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REMEMBERING VIC CHESNUTT

Daniel Arizona considers the life and music of a southern bard who never quite achieved the fame he deserved ...

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

This past Christmas, Vic Chesnutt, our great southern bard, finally slipped away after several days in a coma, the result of a suicidal overdose of muscle relaxants.

Chesnutt’s death was a hard pill to swallow for several reasons. We lost not only an exceptional musician with the innate gift of melody–one who other musicians clamoured to collaborate with–but also a superb poet whose lyrics could easily be bound and anthologised, such was his mastery. The combination of these two gifts elevated Vic Chesnutt into the lofty heights occupied by songsmiths such as Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And yet Chesnutt never enjoyed household-name status, despite a 20-year career and 16 full-length albums to his credit.

Unlike the dramatic suicide of Elliott Smith, whose moody and mellifluous songs won him legions of fans in the 1990s, Chesnutt’s death appears to have been largely overlooked, occasioning some mournful entries on music blogs and not much else. (One notable and commendable exception being Fresh Air, which had interviewed Chesnutt about his latest album and tour this past December and produced a memorial show with his friends Michael Stipe, Guy Picciotto and Jem Cohen.)

As an undergraduate in the early 1990s at the University of Georgia, in the small artists’ community that is Athens (a town lousy with eccentrics), I couldn’t escape Vic Chesnutt’s music and personality. He was a small figure in baggy clothing, with a boyish effusiveness and a kind face under a widow’s peak. His thick southern accent could sound vulnerable and knowingly cornpone, but he could also strain it into a heart-wrenching field holler that silenced rooms. Singing with only half the use of his diaphragm, Chesnutt’s voice had a warbling honesty that sounded like it was painful to get out. You can actually feel it in your own gut; it hits you right there, which somehow made it feel more meaningful, more true, more authentic. Looking at his life, it was.

His story was a riveting and inspiring one of genius over adversity. Chesnutt became a quadriplegic at age 18 after a car accident in which he drove while drunk. With limited control over his arms and fingers, he started playing in a simplified and unorthodox style on a small nylon-string guitar. Wandering into Athens in the mid-1980s, he landed a gig at the famous 40 Watt Club. There he was spotted and plucked from obscurity by REM’s Michael Stipe, who landed him a record deal and produced his first two landmark albums, the incomparable "Little" and "West of Rome".

While Britpop pulsed, alt-country raised hell and indie-rock took over the neighbourhood, Chesnutt quietly picked and strummed along, crafting his brilliantly idiosyncratic stories and visions, unfazed, unpredictable and often hilariously funny. Basically a folky, Chesnutt went beyond the genre’s more popular associations with Greenwich Village or Laurel Canyon, experimenting with different soundscapes, instrumentations and textures in a fashion that eventually helped to usher in the psych-folk craze of today.

But in nearly every instance his music served his words. Chesnutt’s lyrics are typically highly literate and allusive. An inveterate reader and a wheelchair visionary, Chesnutt is probably the only songwriter who would pen a song called “Wallace Stevens” and craft it around the modernist poet’s famous “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.” Chesnutt evoked his southern surroundings so well that his songs are often described as Southern Gothic (despite the absence of bellowing man-children and burning mansions). He believed that it was his duty to communicate in his songs what he saw in life, loading them up with carefully chosen words and emotions that would guarantee their immortality and not infrequently reduce both singer and audience to tears.

A Vic Chesnutt song could take you anywhere, from the claustrophobic and alcoholic self-laceration of “Square Room” to the omniscient distillation of the entire small-town experience in “New Town”, with its old ladies convening to discuss Jesus, its smiling mayor, its local businesses, its rookie police, its newborn babies and even the kittens who “discover that the birds scrape the ground". Or Chesnutt could take you out into the world beyond the square room and the new town, as in his winkingly humorous and grand “Big Huge Valley”, where geological and meteorological forces take on subtle (and not-so-subtle) sexual undertones:

And the oil is pumping up out of the dirt
Those virile dinosaurs continue to squirt
And the mountains lay like croaker sacks
The global forces sculpt with tectonic panache
The crop duster flies through those blackish skies
She ain't on the clock
She's banking in and pulling out
Her propeller eyes on the wind sock

Despite his prolific output, touring, critical reputation and popular reception among serious music lovers, Chesnutt was deeply in debt due to his various medical needs caused by his accident. He was even afraid he was going to lose his home as a result, making him another victim of America’s deep need for health reform.

Chesnutt’s last masterpiece, his swansong, “Flirted with You All My Life”, seizes upon this lifelong struggle with depression and hardship. Displaying his affinity with Emily Dickinson and John Donne, Chesnutt meditates on sickness, suicide and death in the deceptive form of a confession to his lover and antagonist, Death personified. He ultimately concludes with an expression of perseverance, “Oh Death, clearly I’m not ready”. In light of Chesnutt’s suicide, the song feels like the bitterest of ironies, or a Donnian paradox, at once harmonious and maddeningly contradictory. In losing Vic Chesnutt, we’ve lost too much.

Picture credit: Delgoff (via Flickr), Jem Cohen

(Daniel Arizona is a writer based in California.)