The tragic life and death of Chris Whitley
It might feel like it’s a new phenomenon that everything in modern culture is seemingly reaching back for and referring to something nostalgic and supposedly better, but it’s been happening for longer than you might think, so much so that what dominated the cultural landscape in the 1990s was actually reverentially inspired and informed by what had happened culturally in the 1960s.
Forrest Gump was fuelled by ’60s nostalgia, and out in the streets, Flower Power was back, in its way, so was Woodstock, sort of, with events in both 1994 and 1999 (although the less said about the latter, the better). Oasis wanted to be The Beatles, and even The Beatles wanted to be The Beatles again, as the now and then ‘Fab Three’ got together to record the footage and extra tracks for the Anthology series.
It makes sense that the scene might come full circle when it did, as people coming of age in the ’90s were likely to be the kids of the original Flower Children from the ’60s, having grown up with the sounds of Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds and Neil Young echoing around their homes and minds. And, just like the younger generations of the late ’50s and ’60s were rebelling against the structures and strictures of fusty ’50s life, so too were the young people of the ’90s rebelling against the corporate world and rise of neoliberalism that had come with the disastrous rule of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan.
Some of those kids went on to try and raise the ghosts of the ’60s and recreate the sound of their old favourites, while others were simply possessed by the spirit of the times and used that spirit of rebellion, but wanted to make their own names, their own sounds and speak for their own times.
Of this, every generation has its own tragic heroes; the ’60s lost Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison and all the rest, then 30 years later, Jeff Buckley joined the list shortly after Kurt Cobain had done, and nobody in his life would have been surprised if Chris Whitley had done it sooner than he eventually did, too.
While his contemporaries were turning on, tuning in and dropping out to the sounds of the British invasion and the blues rock of the 1960s, Whitley was looking a little further back still, to the music that had inspired all of that in the first place, and finding his comfort and his muse in the grooves of his parents records’ of blues greats like John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters and Bukka White.
When Whitley began making music, though, he wasn’t just reworking what had gone before, but making it in his own way. “He was somebody who was obviously inspired by the blues as a basic form”, audio engineer Malcolm Burn would later recall, “But [was] not interested in just rehashing something. He’d invented his own language and wasn’t playing by other people’s rules”, and it’s clear for all to hear in his music.
His use of the dobro, for instance, is a direct call back to the street musicians of Southern America and blues troubadours from the 20th century, and his playing always starts out in the deep past of the Deep South before jumping somewhere far more modern. However, the true departure from his blues roots comes when he starts singing, as both vocals and his lyrics have far more in common with Chad Kroeger, Kurt Cobain and Eddie Vedder than they do with Blind Willie Johnson, Sleepy John Estes or Son House.
It’s no wonder that he related to the blues figures of the ’40s and ’50s more than the riotous and rebellious blues-rockers of the 1960s, as Whitley was visited by more than his fair share of demons.
Towards the end of his life, he spent time with the aspiring filmmaker Jonathan Mayor, who later observed of the troubled singer that, “He was very depressed. At the same time, there were these sides to Chris that endured–an immense kind of potential to see beauty in art and the future. As bad as things had got, his creativity endured, and so did his fighting spirit. It was a tough situation. He was drinking heavily and didn’t have a lot of options. He felt as if he’d tried really hard to be very good at something and sacrificed a lot for that. I don’t think he ever made music to be financially successful, but he felt betrayed, not by anyone in particular but by a world where that could be a reality.”
From the outside looking in, he might have been tipped to be the next big thing or seen as having it all in the 1990s; he was signed to Columbia Records, praised as having released the ‘Best Debut Album of the Year’ for Living with the Law by Rolling Stone in 1991, toured in support of his hero Bob Dylan as well as playing some shows with Tom Petty and had attracted the attentions of industry heavyweights like Bono and Daniel Lanois. But for all professional success, Whitley battled with a barrage of personal demons, too.
By the time his first album hit the shelves in the States, he was nearly 30 and had already done plenty of hard living. Having landed in New York’s Greenwich Village at 17 years old to play in bars and on the streets if he had to, Whitley somehow soon ended up making a life for himself in Belgium, after a chance encounter with a travel agent in New York who gave the young singer a free plane ticket to Brussels and the contact details of a promoter there.
Whitley spent the next ten years in Europe putting down roots both on and off the stage, forming a band in Brussels and starting a family with his then-wife, Helene Gevaert, but the marriage broke down when the family returned to the States.
His confidence in his professional direction dwindled as well, as, despite the industry hype around his output, he struggled to connect with any kind of audience. After three albums with Columbia Records, he was dropped from the label. Having struggled throughout his life with feelings of depression, insecurity and despondency, Whitley increasingly turned to the bottle to help him through the end of both his marriage and the end of his time with the major label.
He returned home to reconnect with his muse and began to release a string of raw, stripped-back and emotionally bare music, which he would continue to play and perform for the rest of his life. In the early 2000s, Whitley once again relocated to Europe, this time to live in Dresden with a new partner, Susan Buerger, who was almost 20 years his junior. Buerger was further witness to Whitley’s increasing alcohol reliance, which worsened still following the death of his mother in 2004, and one year later, he would return to the States for the final time, taking on a string of low-paying club dates that his friends, family and doctors advised against.
“Chris was never at peace,” said his brother, Dan Whitley, “It was kind of what drove him–to find nirvana writing about his demons. But he was on a treadmill that he couldn’t get off”. But he was forced to get off that treadmill towards the end of 2005, cancelling the final dates of the tour following a diagnosis of lung cancer, and just weeks later, on November 20th, 2005, Whitley passed away at the age of 45.
“I was alone with him in his room,” Buerger later remembered of Whitley’s final days, “I held him, lay on his chest and told him how much I loved him. He always used to say to me, ‘have a safe trip’, even if I was just going to drop my child at kindergarten. So that’s what I said to him. ‘Have a safe trip’. He exhaled, and that was it. It was just a breath, and it was beautiful.”
