It was his first album of original material in five years and was produced by Chips Moman.

Many of the songs that appeared on Flyin' Shoes were originally recorded in 1973 for an album with the working title 7 Come 11. The album was not released, however, due to a dispute between producer Jack Clement and Poppy Records founder Kevin Eggers. As Van Zandt's former manager John Lomax III explains in the 2004 biopic Be Here To Love Me, "That was the sort of missing link in his career. If that had come out right on top of the Late Great, it would've really been a whole other thing but I think Kevin lost the deal so Jack Clement just held on to the tapes."

In the same documentary, Steve Earle confirms that the tapes "got put back into the tape pool because Kevin Eggers didn't pay for them." According to John Kruth's 2007 biography To Live's To Fly: The Ballad of the Late, Great Townes Van Zandt, the bad feelings had been festering ever since Clement had requested that Van Zandt alter a potentially offensive line in the song "Tecumseh Valley" for the singer's debut album For the Sake of the Song back in 1968, and that by 1974 Clement and Eggers "had come to a final parting of the ways. Between Kevin's unpaid bills and some of the Cowboy's more questionable production decisions...there was some bad blood behind them. And Van Zandt's dual Jekyll and Hyde personality could turn a shaky situation volatile in a heartbeat."

By all accounts, Van Zandt was extremely frustrated that 7 Come 11 had been held up, with guitarist Mickey White telling director Margaret Brown in 2004 that any hopes they had that the album would come out "were just about gone. Every time we'd try to call Kevin to find out what was going on with it, or try to communicate with him, it was just clear." A short time after the split with Clement, Poppy Records went under, further isolating Van Zandt from the music business.

By 1978, Van Zandt had released no new original material in five years and was living with his second wife Cindy in a cabin in Franklin, Tennessee where, as Earle recalls in Be Here To Love Me, the troubadour spent most of his time listening to Paul Harvey every morning and watching Happy Days. However, the stagnation worsened Van Zandt's drug and alcohol problems, with the singer's son J.T. telling John Kruth in 2007 that his father openly did drugs in front of him when he visited his dad as a boy." 7 Come 11 would finally be released as The Nashville Sessions in 1993.


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