Unbound

Vic Chesnutt lights up the second Sweet Relief release

by Matt Ashare

A little over a year ago, tucked away in a modest-size auditorium at New York's Lincoln Center in midafternoon, Vic Chesnutt, a scrawny, wheelchair-bound singer/songwriter from Athens, Georgia, shared a stage with Kris Kristofferson. It was part of the annual CMJ music festival, and there were maybe 50 alterna-rock types scattered among two or three hundred seats, waiting to hear Chesnutt, Kristofferson, Ben Folds, Carla Bozulich (of the Geraldine Fibbers), and a couple of other lone songwriters do their thing. A disheveled Chesnutt awkwardly wheeled himself on stage and sat fidgeting nervously with the fingerless glove he wears on a right hand that doesn't always work as well as he'd like it to. Even in this modest setting he seemed dwarfed. Kristofferson, dressed neatly in all black, strode out with the confident nonchalance of a movie star, the force of his personality easily filling the room. But music can be a powerful equalizer. When Chesnutt picked up his guitar and slowly, shyly played a nostalgic, melancholy tune called "Sewing Machine," Kristofferson sat transfixed, transformed from main attraction to audience member. "That was beautiful," was his response. And he was right.

Kristofferson's voice doesn't show up on Sweet Relief II: Gravity of the Situation -- The Songs of Vic Chesnutt (Columbia), a tribute album that benefits the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund. But the disc resonates with the power of plenty of other songwriters discovering the elemental beauty of Chesnutt's work and then trying to live up to it. Music's role as equalizer is enhanced here as it was at that CMJ performance and on the first installment of Sweet Relief (Columbia, 1993), which was a benefit for and tribute to the multiple sclerosis-stricken songwriter Victoria Williams. This album puts the songs of Chesnutt -- like Williams an eccentric outsider -- in the hands of stars like R.E.M., Smashing Pumpkins, Hootie & the Blowfish, and, yes, even Madonna.

"The good thing about this record is that everybody seems to feel it's really good," Chesnutt reflected last April in a small dressing room backstage at the Orpheum before his set opening for the Cowboy Junkies. "I mean, I'm not sure how much Madonna and I have in common. But I guess we probably have more in common that I'd like to admit and probably more than she'd like to admit too. It's funny because the song she does with Joe Henry ["Guilty by Association"] is a little bit about crazy fans. And the reason she sang on that song is because she had just come back from shooting Evita to LA to do that trial for that stalker thing. And Joe was in LA recording at the time. And Smashing Pumpkins did `Sad Peter Pan,' which seems perfect because that guy Billy [Corgan] really is kind of a sad Peter Pan."

Not all the tracks on Sweet Relief II are as perfect an artist/song match as "Sad Peter Pan," which teams Smashing Pumpkins with Chicago indie-rockers Red Red Meat for some spare and haunting deconstructed blues. The disc opens with Garbage turning one of Chesnutt's sketchier songs, the humorous passive-aggressive "Kick My Ass" ("I'm so sorry you had to kick my ass"), into a slick and sultry pop confection that bears little resemblance to the original. At the other end of the spectrum is Cracker's version of "Withering," a sad and bitter poetic rumination about an unlucky friend that gets an almost note-for-note treatment by singer/guitarist David Lowery and his guitar-slinging partner, Johnny Hickman.

Some of the disc's other standouts include an eerie acoustic rendition of "Panic Pure," a song about childhood memories and future plans that recalls the stories of Flannery O'Connor, by Throwing Muse Kristin Hersh; R.E.M.'s feedback-laced "Sponge"; and, believe it or not, a soulful, countrified rendition of "Gravity of the Situation" by Hootie & the Blowfish with Nanci Griffith, which proves that a good song can make all the difference. The disc is capped off with the two Vics (Chesnutt and Williams) trading lines on a hopeful, hymnlike tune that Chesnutt wrote especially for Williams, "God Is Good."

"Victoria warned me that this Sweet Relief thing might get weird," admits Chesnutt, who's been wheelchair-bound since a car accident a decade ago. "Everybody might end up thinking it was a tribute record for me. And then they'd all end up thinking, `What do you need a tribute record for, Vic?' I was lucky because when I crashed years ago, I had a job, a real job, and I was paying money into Social Security. So I was on Medicaid until I signed with Capitol.

"I know the last record helped a bunch of people who didn't have Medicaid, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars went to other musicians in every kind of walk of musician's life. The odd thing is that some people seem to think that just because my name is on this record I have an answer to the medical fiasco we have in this country. I really don't. I think revolution would be nice," he jokes, "you know, overthrow the government. But other than that I really don't have any idea what to do about it."