For the past year and a half, I've been hanging out with some of my friends about once a month to record a podcast called the Radio Free Song Club. I'm there as a photographer, but the others assembled are songwriters, musicians, sound engineers and visiting guests. It's hosted by Nick Hill (formerly of the Music Faucet on WFMU) and singer-songwriter Kate Jacobs. Dave Schramm is the bandleader, and is joined by a semi-rotating band known as The Radio Free All Stars, which includes David Mansfield, JD Foster, Jeremy Chatzky, Doug Wieselman, Andy Burton, Paul Moschella, Ted Reichman, Anton Fier and many others.
The concept of the show is that the club members-- which include (among others) Freedy Johnston, Jody Harris, Laura Cantrell, Peter Blegvad, Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby, Peter Holsapple, Victoria Williams, Kate Jacobs, and Dave Schramm--contribute a newly written song each month. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don't, but the results are always interesting. Some come as finished masters sent by email from across the sea or out on the road. Others come as demos which are then dubbed live by the all-stars in the studio. On one episode, the band played live with Victoria via Skype. Peter Holsapple has released a CD of new material comprised entirely of songs written for the show.
There have been numerous guests as well as live performances by the club members on each show, including Syd Straw, Beth Orton, Ronee Blakley, Bob Neuwirth, Mary Lee Kortes, Lianne Smith, Susan Cowsill, Glen Hansard, Alana Amram, Steve Wynn, Katell Keineg, and Michael Hurley.
Everyone involved, including Gary Arnold and Andy Taub, who have offered their studios as well as their services, have worked for free, giving their time and their talent to this labor of love. The shows are available for free and have produced some 150 masters of new songs thus far.
This is top-shelf entertainment, folks.
So, the Radio Free Song Club has launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise money for incidental costs in producing this fine show.
Won't you please consider sending a donation? This project will only be funded if at least $5,555 is pledged by Thursday Jun 23, 11:58am EDT. We are most of the way there, and every little bit helps.
In the meantime, here's a few of the songs from the show, including Victoria Williams's version of Townes Van Zandt's "Buckskin Stallion," recorded for the last show, live at The Living Room in New York City, in tribute to her recently deceased horse, and for now, only available here.
Alex stuck his finger down his throat and gagged, showing me that’s how much he hated Memphis. We laughed about it. He didn’t like me much either (something I wrote perhaps, or his interpretation of my horoscope charts), but that didn’t mean we couldn’t laugh together, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy Memphis. He’d recently boarded a flight for a European tour, and the movie showing was The Firm, shot in Memphis—he gagged again. Memphis was a cloak that was hard to shake.
Alex Chilton became a public figure at the age of 16 when, not long after he’d first seen the inside of a recording studio, a song from that session became a 1967 #1 worldwide hit, “The Letter” by the Box Tops. At that impressionable age he became a product packaged and sold, considerable talent yielding considerable profits—for the manager and not the artist. Soon, the monkey walked away from the organ grinder to do his own thing.
His thing: He channeled the future by capturing the underground zeitgeist, three times in the 1970s alone—an audience for the clean pop of the first two Big Star Records caught up to the music a decade after it was made; the third Big Star album was nihilistic and beautiful (hello Elliot Smith and the ‘90s); the shambolic Like Flies on Sherbert deemed hip the wealth and diversity of Americana roots while becoming a punk rock classic. The art of these efforts has become canonized, but the financial return was—again—basically nil. So the monkey bit the hand that fed the banana and cut its own path.
Instead of profit, he was assigned prophecy. But the Replacements only got it half right in their tribute song. Children by the million might have screamed for Alex Chilton, but he’d never have come running. Waves of admiration and love were an assault, and he was scornful of those who needed to make more of his songs than he did. His lifelong interest in astrology makes sense: What is colder, more beautiful, more distant than the stars? Astrology is the province of the seeker, not the sought.
Alex Chilton’s career in song is a testament to his seeking, to his eye for precise detail, his adventuresome ear, his empathetic heart. In a few lines he could chillingly evoke the angst and maelstrom of young adulthood, touching strangers in a personal way (their responses leading to his notorious friction with admirers). He could be a sweetheart as often, and less notoriously, than the contrarian. His mind remained curious all his life, making its own way through politics, the humanities, and sciences with the same zeal he mined R&B, country, classical and all music. He was never predictable, and kept his audience on its guard. In the same late-night late-1970s radio appearance when he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—years, of course, before Whitney Houston made a career out of it, he also broke into a filthy racist ballad. His songs were not unlike William Eggleston’s photographs—crisp, saturated, and composed, with an underlying menace, with a throat-aching wistfulness.
Alex was as complicated as Memphis itself. XL Chitterlings, my favorite of his stage names, stole Wilhelm Reich books from the Memphis Public Library because he said no one checked them out, and he gave them to people whom he thought would appreciate them. When a friend heard him explain his world view, he chided him, “You're right Alex, the world is wrong.” Telling me about this later, Alex added “And, hell. I believe that. The world is wrong, I am right.”
To the end, he did it his way. Apparently he’d been feeling bad for several days, but not so bad he couldn’t refuse advice to visit the doctor. Dead at 59, the loss magnified by its abruptness, this meteoric musician is stilled but his great recordings live on. The eulogies will too, much to his likely irritation.
A couple of Wednesdays ago, I got off the train on the lower west side and started walking towards Gary's Chop Shop, a recording studio where my friend, Nicholas Hill, hosts and records a show called the Radio Free Song Club. I chose my path carefully, avoiding crowds outside bars. It wasn't any ordinary Wednesday. It was March 17th, Saint Patrick's Day, and the streets of New York were overflowing with inebriated revelers, mostly of non-Irish descent, celebrating their alcoholism.
But that's not the point.
As I approached Hudson Street, my phone rang. It was my old friend, Jared, who calls infrequently, and told me he had some bad news. "Alex Chilton died," he said. I didn't believe him. "Are you sure?" I asked. In this age where information flies around so quickly and sometimes incorrectly, it just didn't seem right. He said it was confirmed by the local Memphis paper. I thanked him for calling to let me know, and still didn't quite believe it. It's funny, because neither of us could say we were friends with Alex, but still, it was the kind of thing that people who were affected by his music would be compelled to share with one another.
When I got upstairs to the studio, I don't think I even said hello, only "Alex Chilton died." It was still breaking news and I had to consult Google to be sure. Everyone assembled there were also in disbelief. I checked, and indeed, it was true. The Radio Free Song Club is a loose conglomeration of songwriters, all of whom have been affected by his music, either directly or indirectly. For that evening's taping, the scheduled phone interview was with Peter Holsapple, who was a friend of Alex's, and also recorded with him. Peter had accompanied some fellow North Carolinians on a pilgrimage to meet Alex and Chris Bell in Memphis in 1978 that was chronicled at this blog a few years ago. Nick wanted to be sure that Peter already knew before the call, so we we checked a certain social networking site where the deaths of many are first publicized by the ubiquitous R.I.P. status updates.
Peter knew.
Still processing the loss of his friend, he had this to say: "It's hard to say how much Alex influenced me and a generation of people to pick up guitars ... you hear him in so many songs, and especially recently ... and I'm just grateful that the mythology of Big Star, that he kind of fought against for years, finally kind of seems to have won out, and people realize what a superb band they were and are ... he will be missed."
The special guests for the March 17th taping were Beth Orton and Sam Amidon. They walked in and we shared the news. Sam said he knew Alex's early Big Star song "Thirteen," and I went to work looking up the lyrics on the internet. Beth and Sam worked out a version, accompanied by the more than able house band of Dave Schramm and David Mansfield, and recorded it in one take. None of the assembled musicians had ever played this song together. It's exceptionally beautiful and was recorded only hours after Alex's death. You can hear it HERE.
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To a lot of people, Alex Chilton was "that guy from Big Star" or "the singer in the Box Tops." He was, of course, a lot more than that. Some, first learned of him from Paul Westerberg's song, "Alex Chilton" on the Replacements' 1987 record, Pleased To Meet Me, recorded in Memphis with producer Jim Dickinson - who also died prematurely this past year. Dickinson collaborated with Chilton on his two most important records: Sister Lovers and Like Flies onSherbert. They are records that are both dark and full of light at the same time - the sound of things falling apart and settling into a beautiful mess.
Producer Jon Tiven also tried to record Alex in 1975 in another attempt at capturing the mayhem that was midtown Memphis. He was duly treated as a carpetbagger, and arrived to find Chilton unable to play guitar - his arm was broken. The sessions went on, regardless, and produced a few minor masterpieces, and several other things that probably should have never seen the light of day.
I probably saw Alex Chilton play about twenty times. He was, at times, brilliant, and other times just half-assed. Alex was as good as anyone when he felt like it. Talking to a musician friend of mine who also knew him, I suggested that Alex was a guy who just didn't give it a shit. He corrected me, "No, Chilton was a contrarian." The more I think about it the more I think it's a pretty accurate picture of a guy who did whatever he felt like, especially if it was contrary to what others expected him to do. God bless him, he made a career out of it, and re-invented himself continually while always staying true to his ideals. He would have made a fine aging New Orleans bluesman.
The first time I actually saw him play, was also on a Wednesday night, at Folk City's Music forDozens - shows for three bucks booked by a pre-Yo La Tengo, Ira Kaplan. I was awestruck. Alex was embarking on a new phase of his career, and had (I think) yet to release Fuedalist Tarts, where he covered Slim Harpo, Willie Tee, and Carla Thomas. For me, and a generation of younger post-punks, we learned about a lot of music from Chilton. His records from the 80s have some songwriting by him, but are mostly flavored by his excellent skill as a song-finder. So were his shows. An incredibly talented songwriter (he could rhyme "Flakier" with "Tammy Baker") and a musician who could effortlessly play nearly anything, including Bach and Jazz standards. He approached songs from an astoundingly democratic position, and was at ease in covering "Volare" (in Italian), as well as K.C. and the Sunshine Band, Jimmy C. Newman, Brenton Wood, Porter Wagoner, Troy Shondell, The Velvet Underground, Frank Sinatra, The Seeds, Guitar Slim, Ronnie and The Daytonas, The Carter Family, The Troggs, Sir Mack Rice, Loudon Wainwright III, Carole King, Ernest Tubb, The Beach Boys, or "Disco Lady" by Johnnie Taylor.
The last time I saw him play, he was also booked by Ira Kaplan, at one of Yo La Tengo's 2007 Hanukkah shows at Maxwell's. I felt lucky, because when buying tickets for these shows, no one knows who the special guest is gonna be on any given night during the eight-night stand. I met Alex a few times over the years, photographed him, made small talk, smoked a joint with him (as most people that spent any time around him did) and after the show with Yo La Tengo, talked to him about sending some photographs that I had made of him. I asked him for his email address. He said he didn't have one, and that he'd never used a computer in his life. He may have been pulling my leg, but I kind of believed him. I took my notebook out of my bag and handed him a pen, and he wrote down his home address in New Orleans. We talked a little bit about New Orleans, and how he had gone "missing" during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Friends tried to persuade him to flee with them to Memphis, but he stayed behind giving them his car. For about a week, no one knew if he was dead or alive. He survived, and was eventually air lifted from his house in Treme. In the Replacements' song, "Alex Chilton," Westerberg sang a line that probably never sat well with Alex, "If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe."
He didn't.
On March 17th, 2010, while cutting his lawn, he suffered a heart attack and died en route to the hospital in New Orleans, the city that he called home for nearly half of his life. Thanks for the music, Alex.
I wish I didn’t have to write this obituary, elegy, tribute, grief porn, whatever. I got the assignment on Christmas night––after spending the day hoping, recklessly and stupidly, that Vic Chesnutt might emerge from his coma and, even more improbably, be magically scoured of his chronic death wish––and, with the full understanding that an obit should be, if nothing else, timely, I put off writing it and slipped a DVD into my iMac instead: Jean Cocteau’s frothy fable in glorious grisaille, La Belle et la Bête. This failed attempt to distract myself only reminded me of Chesnutt and his catalog of beautiful beasts. I was unaccountably pissed off. Couldn’t I postpone my sadness, pretend for a night that the gravity of the situation was not, in fact, apparent to us all? Sugarplums and baby Jesuses should have been dancing in my head, not drafts of sentences about how some poor sad fucker offed himself and why we should be sorry.
I regretted the lack of oxycodone, tried to console myself with my mother-in-law’s macaroons. I put away the Cocteau DVD and replaced it with The Salesman and Bernadette, Chesnutt’s 1998 masterpiece, and the man I never knew but loved came alive to me again, my own beautiful, unattainable, much-mourned Bernadette: Vic, I honor you. Vic, I owe you some.
Maybe it’s wrong to mourn him. Maybe we should respect his right to kill himself no matter how much it hurts the people who love him, because that's his choice, and life loses all meaning if it’s mandatory. Maybe it's selfish to ask additional favors of a man who suffered more in his 45 years than most of us can imagine. How many times have you heard someone say that he (and it's almost always a he) would kill himself if he ever became paralyzed? Chesnutt faced this nightmare and stuck it out for a long time. A car accident made him a paraplegic at the age of 18, and he spent the remaining 27 years in a wheelchair. In a weird way, maybe this qualifies as what some theologians call the Fortunate Fall, a bad event with good consequences. Maybe it helped transform him from, in his words, “a redneck bum from Georgia” to a sui generis musical genius, a songwriter’s songwriter, championed first by Michael Stipe and then by countless others, from Madonna to Jonathan Richman to Patti Smith. Without that formative misfortune, could he have written a song like “Sultan, So Mighty,” an odd and lovely little number from 2003’s Silver Lake, which he sings, in a spectral falsetto, from the perspective of a court eunuch? Would he have had the imagination, the empathy, to cast his lot with the freaks, the rejects, the degenerates? (Consider, for example, his heartbreaking, definitive cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Like a Monkey in the Zoo.”) At any rate, despite or because of his suffering, he made more people happy in his brief time on this planet than most of us can hope to do if we live twice as long. As he sang in a tender, revelatory cover of Dylan’s “Buckets of Rain,” “Life is sad, life is a bust/All you can do is do what you must.” He did what he must do, and he did it well.
He called himself “a brokeback atheist,” so I'm not going to hope he's in a better place, or at peace, or hanging out in heaven with his mama, eating pecan pie on a fluffy pearlescent cloud. What do you say on the death of an atheist? What can you wish for him? A miraculously intact spinal cord, pleasure in place of pain? For most believers, heaven is the absence of all hardship, the end to all desire, a magnificent tautology. Heaven, even the hypothetical heaven that nonbelievers believe in, is deadly dull. Chesnutt was many things, but he was never boring. It’s impossible to imagine him in that sterile libido-proof realm, this beautiful broken man who plucked blossoms from the muck, who found his consolation in the imperfect here, in the brutal now.
You could easily turn his suicide into an argument for single-payer health care, as several commentators have done. It’s especially tempting because Chesnutt, who had racked up more than $50,000 in medical debt despite the fact that he had health insurance, railed against our colossally corrupt system in recent interviews. As someone who knows all too well the unique agony of bickering with some midlevel insurance rep when you’re way too sick to care anymore, I have to wonder if he simply got tired of fighting. Maybe he figured, “Fuck it all, I did what I must do, and I did it well. Now I’m through.” He made many great records, he had thousands of fans all over the world, if nowhere near as many as he deserved, and a bunch of people he admired and respected admired and respected him back. What more could anyone reasonably expect? Maybe he got sick of always having to make that extra effort, always having to measure up.
But using Chesnutt’s death to advance a political argument seems reductive and wrong, and speculating about his motives won’t bring him back.
Suicide, unfortunately, inducts you into a special club, and you might not like the other members. There you are, wedged between Ian Curtis and Sylvia Plath, Mohammed Atta and David Foster Wallace, Kurt Cobain and my maternal grandmother. Everyone starts reading your life backward. They start inferring dark shit from your every innocent pronouncement, imposing new, unintended meanings. Skinny girls in black lipstick flop around in their darkened bedrooms and mouth the words to your songs, carve your lyrics into their flesh. Suddenly, despite your best intentions, you’re, ugh, kind of goth. Chesnutt, whose best songs are, like all great works of art, life-affirming and happy-making regardless of their subject, deserves a better fate.
I wish he wouldn’t have done it, of course, but more than that I wish he wouldn’t have wanted to do it. But then we’re back to the old Fortunate-Fall paradox: Maybe his curse was his gift. The ability to experience joy and share it comes with a price, the necessity of pain. Numb yourself to the latter, and you deny yourself the former.
And joy abounds in Chesnutt’s canon, a joy that’s always pitted against pain but somehow prevails. He grapples with the can’t-go-on-must-go-on quandary in Silver Lake’s transcendent closer, “In My Way, Yes,” a touching argument against self-annihilation. After he runs through a litany of life’s little compensations (“Driving fast all night/Bursting into song at first light/Sharing breakfast from one plate/Holding hands over loved ones’ graves”), a stern Greek chorus of alter egos asks him if he thinks he deserves his happiness, to which he replies, “I say yes, in my way yes.” Never has self-affirmation sounded so heroic.
In the recent song “Flirted With You All My Life,” which Chesnutt described as a “breakup song with death,” he informs Death, the “You” of the title, that he’s not ready, not yet ready, to die. In hindsight, it’s far from reassuring. I said I wouldn’t speculate, but I can’t help myself. Why did he do it when he said he wouldn’t? Guess what, Vic: We weren’t ready either. We still aren’t.
Let’s try to be grateful for all the beautiful songs he left us––about 15 albums’ worth, depending on how you count them––and stop being greedy, wishing for more.
Here are a few that I’ve been comforting myself with lately, from my favorite Vic Chesnutt albums, The Salesmanand Bernadette and Silver Lake.
There’s “Old Hotel,” which I recently decided is a metaphor for the human body, the way it can both betray and redeem us. The original version, on Salesman, is strange and a little off-putting, with Chesnutt’s multitracked mutter bobbing above Lambchop’s funereal horns. The vocal effect makes him sound slightly detached, at some remove. The lyrics are among Chesnutt’s best, though, a stoneristic riddle that starts out sordid (“I can see my old hotel down amongst the smells. I’m up above that ancient city river. It’s filtered by my lousy liver. It’s filtered by my wilted lily liver”) and accumulates an unlikely grace (“I’m giddy like a tipsy Mary Poppins”). The live version, from a 1995 performance on WFMU’s Radio Thrift Shop, is knee-bucklingly beautiful, with a more intimate arrangement of keening cello, shivery vibes, and Chesnutt’s plangent rasp.
“Old Hotel” (live) mp3 by Vic Chesnutt, 1995. from WFMU's Radio Thrift Shop at the Museum of Television & Radio (courtesy: Laura Cantrell)
He’s one of those lyricists whose words can fall flat on the page––deliberately, operatically flat, like a slapstick stunt that makes you laugh all the harder because you know how much it hurt. For every perfect line, there’s a real howler, and it’s this friction between the sublime and the silly that sets Chesnutt apart from lesser poets. He is endearingly unafraid of looking stupid. He makes ridiculous rhymes, or more precisely, he reveals his own ridiculousness by stretching for them and failing extravagantly, like a sitcom drunk. He doesn’t embrace so much as tongue-kiss the absurd.
Sometimes he rhymes like a very stoned person trying to be funny, which, it turns out, can actually be really funny. Then, while you’re all relaxed and giggly, he tosses off a couplet so devastatingly gorgeous that you’d swear he ripped it off Yeats. He’s often quite crude, in an almost self-consciously juvenile way, as on the horndog pastorale “Maiden,” a sweet and slow art-soul high-five to fucking that begins, “Dogs are barking. Birds are chirping. The only thing better is if I was squirting.” It’s one of many songs in which he pokes fun at himself, at the male ego.
He has always reminded me of Stanley Elkin, another dirty-minded genius in a wheelchair, another crass and extravagant lover of life. Elkin, who had multiple sclerosis, was a big-shot novelist at Washington University in St. Louis, where I attended grad school. I never took a class with him, never had the nerve, but more than once I saw male students awkwardly heaving him up the stairs of the old elevatorless building where Hurst Lounge, site of most of the fiction and poetry readings, was located. It seems unfathomable now, in light of the Americans with Disabilities Act and insurance regulations and the potential for lawsuits, that anyone, much less a literary lion, would have to undergo that particular humiliation, but endure it he did, probably several times a semester. All the petty indignities, the physical and emotional pain: How did they imprint themselves on Elkin’s work, on Chesnutt’s? To what extent are they responsible for that radiant empathy?
“Stay Inside,” another standout from Silver Lake, is the atheist’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” an introvert’s manifesto. Supported by a mournful choir and stately Wurlitzer, Chesnutt’s slippery moan sounds soulful and reverent, as timeless as Dylan or the Bible. Printed on a page, the words are almost unbearably sad: The last verse goes, “Suddenly everything’s different and/Everyone’s on edge/I just wanted to bring folks together/But it seems that I am the biggest wedge.” It’s hard to resist staying inside, the siren call of the chorus, when you know that shutting yourself off is the only sure way to keep from causing further damage. Somehow, though, the song demolishes its own argument, comes out on the side of the communal. It is so perversely beautiful that it almost sounds holy, more holy than a song that references stinky bedclothes has any right to be. The band comes together, gingerly at first and then with a loose but locked-in grandeur, as if they’ve all tapped into the universal mind. We’re not alone, not yet.
