By 1995, I found myself working the graveyard shift five nights a week at a 7-11 in Jamul, California. It had been a rough few years since I'd graduated high school--factories, homelessness, missing parents, etc. There was a store in El Cajon called Music Trader that offered 4 tapes for $10, and it's one of the places I spent whatever extra money I had at the end of the week. When I saw Vic Chesnutt's album "Little" in there one afternoon, I went ahead and picked it up. I think he has something to do with R.E.M.? Sure enough, Michael Stipe produced it. For $2.50, it seemed worth checking out.
I didn't take to it right away, but I kept playing it on the nights when I worked. It sounded pretty good around 3 in the morning, with the doors propped open as I swept the parking lot. After a few nights of this, the songs started to emerge. After a few weeks, I found that the songs reached parts of myself emotionally that very few things could in those days. And so I played it every night. At 3 in the morning. As I swept the parking lot.
It didn't make me feel better, necessarily. Or worse. Even listening to it right now, 15 years later, I still can't tell you much about it. With a few exceptions, the lyrics didn't relate a whole lot to anything in my experience. His writing seemed so personal that there wasn't much room left for me. I felt like a spectator. It was never one of my favorite albums, or even the album that touched me the deepest, it was just something I felt compelled to play every night for a year.
I guess maybe it just made me feel a little less alone.
A couple of years later, I was working at a golf resort in El Cajon. Vic Chesnutt had just released "Is the Actor Happy?", his major-label debut. I picked up a copy, and listened to it a few times, but for whatever reason it didn't really grab me.
In the fall of 1998, I headed to Boston to start college. I was 26, and was so intimidated by my new situation that I didn't speak to my new roommate for two days. It was only after we realized that we'd both been playing a lot of the same music that we found a way to start talking to each other. His favorite singer in the world was Vic Chesnutt. He talked about how he had never heard music with such raw emotion, such genuine unfiltered passion (he had, after all, just graduated from Tufts).
That spring Vic Chesnutt collaborated on an album with Lambchop. Once again I shrugged my shoulders and yawned. Except for this song. Which I listened to constantly.
The following year, the roommate--and by this point, one of my good friends--had moved to New York City. It so happened that the weekend a couple of us went down there to visit him coincided with a show at Maxwell's in Hoboken featuring Kristen Hersh and Vic Chesnutt. The entire way there, my friend kept saying how happy he would be if Vic played "Isadora Duncan". He was literally bouncing up and down in his seat as he talked about it. We arrived to a packed Maxwell's. Me, I was more excited about seeing Kristen Hersh for the first time (that first Throwing Muses album was also one of my 7-11 era faves).
Vic was due to go on first, but the packed room was making it difficult for him to reach the stage in his wheelchair. Eventually, he had to ask some people to lift him up and carry him to the stage, wheelchair and all. Once safely there, he told the group that he'd play their request as his first song. They chose "Isadora Duncan". My friend cried, smiling the entire time. The show was wonderful.
Kristen Hersh was one of the first people to announce that something had happened to Vic Chesnutt yesterday.
I didn't know Vic Chesnutt. I saw him out around town a few times, and though I was tempted to introduce myself, and maybe tell him some of my stories, I never did. I hadn't listened to his music in years, and if you had told me I could never listen to his music again, I wouldn't have cared. And yet here I am on this Christmas night, my friends having left and my girlfriend having gone to work, and I can't stop listening to an on-line version of that album, the one I found in a bargain bin 15 years ago. And I've spent the last half-hour on the verge of tears for someone I've never met.
See, at a time in my life when I very badly needed someone to hug me and tell me everything was going to be okay, and I was several years away from anything like that ever happening, Vic Chesnutt's album "Little" was about as close as I could get. I didn't, and still don't, understand why. But maybe some things are more powerful if you can't find the words for them. I will always be grateful to him for what that album gave me. Even if I may have forgotten about it until last night.
I'm so sorry he died. And I'm even sorrier for the pain he must have been in while he was alive. Please, Athens, be good to one another. There's a lot of people around here in a lot of pain.
This was filmed earlier this year.
There's a few other drugs I'd like to add to this list. Depression is a real bitch to live with, and whatever benefits drugs, alcohol, etc. might bring you in the short term, they take a hell of a lot more away in the long term. Believe me.
Please R.I.P. Vic Chesnutt, you sweet sad beautiful man.
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