Kristin Hersh - Dont Suck, Dont Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

PETER BLACKSTOCK AND DAVID MENCONI, EDITORS

DONT SUCK, DONT DIE

GIVING UP VIC CHESNUTT

KRISTIN HERSH

FOREWORD BY AMANDA PETRUSICH

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

AUSTIN

Copyright 2015 by Kristin Hersh

Foreword copyright 2015 by Amanda Petrusich

All rights reserved

First edition, 2015

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University of Texas Press

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Austin, TX 78713-7819

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hersh, Kristin, author.

Dont suck, dont die : giving up Vic Chesnutt / Kristin Hersh ; foreword by Amanda Petrusich.

pages cm (American music series)

ISBN 978-0-292-75947-3 (cloth : alkaline paper)

1. Chesnutt, VicAnecdotes. 2. Hersh, KristinAnecdotes. I. Petrusich, Amanda, writer of supplementary textual content. II. Title. III. Series: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

ML420.C4727H47 2015

782.42164092dc23

[B]

2015009516

: Vic in Athens, Georgia, 1996.

Photo by Carl Martin.

doi:10.7560/759473

ISBN 978-1-4773-0875-2 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-0874-5 (individual e-book)

FOR TINA CHESNUTT AND BILLY OCONNELL

CONTENTS

by Amanda Petrusich

Vic with one of his paintings, 1988.

Photo by Rick Hawkins.

FOREWORD

AMANDA PETRUSICH

If the 1990s had a reigning ethos, it was apathyor at least that was the party line repeated by the press, trotted out again and again to describe the supposedly listless temperament of the decades youth. It was presumed that everyone born into Generation X was combative but disengaged, a slacker-malcontent with an armoire full of flannel and a blank stare. The soundtrack was apropos: there was the icy disaffection of Sonic Youth, the existential whine of Nirvana, the mumbled, indolent refrains of Beck.

And then there was Vic Chesnutt: feeling everything, pawing at an acoustic guitar, singing the kinds of songs that made you want to cover your mouth with your hands, they were that honest.

Vic Chesnutt was born on November 12, 1964, in Jacksonville, Florida, and was reared about three hundred miles north, in Zebulon, Georgia, where he moved with his adoptive parents as a boy. By all accounts, Chesnutt was a funny and occasionally desperate kid, and he flourished under the gentle tutelage of his grandfather, a country singer and guitarist who introduced Chesnutt to the more nourishing qualities of music. In 1983, at age eighteen, Chesnutt was in a brutal single-car accidenthed been driving drunk, he later saidthat left him almost entirely paralyzed from the neck down, although he did eventually regain limited use of his arms and hands, enough to hit a crucial handful of chords on a guitar.

In 1985, Chesnutt relocated to Athens, Georgia, the tiny university town that nurtured so-called college-rock titans like R.E.M., Neutral Milk Hotel, Elf Power, and the B-52s. There, Chesnutt met Michael Stipe, an early champion of his songwriting; Stipe ultimately produced Chesnutts debut record, Little, which was released by Texas Hotel Records in 1990. Speed Racer, one of that albums most beloved songs, showcased Chesnutts atheism, the tenets of which would pervade his lyrics for the next twenty-five years: Im not a victim / I am an atheist, Chesnutt wailed over a few strummed chords. Then an electric guitar riff appeared, as if piped in from a malfunctioning AM radio in another room.

For sixteen more albums and EPs, Chesnutt sang in a crooked, southern way about darkness and pain. Jon Pareles, writing in the New York Times, said that Chesnutts songs were about the inevitability of collapse and decay, and there is a sense, listening to him sing, that his primary creative prerogative was to remind his listeners that we are all rotting away, every single moment that we are alive, and the whole of human existence is merely a long, ridiculous creep toward the same stupid end. When he was performing, he had the comportment of a person who had lookedand I mean really lookedinto some kind of void. Who gets access to that vantage, and why, is an impossible thing to reason out, but proximity to that type of darkness changes a person. There was a slackness in his eyes sometimes, a droop that betrayed a truth no one wanted to see or believe: it doesnt matter if I live or die, it said, andthere was that glint, the puckish flashit doesnt matter if you do, either. Its reductive to attribute Chesnutts particular anguish to his paralysis (hed exhibited signs of severe depression before the crash, and attempted suicide as a teenager), but his immobility made that pain outwardly palpable. It almostand this is a hideous thoughtfelt justified, like hed earned it. Of course, the people who loved him bucked that idea, violently.

Chesnutt spent a good chunk of the mid-1990s traveling the globe with Kristin Hersh, the front woman of the rock band Throwing Muses, as the opening act on her solo tours. Hersh was born in Atlanta to a pair of hippie parents (her grandparents, meanwhile, were strict southern Baptists) and was raised in Rhode Island; like Chesnutt, there is something unmistakably southern about her work, something cracked and bluntly soulful. In 1995, Rolling Stone called Throwing Muses one of alternative rocks most influential but under-appreciated groups, but by 1997 Hersh had settled into a solo career and was exploring an array of creative options, playing everything from Appalachian folk ballads to lead guitar in the aggro power trio 50 Foot Wave.

Early on in this extraordinary book, Hershs memoir of her time with Chesnutt, theres a scene in which she smashes a bag of cinnamon candy onto Chesnutts windshield, and what seems like an amiable road gag becomes an extended metaphor for her furious attempts to get Chesnutt to recognize, if not embrace, the tremendous sweetness of being. Its right here, she tells him, over and over and over again. Its right here. She does this work ferociously, and with the wild and propulsive tyranny of someone who knows that she is doing an important and difficult job. Grab sugar wherever it falls is how she first puts the idea to him. (Moments later, he tells her that its the gayest thing shes ever said.)

The exchange reminds mein its purity and vigorof the way we sometimes try too hard to get the wrong people to love us, and how their reluctance only makes that desire deeper and more urgent. You cant imagine how good this will be is all we can think in that hot, panicked moment, and so we plead: Just try it. Just try me. But fear of sweetness, fear of lifeits such an impossible thing to conceive of when youre standing on the other side of it. Chesnutt wore his disavowal of it proudly, like a medal. I, I, I, I, I am a coward, he hollered in Coward, a spare, arresting track from his penultimate LP, At the Cut. He was not an easy person to love, or be loved by, but he and Hersh seemed to recognize something in each othermaybe a shared impulse to articulate something true about the world, maybe a shared sense of being lost in it.

And so it turns out that Kristin Hersh and Vic Chesnutt were the exact right people for each other, at least for a while. This book explores that deep and devastating relationship, the oddball camaraderie of two independent-minded songwriters working at the margins of popular music. Hershs remembrance of their tours together proffers insight into many things (music, marriage, mental illness, love, big ideas about home and the passage of time), but this book is concerned mostly with friendship. These types of heavy platonic alliances, the ones uncomplicated by sex or romancethey dont get nearly enough airplay. They can be as formative and influential as the great loves.