Dunno if any of my old homies have already posted this, since I'm a little behind. Sorry if you've already seen it... ROCK NOTES Chesnutt and Wilco: works in progress By Jim Sullivan, Globe Staff, 04/23/99 About 10 years ago, Vic Chesnutt - singer-songwriter-guitarist - spent an evening he can't recall that well, but one that turned out to be fortuitous. He was playing before a smattering of people at a Nashville bar and had propped up a cardboard sign that read ''I suck: Tapes $5.'' ''That sounds like something I would do,'' muses Chesnutt, on the phone, earlier this week. ''I remember that. That's the show where I met Kurt [Wagner] from Lambchop. He says I talked to him; I don't really remember it. I was really drunk.'' Nevertheless - or perhaps because of this lapse - a friendship developed. Last year, Chesnutt collaborated with Lambchop, a 14-piece band, to make the haunting and gorgeous song cycle album ''The Salesman and Bernadette,'' the recollections of a lovelorn salesman, someone both similar to and different from Chesnutt, he says. ''For me it's very important to have the pull between the goofy and the pathetic, the sad and funny. That's what makes my music, I think. That's my whole thing. I know the South plays a very important role in my imagination. I love it and I hate it, and that's a lot to do with my personality, my schizophrenic nature in general, and the nature of my music.'' The shape of the album ''started after I knew I was recording with Lambchop,'' says Chesnutt. ''I started picking some old songs, writing some new songs, it turned into a song cycle, an exercise in collage portraiture. Like I was going around finding `found objects' and placing them on a big sheet of plywood, and arranging them in a portrait.'' ''I'm a big fan of Lambchop,'' he says. ''They're a big band that can play quiet. Their older records were meandering dirges and they progressed into a soul band and I like both sides. This album was a complete collaboration, and sounds like a Lambchop record in a way. They're friends, and I love 'em as people.'' Chesnutt says he had the time of his life playing 25 European shows with Lambchop. They're not on his current tour, where he's opening for Wilco (tonight at the Paradise), because they work day jobs and can't take the time off. This makes Chesnutt's solo show ''not as lush and beautiful,'' he says. ''When I play solo everything slows down a lot. I think you can see the song a lot more, it's more personality driven. Opening for Wilco is different, too. It's been great. At least half the crowd knows who I am and they're really quiet while I'm playing. I'm a short guy [a paraplegic, Chesnutt is confined to a wheelchair], and sometimes they can't see me in these packed rooms. It's heartwarming.'' In another lifetime, when he could walk, Chesnutt played keyboards in a Georgia band called the La De Das. When he was 18, while drunk, he smashed his truck into a ditch and irreparably damaged his spinal cord. In order to play guitar, Chesnutt superglues guitar picks to a glove on his right hand. Has his technique improved over time? ''No,'' he says. ''I have good days and bad days. Sometimes, I think I make breakthroughs but it's all physicality: Sometimes my fingers don't work. It used to horrify me and the show would fall apart, but I learned to play through it, learned to just not let it affect me. The crowd loves it. They come up and say, `You're so real.' They don't see people [mess] up like that that often.'' Chesnutt, says Wilco singer-guitarist Jeff Tweedy, is '' a sweet guy. I love his music. I think he's one of the best lyric writers around. It's inspiring.'' Over the past few years, the Chicago-based Wilco has been regarded as one of the alternative country-rock standard bearers. But, perhaps, that tag needs revising, at least if the music on their latest effort, ''Summer Teeth, '' is any indication. Tweedy says the expansive, wide-ranging disc is the result ''of a band that's been traveling so much the past three years, really becoming a band. We wanted to go into the studio and hear something that sounded like us, and a bit like the Beach Boys and Beatles. We really used the studio and took our time. I think we succeeded on most songs, and came up with something kinda unique.'' That was the result. Did they discuss a plan to cover so much musical territory? ''Just a little bit,'' says Tweedy. ''In general, we just wanted to put stuff on tape that would excite us at the end of the day. I wish I had some good snappy answers, but it's just something that evolved.'' They actually completed most of ''Summer Teeth'' before they went in to record the Grammy-nominated ''Mermaid Avenue'' with Billy Bragg, the collection of unearthed Woody Guthrie songs. What Tweedy took away from working with Bragg was this: ''I took away some confidence as a writer - write things down, don't worry about editing.''
