The phony earth below my feet

The front lawn is a cliche. From the pink house on the hill, the yard slopes down into a shallow valley before rising to meet the gravel road. A broken-down truck rests in the valley, one of a half-dozen cars in various states of disrepair dotting the property. Garbage is strewn across the lawn, as well as all manner of patio furniture. To the right of the house, down the hill, sits a small pond. To the left is an above-ground swimming pool. Two shaggy black dogs keep a disinterested watch near the dirt driveway.

“I can’t believe how redneck that looks,” Vic Chesnutt says, staring out the car window at the house he called home for most of his childhood. “We kept a pretty tight ship. We didn’t have trash everywhere. We had one extra car. Not like that. This is just ridiculous.”

Chesnutt’s father bought the house in Atlanta and had it moved to this wooded, four-acre lot outside of Zebulon, Ga., in 1970, when the family relocated from Jacksonville, Fla. Zebulon is a small town of a thousand or so residents in Pike County, about an hour south of Atlanta. Vic was 5 at the time, and he lived here until he moved to Athens at 19, a year after a drunk-driving accident put him in a wheelchair. It was in Athens where Chesnutt began churning out albums of folksy, idiosyncratic art songs that both embraced the soul of this region and strode purposefully away from it.

From his 1990 debut, Little, to his just-released ninth record, Silver Lake, Chesnutt’s toyed with different instrumentation, production and arrangements, but the exacting details that have continually poured from his writing have root in his rural childhood here in Pike County.

This is Chesnutt’s first trip back to Pike County in nearly eight years. His parents died over a decade ago. Before he and I set off from Athens in the morning, Vic’s wife, Tina, explained, “After his sister moved to Athens, there’s never been much reason to go back.”

“When we bought this property, there wasn’t shit out here,” Chesnutt says, waving toward the house. There’s still only a handful of homes, but where the house next door now sits was once only woods, a kudzu patch and a spring-fed creek. “I used to stomp through there, hunting rabbits.”

Chesnutt motions toward the yard. “We had rabbit boxes up here that I would check before school every day, to get my rabbits. Then I’d kill ‘em and put them in the freezer.”

The family also had a pen of 60 chickens and some pigs, rows of plum and pecan trees, and gardens filled with okra, peas and tomatoes. Farming, though, was just a sideline. Chesnutt’s father worked loading planes for Eastern Airlines and his mother worked in the immigration office before taking a job at a hair salon on Zebulon’s main square.

“See that mailbox? We built that.” He sighs. “That really reminds me of my folks. A lot. I’m gonna start crying. That thing is fuckin’ 30 years old.”

A black pickup truck drives past and Chesnutt, who’s wearing big sunglasses and a floppy sunhat, slinks down in his seat.

“Yikes. I hope they don’t know who I am.”

The truck rolls by without incident, and he continues. “Look at that fuckin’ house. I used to rock like a motherfucker in that basement! I’d fuckin’ crank up so loud. My parents were cool with it. They encouraged my rock.”

Chesnutt points to the pond beside the house. “This lake was a great thing for a boy, kind of Tom Sawyer-ish. I had a great childhood. Hunted and fished every day. I got to know the value of hard work, working in the gardens. I loved all that.”

Back out the gravel road we came in on there’s a trailer where his grandfather, an itinerant, part-time country musician named Sleepy Carter, lived for a while. Carter first taught Chesnutt to play guitar.

“He said he had to move out of there because the ghost got him,” Chesnutt says. “He was convinced that under his house, somebody had ‘throwed a nigger in a well,’ quote-unquote, because ‘that nigger was always coming in at night and smiling at him.’ So he had to move.”

Pike Country was home to a large black population and, according to Chesnutt, everyone was racist. His high school elected two homecoming queens — one black, one white — because there were enough blacks that a straight vote would’ve likely yielded only a black queen.

A few miles from Chesnutt’s childhood home is the Zebulon town square, ringed by buildings in fading shades of whites, yellows, greens and grays, and dominated by a grand, old red-brick courthouse built in 1895. Chesnutt played trumpet in a jazz band that would occasionally perform on the courthouse lawn at town bazaars.

He points to a tree. “See that Magnolia? That was one of my favorite things to do. Climb up in that tree, hang out for hours and just watch people.”

Driving through Zebulon with Chesnutt, it’s not hard to imagine it as the kind of place the young artist began making the probing observations that would fill his songs:

“The filthy steps, the cold concrete, the phony earth below my feet,” from 1992’s “Sponge.”

The “acorn squash,” “hearty rows of okra” and “stand of sweet corn by the trickling creek,” in 1996’s “Degenerate.”

The “little bitty baby [that] draws a nice clean breath from over his beaming momma’s shoulder ... staring at the worldly wonders that stretch just as far as he can see, but [who] will stop staring when he’s older,” from 1996’s “New Town.”

“The tired old alcoholic, waxing bucolic” in 1998’s “Square Room.”

About a mile further down the road is Pike County High School. “Man, I owned this fuckin’ school,” Chesnutt says, as we drive up. “I wasn’t like Fonzie or anything, but I was still kind of popular. The teachers liked me. Which is weird, because I was controversial. I was a professed atheist.”

Chesnutt was a dedicated church-goer until the age of 13, when one day in church, he came to the realization it was all bullshit. The Bible wasn’t true. Christians were hypocrites. He says he started crying right there in church because everything he’d been told was a lie.

To call his teenage break with God mere disillusionment understates both its importance in Chesnutt’s worldview and the effect it had on his place in this small God-fearing community.

“It ruined my life,” he says simply.

Over lunch in Athens a few years ago, he described this break as nothing less than a betrayal. “It really affected me deeply when I realized that a lot of what they told me is not right,” he said. “This kind of betrayal led to this investigative nature I have in my songs, to seek below the surface.”

It wasn’t just Christianity that Chesnutt shook off. It was the closed-mindedness and racism that was passed down from one generation to the next. But despite assumptions about small, Southern towns, Zebulon didn’t completely turn its back on its burgeoning liberal atheist. In fact, his creativity was nurtured by a handful of important people. Central among them was a band teacher named Randy Edgar, who Chesnutt calls “his mentor.”

Edgar asked Chesnutt, then 16, to play trumpet in Sundance, a cover band that played at local bars. “I learned a lot about rock ‘n’ roll from that guy,” he says. Edgar, he adds with all intended irony, eventually moved to Mississippi and found Jesus.

Chesnutt had fairly limited access to new music back then. Nearby Griffin had two record stores, but for music by people like Leonard Cohen, he had to go all the way to Atlanta. It wouldn’t be until his senior year of high school that a friend who’d moved to England finally turned him on to punk rock. By then, he says, it was 1982, and “it was already too late.”

There were others who helped Chesnutt open his mind: an editor at the local newspaper, a libertarian lawyer who worked in town, a few teachers and his high school principal, who used to pull Vic out of class just to hang out and talk.

“Their influence was kind of subversive,” Chesnutt says. They encouraged him to “look beyond the facade, to see the crap,” a quality that would eventually inform his songwriting. “There’s a lot of Pike County in my songs. I don’t speak with as much of a Southern voice as I used to, but my experience here as a Southerner, as a kind of free thinker trapped in a closed society, was important.”

His parents always encouraged his intellectual independence, too, but were devastated when it led to atheism. We visit their grave sites, a small cemetery that had only recently been converted from a soybean field when Chesnutt’s father become one of the inaugural burials there.

“They died thinking they wouldn’t see their little boy in heaven,” he says. They both died of cancer and Chesnutt believes their stress over his rejection of Jesus accelerated their decline.

It was early in his teenage years when Chesnutt realized that, unlike many of his classmates who’d live their whole lives in Pike County, he needed to get out.

“I wasn’t Trenchcoat Mafia or anything. I mean, I was an angry young man in certain ways — I read Mother Jones in high school — but I was jovial about it. I was fun to hang out with. I made jokes. I was happy.”

Next door to the high school is Ruth’s Restaurant, a relatively nondescript establishment that gets name-checked in a song called “Band Camp” on Silver Lake. It’s one of a couple of local landmarks mentioned on the record. The other big one is the Key Club in Griffin (mentioned on “Wren’s Nest”), on the way back toward Athens.

Sundance, the cover band Vic played in, performed every Friday and Saturday night at the Key Club. The ramshackle light-blue building that once housed it has since been taken over by a tree service company.

“I learned a lot about life in that place,” Chesnutt says. “It was a redneck bar. I saw fights in that place you would not believe. I saw people shot, knifed. I saw a guy bleeding to death in the parking lot. It was rough. That looms large in my history. When I was a teenager and saw the way adults acted, I never wanted to be a fuckin’ adult.”

His high school friend, Tony Johnson, played sax in the band, but the rest of Sundance, including his teacher, Randy Edgar, were all in their 30s and 40s. They played exclusively covers, mostly classic rock, though they did let Chesnutt out from behind his trumpet to sing lead on Devo’s “Whip It.”

“I wanted to introduce my songs to the band, but rednecks didn’t like that shit. They want to hear what they know. I understand that. It was about makin’ money. It wasn’t about art. The organ player and lead singer had been in bands with Mitch Ryder in the late ’60s and early ’70s. They said they had to quit his band because he was a fag. That’s the kind of people I’m talking about. But it was a great band.”

It’s more than the mere mention of places like the Key Club and Ruth’s Restaurant that ties Chesnutt’s songs to this community and to the South in general. To a certain extent, it’s his language and the way he employs it. It’s a unique mixture of the crude and the elegant: historical references, lunatic ramblings, pop culture detritus and corner-store bullshit sessions all mashed-up.

Take, for example, the sparse folk song “Bug,” from his 1992 album, West Of Rome. The opening lines (“‘Michelle Loves Willie’/ ‘Our Little Sarah’/ ‘Daughters of the American Revolution’/ ‘Stryper Loves Jesus’”) are essentially “found poetry” — Chesnutt read them scrawled on sidewalks, walls and graves. And the chorus, “When the bug hits, that’s the time to scratch it,” was a homily uttered by Chesnutt’s grandmother to mean, more or less, “seize the day.”

The song’s best line, however, is one whose charm can’t quite be captured on the written page: “My roommates got married and I booted up/And a friend of ours told me I was disgusting.” Chesnutt stretches the vowels in “booted up” to ridiculous lengths, and enunciates every syllable of “disgusting” — somehow conveying not only his contempt for whoever hurled the insult, but also a proud, stubborn defiance and a measure of shame as well. That peculiar mix of pride and self-loathing that informs so much of Chesnutt’s music has roots in his complex relationship with Pike County, its inhabitants and the entire rural South.

On the ride to Zebulon, Chesnutt confides that he’d been meaning to come back and visit for a while, but he just hadn’t gotten around to it. Clearly, though, something more than inconvenience had kept him away. He had avoided high-school reunions over the years and had lost touch with most of his friends from the area. And while back in town, he was intent on not running into anyone he knew.

It’s not that he holds a grudge against his hometown. Zebulon never rejected Chesnutt. Rather, he rejected it. And it’s this fact that, perhaps, haunts him most about the place.

“It was too bad for me I couldn’t deal with it,” he says. “It’s a great place to grow up and raise a family. But I just had a completely different set of beliefs. I had to go somewhere where people knew who T.S. Eliot was. I needed to talk to people who were atheists. Two homecoming queens — that ain’t gonna fly in my worldview. But I’m sad. I miss it.”

Chesnutt still struggles to resolve how he can love a place so viscerally, yet hate so much of what it stands for. But there’s something else going on here, too. It has to do with his wheelchair. Pike County is a tangible, living reminder of his life before the accident. To the people he knew then, he was the kid who climbed trees and hunted, rode his bike and played sports.

“After I broke my neck, I symbolically broke my Pike County connection in a way,” he says. “I knew it would trip people out. My hipster buddies, they were cool with it, but I wanted to move on. I didn’t want to reinvent myself so much as I needed to grow.”

Back in Athens, Tina asks him why he avoided seeing the people he knew. He says it’s because he doesn’t worship the three things most important in Zebulon these days: George W. Bush, the Confederate flag and Jesus.

But there’s also something else. “I’d be embarrassed,” he says. “I’m all broken-necked and atheist.”

The stretch of road where Chesnutt flipped his car into a ditch half a lifetime ago is unremarkable. In fact, he had trouble finding the exact spot on the drive into Zebulon. There are a string of ranch-style houses set back from the road, and he wrecked on one of those lawns.

One has a huge Confederate flag hanging in the window.

Chesnutt sees it and laughs. “Yeah. It was probably that one. That’d be purrr-fect.”

There’s something undeniably twisted and poetic about the image of Vic Chesnutt crashing into the Confederate flag. It plays right into all the Southern gothic, mythical, metaphorical mumbo-jumbo so frequently associated with him and his music. There’s only one problem: It’s not true. Driving further along the road, Chesnutt realizes the crash site is almost definitely further down.

Vic’s 1993 song, “Gluefoot,” contains a great line: “I want to blame my heritage for my leisurely demise.” But in real life, it’s just not that simple. His songs have been consumed with subverting myths and tearing down facades to get at the real truth. And the real truth about Chesnutt ultimately exists in the gray areas between his pride and guilt over his heritage, his atheism and his wheelchair, and in his love/hate relationship with Pike County.

Of the accident, Chesnutt says, “It’s a cliche. A teenager gets drunk and flips his car.”

The truth is Vic Chesnutt didn’t crash into a house with a Confederate flag. He just crashed.

david.peisner@creativeloafing.com