Sometimes, a documentary maker is present at precisely the right moment to capture lightning in a bottle. It happened with essential punk doc The Decline of Western Civilization, it happened with Dylan’s Don’t Look Back and Chet Baker’s Let’s Get Lost, and it happened with 1976’s Heartworn Highways.
The iconic performance documentary saw filmmaker James Szalapski travel to
Texas and
Tennessee to capture the radical country artists reclaiming the genre via an
appreciation for its heritage in folk and bluegrass and a rejection of the
mainstream Nashville machine. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Steve Young, David
Allan Coe, Steve Earle and many others appeared on both screen and soundtrack,
where musical highlights include Clark’s brilliant “Desperados Waiting For
A Train”, Young’s stirring “Alabama Highways” and Van
Zandt’s emotional “Waiting Around To Die”.
The hard living – and hard partying – lifestyles of outlaw country’s figureheads are played out on screen as we visit Van Zandt’s Austin trailer, see Coe play in Tennessee State Prison, join the gang in Nashville’s notorious Wig Wam Tavern and witness a liquor-fuelled Christmas at Clark’s house. No wonder the film’s original tagline read: “The best music and the best whiskey come from the same part of the country.”
Outside of a couple festival screenings, the movie remained unreleased for
five years after its
completion, finally hitting screens in 1981 and finding a cult audience
ever since.