Fate has been good to me
You may not understand how I can be thankful to be where I am
To be where I am.
– Vic Chesnutt, “Ignorant People”
Vic Chesnutt wheels himself into the room, gliding over the wooden floorboards with a sudden whoosh.
“Hey,” he says, stifling a stray yawn under his skewed smile.
It’s a chilly winter afternoon in Athens, Georgia, and Chesnutt is dressed in a plaid cotton shirt and an outsized, garishly dyed fur hat. “It’s fake Russian mink,” he explains. “I got it at Gatwick airport.”
Parking his wheelchair at the end of the long table in the kitchen of the sprawling, partially renovated Victorian he shares with his wife and longtime musical partner, Tina, Chesnutt appears slight but powerfully present. The hat accentuates that, its bluish-purple fuzz around his brow ballooning up to the dimensions of a cartoon character’s head and bringing out the shine in his pastel-blue eyes.
Sometimes, thinking hard, Chesnutt’s eyes turn steely. Sometimes he stretches and stiffens his slender arms and slowly raises himself up from his chair, his rear end hovering just above the seat, as if to curse gravity for a few seconds before succumbing to its pull again.
Anyone who’s seen him in his most familiar guise — onstage, squeezing his guitar and singing his hilarious, heartrending songs with a yip and a drawl — knows he can be utterly charming, if willfully unpredictable, and occasionally irascible as hell. Those who have looked further have seen the scars and the suffering and understood the passion of his poetry.
Some know Chesnutt as a survivor — mostly of himself. The back story goes something like this: In 1983, at the age of 18, he got drunk, wrecked his car and became partially paralyzed. More drinking and bouts of depression followed. But so did a newfound feeling for music. These days, relatively clean and sober, even off cigarettes, he seems more focused than ever before on the business of being alive.
Right now, he’s positively giddy about his new CD, Ghetto Bells — a work that’s distinctly sophisticated in its melodic flourishes, but still manages to represent Chesnutt the songwriter at his iconoclastic best. In total, it’s a sort of southern eccentric’s compendium of short stories that read like displaced classic literature: There’s erupting “Vesuvius” and perilous “Little Caesar”, Roman history and a high-pitched Greek chorus, and most certainly the Bible, but as interpreted by a bona fide atheist. What’s more, it showcases some the finest singing of Chesnutt’s career.
Ghetto Bells also features a heavyweight cast of supporting musicians, who also happen to be friends and fans of Chesnutt. They including genial genius jazz guitarist Bill Frisell; legendary composer, arranger and producer Van Dyke Parks (of Brian Wilson Smile fame) on piano, organ and accordion; and drummer Don Heffington, who’s worked with everyone from Big Joe Turner and Big Mama Thornton to Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris.
It’s the twelfth recording Chesnutt has released since 1990, when Little, produced by Michael Stipe of R.E.M., gave the universe its initial glimpse of Vic’s world in purposefully primitive but strongly evocative songs full of fiercely personal and provocative lyrics — with plenty of exclamation points: “I am intelligent, I am intelligent!/I’m not a victim, I’m not a victim!/I am an atheist, I am an atheist!”
Chesnutt’s earliest and latest works differ in many ways. But they form a fascinating arc that goes back to the beginning of his career. Ghetto Bells — due out March 22 on New West Records — has its roots in the early ’90s, in some of Chesnutt’s first shows outside Athens, when he often traveled to Los Angeles to perform as the opening act for shows at the celebrated McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica.
John Chelew, who produced Ghetto Bells and is known for his work with John Hiatt, Richard Thompson and the Blind Boys of Alabama, was booking McCabe’s then. And Chesnutt’s first label, Texas Hotel, was based in Santa Monica.
“The coolest thing they gave to me as a record label was introducing me to John Chelew,” Chesnutt reflects. “My career was basically launched out of McCabe’s. The first papers that wrote about me were the L.A. Times and the L.A. Reader. And through playing there, I met Victoria Williams, and through Victoria, I met Don Heffington. I also met Van Dyke Parks there, through John. That was when John had the idea to make a record with Don and Van Dyke.”
Memories get murky, especially nearly a decade and a half later. But Chelew, Heffington and Parks all agree that Ghetto Bells had its genesis in the professional and personal relationships they began building with Chesnutt at McCabe’s. And the connection they felt with his self-determined artistry has only gotten stronger in the years since.
“I must have been given a tape of Little a year or two before it came out,” Chelew remembers. “And I booked him on the strength of that tape. I had been booking McCabe’s since ’84 and I was starting to get a little bit jaded. I listened to so many demo tapes, and even people who’d already been signed. I’d heard so many singer-songwriters by then — every approach, every age group.
“But when I heard Vic’s tape it completely floored me. I thought, ‘I am hearing storytelling again, finally.’ All these other tapes had nice music and they were playing well and the songs were well-constructed, but I wasn’t drawn in around the campfire. I wasn’t drawn into the story. With Vic, I thought, ‘These songs are amazing.’”
“I met him when I was working with Victoria Williams,” says Heffington. “He used to open for us once in a while and that’s when I started hearing his songs. All the great writers I’ve worked with have a strong point of view, but without trying to define what that is, you just know it’s a Vic song. It’s coming from a place most of us haven’t been.
