Van Hunt

He played keys and some bass, laying down the rhythm for AC/DC and Van Halen cover tunes. And—if the band was feeling progressive—R.E.M.

The infrequent spate of gigs ended shortly after the lead singer contracted pubic lice and the band, including Hunt, advised him to shave absolutely everything. He did, and while the look worked for Bob Geldof in The Wall, it didn’t go on the high-school circuit. Meanwhile, Hunt’s musical personality—nurtured by his mom’s Isley Brothers collection and her boyfriend’s Richard Pryor tapes—was maturing independently from everything going on around him. As the flamboyant ’80s dulled to the grungy drone of the ’90s, the chasm between Hunt and the modern world grew.

He found himself drawn to the liner notes of Sam Cooke’s and Sammy Davis Jr.’s recordings. A photo of Cooke taken at The Copa in 1961 held an almost spiritual allure for him and prompted him to explore the history of R&B, blues, bebop and the Big Band era. He found the same sort of glamour in Ray Charles and—closer to his own era and more passionately—in Prince.

At the same time, Hunt entered Morehouse University, colliding with popular culture in Atlanta’s hip-hop mecca.

“I think the reason hip-hop grew to be so big in the ’90s was that it matched the ’90s,” he says. “The ’90s were all about marketing; it was all about the image and glorifying a product and hip-hop was the perfect music for that.”

He often skipped class, ending his marketing-analyst mother’s willingness to pay his tuition. Abandoning the pre-law track, he dropped out of Morehouse, friendless, as he’s spent most of his life. The problem with friendship, Hunt says, is that he feels as if he’s living in the wrong time, a difficulty that robs him of the commonalities of music and television and fashion.

“I am a songwriter in rebellion against my era,” he says, and in fact, a closer look at Hunt’s post-Morehouse life reveals a modern era not so different from the Great Depression. He worked for a janitorial service for $100 a week before taxes while he lived in the dorms, but after dropping out, he needed more money. He then worked for a uniform service, picking up soiled uniforms and delivering laundered ones to the General Motors plant in the grey-concrete industry-scape of Doraville, Ga.

“These men had worked 40 years banging out cars and there I was going through their pockets looking for change,” he says. “If I found a few dollars, I would eat that day.”