Nobody’s rules but his own

The crowd at the Temple Bar in Santa Monica has been seriously grooving to the mix of soul, R&B; and rock being played by Cody Chesnutt and his band, but now the listeners are getting impatient as a break between songs drags on and on. “Just sing!” shouts one man in the audience. Maybe he’s heard that Chesnutt can be a little, well, odd, but he probably didn’t expect to be watching the star of the show carefully setting up a typewriter on stage.

Chesnutt seems unperturbed as he patiently positions the machine and finally begins his ballad, “Love Don’t Be Wrong (Not This Time),” tapping the typewriter keys to portray a man writing a love letter. Just like that, the crowd is back in Cody’s corner.

“It’s my song, it’s my music, if I’m having fun expressing it with a typewriter, who can say that I can’t,” Chesnutt says later when asked about the episode. “True artists know there is no rules.”

Words to live by. Chesnutt has disdained musical and cultural restrictions since he started cobbling his distinctive musical vision as an teenager in his hometown of Atlanta.

Consider his recent emergence, in which the singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist displayed a remarkable facility for getting his face and name into the music public’s bloodstream far in advance of his first album’s release last month.

There was his guest spot on the summer’s Smokin’ Grooves concert tour with the Roots, the acclaimed Philadelphia rap group that has recorded his song, “The Seed,” for its upcoming album.

But nothing tops his memorably bizarre appearance with the Strokes during the latter’s performance on MTV’s “Two Dollar Bill” concert program, where Chesnutt climbed on stage with the New York rock band and stood with his scarf-draped arms spread wide, beaming beatifically behind singer Julian Casablancas as they played their hit, “Last Night.”

“I just happened to be at the taping,” recalls Chesnutt, sitting in an alcove at the Zen nightclub in Silver Lake, where he’s playing a show in a few hours.

Wearing his trademark round-topped hat and a white scarf with bands of the Jamaican tricolor red, green and yellow, he has an easy charisma and a wide-eyed sincerity. He’s a little subdued after driving from Las Vegas, where he performed last night, but his speech has a fast, urgent cadence as he continues the story.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is MTV, the most powerful music network on the planet, I’m tired of the stuff they show, let’s give them something new to see.’

“So I went up to Julian and I said, ‘You want to make music history together?’ And he was like, ‘How do we do that?’ I said, ‘Bring me up on stage, man and let’s celebrate your single “Last Night” together. He said, ‘OK, cool,’ called me up. Simple as that.”

Simple as that. The fact that Chesnutt had never met the Strokes is just one indication of his brashness.

Another is the nature (not to mention the title) of his album: “Headphone Masterpiece.” It’s a two-disc set running 100 minutes, an unruly, effervescent landscape of old-school soul, garage rock, psychedelic pop, quirky folk and a dozen more musical strains, primitively recorded on four-track in his bedroom studio in North Hollywood. Its disarmingly blunt lyrics struggle with the age-old conflict between the spirit and the flesh.

Border-bashing comes naturally to Chesnutt, 34, who grew up in an Atlanta household filled with many styles of music, from classical to KISS. He started playing drums at 7 and then took up piano, and later guitar. After moving to Los Angeles he fronted a group called the Crosswalk, but things went sour with its label, Hollywood Records, and its album never came out. It was a shattering and defining experience for Chesnutt.

“It’s the same old disaster story,” he says. “You put all your heart and soul into a record and it gets tossed aside as a tax write-off or whatever.... I came out extremely educated and focused. Because I’m human, the disappointment had its effect on my heart, but nonetheless it inspired me to push even further.

“I wasn’t gonna let that kill my flame. There was a point of redirection and just kind of sortin’ it out, but it didn’t stop my determination.

“I was extremely enlightened about how not to put so much of your life into another man’s hands, and not to trust him so much.”

That’s when Chesnutt withdrew to his studio and began to piece together “Headphone Masterpiece,” following only his rules.

“That’s the only way,” he says. “That’s the only way you truly create. You just plant your own seed, make sure you see your vision through completely.”

Now that the artist-to-watch buzz is on and the album is out (on his own Ready Set-Go! label), and with some Erykah Badu dates booked for January, it looks as if the campaign is ready to roll.

Look again. As far as Chesnutt is concerned, it’s over.

“To be honest with you, I already consider myself a success as an artist,” he says. “Everything else is extra, a blessing. I’m doing what I love to do. So if it gets to 2 billion people, that’s fine. I’ve played in front of two people, I’ve played in front of 10,000. It’s at the point now where it’s on its own path, it’s on its own frequency.”

Chesnutt takes pride in reclaiming a piece of rock ‘n’ roll for black artists, but most of his attention is on the bigger musical picture.

“I want to change the face of what the whole thing’s supposed to be right now. Music has gotten to the point where it’s ridiculous. It’s so watered down, there’s a cookie-cutter, assembly-line, factory feel to it.

“There’s nothing truly pushing the people or touching them. Even if it is raw and blatant, there is no constructive passion. Truly talking to people about what they’re going through in their daily lives, really trying to figure it out and sort it out, that’s what we need in the dialogue now.”

*

See Cody Chesnutt

Where: Amoeba Music, 6400 Sunset Blvd., L.A.

When: Thursday, Nov. 21. 7 p.m.

Cost: Free

Contact: (323) 245-6400