Chris Whitley passed away after suffering from lung cancer in 2005. I realize this sounds silly, but I had one of those moments upon learning of his passing like I had when I was riding my bike one day in March of 1981. My mother came running outside and yelled at me and my brothers to come inside. What for? we asked. Mad yelling, which she almost never did, she screamed “because the President has been shot!” There is no describing the feeling, is what I’m saying. I was heartsick when I discovered that Chris was dead. I honestly thought, “well, music will never be the same. We’ll never hear more of that genius.” I could have cried.
Whitley’s debut, 1991’s “Living With The Law,” was as gutsy an intro to a career as was ever waxed. Bluesy, stark, starry, cliff-side deep. Haunting. And tender, too. Hard as the slide of a Ruger, soft as your lover’s insides. Noone writes this:
Who’s gonna win the medal?
Who’s gonna win the glittering prize?
Everybody out here now
No one can disguise
No one can disguise
I woke to you that blessed morning
That’s when I knew you was the one
Somebody always cryin’ somewhere
Look what love has done
Used to be when things got tight
I could bid you a well bye bye
Riding some two-wheeled sex machine
Like I don’t have to try
Now I say my my baby
My how you have grown
I say look what love has done
Some folks gonna live forever
Some they won’t never cross that line
But everybody out here now, trying to unwind
We rode out in the open
Lord I love the way that you run
Somebody always crying somewhere
Look what love has done
Look what love has done
Massive and heavy like the opening strains of 1969’s Led Zeppelin was Whitley’s sophomore effort, “Din Of Ecstasy.” Opiate addled loudness and brash fusion progressions in a power trio format, sexuality and sin permeate this gorgeous exploration of that place in the mind where sibilants congregate to make whispers into your subconscious. Head-cracking noise and gut-churning bass explode; subtle missives underscore the reality Whitley alone knew, but with which we all somehow feel we can identify.
“Terra Incognita,” the aptly titled 1995 release provided a sort of return to form with textural blues and resonator guitars illuminating a path to where “Cool Wooden Crosses” stand and your love is “Weightless as a child, lonelier than God.” An “Aerial” spires into the sky evoking the West which Chris loved so well. Emerging from the Din was a new series of outlets for Whitley, searching digital ambiance without abandoning listenability or fervor.
In 1998, Chris went to his family’s farm in Vermont to record a solo acoustic emotional masterpiece recorded live with each song consisting of voice, foot tapping and guitar (or banjo on one track). Infused with earthiness and as inexplicably room-filling as anything else he ever did, “Dirt Floor” is quite simply one of the 5 sound recordings I would insist on taking with me into exile. From the solace seeking soul who keens
There’s a dirt floor underneath here
to receive us when changes fail
May this shovel loose your trouble
Let them fall away
Now the mist shall be your blanket
While the moss shall ease your head
As the future is soon forgotten
As the dirt shall be your bed…
to the sated one who gently revels in finding his “Loco Girl” and simultaneously aches to find her again, a real life bleeds through the notes, and Whitley’s sacred harp, the instrument he was born with, is never richer than in these tracks.
There are several subsequent releases, each brilliant in different ways, and I love each of them in a way I do not with other artists. Chris was uniquely talented; his equal is unimaginable. I hope that Chris is with his “secret Jesus” after following “the good, red road.” I hope somebody received him up there, via blood antenna and dust radio.
Rest in Peace, Christopher Whitley.
Syzygus 
11 comments
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January 24, 2008 at 6:23 am
love the girls
syzygus writes : “Dirt Floor” is quite simply one of the 5 sound recordings I would insist on taking with me into exile.”
Jame Newland writes on the Fiction thread : “the modern world is incapable of exceptional art. Because it is sunk in error, profundity eludes it, and because its world is dark and ugly, beauty is nowhere to be found.”
I wonder what role sound recording have had in causing the loss of the beautiful?
The loss of the quiet which appears to be necessary to formation of the material appetites whose object is the beautiful.
If sent into exile, and thus not bound by the culture we live in, would it not be preferable to leave those sound recordings behind?
Are we really better off having sound recordings which are another means of saturation of the senses? A saturation which causes the sense to be both insensitive to stimulus while yearning for greater stimulus to overcome the saturation.
January 24, 2008 at 7:51 am
syzygus
No, I don’t think so. One of the repeated and perhaps the primary mode of expression in the worship of God is music, particularly sung music. In Heaven in St. John’s Apocalypse, apart from the period of approximately half an hour, the angels and saints deluge the ether with the sound of ceaseless singing. This can hardly be overwhelming to the senses. I understand your point about the value of silence, but we were designed to listen as well as to vocalize. I would much rather be blind than deaf. I can’t imagine the agony of a Beethoven.
January 24, 2008 at 8:25 am
love the girls
not sung music, but recorded music.
January 24, 2008 at 10:08 am
syzygus
I’m not sure I understand the reason for your objection to the format of the music. Nor am I of the opinion that repeated exposure to or participation in music in any format is detrimental to beauty, presuming of course that one is speaking of beautiful music to begin with. Aeolian harmonies, myxolydian progressions, voicings, phrasings, structures, simple melodic lines, complex selection of instrumentation, etc. all go into the endless variety of approaching the beautiful, and these structures mirror the celestial order to greater or lesser extent or else we cease to consider them music in the true sense.
I truly believe that this is why even the modern pagans can create beautiful music, as they have access to the beautiful in those structures in a way analagous to natural theology’s accessibility to the pagans to whom St. Paul spoke on the Areopagus.
January 24, 2008 at 10:24 am
Jon Luker
I’m not sure this is where LTG was headed in his objection, but I do wonder about the impact of individualized “consumption” of recorded music on our former communal ways. Before the advent of recorded music, its enjoyment, it seems to me, was more participative, even if participating only meant to attend a concert or a performance. Just thinking out loud here.
January 24, 2008 at 10:31 am
Josh M.
Is it recorded music that’s the problem, or the way sinful people use it to “saturate their senses”?
January 24, 2008 at 11:12 am
love the girls
Josh M. writes : “Is it recorded music that’s the problem, or the way sinful people use it to “saturate their senses”?”
Primarily the way it is used. But recored music by its nature lends itself to being used continuously as is evident by how it is used. A person could listen for a few minutes a day, but like television, it draws the appetite to engross itself in more.
January 24, 2008 at 12:24 pm
Josh M.
LTG, are you saying that the lack of scarcity–or the availability of recorded music to be played constantly, so as to “engross” us more and more–is the problem?
January 24, 2008 at 1:10 pm
love the girls
Josh,
The problem is the constant and overloading stimulus of the senses. It is not unlike the epicureans who indulged to disorder.
Or to put it a different way, we’re so busy being stimulated and seeking stimulus we barely have time to think back and wonder. The quiet simplicity of light and shadow is lost in the vivid saturation of colours.
January 26, 2008 at 10:01 am
Karl
Mike, I really thought Hotel Vast Horizon warranted its own mention. Of all of Whitley’s releases since Living With the Law, I thought Hotel and perhaps Rocket House were exceptional. I still haven’t really taken to Din of Ecstasy, but maybe if I just listened to it more often…
January 26, 2008 at 1:26 pm
syzygus
You know what’s interesting? I listened to Din of Ecsatsy when it was released and put it on the shelf. I waited for Terra Incognita, Dirt Floor, the live album, the covers album, and Rocket House before I ever really rediscovered it. Absolute genius. You are completely correct about HVH. I, too, fell in love with Rocket House, but that (in retrospect) had a little something to do with my affinity for Revolution era Prince, I suspect. Some have told me (and I quite understand) that they do not care for it at all. The fact is, they all merit singling out: Weed, War Crime Blues, Soft and Dangerous Shores, and the posthumous releases Reiter In (with the Bastard Club) and Dislocation Blues (with Jeff Lang). Each have incredible moments, but you’re right I suppose, that jazz trio album Hotel Vast Horizon is glorious. Not a bad track. I recently listened to the covers album (Perfect Day, with Billy Martin and Chris Wood of Medeski Martin and Wood fame) again and I am telling you, Bob Dylan should be grinning ear to ear when he hears what justice Chris Whitley did with “4th Time Around.” His treatment of everyone from The Doors to Dylan to Nat King Cole to Jimi Hendrix and beyond are incomparable. There are times when you simply forget that Whitley is covering other people’s stuff.