LAMBCHOP

Kurt Wagner’s moving meditation on the late Vic Chesnutt

By: MATT ASHARE |
Published: February 22, 2012 http://www2.the-burg.com/entertainment/2012/feb/22/lambchop-kurt-wagners-moving-meditation-late-vic-c-ar-1707275/

Lambchop, Mr. M (Merge)

It had to be fairly early in the ’90s — definitely no later than 1995. I was in Manhattan for a music convention and I wandered mid-day from my Midtown hotel to a mid-sized theater space at Lincoln Center just in time to grab a seat before Kris Kristofferson, the outlaw country star-turned-Hollywood actor, walked on stage as the main attraction for one of those songwriters' workshops where four or five artists play a tune or two and then talk about their process, dropping enlightening and/or amusing anecdotes along the way. I don't remember much who else was on that stage or about what transpired, although I'm pretty sure Kristofferson, tall and ruggedly regal in cowboy boots and jeans, may or may not have done "Me and Bobby McGee," the song for which I knew him best. But I wasn't there for that. I was much more interested in a lesser-known singer-songwriter on the bill, a guy in a wheelchair who called himself Vic Chesnutt.

       Chesnutt, the victim of a car accident in his late teens, was an outsider's outsider artist who'd been "discovered" by Michael Stipe playing around Athens, GA, in the late ’80s. The R.E.M. frontman would go on to produce Chesnutt's first two remarkable albums, 1990's Little and the one that initially caught my ear, ’91's West of Rome. Seven years later, R.E.M. joined the likes of Smashing Pumpkins, Indigo Girls, and, yes, Madonna covering Chesnutt's songs on the benefit album Sweet Relief II: The Gravity of the Situation. But what I remember best about that day at Lincoln Center was both how shabby and diminutive Chesnutt looked next to the imposing Kristofferson, and how genuinely moved — "blown away" is probably more accurate — Kristofferson seemed as Chesnutt strummed his way through the mini-set.      

       On his best days, Vic could do that. On his worst, he wrestled with the demons that were muses of sorts — demons that finally got the better of him in December of 2009, when, shortly after his 45th birthday, he took his own life. But not before recording and releasing a dozen and a half albums on his own and in collaboration with bands as diverse as the jammy Widespread Panic, lo-fi popsters Elf Power, and, most notably, a strange Nashville-based outfit called Lambchop, a group led by Chesnutt's friend/kindred spirit Kurt Wagner.

       Wagner and Chesnutt were essentially fellow travelers, exploring fertile yet mostly forgotten backroads of Americana, when they hooked up on Chesnutt's 1998 album The Salesman and the Bernadette. And they charted similarly skewed, if somewhat diverging paths in the decade that followed — two unique voices in a landscape often cluttered with too much of the same. So it's no surprise that the first new Lambchop album since Chesnutt's death, the curiously titled Mr. M, is both dedicated to the late singer-songwriter's memory and suffused with what might best be described as peaceful, uneasy feelings.

       The mysterious Mr. M — shorthand, I'm guessing, for "Mr. Met," the softly set, seven minute-plus, ruminative centerpiece of the album, as if that clears up anything — is the 11th album Wagner's recorded with a rotating cast of players under the Lambchop moniker since 1994. Although the "band" has more or less always been a vehicle for Wagner's abstract musings on life, love, and loneliness, it’s never been quite as straightforwardly hear-on-torn-sleeve as that may suggest. In 2000, for example, Wagner released a Lambchop disc titled Nixon that was, indeed, meant to be inspired by the troubled rise and fall of the 37th President of the United States. But good luck finding any direct reference the Watergate scandal or anything else overtly political in any of the lyrics on that album. Similarly, while Lambchop have generally fallen under the "alt-county" heading, Lambchop's brand of roots music has grown to be expansive enough to incorporate loungey jazz undertones, classically arranged orchestrations, soul music, and a touch of the avant garde.

       The dominant mode on Mr. M is orchestral, as in the string quartet that opens the disc’s first track, “If Not I’ll Just Die” — the “strings” and “crazy flutes” Wagner references in the song’s pointillistic lyrics. There’s no linear narrative here, just snapshots of “grandpa coughing in the kitchen” and open-ended sentiments like, “Oh, gonna miss you,” as well as this twist on the famous Springsteen line: “We were born to rule.” Cocktail drums, muted piano, and stand-up bass (but none of the “harps and electric guitar” that are also part of the lyric) underscore Wagner’s understated delivery, as the measured mood is set.

       Wagner drops the strings on the reflective “2B2,” deploying some minimal electric guitar and droning organ to accompany minor-key piano chordings and amusingly absurd observations like, “Took the Christmas lights off the front porch/On February 31^st,” a line one could easily imagine Chesnutt singing. And the more briskly paced “Gone Tomorrow,” with its picked and strummed acoustic guitars, brings him closer to something Johnny Cash might have considered covering in his later years, until midway through its nearly seven minutes, the strings return, and Wagner takes the rest of the band off on an ambient excursion.

       But the show-stealer here is the de-facto title track. “Mr. Met” may be rooted in Nashville, but it echoes a lavish production style Music Row hasn’t much favored since the’70s. Wagner sounds like Glen Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” stripped of all glitz, as he reflects, almost randomly, “Fear makes us visual/Life made you beautiful/Fate makes us powerless/Turn on your radio.” Yes, the song is heavily orchestrated, replete with an angelic chorus of female voices that accompany the rising tide of strings and fingerpicked guitars. But the effect is somber, not gaudy. And, even if Wagner never mentions Vic Chesnutt by name, it’s fairly easy to read between lines like, "Friends make you sensitive/Loss makes us idiots/Fear makes us critical/Knowledge is difficult." Vic almost certainly would’ve gotten the point.