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- Phthursday Musings: Jonathan & Vic, Beauty & Sadness
Phthursday Musings: Jonathan & Vic, Beauty & Sadness
or, What do I mean?
So I write a long tangential entry about tennis and golf, and what is the feedback? What are the masses craving?
More Jonathan Richman! they exclaim.
The masses must be sated.
So one night I took this girl out to a concert. Jonathan Richman and Vic Chesnutt at the Castle Theatre in Bloomington. Imagine that: Jonathan Richman and Vic Chesnutt in little old Bloomington, Illinois!
Vic came out in his wheelchair. He remains the most unusual figure I’ve ever seen on a stage. It just didn’t look like he could actually play his guitar. It looked like he could barely move. But, of course, he was mesmerizing. He was Vic Chesnutt.
Jonathan came out with his drummer, Tommy Larkin. I didn’t realize exactly what his set was going to be. And it was outrageous in its simplicity and tenderness.
At some point during the show, not really sure when, I actually got up and chastized some idiot for being too loud in the balcony. We weren’t there to hear that fool! We were there to hear Jonathan and Vic!
Oh, my date was mortified.
I still hear about it 15 years later.
She must not have been too mortified.
Vic, for those of you unfamiliar, was an acclaimed singer-songwriter. He was paralyzed from a car accident, wheelchair bound for his last 26 years. He could only play simple chords. He was not what you might expect from a master singer-songwriter. Or, maybe, he was exactly what we all should expect.
The albums I’m most familiar with are 2003’s Silver Lake and 2005’s Ghetto Bells. Neither sound like a guy in a wheelchair idly plinking around. They’re both wonderful, also difficult, sometimes super weird. I can’t claim that they’d be for everyone.
It was seeing Vic at the Castle which fully engaged me. From that point forward I would keep coming back, to those two albums especially, but more than anything else, to this, one of the most beautiful, fragile, and ambiguous works of art ever created:
I saw Vic twice more, another time opening for Jonathan (at the Abbey Pub in Chicago), and then headlining at the Empty Bottle, with Elf Power as his backing band, which was probably even weirder, because I was already used to the idea of a man in a wheelchair producing whatever he could, not him being backed by a loud bright band.
Vic died in 2009. I’ve got his last two albums on my shelf. I haven’t listened to either of them. I’d heard that they were difficult. And I thought… I don’t know if I want to listen to albums like that. And I never did.
But some time last year, some playlist I stumbled upon included “Flirted With You All My Life”. This was filmed in Chicago less than two months before we lost him. It is possibly the most painful performance I have ever seen:
Some people wouldn’t find anything in that for them. That’s okay. I’ve never been too sure what it does or doesn’t mean that I do find something.
What does it mean that I have a Spotify playlist called “sad sack shit”? I don’t know.
The thing is that I tend to find a certain uplift in all of it. The swirl of beauty and sadness. The essence of the human condition. Blah blah blah. It’s not for wallowing. Except when it is.
I miss Vic terribly. And I miss Jason Molina, and Mark Linkous. And David Berman. I bought the Purple Mountains album shortly after it came out. I hedged on listening to it. I had tickets for the tour. I thought maybe, I wanted to see the songs live first. I’m not sure what the hell I thought. And then he was gone. And the disc still sits on my shelf, still in the plastic. I don’t know when I’ll open it.
Vic and Mark and David, of course, didn’t just die of accidents or cancers or anything quite like that. For Vic it was an overdose of muscle relaxants. For Mark it was a rifle. For David… I never looked it up exactly, and don’t care to be told.
I’ve set out to write something about all this before and never could figure out what to say or what the point was. Well, maybe it’s just about throwing it out there. Maybe someone else has something to say and has been lost and didn’t know what or where. I don’t know.
I don’t mean to go too far off in this direction. It’s just difficult to think about these people, to think about someone like Vic, whose pain and beauty were so inseparable, and just be like, oh, here’s a cool tune.
Is it possible that the whole point of a Jonathan / Vic show was to mope you out just so, only so that you can be picked up just so? To tug at your humanity with the most beautiful songs about misery followed by the most wonderful sappy scoundrel?
I talked to my dad a couple of days ago. He said the first ten minutes of this - Jonathan Richman at Andrew Bird’s Great Room, doing a rendition of “The Fenway” - was a musical crystallization of everything that Phthursday Musings have been about:
This song about a baseball stadium is followed by an extended discussion about Ravel and Debussy. And why not? It all made stupifying sense to me.
The more I heard Jonathan talk in this, the more it occurred to me that I’d only heard one other musician talk like this: Iggy Pop, when interviewed by Vish Khanna for Kreative Kontrol a couple years ago. I don’t know if Iggy’s recent music is good, bad, or just super fucking weird. His attitude though is tremendous. I think maybe we should all be checking it all out if only because of his attitude.
I stumbled upon an article about one of the last lesbian bars in America. Somehow there are only 21 left, a number which seems impossible in my mind. I would have expected there to be at least two or three in Sioux Falls alone! But of course I couldn’t read the article without thinking about… Jonathan Richman.
Earlier today I was exchange stories about having to get major appliances repaired or replaced. That’s real life! But still! That kind of bullshit doesn’t work its way into a Jonathan Richman song, unless he can find something poignant / beautiful about it.
We took our goofy kid out tonight. We had dinner on the patio and then watched a set performed by a flamenco trio. He paid no attention, of course. We gave him a phone and he played golf. But we’ll keep trying.
Mark Linkous wasn’t the first, but he’s who I associate with declaring this to be a sad and beautiful world. And I try to hold onto that. I try to hold onto the idea that through the infinite sadness there remains immeasurable beauty.
It’s not a point that can be made with any coherence to a seven year old. But I try to sneak it in there. Flamenco night at Fitzgerald’s might not sound like it’s much of a life lesson. But the point is that beauty comes in many forms in many places, and while we may gravitate to some forms over others, we should embrace the existence of all forms.
The Milwaukee Bucks won the NBA Finals this week on the back of a singular Game 6 performance from Giannis Antetokounmpo. So many time he would get the ball somewhere around the free throw line or the top of the key, and he would simply go after the rim, even though there was a large, strong 6’11” man in his way every time. It was a thing to behold. Watching the full actualization of who might be the greatest raw basketball talent any of us have ever seen is an act of remarkable power and beauty. Maybe it’s your cup of tea, maybe it’s not.
Winners, of course, are accompanied by losers. For the Phoenix Suns, the outcome was one of pain, misery, heartbreak. For every action, is there an equal and opposite reaction? Maybe. But I think the human condition is a little different than that. For me, it’s not a zero-sum game. The beauty persists, at a level beyond which we can expect to comprehend. Collective joy can win out. As Neil Young said, love and only love will endure. Why shouldn’t we embrace it?
I think most of us - nay, all of us! - spend insufficient time surrounding ourselves with beauty. It is true that much beauty is accompanied by sadness, and perhaps this is what scares us off. Or maybe we just get too obsessed with the shit that doesn’t really matter. But we can all reach out for the beauty and grasp it. All the better if we do so together. Beauty and sadness are both meant to be shared. Think about it.
Vic Chesnutt, may he rest in peace, has left us with immense beauty - and sadness - and I would implore people to partake.
Jonathan Richman, bless him, is still out there sharing. People, you know what you need to do: Surrender to Jonathan!
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