Kristin Hersh has had a problematic relationship with music for most of her life. The co-founder of the influential post-punk band Throwing Muses and erstwhile folksinger has made music while dealing with diagnoses of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but in recent years has found a sort of normalcy in family life, writing, occasional recording solo or with one of her two bands (the other is 50-Foot Wave) and touring.
She also had the great fortune and great misfortune to be friends with Vic Chesnutt, another native Southerner with a problematic relationship with music. The two toured extensively in the U.S., U.K., and Europe in the 1990s, alternately bolstering and tormenting each other —she trying to get him to see and acknowledge the occasional sweetness in life, he telling her to fuck off. After a period of estrangement that more or less coincided with a time when Chesnutt was estranged from his wife Tina, who was also his bass player, Hersh and Chestnutt patched things up at an R.E.M. tribute concert in New York in 2009. That was shortly before Chesnutt committed suicide by an overdose of muscle relaxants just before Christmas that year. (I’m not entirely sure on the timeline &mdash Hersh doesn’t give such mundane details as dates in this book.)
Chesnutt, who was largely paralyzed from the neck down since he crashed his car while drunk at age 18, was by all accounts a prickly and mercurial person. It shows in his music, a fiercely independent and poetic type of Southern Gothic singer-songwriter folk-rock. One of the things that he had in common with Hersh was that both made music that can be difficult to listen to. Chesnutt’s songs, like those of Throwing Muses and solo Hersh, can be hard to parse, following as they do their makers’ often twisty artistic impulses. They veer sharply away from anything that could be considered mainstream, but can reward the close listener with frequent opportunities for epiphany and catharsis.
Hersh has memorialized her years traveling with, being friends with, fearing for and being frustrated by Chesnutt, in Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt. It’s written as a monologue directed at her old friend in third person, as she recounts the years of squalor and hunger while touring Europe and the U.S. in a van with him, Tina, and Hersh’s husband and manager Billy O’Connell (who divorced Hersh after 25 years some time after Vic’s death). The narrative is by turns fiercely emotional, utterly appalling and wildly hilarious. Hersh is a highly inventive lyricist and in this slim volume shows that her power extends as well to prose. (She also has written a critically lauded memoir, released in the U.S. as Rat Girl and in the U.K. as Paradoxical Undressing, which I haven’t read.) The title comes from a mantra of sorts that the two developed when Vic threatened to either try to make his music more commercial, or to follow through on his long-time desire to shuffle off this mortal coil. He never sold out his muse, but he did shuffle off. Kristin Hersh, as she has done all her life, took this small-scale tragedy and made a great rock memoir out of it. Hersh’s Don’t Suck, Don’t Die is a funny, sad, bittersweet and at times hard-to-follow work of art.
(University of Texas Press, 2015)
[Editor’s note: David Kidney previously reviewed Vic Chestnutt’s Skitter on Take-Off for GMR. Gary previously reviewed Kristin Hersh’s Learn To Sing Like A Star. Kristin Hersh has a website, and is active on Twitter as @kristinhersh.]
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