In His Way, Yes: RIP Vic Chesnutt

If you care you probably already know about Vic Chesnutt’s death over the holidays, at the age of 45. I first heard of him when a tribute album was organized to help pay the wheelchair-bound (from a drunk-driving accident in his teens) singer’s medical bills in the mid-1990s. But those financial burdens only got heavier over the years, with Chesnutt reported to have owed $70,000 in hospital fees at the time of his death - which happened to coincide exactly with the passage of the defanged U.S. health-care-reform bill in the Senate. Whether the new legislation could have provided someone in Chesnutt’s situation any “sweet relief” I can’t say, though I am inclined to doubt it, and judging by the timing of his apparent suicide, perhaps he did too, although speculation on what is sounding in the depths of someone’s heart when they take these desperate measures is really out of bounds.

I could rhapsodize for days about what a fascinating songwriter Chesnutt was. While he was more than capable of crapping out or trifling with his own talent - and even that said something about his fearlessness - his strongest moments offered this unusually philosophical music that reminds me of the aphorisms of E.M. Cioran (the author of books such as The Trouble with Being Born), who wrote, “Melancholy redeems this universe, and yet it is melancholy that separates us from it.” But Chesnutt’s was, unlike Cioran’s excoriate-the-cosmos Romanian po’face, a southern-gothic existentialism that also partook of moments of transcendence in which the same things that make life intolerable also make it worthy of the love that pokes its crooked nose out between the bars of his songs - songs that find the pungency in a pun and heroism in just squinting hard enough to see your way clear to survival. … Most of the time.

The video above was made just a month ago, which makes it hard to endure, the thought that all that liveliness could be so suddenly given up and gone.

PS: His close friend Kristin Hersh (ex-Throwing Muses) provides a Paypal link to donate to Chesnutt’s family, along with her own moving tribute.