"to fly over the mountain, though i'm standing still...."

[initially published October 30, 2007, on the now-defunct nodepression.net website]

When a new live release from Karla Bonoff (titled, reasonably enough, Live) arrived in the mail recently, my first impulse wasn't to put its two discs into the CD player, but rather to pull out my tattered old vinyl copy of her 1977 self-titled solo debut and play IT instead.

Such is the lifelong blessing and curse of artists who make a classic album right outta the gate. Think Marshall Crenshaw's self-titled debut; the Cowboy Junkies' The Trinity Session (though it wasn't technically their first); Willis Alan Ramsey's first (and, still, only) record .... all so good that the artists in question have spent the rest of their careers trying to live up to such perfect beginnings.

Bonoff's debut was that good, and she's certainly well aware of it. She wrote eight of the record's ten songs, and all eight of those songs are among the 21 tracks on her new live disc. Clearly she's come to terms with the reality that her fan base still wants to hear all those songs, and when it comes down to it, that's a good thing. There are worse fates than having written an entire album's worth of material that stands the test of time three decades later.

The new live versions (recorded at shows in California and Japan) are quite good; Bonoff remains in fine voice, even as she's inevitably tuned down a step for "If He's Ever Near" (and yet she still hits some majestic high notes in "Falling Star", my personal favorite from that first record). It's also fair to note that the other thirteen tracks are more than chopped liver; especially of note is "Wild Heart Of The Young", the title track to her 1981 album. Conspicuously absent from the live collection is her lone top-40 hit, 1982's "Personally", but that's just fine by me, as that song always seemed a little bit lightweight compared to the emotional depth and resonance of Bonoff's best work.

It's worth acknowledging that I probably would never have become familiar with Bonoff way back then if not for the influence of my older brother Si, who had a fair bit to do with the development of my musical tastes in those formative years. I may have listened to the album then in large part because Si played it and I just liked what I heard; but I'm struck all these years later by just how strong a record it really is, the kind of songwriter's statement that definitively proves an artist's worth, much like Lucinda Williams' self-titled 1988 record (indeed, Lucinda's "Like A Rose" from that album seems to echo "Rose In The Garden" from Bonoff's debut), or perhaps Iris DeMent's "Infamous Angel".

Bonoff never did become a big star -- in some ways, her greatest notoriety came from Linda Ronstadt having covered three of her debut album's songs on her 1976 blockbuster Hasten Down The Wind -- but she did seem to earn a reputation as one of the best singer-songwriters to come out of the 1970s SoCal scene. She certainly deserves that respect.

Losing Vic Chesnutt

by Peter Blackstock

I've been trying to write something about Vic Chesnutt for a couple of weeks now, and just haven't seemed to be able to get it all out. Mostly because it's just been too sad and depressing to face, I think. Partly because I fear that some of the things that Vic felt he lost in recent years have been things that I have lost too. And maybe -- I should admit this part because Vic would've done the same himself -- I've just been slack. (In fact he DID fess up to just that in his hand-scrawled liner notes to the 1993 album West Of Rome: "But know I am slack," he warned those who might write to the P.O. Box address he provided.)

Slack in getting the words down on the page, though, doesn't mean I haven't been thinking about him pretty much every day since Christmas. Most of an afternoon vanished when I tried to hunt down an old Polaroid of Vic taken in Austin circa 1991; not sure exactly how it ended up in my possession, but it was a fun snapshot, with a handful of Austin musicians (including Wammo, Frank Orrall of Poi Dog Pondering, Ingrid Karklins, and Thomas Anderson, and somebody's young son) all surrounding a beaming and charming Chesnutt. Perhaps someday it'll turn up and I can scan and post it here. Till then, it still burns brightly in my mind's eye, a split-second of joyousness frozen in another lifetime.

I also spent hours combing through my hard-drive and pre-laptop computer printouts to find all the old interviews and reviews and articles I wrote about Vic, for the Austin American-Statesman and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and The Rocket and the MusicHound Country Album Guide and No Depression. Somehow I never did write at length about Vic for ND; as editor, I spent more of my time assigning pieces to our many talented freelancers (we had Russell Hall, William Bowers and Bob Townsend write extended pieces about Chesnutt at various points along our thirteen-year run), but I did go over my own personal history with Vic in a "Hello Stranger" editor's note when we had Chesnutt on our cover in ND #56. I put that up on my previous post here.

During the '90s I seemed to have an encounter with Chesnutt once a year or so. I didn't see him nearly as much over the last decade; there was an occasional SXSW gig, and a show at Cats Cradle in Chapel Hill (opening for Hem) where my wife Lisa got a chance to see and meet him. And this past January, I went to see him at Local 506 in Chapel Hill with Elf Power; I briefly said hello inbetween sets, but didn't make the effort to visit more with him. My last chance, alas.

Counting it up from my show logs, I found that I saw Vic perform 22 times between 1991 and 2009. One of the singular things about Vic's shows was that he almost never paid any heed to whatever record he might have most recently put out. That Elf Power gig was an exception, for the obvious reason that they could only do songs they'd worked up together, which meant that they played most of their excellent Dark Developments album. Most of the time, though, and especially when performing solo (which he did frequently), he just ignored his latest release and played a buncha new stuff. Might have been frustrating for some, but I always found it fascinating, in large part because going to see Vic was always less about the song (though he truly was a great songwriter) and more about the personality. Half the experience was the humor; he was one of the funniest people I've ever encountered.

A few scattered memories from those nearly two dozen shows:

-- At a performance at the Backstage in Seattle, someone kept requesting "Danny Carlisle" (from Vic's debut Little). Chesnutt generally didn't suffer requests gladly, but in this case he had a unique reply: "Why don't YOU come up here and play 'Danny Carlisle'?" And so the guy did -- Vic eyeing him all the while with a sort of mock-schoolmarm judgmentalism, as if he were fixing to grade the kid's oral report. It was a nicely played and heartfelt rendition, which Vic ultimately acknowledged quite warmly: "You did good."

-- A crazy Sunday night in Athens in November 1993 began with an Alejandro Escovedo show at a small club and ended up in someone's living room, with Escovedo and his violinist Susan Voelz and cellist Frank Kammerdiener swapping songs well into the wee hours along with a cast of locals including Kevn Kinney, Syd Straw, and Armistead Welleford. Vic was there too; people kept prodding him to do a song, but he kept insisting, "I'm too drunk," until his benefactor finally berated him into complying.

-- At that final show I saw with Elf Power a year ago, Vic went on a classic rant about how his thunder had been stolen by Hollywood wannabes. Seems that one of the best songs on his new record was a jaunty little ditty called "The Curious Case Of The Bilocating Dog", about a remarkable canine that could appear in two places at once. A couple months later came the Oscar-nominated film The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button. Vic was not amused. "I got screwed!" he howled from the stage, to waves of sympathetic laughter.

Such moments were common with Vic, and it was hard not to think of him without smiling. I realize he had a significantly darker side as well; I can't say I knew him enough to have experienced it much, but I'd heard the stories about tour freakouts and breakdowns and previous attempts on his life. Lord knows he had a hard go of it in his 45 years, but I did get the sense that he fought pretty valiantly, and he accomplished a heckuva lot. And in so many ways he was just brilliant; the oft-overused "genius" tag is fully deserved in Chesnutt's case.

That his death may have in part been brought on by the failure of the United States health care system is as maddening as it is unsurprising. More than being angry, though, I'm simply sad, for never having a chance to hear him play onstage again, or to sit and talk with him for awhile. It may sound a bit too Ben Kenobi-like, but a great light has been vanquished from our world.

And yet, I'll never forget him, who he was, that irrepressible spirit that soared above the little guy in the wheelchair. Even in this saddest of circumstances, it's STILL hard to think of him without smiling.

Soul Asylum covering Vic's song "When I Ran Off And Left Her"

Remembering Vic

my "Hello Stranger" editor's note for No Depression #56, March-April 2005, when we put Vic on the cover of No Depression:

I first met Vic Chesnutt in early 1991. He was coming through Austin, where I lived at the time, to play a show at the local alt-rock club, and I’d done a phone interview with him to preview the show for the daily paper. As it happened, my roommate at the time, Wammo (now the ringleader of the Asylum Street Spankers), was a friend of Vic’s, so we all went to dinner before the show at Sam’s, a legendary eastside barbecue joint. I remember Chesnutt curiously eyeing the photos on the wall of Stevie Ray Vaughan and other Austin blues greats, and I still recall some of the things he said in that phone interview. (He insisted the car crash that put him in a wheelchair made him a better guitarist: “I played too damn jazzy back then.”)

There was a song he was playing then that never ended up on a record, yet I can still remember it quite clearly. It was called “Critic’s Darling” and it was a snapshot of what he’d been going through in the wake of the attention his debut album had received. “Some say ‘Keep it minimal’/Some say ‘Get an orchestra’,” he related, acknowledging that even his “benefactor” (Michael Stipe) was hounding him: “He says ‘Your new album’s about due’/I said ‘I haven’t got a clue.’” Vic summed it up in the chorus: “This could be the end of me, though I’m just barely starting/Everybody loves to hate the critic’s darling.”

How many songs that you heard just a couple times, songs that never ended up on a record, can you remember vividly more than a decade later? I believe this says something about the weight of Chesnutt’s delivery, and his personality.

We inevitably crossed paths again at various times over the years, and most of those occasions somehow stick out in my mind. I moved to Seattle in late 1991 and Vic came through in mid-’92; few people seemed to know who he was, but by the time he left town after shows at the Crocodile and the Backstage, he’d left a lasting impression among those who saw him, particularly fellow musicians.

I took it upon myself to harangue Grant Alden, managing editor of The Rocket, to allow me to become a sort of serial reviewer of Vic’s catalogue over the next couple years, from West Of Rome to Drunk to Is The Actor Happy to Nine High A Pallet. Looking back at them now, not my finest work, though I do still have a fondness for this assessment of Drunk: “Chapter three, in which our hero (mine, anyway) continues his quest to charm and/or annoy the music-buying public with songs that could only have oozed from his hopelessly, gloriously warped lil’ noggin.”

Then there was the time a couple years later when Chesnutt was scheduled to play a show at the Crocodile. Scott McCaughey and I were sitting in the club’s restaurant when we saw Vic pull up in his van. Driving, by himself. The guy in the wheelchair was touring across the country completely solo. I still can’t quite comprehend how he pulled that off.

Somewhere in there, I did another phone interview with him, and he talked about how he’d recently written a letter to the city of San Francisco in defense of the nightclub Slim’s, which was facing stiff penalties for not meeting handicapped-access regulations. “It was gonna cost $150,000 dollars to get it up to code.…That's just berserk. That's crazy. If the place catches on fire — so I die. You know, big deal. It's better that I die so that San Francisco can rock!”

I bring up all these memories not simply to reminisce about the good ol’ days, but perhaps to try to underscore why Vic Chesnutt is on our cover. Yes, it’s been nearly a decade since his profile peaked with that Sweet Relief tribute disc and his brief tenure on Capitol. Yes, there are newer and younger and hotter artists we could put out front, ones that might be wiser choices in terms of newsstand sales.

But Vic has a history in our little world. Not only a history, but a story to tell, and he does so with rare and brazen honesty and insight. It says quite a bit that we had William Bowers write at length about Chesnutt for us a couple years ago, and now have Bob Townsend writing a cover story about Vic in this issue, without retracing steps already taken. This is an artist whose life and work are intriguing and uncommon enough to warrant the continued attention. Critic’s darlings be damned.

— Peter Blackstock

Sad Peter Pan

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a cover of Vic Chesnutt's "Sad Peter Pan"

recorded by Peter Blackstock on July 30, 1995

at 1321 N. 44th Street, Seattle, Washington

Goodbye, Vic.

(A Great Frigatebird soars high above the lighthouse at Kilauea Point National Wildlife Refuge, November 2009.)