VIC CHESNUTT :  Bernadette & the Salesman
****

The key, the one pivotal word sung on this record comes three lines from the end of track eleven Parade with these classic lines;-
"Remember that time you took me to see Harold and Maude
'cause I didn't know the meaning of the word catharsis"
We're a long way away from moon and June territory here! This is Chesnutt's seventh record, if you count the Brute collaboration with Widespread Panic as one of his, and is the most difficult to decipher yet! The man has tongue-twisting literary confidence in buckets as he flicks artists names around like ash on the carpet. An erudite magpie - thieving and commemorating in equal measure- with backing band Lambchop he has found a flock of jackdaw conspirators to fly with. A quick artist check through the back catalogue would turn up references to Isadora Duncan, Stevie Smith, Hemingway, Picasso, why even fellow singer/writer Lucinda Williams (out of a Pulitzer poet by the way) gets a song named after her. He ain't scared of art with a big A. Academic thesis territory no doubt, but he also suffers from lazy journalism too. It's always been easier to trot out the wheelchair minstrel tack complete with Georgia porch backdrop than examine his work too deeply! Neither approach does justice to his talent.
Imitation Flower documentary chic aside lets acknowledge what he's achieved so far. In those seven discs he has laid claim to the great songwriter mantle. The Sweet Relief II disc with versions of his songs by everyone from RE.M. to Madonna and Joe Henry to Margaret O'Hara testifies to the regard he is held in .The majority of the songs on that tribute can be found on to his best single disc West Of Rome which links to this disc via track Florida- that dealt with a friend's suicide on the American Riviera-of which more later!

Never trust a book by its cover! This is no exception as this Athens version of Billy Childish takes pains to emblazon the word FICTION on this one. The majority of the press recently has gone along with this novel approach - giving it a literary gloss . This harks back to past purveyors of the literary/operatic like Wait's Frank's Wild Years /Randy Newman /Mitchell/Chapin/Hardin -any songwriter worth his pillar of salt has dabbled or blown it in this area! The usual signs are contextual references to suite/operetta/song cycle pace Van Dyke Parks. The rewards vary! So what do you get from this song and dance poet? The answer is everything and nothing. First two tracks are spent before hitting their mark. More orchestral warm-up than meat and two veg. The Lambchop orchestra -all 13 of them plus Vic's wife -the Ann-Margaret Rich to his Charlie - have a chance to start dabbling with their palette of instruments. Bernadette's off-kilter soundscape is more annoying than enveloping. Third track Replenished is first one to hit home. It picks up the tempo and is as deranged a take on late 60's, early 70's bubble-gum pop as you could wish. There's something pretty strange lurking in the Lambchop basement -about ten thousand soundtrack records I'd guess! Never has eclectic taste reaped such dividends.  Sometimes this works brilliantly - other times it becomes cloying like too many jelly sandwiches. The collaboration between group and songwriter makes perfect sense though as they'd been converging for years. Indeed there is a rare 7"out there somewhere already.  This sense of artistic community crosses over to other bands such as Cracker and Giant Sand/Calexico. I just wonder how much sharper those other concept album creators Calexico might have left this record? Anyway it is still a trip through sonic wonderland!  Best effects are got when the band set up a charging rhythm behind his voice-  a foretaste of which came on the Fucking Sunny Day single- It's marvellous when it works like that. Real lickety-spit Stax/R&B boogie stuff! Here Until The Led has the same groove. Maybe that's Lennon getting hit - I've tried to decode the lyrics and failed! There's a lot of loneliness and sex draped around the place. There's recurrent characters but -novel , nope sirree. Maiden lets me down -squirting is a fine unsentimental tag for love I suppose. There's politics -Replenished's feminist slant. Best of all though is Vic's voice. It's developed into a contender. Gone is the folksier side. At times he sounds like a Tony Joe White or Mickey Newbury. Beautiful melodic crooning! He even drawls a bit like Terry Allen ( his Juarez is a brilliant take on this sort of a thing by the way). Most of all it reminds me of Charlie Rich -that drowsy melancholic tone. Mysterious Angel's lullaby mood recalls the great man the best-Vic C. -a post-punk Charlie - why not? Piano mood from Lambchop  orchestra pins the mood perfectly. Arthur Murray is a bit of a non-event in my book and is knocked sideways by next one, Prick, which is daft as a brush! If I was one of those annoying reviewers who coined phrases like Residents crossed with Booker T I'd say that. That's the filler sorted out. Now we get to the core of this record -a magnificent E.P. in my opinion and a couple of singles!

Woodrow Wilson pitches the divine Emmylou Harris into the fray as the ghost of Bernadette. Hell it not only links Vic back to the origins of Country-Rock but he makes a fine partner as he rises to the occasion! Then a short interlude before the knock-out punches. Parade softens the listener up before the scary stuff starts. Real music like Square Room is hard to achieve. It is bare nerve stuff - so disarmingly honest you think he might be being arch. I won't quote it -just read it. Then picture a runaway Vic C. holed up in a Florida Hotel on his own having dumped band, wife, everything and 'done a Zurich' as he put it. Ho owed Lambchop and everyone else involved in this project after that. Somehow he came back from that difficult period. It's all there in this one song. As emotionally taut as a high strung piano wire, a catharsis -plain and simple. Following his friend's path -who knows? It comes over like Robert Johnson's hotel room truths. Fiction - maybe. Facts distorted into lies distorted back into truth. After that there's not much I can say. Closer Old Hotel drifts deeper in the register -his range is growing - but what it says has been said already -maybe one of the older songs burnished new for the project. A line sticks out: -
" ..things would derange given just another hour.."
This could be the soundtrack to Hancock's Last Half Hour. Suburban suicide blues like Stevie Smith had -that's where the sharpie tongue comes from. So desperate it has to laugh. Genius or Clown Vic's made a record. It's as difficult, broody, and silly as watching the Partridge Family play Muddy Waters. Imagine it made into a Lloyd-Weber type stage musical! An Oklahoma with few characters and no porches!

This review first appeared in Hearsay Magazine