Vic Chesnutt (November 12, 1964 – December 25, 2009)
Many of you do not know who Vic Chesnutt is. Many of you have never heard about him or heard his music. He has played with and inspired many notable musicians. Including, Bob Mould, Widespread Panic, R.E.M., Soul Asylum, Garbage, Live, Hootie and the Blowfish, Indigo Girls, Madonna, The Smashing Pumpkins and many more.
His songs were collected and performed by some great artists in the CD, Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation – The Songs of Vic Chesnutt.
Vic Chesnutt was pronounced dead on Christmas day of 2009 after he had been in a coma. Many reports state that he had committed suicide due to his mounting medical debt. Vic had been paralyzed from the waist down since a tragic car accident in his teens.
An excerpt from an interview with the LA Times says:
“I’m not too eloquent talking about these things,” Chesnutt said. “I was making payments, but I can’t anymore and I really have no idea what I’m going to do. It seems absurd they can charge this much. When I think about all this, it gets me so furious. I could die tomorrow because of other operations I need that I can’t afford. I could die any day now, but I don’t want to pay them another nickel.”
Those feelings are deeply ingrained in “At the Cut,” where almost every song offers at least a sideways glance at creeping mortality. Take, for instance, “Flirted With You All My Life,” an incandescent country tune that’s a kind of a breakup letter to Chesnutt’s own thoughts of ending his life.
“I’ve been a suicidal person all my life, and that song is me finally being ‘Screw you, death,’ ” Chesnutt said.
From Neil Young News:
We first met Vic Chesnutt back in 1995. Encountered, really.
We had just parked our car under the Whitehurst Freeway across the street from the Bayou Club in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. Next to us was an Econoline van where some folks were loading up various pieces of equipment to haul across the street.
Our car doors were open as they were trying to squeeze by so we were trying to hurry up so the roadies could be on their way. Someone in a wheelchair was waiting for us and said “Take all the time you need”.
We made our way into the Bayou Club and it wasn’t until Vic Chesnutt wheeled onstage did we realize who we had parked next to outside. You see, we didn’t know Vic was in a wheelchair or really much else about him. As best we can recall, we had read about Vic’s music on alt.country back in ’95 and thought we’d check him out.
We guess the thing we remember about seeing him perform was that here was a guy trying to make the best of a situation in which he struggled with but verged on overwhelming him. And it made his music palpable in that it really drew in to the point it was something you weren’t sure whether to look or look away.
And — sadly — most did look away. We did. Even though we had encountered him, literally — in a van down by the river — by the Potomac under a freeway where it appeared the band was living between gigs.
From collaborator Kristin Hersch:
What this man was capable of was superhuman. Vic was brilliant, hilarious and necessary; his songs messages from the ether, uncensored. He developed a guitar style that allowed him to play bass, rhythm and lead in the same song — this with the movement of only two fingers. His fluid timing was inimitable, his poetry untainted by influences. He was my best friend.
I never saw the wheelchair—it was invisible to me—but he did. When our dressing room was up a flight of stairs, he’d casually tell me that he’d meet me in the bar. When we both contracted the same illness, I told him it was the worst pain I’d ever felt. “I don’t feel pain,” he said. Of course. I’d forgotten. When I asked him to take a walk down the rain spattered sidewalk with me, he said his hands would get wet. Sitting on stage with him, I would request a song and he’d flip me off, which meant, “This finger won’t work today.” I saw him as unassailable—huge and wonderful, but I think Vic saw Vic as small, broken. And sad.
I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to listen to his music again, but I know how vital it is that others hear it. When I got the phone call I’d been dreading for the last fifteen years, I lost my balance. My whole being shifted to the left; I couldn’t stand up without careening into the wall and I was freezing cold. I don’t think I like this planet without Vic; I swore I would never live here without him. But what he left here is the sound of a life that pushed against its constraints, as all lives should. It’s the sound of someone on fire. It makes this planet better.
And if I’m honest with myself, I admit that I still feel like he’s here, but free of his constraints. Maybe now he really is huge. Unbroken. And happy.
Love,
Kristin
From Chris Riemenschneider at Startribune.com:
Like a lot of Twin Cities rock fans, my first exposure to Vic Chesnutt was seeing him open for Bob Mould on a few of Bob’s solo acoustic tours in the late-80s and early-90s. In fact, one of those gigs I saw with Bob was at the Cannibal Club in Austin, Texas, the night the Twins won the Series in ’91, a great night all-around.
Those first few times, I have to admit it: Vic scared me. I was too young and too vanilla to get the ocean-deep context and river-rapid outpouring of symbolism and poetry in his songs. So all Vic was to me back then was a guy in a battered physical state with a thick, backwoods Georgia drawl and a surly demeanor. He was damn intimidating.
Of course, as I grew up, and as Vic’s albums got better and better (or more sonically accessible, I should say), it became clear he was one of the most tender and raw songwriters of our era. Underneath that gruff exterior was a poet and storyteller of the first degree, and like many of the best songwriters (Dylan, Willie, Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen), his unique singing voice took some getting used to but ultimately was a thing of beauty. And while he put out a lot of terrific albums — “Is the Actor Happy?,” “Silver Lake” and last year’s “North Star Deserter” are among his best — they were no match for seeing Vic live. Those qualities that at first made me uncomfortable were really an integral part of the music, it turned out.
From The New York Times:
Vic Chesnutt, a singer-songwriter whose music dealt with mortality and black humor, died on Friday in a hospital in Athens, Ga., a spokesman for his family said. He was 45 and lived in Athens.
He had been in a coma after taking an overdose of muscle relaxants earlier this week, said the family spokesman, Jem Cohen.
In a two-decade career, Mr. Chesnutt sang darkly comic and often disarmingly candid songs about death, vulnerability, and life’s simple joys. A car accident when he was 18 left him partly paralyzed, but he has said that the accident focused him as a musician and a poet.
“It was only after I broke my neck and even like maybe a year later that I really started realizing that I had something to say,” he said in a recent radio interview with Terry Gross.
Discovered in the late 1980s by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., who produced his first two albums, Mr. Chesnutt has been a mainstay in independent music, collaborating with the bands Lambchop and Widespread Panic.
In 1996 his songs were performed by Madonna, the Indigo Girls, Smashing Pumpkins, R.E.M. and others for “Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation,” an album that benefited the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, a nonprofit group that offers medical support for musicians.
His survivors include his wife, Tina Whatley Chesnutt; a sister, Lorinda Crane; and nine nieces and nephews.
Recently Mr. Chesnutt had had a burst of creativity, releasing two 2009 albums, “At the Cut” and “Skitter on Take-Off.” In the song, “Flirted With You All My Life,” from “At the Cut,” Mr. Chesnutt sings about suicide, which he had attempted several times. Written as a breakup song with death, it expresses a wish to live:
“When you touched a friend of mine I thought I would lose my mind
But I found out with time that really, I was not ready, no no, cold death
Oh death, I’m really not ready.”
Vic Chesnutt was a tremendous song writer and a gifted human being put through extraordinary circumstances and he will be sorely missed. Earlier this year he was facing around $700,000 in medical debt and was being sued by a Georgia hospital for $70,000. He added, “There’s nowhere else in the world that I’d be facing the situation I’m in right now. They (his Canadian band mates) cannot understand what kind of society would inflict that on their population. It’s terrifying.”
Here are some links:
Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vic_Chesnutt
Blog- http://vicchesnutt.blogspot.com/
Official Vic Chesnutt website.
And support Vic Chestnutt’s music and family.
Go here to donate.
R.E.M.’s Michael Stipe remembers Vic
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