Weird Deer

In September of 1999, venerable Athens, Georgia singer/songwriter Vic Chesnutt talked with Travis Nichols about shooting coke and being a pilot. 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 fifth and final part of the interview.

TN: Who else do you listen to now?

VC: Well, hold on, I got to finish talking about substances.

TN: Oh. Right. Go on. Go ahead

VC: Well another one—there’s a couple more—now the weed is my favorite songwriting substance. I like it a lot. It’s not for everybody, either. It makes you paranoid. It’s good for me, though, because when I get shtoh-ned [Vicspeak for stoned] then I forget the world is around me. I can concentrate on whatever I’m doing. Even though it’s a weird concentration and sometimes stupid things come out of it, it’s a good thing. I can spend hours trying to figure out that word I need. I love it. I love it. I wouldn’t want to be writing a whole novel or anything, but for song-length stuff it’s great.

The thing about it that’s great is that it gives me a weird ability to see connections between things that I wouldn’t normally see if I weren’t shtoh-ned. You can see patterns, and I think that is really good for songwriting. It’s like you can see eight spots on the ceiling and when you’re not stoned you think, “Oh eight spots,” but when you’re stoned and you see eight spots you’re like “Whoa, look at it! It’s… it’s an airplane!” That kind of thing. And that’s good for songwriting, because I can notice patterns in words.

TN: You’ve said that with lists of things like in the song you sang at the Flagpole Music Awards, the things by themselves aren’t that meaningful, but when you string them together they take on meaning.

VC: Right. Exactly. That’s a perfect example. That’s the thing that’s good about weed for me and songwriting. Another good thing about it is that it gives me energy to just go and go and not worry about if it’s stupid or not until later which is good for me because I get full of doubt all the time. It’s really good for that.

I wrote a lot of songs on X midway through the ’80s. I wrote certain songs on it “Supernatural” was one and “Wrong Piano.” I don’t think it gave me any great ideas but I felt all inspired and it gave me energy to pursue. A song like “Wrong Piano” is two verses and I spent hours writing it and singing it over and over and over cause X made me crazy like that. Just 14 hours went by and I was like, “Hey look I got a two verse song!”

Every song that I write you know I’m not all wasted writing it, but these are psychoactive compounds and they can’t help but do something to the songwriting process because it’s such a cerebral activity. I shot coke for a long time and that was like instant melodrama. The whole world turned to instant melodrama and I wrote a song like that and they were all kind of hyped in that way. Some of them were great, I have to admit, but they all had this sort of electric melodrama going on. Coke is like that you know. Hyped mock emotion.

TN: The themes of Drunk seem to have a lot to do with that sort of artificial inspiration—you know like, “Gluefoot. ”

VC: Right. A lot of that record came out of trying to quit shooting up coke and I was drunk. That was like my two weeks in Charter; that was making Drunk. Like “Gluefoot” exactly. That’s spelling it all out in my own little code.

Heroin is the absolute worst drug for songwriting. For a whole year I didn’t write anything. I couldn’t string two words together, ’cause everything smelled like shit. I mean everything was rosy in a way, well not rosy but everything was just fine. That was the worst. I couldn’t write shit on heroin. Sometimes I thought it was good for singing, but I wasn’t cut out for that shit.

TN: I don’t know anybody who really is.

VC: Yeah. I wish they’d legalize everything or legalize opium so people would be all dreamy and wouldn’t have to get to nasty old heroin.

Antidepressants, I was on those for a long time, and I didn’t like those. They affected my body too much. My legs would shake. I didn’t think it blocked anything, but the whole time I was on ‘em I couldn’t relax, cause I was shaking. Actually a lot of the songs on Salesman and Bernadette were written on antidepressants, but I was getting schto-ned, too. Everybody I know is on antidepressants, so maybe I just need to try some different ones.

I also injected a lot of speed—crystal meth and that sort of thing, ugly yellow compounds. I really liked that for songwriting. It’s not like coffee, you know. It does what they invented it for, keeping you going, and I’d be at it till it was over. I wrote a lot of stories and stuff then.

TN: That was Lester Bangs’ secret.

VC: Well, it was NOT a secret. That was definitely not a secret, but he did do that. A lot of writers did that. I think it’s a good thing for writers. But again, not that these things would make somebody a good songwriter, but I think they are good tools for songwriters if they’ve already got something going on.

I mean it can’t not do something, ’cause they fuck with your mind, and you’re doing a mind thing when you write songs. It’s not like pilots or doctors—that’s a whole different interface—but songwriting is all internal. As a songwriter I don’t have to interface with anyone else. That’s the difference.