Weird Deer

In September of 1999, venerable Athens, Georgia singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt talked with Travis Nichols about LSD and Daniel Johnston. It was rainy and a little bit cold, but they sat on Vic’s porch and stayed dry.

The transcript of their conversation originally appeared in Flagpole Magazine in October of that year. This is the fourth part of the interview. The fifth and final section will appear tomorrow.

Travis Nichols: There’s a sense of humor that you have on-stage and in your songs that’s so self-deprecating it seems that it must sometimes go from being a healthy sort of self skepticism to the flat-out ugly, “I can’t get out of bed and I can’t show anybody my songs, because they’re just dumb” kind of self-deprecation.

Vic Chesnutt: Yeah, I do that all the time. That happens all the time. I never would have pushed my songs on people. I hate that now, thinking that I would push it. I had my songs, but I never thought, “Oh yeah, these are songs people gotta hear.” I never thought that way. I wrote ‘em and thought “cool.” I played ‘em for my friends, and I played ‘em sitting around the house, and then I played ‘em at a party, and then somebody said, “Hey, you gotta play these,” and I was like, “Ugghhh, I’m scared,” and they were like, “We got you a gig,” and then people had to physically take me down there, because I didn’t want to go.

Then people were clapping, and they were like, “Those are great! Those are great!” and I was like, “Really?” Then it was like somebody said, “Do you wanna open for our band?” and I was like, “Uggghhh, I don’t know… okay.” I was so nervous about it, but this approval I got from everybody was infectious.

I’d written all these songs beforehand, and I would have kept doing it. It was my own private thing. I thought I was going to be an English teacher or whatever, and I could have written songs forever and written poems. I didn’t have to show them to anybody, because it was just a byproduct of my nature in a way. You know what I mean? Something I would just do. Some people twist their hair, you know. I write songs.

TN: Do you ever feel regrets about it now that it’s this big public thing? Has it changed it?

VC: It has changed it. A lot. I regretted that so much a couple of years ago. I thought I ruined that because before it was just about songwriting and now I’m going out and playing. Earlier in my career, I started going out and opening for bigger acts, and I thought I had to change my songwriting to make it a little more catchy or whatever.

I was opening for Bob Mould in 1990, and there I was singing “West of Rome” in front of a thousand people, and they’re all just looking at me like, “You fucking freak.” Some people dug it, I guess. I got into this thing where I’d write shorter pop songs so, yeah, the melodies were changing and stuff like that. Before, I had wanted my songs to be linear and not cyclical. I wanted them to be this kind of graph and then they started being these little figure eights or whatever and I thought, “Goddamn it. I’ve ruined what made me interesting to myself. It’s ruined now, and I can’t get it back. ” But you know, I was like, “What am I going to do?”

TN: Do you feel like you got it back?

VC: Well, I mean, I just had to start… Yeah, I have. I had to remember what I liked to do earlier, and I tried to do that. This is like 1994, 1995. Right after Is the Actor Happy? where all the songs had these weird choruses and shit, and I was like, “What am I doing?”

TN: So you weren’t happy with that record?

VC: Oh I loved it. It was all those songs that I had been writing just for that for opening for bigger bands that I thought somebody in the audience who didn’t know me could latch onto a little better. For my next record I was trying to fight that a little bit. I had several little chorus-y songs, but again with the schizophrenia, “I can’t do this… but I gotta. I gotta have the chorus, but this one, I don’t know… ” At that time I couldn’t remember who I was as a songwriter or as a music maker. That whole year there when I was recording that record I was running around like a chicken with my head cut off trying to recall what I did that I liked about songwriting.

TN: How do you feel now? Do you feel like that period helped your progression as a songwriter?

VC: Yeah. I got through that little crisis, and I remembered what it was that I liked about my earlier songs, and now I feel more comfortable now with the way I am now and the way my head is. Songwriting-wise, not life-wise. Songwriting-wise I’m doing what I do, and I’ve been trying not to think too much about an audience. I’m trying to forget that audience is out there. Trying to work through my little alchemy projects.

TN: I’m glad you brought that up again. In terms of alchemy, you’ve said you like artificial inspiration. Which drugs are best for inspiration?

VC: Well, l drank ungodly amounts of liquor my 20′s, and one thing I found about alcohol that was good for my songwriting was that it eliminated pressure. I wasn’t nervous if I was drunk, I’d just be scribblin’ away. If I was drunk and writing songs I could concentrate on whatever I was doing and not think about how fucked up the world is and other things. So that was good. I thought that was a good drug for songwriting, and, you know, acid.

As a teenager and all through my 20’s I took ungodly amounts of acid. I would never have written the songs that I had written if it wasn’t for this kind of kicking open the doors of perception kind of shit. I learned a lot about thought processes and how humans think and perceive from that. Every time I took some acid I re-learned what it was like to be human again which was good. It turned me into a baby every time.

It was a humbling experience and a good shrinker. Anytime you start feeling self important and then you take some acid, that’s evaporated immediately. You are a nothing piece of crap. At least I was.

TN: It’s terrifying.

VC: It’s horrifying, and I found a lot of inspiration in that horror, the overwhelming vastness of the universe.

TN: Acid does have that moment where you realize you can’t look forward to being dead anymore because you see what happens after you’re dead and it just goes on and on. There’s nothing you can do after that but think life is kind of goofy.

VC: Yes. Yes. Yes. I can see it all over everything I write, the influence of LSD. My world view is completely, I don’t know, I wanna choose the right word. I would say it has been sharpened. My vision has been sharpened. My world view has been shaped, I guess. I mean, the drug isn’t for everybody, I mean it’s not. Liquor isn’t either. I mean I ruined my liver completely. I wish I could drink right now, but I can’t.

TN: Doctor’s orders?

VC: Well, long past the doctor now. It wasn’t that.

TN: The whole idea of acid amplifying what you’ve already got is put out pretty clearly in this book Acid Dreams. It talks about everybody in the ’60s taking acid. All these left leaning boho kids taking acid and thinking that the whole world would feel the same way they did if the whole world took acid, but people in the CIA were taking acid 10 years before all that, and they were using it as a truth serum. It was a totally different thing for the CIA.

VC: Right. Well it’ll scare you to death. I don’t see how you could get any truth out of anybody.

TN: Just get ‘em crying on the floor, I guess.

VC: Oh god. No doubt, no doubt. I spent lots of hours just bawling my eyes out. I read a book on that, too, a while ago. It was really scholarly. It completely ragged on everybody in the ’60s and said that these guys just completely fucking ruined it. They were idiots. Timothy Leary was the biggest fucking idiot in the world. “Let’s dose everybody in the whole world!” What a fucking idiot. He’s a fucking idiot. I hate that bastard.

TN: That’s one thing, you know, people who first start to take acid get really into Tim Leary, but I would think the worst thing in the world to have by you on acid would be that Tibetan Book of the Dead. It would just put all this pressure on you to have a big, transcendent experience, but then if you don’t, you’d start feeling like you were defective.

VC: That’s one thing—being defective. I mean, I knew it before, that we were defective, but acid reinforced it. That was a huge influence on me. I haven’t taken it in a while, well… I took it four months ago, a bunch of it, but it wasn’t like it was before. I took it every day for a year in like 1985.

TN: Wow.

VC: I had vials of liquid acid in my freezer, but it wasn’t like a party. I was doing serious research into the depths of my horror, my self.

TN: Do you feel like you have any after-effects now?

VC: I don’t have flashbacks or anything or feel like I’m burned out. I don’t have residual shakes or blurry trails or anything. No physical things. I’m humbled from it, that’s about all. I feel like crap. All the time.

TN: But in an enlightened way, right?

VC: Well, I know it. I’m not trying to bullshit anybody. I’m nasty. I’ll admit it. Humans are nasty beings. That’s all I know. Everything we do. We’re corrupt. That’s one thing I’ve learned—babies are corrupt; everybody’s corrupt. It’s not like an original sin sort of way, it’s just nature. I guess it’s not defective, though I think modem humans are defective, it’s just cruel. It’s a cruel world so we have to be cruel to be kind.

I mean, that’s not the only thing I learned. I learned little things, but it’s not for everybody, that’s for sure. I mean, I’ve been a depressed being my whole life, and acid helped me realize why, but some people wouldn’t be able to handle it. It’s going to scare them to death, and they’re not going to be the same. If you’re just barely holding it together, then you don’t need to be taking acid, because you’re going to crack. You’re definitely going to crack. I mean you look at Daniel Johnston. He’s a fucked up person, and the Butthole Surfers gave him all that acid, and he just lost it.

TN: He’s coming here pretty soon.

VC: Yeah, I’ve gotta go see him. They ain’t pretty, but I love his songs. Like in 1990 and 1991, I listened to him all the time. It was good for me, because he was fearless, too. He was naive like a kid, totally willing to embarrass himself to no end. After that, I was like, “Damn, I’ve got to open up now. I have to open up like him.”