I had contacted Guy and Townes' management, Keith Case, in Nashville, sent them a promo packet and asked if it might be possible to photograph them - somewhere, anywhere in the western U.S. I got an answer back that they would be playing in Fallon, Nevada and I could drive on up there and take some pictures. I left about three days early as it's an eight hour drive and I needed to scout locations. I spent a couple of days driving through Fallon, east, then west, and finally settled on this little spot on the map called Hazen. Not much there but a few buildings. We found a nice location out behind the "town" with some telephone poles going off in the distance and a train track nearby. This was 1992 and a railroad security person found us and asked what the hell we were doing there. It turns out that rail line was a munitions line to Hawthorne, Nevada, a big military supply depot. After he was satisfied that we weren't terrorists (yes, they worried about that shit back then too) he let us be. I don't know exactly what Guy and Townes thought, looking back, meeting this strange photographer in an even stranger piece of real estate that really was the middle of nowhere, but they were game for shooting a bunch of shot before noon in the Nevada desert and out of that came what I consider to be perhaps the finest image of Townes I've ever seen. And the one of Guy, well, it's one of my faves as well.
There were three or four hundred people at the show that night in Fallon and it sure seemed like everyone knew all the words to all the songs for all three - Robert, Townes and Guy. I had told Guy earlier that The Lone Star Hotel was the second song I learned on guitar and he was kind enough to play if for me that night. He also brought out Ramblin' Jack and Jack rambled for about forty minutes.
I ran into Townes a few years later at The New Ashgrove on Santa Monica Pier, and even though he was quite well lubricated that night, he still cut back with razor like clarity to that morning in Hazen - as if it had been just a few days prior.
