Vic Chesnutt: Little
Vic Chesnutt's first album, Little, is the most spare of them all, and is the closest to his live solo sound: his voice, his guitar, in a cavernous room. Recorded in 1988 by Michael Stipe and released in 1990 on Texas Hotel, Little begins with a harmonica wail and a dream about dancing with Isadora Duncan. With this, Chesnutt visits a subject large on his mind: how do modern minds love? Isadora Duncan, the inventor of modern dance, a cultural revolutionary and "a champion of ... the realization of poetry in everyday life" (Lori Belilove, isadoraduncan.org) rails lightly at Chesnutt as he tries to position her into a gilded cage of romance:
...she sang, My smile is more than pearly white and my dreams are more than you my yellow eyes are more than mirrors and my scarf is more than blue: I can't believe you own this attitude!
He returns to the subject of modern love with Soft Picasso, a wild balladeers song almost without meter: an open relationship bites a man in the ass as his lover realizes that the revolution gives her the right to have "anything that striked her fancy / and she fancied quite a bit." The song ends with the man composing "an epigram: Live by the scam, die by the scam."
Chesnutt's unflinching observations, gift for lyrical sketching and heavy phenomenological poetry all establish themselves on Little. Bakersfield, a song about preparing for a hard entry into "a gritty afterlife," begins with a character polishing his dusty trophies and watching his posters fall from the wall ("who needs them at my age?"). Danny Carlisle gives us two images of a man "barely grown and he's used up most of his options: he would rather dream than fuck." Giupetto is a gentle remonstration to a heartbroken puppet-maker/dad: "Your sorrow is so silly! What was there to keep him in Italy?"
The centerpiece of the record is a humid portrait of "Pike County nostalgia," a boy's adventures in small-game hunting, and an early example of Chesnutt's relentless, tumbling imagery:
Once I took my single-shot gun, put on some camouflage Hid in the neighbour's pasture by the cow pond Finally, after a long time, A bunch of doves flew by And landed in a huddle on the power line. So I aimed with an eagle-eye and fired But it was 2 pigeons that fell Like bean bags into the weeds They sure looked like doves to me.
There are a couple of tunes on Little that sound like the work of a younger artist, which is fair on a first album: Independence Day clunks from time to time with obvious lines ("Independence Day... I never knew it would be so symbolic"), and Speed Racer makes bold, young proclamations that the singer is "not a victim, I am intelligent. I'm not a victim -- I am an atheist" which seem slightly less mature than the rest of the record. But this is nit-picking, really. The songs are quite listenable, and the emotional impact could really be missing for me because I have no attachment to American holidays or the church...
Little is an incredibly powerful debut. It isn't surprising that Stipe returned to the studio with Chesnutt again to record his early classic West of Rome, or that Peter Sillen???? was moved to document Vic Chesnutt's existence with the short film Speed Racer. If you're in Canada, you may find Little to be ridiculously expensive. Try and find it online. GEMM's a good bet, and CDNow had a copy last time I looked.
Vic Chesnutt: Little. Texas Hotel, 1990.
Review by jep clayton, BadMonkeyX January 2004.