Nota Bene: I wrote this in July, 2005, four months before Chris's death in November.
The first time I saw Chris Whitley was on a small stage in Dallas’ Gypsy Tea Room. Before the show, I saw him shuffling around the corners, his black suit jacket sitting loosely on his thin shoulders, his chin-length curtain of hair masking his face. Whitley took the stage a short time later, stripped down to a tattered white undershirt and jeans. His bare arms and shoulders were bone-thin without being frail. Thick, pronounced veins covered his forearms even when unclenched and his biceps nearly doubled in girth when he began playing. His sad eyes sat a little deeper than most people and his face had carved into it the deep lines of anxiety. It made me wonder what he had been worrying about so intensely.
After taking the stage, Whitley muttered something unintelligible, something about thanking us for coming out on a “damn Sunday night.” Whitley’s distressed National guitar had lost its original sheen decades ago. The instrument’s body was chipping in large, varied chunks, like an old wall that begins to show patches of red brick. He looked so much like a broken man I wondered if I’d spent fifteen bucks merely to see someone fall on their face. Then, he began to play. Whitley did not bother with the nicety of a crescendo. There was no pretense of easing into his craft. He began hastily, attacking his aged guitar with sharp, tense fingertips, sending out frantic, tinny blues chords. His lips tightened as he focused more on his instrument, but opened wide as he approached the microphone to sing. Instead of an embarrassed mutter, Whitley erupted a clear, passionate melody. A steady thump, tapped out by Whitley’s scuffed cowboy boot, resonated throughout the venue. Whitley had duct-taped a small piece of wood to floor, pulled tight at a slant over a microphone to create the effect. It amazed me how one such thin man could make sounds so wide. Sounds that were a blanket, drowning out my anxiety.
The shows didn’t always go this well. Friends of mine had seen Whitley over a year ago in Austin. At that show, they said, he had displayed none of the ease and musical stride I was then seeing at the Gypsy. Instead they saw a slow, distracted Whitley, carelessly strumming tunes that sounded muddy and stopping occasionally to beg audience members for extra pot. His only other extra-musical dialogue was a perplexing diatribe about wanting to see his daughter.
I was privy to a similar display once. It was my second time seeing Whitley, still within the cozy envelope of the Gypsy Tea Room. This time, the audience, which was meager enough the first time, was cut in half. Whitley’s long hair had been shorn to something between a 1950’s army crew cut and a chemo patient’s vulnerable scalp. The music, while still beyond the listless picking I’m used to seeing from other bands, was lackluster for Whitley. The first time I’d seen him, he traveled with a guitar tech. Here he was traveling completely alone and the pauses he took between songs to tune his instrument were long, silent, and awkward. It was within one of these pauses that Whitley stopped to say, with the same mutter that had previously bid me welcome on a Sunday evening, that he had just undergone excruciating dental work. Oh, and his mother had just died. It was then that I realized I wasn’t merely seeing a possibly chemically-altered Whitley at a mediocre show. Nor was his laziness born of impatience with an unresponsive crowd. Whitley, embarrassing as it may have been, wished that night to make a display of his inner turmoil. Somehow, the need to show us his wrenched, grieving soul was important to him. The tension was unbearable. The music was loud and full and incredible, but Whitley himself looked on the edge of emotional and physical collapse. I clapped loudly between songs to make my enthusiasm obvious, but never long enough to fill the entire gap. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to act like a complete groupie or his best friend. Part of me wanted to go up and just put my arm around him, patting his shoulder reassuringly. That’s how personal Whitley gets with his audience.
The very next evening after that second Whitley show, I saw Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. I’d heard a lot about Ted Leo. Some of it was about how brilliantly melodic he was. How all of his music was catchy, wall-to-wall hooks, but still subversively chaotic. But a good deal of what I heard about Leo had to do with his politics and his personal habits. “He’s really political, really unapologetically progressive,” friends would say. “Oh, and I think he’s a vegan.” A socially conscious vegan with a good haircut, nice manners, and ripping guitar riffs. It sounded way too good to be true. In fact, that was the very problem with him. The Ted Leo show was great, no doubt. I was impressed enough to have seen him a second time since. But the whole time I was thinking, “How am I ever supposed to connect with you? You’re a poster-boy for activists and restless post-punk rockers and I’m a mess of stifling inhibitions, incessant shame, and perpetual misgivings. Why would you even bother talking to me?”
Perhaps Mr. Leo has just as many misgivings as I do, but how unmitigated are those misgivings when they escape through his music? Leo makes cursory attempts at lyrically relaying personal doubt but always with the underpinning of some politically idealistic hope. Chris Whitley lives out his every doubt on stage. Whitley’s every note is a plea for deliverance. Activism, as it’s popularly known, requires a level of self-affirmation. Whitley, as I know him, hasn’t the energy to bother about affirmation. Whitley knows that every man is a liar and that he’s probably chief among them. There’s no room for strident agendas in his oeuvre.
I once thought every rock star I heard was speaking to me. My adolescence and the career peak of every grunge wannabe coincided nicely. I was audience to a million disposable discourses on melancholy, disenchantment, and – delightful catchword of the nineties – angst. Only we were not so much angst-ridden as hormonal, but we never would have admitted that. Everything in adolescence seemed to have more gravity. Everything was romantically inflated to these enormous problems that could be solved with a Smashing Pumpkins album. Adult problems are trickier. Adolescence is spent hurling blame at anyone older than you. It takes several years of adulthood, and a few self-inflicted tumbles before you’re cynical enough to blame yourself. Then it’s not angst, it’s shame. And shame can only be soothed with the substance of redemption.
A close friend of mine is always rattling on about redemption. To her, the echoes of redemption are found in a million different places: French orange soda, haircuts, wood grain. The important thing is that she only finds redemption in these simple things after moments of grief. It is easy to see that the qualities of a medicine are only appreciated when a harm is relieved. That’s what redemption is: taking your soul from a state of injury to a point of relief, sometimes with scars. I’m in love with the idea that everything – orange soda, wood grain – is still ringing with the chords of redemption, but I also hear that sound to greater or lesser degrees in different places. To me, music – what I deem good music – has always shouted redemption the best. With Whitley, I can see redemption carved out in the lines of his face, on the veins of his arms, and I feel it with every deep, metallic reverberation from that old guitar.
Chris Whitley is certainly the most afflicted, the most broken, the most contrite person I’ve ever seen perform. This also makes him the most human musician I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing cavalier about anything Whitley does. Despite his transcendently unconventional talent, Whitley is one of the more anonymous musicians in this world. He has none of the airs of a typical musician. I’ve known local egotists – with bands that fizzled out after a dozen gigs – who had more bravado than Chris Whitley. Whitley doesn’t have to make an effort to relate to his audience, being a meager human being is just part of his natural perception. The minor details of his personal life that slip out at shows – his substance abuse, his mother dying, his immediate physical pain – only crystallize his humanity.
In addition to Whitley’s personal issues, he also seems to be getting by financially on mere scraps. Despite some minor success in the early part of his career, which lasted until about the mid-nineties, Whitley has been recording brilliant records on a dime’s budget, in one day, under bridges and in barns, for nearly a decade now. At that first show, there were rumors that he had been living out of his van for several months on end, even when he wasn’t touring. Rumors or no, Whitley certainly isn’t drawing audiences that can even compare to most musical acts and there are few places where I can mention his name and not draw blank stares. I was mulling over all these details at that second Whitley show I attended when it hit me: “Chris Whitley needs to be supported as a missionary.”
The idea of a missionary conjures up in people’s minds some very polarized images. I went to a Christian-affiliated university that, every year, funded and sent out students on dozens of holidays in the sun that were thinly veiled as “mission trips,” so I always think of self-righteous college students. There are people for whom “missionary” would evoke pictures of brave, heroic individuals who make life-altering sacrifices as they boldly set their face against evil. For others, the connotations of “missionary” are very uncomfortable: backhanded religious propagandists who, armed with misleading rhetoric, subvert and destroy cultures to lead the world into a smooth, glassy state of homogeneity. This is a tragedy because the real definition of a missionary does not even lie between those two views. A real missionary ought to be an instrument of peace. Just as a traveling doctor brings physical healing, so a traveling missionary ought to bring spiritual healing.
The understanding of what is spiritual and whether or not the soul is in need of healing varies from place to place. History has created some peculiar religions; religions that have split into sects, sects that have split into sects. Divisions have occurred so often that these various strains of careless faiths hardly resemble their origin. And each division creates new beliefs and theories about what people need; parlour tricks for personal fulfillment. Despite these varied and conflicting beliefs, the only thing that seems consistent in this life is that people are meek, walking around on broken legs, desperate to be healed, to be reconciled.
Of course, the missionary’s goal of spiritual healing is only a theory. In practice, the title “missionary” gets thrown around much more carelessly. In the context of a musical missionary, the reality is even more tragic. I have an aunt and uncle who run a quaint “music ministry” that is funded entirely by donations: some regular, some made one time. They travel around in a fifth-wheel trailer – much plusher than Whitley’s van – singing at different churches. Well, my uncle sings, my aunt sits in the back and runs sound, which is a challenge considering the complexity of the setup: my uncle’s voice and a cassette tape. I don’t know where the music on the cassette tape came from. My uncle didn’t perform any of it. I think he buys the music the same way people buy other stock audio like laugh tracks or gunshots. Then he just sings along. The songs are flaccid in terms of musical complexity and the concepts with which they deal are superficial. Whitley pulls and bends so much music out of that guitar that it becomes alive; my aunt hits “play” on the tape machine. Whitley’s voice growls and cracks and yells out melodies of intricate, penetrating metaphor; my uncle sings steadily, sweetly, and flatly about false hope. But my uncle is the one to whom people lend their financial support, under the auspices of being a “missionary:” one who brings spiritual healing. But my uncle never articulates an audience’s pain. And if he doesn’t articulate pain, there’s no acknowledgment of sickness. And if there’s no acknowledgment of sickness, there can be no healing.
Whitley is the most equipped to minister to sick souls because he is afflicted as we are afflicted. He can explain back to you every sharp pain in your heart, note for note. He shares in our misery, because he knows himself to be miserable. And where better for us to be than under our common tent of flaw, where Whitley stands with us, telling us our story in a steady flow of music? Honesty is what humanity needs, not vapid platitudes or entertainment. Any money wasted on fruitless missionary work ought to be funneled towards Chris Whitley. He should be able to tour more. He should be able to record more. He is a capable because he is humble. In fact, Chris Whitley should be more than financially supported. He should be more than commissioned. Chris Whitley should be sainted, the spiritual power of his music forever declared for posterity; Saint Whitley: Comforter of the Meek.
The first time I saw Chris Whitley was on a small stage in Dallas’ Gypsy Tea Room. Before the show, I saw him shuffling around the corners, his black suit jacket sitting loosely on his thin shoulders, his chin-length curtain of hair masking his face. Whitley took the stage a short time later, stripped down to a tattered white undershirt and jeans. His bare arms and shoulders were bone-thin without being frail. Thick, pronounced veins covered his forearms even when unclenched and his biceps nearly doubled in girth when he began playing. His sad eyes sat a little deeper than most people and his face had carved into it the deep lines of anxiety. It made me wonder what he had been worrying about so intensely.
After taking the stage, Whitley muttered something unintelligible, something about thanking us for coming out on a “damn Sunday night.” Whitley’s distressed National guitar had lost its original sheen decades ago. The instrument’s body was chipping in large, varied chunks, like an old wall that begins to show patches of red brick. He looked so much like a broken man I wondered if I’d spent fifteen bucks merely to see someone fall on their face. Then, he began to play. Whitley did not bother with the nicety of a crescendo. There was no pretense of easing into his craft. He began hastily, attacking his aged guitar with sharp, tense fingertips, sending out frantic, tinny blues chords. His lips tightened as he focused more on his instrument, but opened wide as he approached the microphone to sing. Instead of an embarrassed mutter, Whitley erupted a clear, passionate melody. A steady thump, tapped out by Whitley’s scuffed cowboy boot, resonated throughout the venue. Whitley had duct-taped a small piece of wood to floor, pulled tight at a slant over a microphone to create the effect. It amazed me how one such thin man could make sounds so wide. Sounds that were a blanket, drowning out my anxiety.
The shows didn’t always go this well. Friends of mine had seen Whitley over a year ago in Austin. At that show, they said, he had displayed none of the ease and musical stride I was then seeing at the Gypsy. Instead they saw a slow, distracted Whitley, carelessly strumming tunes that sounded muddy and stopping occasionally to beg audience members for extra pot. His only other extra-musical dialogue was a perplexing diatribe about wanting to see his daughter.
I was privy to a similar display once. It was my second time seeing Whitley, still within the cozy envelope of the Gypsy Tea Room. This time, the audience, which was meager enough the first time, was cut in half. Whitley’s long hair had been shorn to something between a 1950’s army crew cut and a chemo patient’s vulnerable scalp. The music, while still beyond the listless picking I’m used to seeing from other bands, was lackluster for Whitley. The first time I’d seen him, he traveled with a guitar tech. Here he was traveling completely alone and the pauses he took between songs to tune his instrument were long, silent, and awkward. It was within one of these pauses that Whitley stopped to say, with the same mutter that had previously bid me welcome on a Sunday evening, that he had just undergone excruciating dental work. Oh, and his mother had just died. It was then that I realized I wasn’t merely seeing a possibly chemically-altered Whitley at a mediocre show. Nor was his laziness born of impatience with an unresponsive crowd. Whitley, embarrassing as it may have been, wished that night to make a display of his inner turmoil. Somehow, the need to show us his wrenched, grieving soul was important to him. The tension was unbearable. The music was loud and full and incredible, but Whitley himself looked on the edge of emotional and physical collapse. I clapped loudly between songs to make my enthusiasm obvious, but never long enough to fill the entire gap. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to act like a complete groupie or his best friend. Part of me wanted to go up and just put my arm around him, patting his shoulder reassuringly. That’s how personal Whitley gets with his audience.
The very next evening after that second Whitley show, I saw Ted Leo and the Pharmacists. I’d heard a lot about Ted Leo. Some of it was about how brilliantly melodic he was. How all of his music was catchy, wall-to-wall hooks, but still subversively chaotic. But a good deal of what I heard about Leo had to do with his politics and his personal habits. “He’s really political, really unapologetically progressive,” friends would say. “Oh, and I think he’s a vegan.” A socially conscious vegan with a good haircut, nice manners, and ripping guitar riffs. It sounded way too good to be true. In fact, that was the very problem with him. The Ted Leo show was great, no doubt. I was impressed enough to have seen him a second time since. But the whole time I was thinking, “How am I ever supposed to connect with you? You’re a poster-boy for activists and restless post-punk rockers and I’m a mess of stifling inhibitions, incessant shame, and perpetual misgivings. Why would you even bother talking to me?”
Perhaps Mr. Leo has just as many misgivings as I do, but how unmitigated are those misgivings when they escape through his music? Leo makes cursory attempts at lyrically relaying personal doubt but always with the underpinning of some politically idealistic hope. Chris Whitley lives out his every doubt on stage. Whitley’s every note is a plea for deliverance. Activism, as it’s popularly known, requires a level of self-affirmation. Whitley, as I know him, hasn’t the energy to bother about affirmation. Whitley knows that every man is a liar and that he’s probably chief among them. There’s no room for strident agendas in his oeuvre.
I once thought every rock star I heard was speaking to me. My adolescence and the career peak of every grunge wannabe coincided nicely. I was audience to a million disposable discourses on melancholy, disenchantment, and – delightful catchword of the nineties – angst. Only we were not so much angst-ridden as hormonal, but we never would have admitted that. Everything in adolescence seemed to have more gravity. Everything was romantically inflated to these enormous problems that could be solved with a Smashing Pumpkins album. Adult problems are trickier. Adolescence is spent hurling blame at anyone older than you. It takes several years of adulthood, and a few self-inflicted tumbles before you’re cynical enough to blame yourself. Then it’s not angst, it’s shame. And shame can only be soothed with the substance of redemption.
A close friend of mine is always rattling on about redemption. To her, the echoes of redemption are found in a million different places: French orange soda, haircuts, wood grain. The important thing is that she only finds redemption in these simple things after moments of grief. It is easy to see that the qualities of a medicine are only appreciated when a harm is relieved. That’s what redemption is: taking your soul from a state of injury to a point of relief, sometimes with scars. I’m in love with the idea that everything – orange soda, wood grain – is still ringing with the chords of redemption, but I also hear that sound to greater or lesser degrees in different places. To me, music – what I deem good music – has always shouted redemption the best. With Whitley, I can see redemption carved out in the lines of his face, on the veins of his arms, and I feel it with every deep, metallic reverberation from that old guitar.
Chris Whitley is certainly the most afflicted, the most broken, the most contrite person I’ve ever seen perform. This also makes him the most human musician I’ve ever seen. There’s nothing cavalier about anything Whitley does. Despite his transcendently unconventional talent, Whitley is one of the more anonymous musicians in this world. He has none of the airs of a typical musician. I’ve known local egotists – with bands that fizzled out after a dozen gigs – who had more bravado than Chris Whitley. Whitley doesn’t have to make an effort to relate to his audience, being a meager human being is just part of his natural perception. The minor details of his personal life that slip out at shows – his substance abuse, his mother dying, his immediate physical pain – only crystallize his humanity.
In addition to Whitley’s personal issues, he also seems to be getting by financially on mere scraps. Despite some minor success in the early part of his career, which lasted until about the mid-nineties, Whitley has been recording brilliant records on a dime’s budget, in one day, under bridges and in barns, for nearly a decade now. At that first show, there were rumors that he had been living out of his van for several months on end, even when he wasn’t touring. Rumors or no, Whitley certainly isn’t drawing audiences that can even compare to most musical acts and there are few places where I can mention his name and not draw blank stares. I was mulling over all these details at that second Whitley show I attended when it hit me: “Chris Whitley needs to be supported as a missionary.”
The idea of a missionary conjures up in people’s minds some very polarized images. I went to a Christian-affiliated university that, every year, funded and sent out students on dozens of holidays in the sun that were thinly veiled as “mission trips,” so I always think of self-righteous college students. There are people for whom “missionary” would evoke pictures of brave, heroic individuals who make life-altering sacrifices as they boldly set their face against evil. For others, the connotations of “missionary” are very uncomfortable: backhanded religious propagandists who, armed with misleading rhetoric, subvert and destroy cultures to lead the world into a smooth, glassy state of homogeneity. This is a tragedy because the real definition of a missionary does not even lie between those two views. A real missionary ought to be an instrument of peace. Just as a traveling doctor brings physical healing, so a traveling missionary ought to bring spiritual healing.
The understanding of what is spiritual and whether or not the soul is in need of healing varies from place to place. History has created some peculiar religions; religions that have split into sects, sects that have split into sects. Divisions have occurred so often that these various strains of careless faiths hardly resemble their origin. And each division creates new beliefs and theories about what people need; parlour tricks for personal fulfillment. Despite these varied and conflicting beliefs, the only thing that seems consistent in this life is that people are meek, walking around on broken legs, desperate to be healed, to be reconciled.
Of course, the missionary’s goal of spiritual healing is only a theory. In practice, the title “missionary” gets thrown around much more carelessly. In the context of a musical missionary, the reality is even more tragic. I have an aunt and uncle who run a quaint “music ministry” that is funded entirely by donations: some regular, some made one time. They travel around in a fifth-wheel trailer – much plusher than Whitley’s van – singing at different churches. Well, my uncle sings, my aunt sits in the back and runs sound, which is a challenge considering the complexity of the setup: my uncle’s voice and a cassette tape. I don’t know where the music on the cassette tape came from. My uncle didn’t perform any of it. I think he buys the music the same way people buy other stock audio like laugh tracks or gunshots. Then he just sings along. The songs are flaccid in terms of musical complexity and the concepts with which they deal are superficial. Whitley pulls and bends so much music out of that guitar that it becomes alive; my aunt hits “play” on the tape machine. Whitley’s voice growls and cracks and yells out melodies of intricate, penetrating metaphor; my uncle sings steadily, sweetly, and flatly about false hope. But my uncle is the one to whom people lend their financial support, under the auspices of being a “missionary:” one who brings spiritual healing. But my uncle never articulates an audience’s pain. And if he doesn’t articulate pain, there’s no acknowledgment of sickness. And if there’s no acknowledgment of sickness, there can be no healing.
Whitley is the most equipped to minister to sick souls because he is afflicted as we are afflicted. He can explain back to you every sharp pain in your heart, note for note. He shares in our misery, because he knows himself to be miserable. And where better for us to be than under our common tent of flaw, where Whitley stands with us, telling us our story in a steady flow of music? Honesty is what humanity needs, not vapid platitudes or entertainment. Any money wasted on fruitless missionary work ought to be funneled towards Chris Whitley. He should be able to tour more. He should be able to record more. He is a capable because he is humble. In fact, Chris Whitley should be more than financially supported. He should be more than commissioned. Chris Whitley should be sainted, the spiritual power of his music forever declared for posterity; Saint Whitley: Comforter of the Meek.
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