Chesnutt in the Wren's Nest
(See my liner notes in Chesnutt’s cd Is the Artist Happy?)
Forget Ryan Adams; here’s Vic Chesnutt! Ryan Adams has that one good album, I know. But like his bud Elton John, he cruises the center lane of pop music shifting the gears predictably. In this time of national insecurity, a song structure as familiar as an old shoe and an “Oh girl, I’ll build your wishing well” nostalgia may be reassuring enough to keep Adams on the charts. Still, at least Elton John had the sense to buy himself a lyricist. Adams has his gifts, but there’s not much charged language under his tree. At his poetic best, he’ll borrow an old rhyme from Neil Young to try to stabilize the wobbly third generation clone of a Leonard Cohen analogy:
As a man I ain’t never been much for sunny days
I’m as calm as a fruit stand in New York and maybe as strange
When the color goes out of my eyes it’s usually the change.
When you get off Adams’ Gold highway and listen around on the unpaved and humped dirt roads, you’ll catch drift of Vic Chesnutt, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter from Athens, Georgia. In nine or so albums since 1990, Chesnutt has chronicled those small lovelinesses that unfurl as nacre and ruby-trailers in the sunset of Western Civilization. His “Free of Hope,” from 1995’s Is the Actor Happy, is one of the great elegies to American culture. In three brief, alliterative, hilarious stanzas, Chesnutt limns the dysfunctional family, environmental and educational neglect, boredom, trendy social tropes, sexual dalliance, advertising, and the feeling of a wasted life:
Bricks are dirty, lakes are dead
The family dog is mad
Baby brother’s science beakers are broken
And now the yard peacocks are all sad
Board games are boring
May they rot on the shelf
Big brother’s at Columbia University
Quote unquote he’s tanning beaver pelts
Subtle as a billboard
Oh so refined
Smoking through my chimney
Burning up this life of mine
These lyrics are nudged along by a tune that begins with a crackly far-off yodel that seems to be rising either from underwater or from some other century. A soft acoustical melody is suddenly overwhelmed by the WHAM of percussion and an electric guitar that sounds like the musical performance of a David Smith sculpture: steel strings flailed across a metal worktable. The guitars and drums gather behind the voice and chase it into a haunting, refrain that inverts Martin Luther King’s dream for our future and catches our emptiness and irony at the 20th century’s demise: “Free of hope, free of a past/ Thank you god of nothing I’m free at last.”
There’s an old Southern romanticism with ruin that Yankees love to connect with the Scotch blood of many Southerners, with Sir Walter Scott’s ballads and with a purportedly Southern inclination to identify with doomed efforts and failed enterprises. In the images evoked by that romanticism, the present usually gets portrayed as a chipped, crumbling remnant of some glistening and fulsome past. To borrow sloppily from Faulkner, our familiar NOW is just a short, thin bottleneck, an inconsequence from which the deep past swells.
Chesnutt snorts at this romanticism. Although he’s hounded in a real way by a past in which, as a teenager, he crashed his truck, broke his neck, and became crippled for life, Chesnutt refuses to moon over it. In the last song of his self-produced album Left To His Own Devices, he chants
Look at me as a tragic figure
One frivolous moment
I beg to differ
Because I’m still alive
I win a prize
I’m still alive
Funny and quick to deflate poetic pretentiousness or philosophical posing, Chesnutt doesn’t buy any cheap resolution of contradictions. When he sings, on his new album Silver Lake, “the horizon holds three great slag heaps/ piercing the sky like the pyramids at Giza,” the images penetrate each other like cones of light. The ruins of the present have a monumental quality, and the monuments of the past have come to ruin. So past and present elicit each other, just as death and life do.
Many of Chesnutt’s best songs, in fact, develop from what he calls in his 1996 album, About to Choke, an obsession “with the premise that through death, life is nourished.” His images of decay can be startlingly specific. In a new song, he notes, “even the pretty fawn is full of wolf worms in the summer.” The brilliant white flash of a barn owl’s belly leads the speaker of “Wren’s Nest” not into some classic ecstatic epiphany but into a self-loathing prayer to “let me evaporate.”
In another song from Silver Lake, Chesnutt admits, “the lousy poet in me can’t lie no more/ and the warrior in me has gone and died before.” Death and life, decay and beauty: for Chesnutt, the necessity of that equation reminds us poignantly of the essential rhythm of experience. As Chesnutt says of the wandering protagonist in his song “Zippy Morrocco,” “it was grief that whetted his appetite.”
In “Second Floor,” also from Silver Lake, Chesnutt describes a pair of swans. While he pierces their iconic grandeur by observing that they are floating on a “sewer pond,” he doesn’t lessen their loveliness so much as contextualize it. We’ll still want to hike up to the second floor, Chesnutt reminds us, to see those swans. But in his songs, we don’t get to gawk at beauty without pinching our nose at the same time.
In some ways, Chesnutt’s recuperation of decay and ordinary ugliness calls to mind the radical innovation of the Japanese poet Basho. In reference to his own imagistic sensibility, Basho noted, a willow tree in rain—that’s the old courtly haiku. But acrow plucking snailsin mud—that’s gritty and stronger for it. Along similar lines, a Surrealist observed, “Beauty will be convulsive or it will not be at all.”
Vic Chesnutt’s way of seeing the world has, of course, a political edge. In Silver Lake’s astonishing gem, “Sultan So Mighty,” a melody punctuated by bassoon, clarinet, oboe, and a gospel choir, Chesnutt invents a sound as whispy and lingering and other-worldly as the rare songs recorded by Washington Philips. Chesnutt sings his song in the trembling high voice of a eunuch in a sultan’s court. Sweeping the snares in slow, deliberate rhythm, the drummer’s brushes call to mind a concubine whose long dress drags the floor with each stately step. The eunuch, wounded in his sex for the glory of his voice, is privy to the secret desires of the women in the sultan’s harem. They admit to him alone “what they like.” Illuminating a subtle power shift, the eunuch boasts:
and the sultan, so mighty
has to go through me
when he’s having trouble pleasing
certain ladies
True to the focus of all Chesnutt’s songs, a performance at center stage is never quite as interesting as what’s going on behind the curtains.
Chesnutt is one of America’s most impressive, original, and poetic singer-songwriters. If you don’t think so, you haven’t listened to his song “Woodrow Wilson” from Bernadette and the Salesman. If you can bend an ear to that song and claim it isn’t among the marvels of contemporary songwriting, I just hope we never meet at the lick log. On the few occasions when Chesnutt lets himself write something as silly and straight as “But something bold and beautiful occurred,” it’s because he can follow that line with one that bucks hard against not only the cliché, but the tone, rhythm, and phrasing as well: “I’m not innnnnn-terred!”
If the words to songs matter to you, you’ll want to check out this Southern wren. And if it seems like the poetic muse has been scarce these days, be assured that she’s in Athens where she’s always been, Athens Georgia, nesting in a mess of hair and dandruff on the photogenic head of Vic Chesnutt.