"And so all you observers in your scrutinydon't count my scars like tree rings.My jigsaw disposition, its piecemeal propertiesare either smoked or honey cured by the panic pure." --Vic Chesnutt, "Panic Pure", West of Rome
Whether as a critic, devoted fan, or casual listener, it's difficult not to count Vic Chesnutt's tree rings, just as it's hard not to overestimate the significance of his wheelchair. It's become something of an icon to the Chesnutt cult, who scour his lyrics for commentary on the traffic accident that left the then-18-year-old Chesnutt paralyzed. The wheelchair looms Changeling-style in songs like "Isadora Duncan" and "Supernatural", and one-time drummer Jeffery Richards used to play it as an instrument in live shows, when it would be rigged with microphones.
And yet, the tendency to trace the Pike County, Georgia, native's first four albums-- Little, West of Rome, Drunk, and Is the Actor Happy?, all of which were originally released on the now-defunct Texas Hotel label-- to that accident is more reductive than instructive. As these and subsequent albums proclaim, there is more to Chesnutt than his wheelchair: There is a fondly, even desperately remembered childhood; a tumultuous marriage; a wicked sense of humor that played/preyed on pop culture like a musical Mystery Science Theatre 3000; a sharp mind; a caustic self-loathing; and a beautifully conflicted Southern man.
After releasing last year's Silver Lake, New West Records is reissuing those first four Chesnutt albums in handsome new editions full of bonus tracks culled from live shows, demos (many of which are early versions of tracks from 1998's The Salesman and Bernadette), alternate takes, and non-album tracks. Each reissue includes new liner notes by Chesnutt's friends and collaborators: producer/sidekick Michael Stipe (Little), friend and photographer Jem Cohen (West of Rome), fan Ian McKaye (Drunk), and poet Forrest Gander (Is the Actor Happy?). Drunk is given a bright new cover, and thankfully, New West has upgraded the packaging on all four, vastly improving on Texas Hotel's cardboard sleeves. The label even allows Chesnutt to right some wrongs: on West of Rome, for instance, he relegates the original opener, "Latent/Blatant", which Texas Hotel demanded lead off the album, to bonus track status, thus restoring his intended tracklist.
Little was released in 1990, after producer and R.E.M. frontman Stipe caught one of Chesnutt's shows at the 40 Watt Club in Athens, Georgia. The most elemental of any of Chesnutt's albums, it features just his warbly voice and precarious acoustic guitar, occasionally accompanied by Stipe's keyboard flourishes. As its title suggests, Little is about Chesnutt's Pike County childhood, a theme he would return to repeatedly as if thumbing worn and creased snapshots found at the bottom of a drawer. "Rabbit Box" begins, "While I was still in elementary school I discovered Daddy's tools," following the songwriter as he builds a rabbit box out of scrap lumber, but only catches a cat and a possum. In one sense, his youth represents an uncomplicated time-- pre-crash-- when all of life's possibilities lay before him, before they were whittled down to the point they are now.
This theme similarly haunts West of Rome. On "Panic Pure", he sings, "My earliest memory is of holding up a sparkler/ High up to the darkest sky/ Some Fourth of July spectacular/ I shook it with an urgency I'll never ever be able to repeat." But Chesnutt isn't lamenting lost innocence, nor does he trust himself not to whitewash the past; memory is something to be wary of, childhood to be reckoned with, and his nostalgia alternates between guardedly wistful, recklessly jaded, and sometimes simply observational.
From Little to Is the Actor Happy? Chesnutt's themes grow from childhood to more adult matters like friendship, romance and community, while the music grows fuller and more dynamic, losing only a bit of Little's casual intimacy as his backing musicians rotate in and out. West of Rome has a warm sound, thanks to Stipe's increasing confidence as producer and Chesnutt's hesitant electric guitar on songs like "Withering" and "Sponge". As its title suggests, Drunk is Chesnutt at his darkest, but its songs and scope suffer a bit. "One of Many", "Supernatural" and "Kick My Ass" all crackle with self-reckoning, but too often the album meanders boozily, which is perhaps the point.
Is the Actor Happy?, his fourth album and last for Texas Hotel, is not just arguably his finest release, but also his most extroverted. His subject isn't just himself, but also his place among friends and amid the sprawl of the South. Namedropping acquaintances like Bill Lowery as well as cultural figures like Larry Flynt, Upton Sinclair's Babbitt, and Stipe (in the apologia-cum-duet "Guilty by Association"), he turns his observational eye outward, from the military convoy rumbling through "Gravity of the Situation" to the kudzu-covered apocalypse of "Free of Hope". Then there's "Onion Soup", a travelogue-via-epistolary song that crafts perfectly understated tragedy from an unsent letter: "I wrote you an eloquent postcard once/ About this most exquisite onion soup/ But of course I never mailed it, though/ 'Cause it was your turn in the loop."
What connects these four albums is what Stipe calls Chesnutt's "economy of gesture and brilliance of character." Chesnutt's writerly voice is as literary as it is lyrical, not merely because he writes in stories and often even in scenes, nor because his subject matter aligns very closely with the concerns of Southern writers like Barry Hannah and Eudora Welty, but mostly because Chesnutt can cajole words into new shapes and meanings. On "Speed Racer", a song about Kierkegaardian victimhood from Little, he sings, "I used to watch Speed Racer with that hyper attitude/ That carried me here to this fluorescent enlightenment." Against this curious juxtaposition of afternoon cartoons with European philosophy, the pun "fluorescent enlightenment" evokes anonymous college classrooms with their institutional lighting and the naïve freshman epiphanies therein, which spark briefly and eagerly like an overhead idea bulb.
Chesnutt's physical voice, shaky and high like a cartoon character, works the same way, drawing out odd syllables into strange, onomatopoeic sounds, even as he rushes to fit all his words to the melodies. On "Isadora Duncan", he shifts the syllable break on the word "attitude" so that it sounds like "a-tit-tude," but without turning it into a raunchy joke. He uses the British pronunciation of "advertisements" on "Supernatural", with the accent on the second syllable and a soft "i" in the third, and growls the word "gravity" so that it becomes "grrrrrr-ravity."
The cumulative effect of this approach to songwriting and singing is that these four albums sound like they all come from a very specific, very singular brain, pickled with alcohol and self-loathing but still prickly with highly personal insights. Taken together, these albums form a quadrilogy of complex self-definition and self-loathing that is as contradictory as it is utterly compelling. Few artists could hope to fill their music with as much humor, insight, personality and "panic pure" as Chesnutt crams into these songs.
