Kristin Hersh is actually to blame. During the interview we recently talked about Vic Chesnutt, her beloved songwriter colleague, to whom she dedicated a great, brutally honest book in 2015: “Don’t Suck, Don’t Die”. By then Vic had already been dead for six years. Their memories of their time together end with the words: “Everything dies, love even. (…) See you in my dreams.”
That made me think of Bruce Springsteen, who now always ends his concerts with the E Street Band with “I’ll See You In My Dreams”. “Death is not the end,” it says, something Bob Dylan already told us. Springsteen now has many people he can only meet in his dreams – as the losses mount, the melancholy grows greater, but he has transformed it into an energy that counteracts the finiteness with a defiant joy of life. It’s similar with Kristin Hersh: She has learned to take things as they come.
And it wasn’t that different with Vic Chesnutt. He became a singer-songwriter because he really wanted to – even though he was left paralyzed in a car accident when he was eight-teen, which made traveling around as a traveling musician difficult and playing the guitar practically impossible. Hersh reports that a group of medical students should discuss his case. Given the facts, everyone agreed that this man was unlikely to be able to move, with minimal use of his arms. Chesnutt laughed at the finding. And how he could play with his “crippled hand” (that’s what he called it himself, he wasn’t a sugar-coater)! Like no other.
November, with its Remembrance Day and Dead Sunday and All Souls Day and all the darkening days, is exactly the right time to listen to Vic Chesnutt extensively. Every month is right because Vic has written so many touching songs. He never became famous enough, but how important is that?
His debut, “Little,” was produced in 1990 by Michael Stipe in Athens, Georgia, where Vic had lived since his accident. Sometimes in the following years he would have liked to run away from all the REM fans there, he once told me, but – with a grinning look at his legs: “Unfortunately, that’s difficult for me.” Interviews with Vic Chesnutt were always lessons Acceptance without self-pity: He wasn’t complaining, he was realizing. And he even had a funny way of describing how he and his wheelchair were once forgotten on the plane. The fact that he ended his life on Christmas Day 2009 because the pain became too severe and the medical costs were too high still makes me sad.
What remains is the music again. He left behind more than a dozen albums, at least three of which are masterpieces: in addition to the debut “West Of Rome” (1991) and “Is The Actor Happy?” (1995). The song titles alone say so much: “Panic Pure”, “Gravity Of The Situation”, “Sad Peter Pan”, “Free Of Hope”. Again and again he wrote angry, tender, sharp folk rock pieces that pierce the heart. One of the last ones is called “Flirted With You All My Life”. With this unmistakable gnawing voice he sings about the longing for death – and: “Oh, death/ Clearly I’m not ready.”