MASTERPIECE THEATER

Donray Von still sighs when the topic is brought up. More than 20 years after his cousin, Atlanta-bred musician Cody ChesnuTT, released his magnum opus, The Headphone Masterpiece, he often wonders what could have been.

There’s no denying that The Headphone Masterpiece was a lo-fi triumph. The 36-track double album had elements of Beck’s Odelay, Lenny Kravitz’s Let Love Rule, Prince’s Around the World in a Day, Love’s Forever Changes and even a bit of Bill Withers’ acoustic eloquence. His lyrics walked the line between the profane and the philosophical.

Boasting the regal mack talk of “Serve This Royalty,” the strutting soul-pop of “Look Good in Leather,” rock joints such as “The Seed” and “6 Seconds,” folk-infused meditations like “Magic in a Mortal Minute” and “My Women, My Guitars,” to name but a few tantalizing tracks, the album served up hooks and ideas galore.

Even without the advantages of social media, YouTube, Spotify or other digital platforms, the project generated significant buzz. As Donray points out, they did it the “old-school way,” handing out flyers, passing out demos and selling albums in record stores. The no-budget, self-released album charted for seven days, peaking at #128 with roughly 8,000 copies sold in its opening week. Not long thereafter, Cody would step into the studio with The Roots—and march into the mainstream, if only for a minute.

All the right ingredients were there: the other-worldly talent, a dedicated team, passion and a tenacious work ethic that could’ve easily propelled them to unimaginable heights. But it all came crashing down when Cody decided fame and everything else that came with a music career weren’t what he wanted.

Perhaps in pursuit of catharsis, Donray has unearthed more than 600 hours of old video footage to chronicle Cody’s journey for the forthcoming documentary Breaking a Masterpiece.

“When the house started to burn down, instead of picking up a fire extinguisher, I picked up a camera,” Donray says. “We have evictions, lawsuits and the dynamics that people talk about in documentaries but very rarely show—because they’re too busy going through them to actually pick up the camera.”

A labor of love, the film features appearances from the likes of André 3000, Erykah Badu, Mos Def, Justin Timberlake, Jill Scott, Iggy Pop, The Roots’ Questlove and Black Thought, who were all touched by Cody’s work in some way. But Cody’s participation is limited to a singular backstage interview with Breaking a Masterpiece director John Maggio at the 2022 Roots Picnic in Philadelphia.

The elusive musician, who’s been shrouded in mystique since first emerging on the Atlanta scene in the 1990s, started out as an R&B artist, stirring funk, soul, blues and rock into his own Southern gumbo. The reaction to his music was immediate, with crowds packing into local clubs to see him perform. Cody’s magnetic stage presence was undeniable. But as Donray says in the doc’s sizzle reel, “I think Cody is the biggest rock star in the world, but you have to want to be the biggest rock star in the world.”

Therein lay the problem.

In 1996, Donray and Cody made the move from Atlanta to Hollywood, where Cody got some songwriting work with Death Row Records (their cousin Talley Thomas and his R&B group, Six Feet Deep, were signed to the imprint). The following year, Cody formed The Crosswalk with Maggio, Jamie O’Connell and Jay Gordon and began playing small L.A. clubs. As the buzz continued to get louder, the band landed a deal with Hollywood Records but was quickly dropped after the 1999 release of Venus Loves a Melody (produced by engineer Bob Clearmountain), making Cody a solo act. A story that began as two cousins with a dream became the saga of one cousin with a dream—and another who wanted the dream to end.

Armed with $10,000 worth of equipment, Cody retreated to his North Hollywood bedroom—dubbed the Sonic Promiseland—to birth The Headphone Masterpiece on a four-track cassette recorder. Simultaneously, Cody’s disenchantment with the music industry only grew.

“Very few people have an opportunity to have their dreams come true,” Donray says. “When my cousin and I, after 15 years of being in the business, got an opportunity for our dreams to come true, a lot of individual decisions were made. There was a history of decisions that we made as a team, and then there were decisions that Cody chose to make himself that changed the momentum. At a certain point in our relationship, Cody no longer trusted my decision-making, or that of anyone in the industry.”

Cody had come within millimeters of mainstream success in 2002, when The Roots invited him to join them on a new version of “The Seed” from The Headphone Masterpiece. Titled “The Seed (2.0),” the track appeared on The Roots’ fifth album, Phrenology, which was certified gold by the RIAA roughly seven months after its release. Cody’s suggestive lyrics and the soulful rasp of his vocals added a raw immediacy to The Roots’ signature brand of live hip-hop—and exposed Cody’s music to a mass audience.

“The Roots’ version of ‘The Seed’ created a lot of incoming celebration,” Donray says. “But history will show that there are times when people start to get incoming acknowledgement of their work, and they’re still so bitter about how the industry treated them previously that they can’t enjoy those things. I think that Cody was just upset at how the industry had treated him. It was like, ‘Oh, now you want me? Well, let me give you my back.’”

Though the big time was in reach, Cody did an about-face and left his career behind. Donray was devastated; all the blood, sweat and tears he’d poured into making Cody a star, he felt, had been for nothing.

To say this damaged their relationship would be an understatement.

“We didn’t speak for years,” Donray explains. “[Going through] lawyers and not speaking became the norm. It was real anger. I not only hated him, but I hated the outcome. I’m not afraid to use those words because I’m not using them in the present tense; we’ve moved on. But at that time, Cody could have walked away from the music business and not do it the way he did.”

The experience of making The Headphone Masterpiece, which he released on his own Ready Set Go! label, ultimately convinced Cody that he didn’t need or want anyone’s help.

“Cody went into his bedroom and played every instrument, sang every harmony, wrote it, produced it, mixed it—he did everything,” Donray states. “So his bedroom became a band of one, no longer needing the team of two. He went in that bedroom a team player, heartbroken from being dropped by Hollywood Records. When he came out, having experienced so much disappointment and heartbreak, I think he decided, ‘I’m no longer going to trust anybody but myself.’ People say there’s no ‘I’ in team, but there’s also no ‘I’ in success. I think that’s the one thing that Cody had to learn the hard way.”

As Donray explains, H. David Gates, who previously did A&R for Dallas Austin and L.A. Reid at Rowdy Records, “brought the music industry to Cody’s bedroom” and was among the first to hear The Headphone Masterpiece. Although he first met Cody a decade prior, Gates didn’t immediately recognize the magnitude of his talent.

“I realized he was a star around 1999 or 2000,” Gates remembers. “I had moved from Atlanta to L.A. to run Dallas’ operation out there. I found out that Donray and Cody were out there, and we ended up linking up. Being from Atlanta, community is everything, so I used to go over to their crib and listen to what he was creating—and it blew my mind.

“He was never supposed to be an R&B artist. That’s not who he was. He was a rock & roll soul singer. When you saw the whole package of how he dressed, the oils he always kept on, it was amazing. It was like he was living his truth at that point.”

Much like a modern-day Jimi Hendrix, Cody often dressed in ruffled shirts, leather pants and vintage oversized hats, lending him a swagger that Gates says made Cody the “full package.” Even so, Gates was still struggling to get him a deal and instantly regretted not signing him to Rowdy Records when he had the chance.

“I wanted to sign him,” Gates admits. “I was with Free World Records through Capitol at that time, but a lot of people just didn’t get him. It was one of those things where some A&Rs got him but the upper management didn’t.”

But Cody presented his own challenges too. Gates goes on, “Cody also didn’t like a lot of machines, so if he didn’t like the label it wasn’t going to work.”

Bryant Reid saw it firsthand. Bryant settled in Atlanta with his brother L.A. and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds in the early ’90s as LaFace Records was beginning it ascent. Formed in 1989 as a joint venture between L.A., Babyface and Arista Records, the label launched the careers of Usher, Outkast, TLC, Goodie Mob and the production trio Organized Noize, to name a few. Bryant has witnessed numerous times how artists’ distrust of their own team can destroy careers.

“Sometimes the supporting cast could actually want it more than the artists,” he says. “That might sound crazy, but it’s absolutely true. Donray and everybody around him wanted it much more than Cody.”

But from Gates’ perspective, it isn’t necessarily self-sabotage if a person is happy.

“Once Cody got to a point where he was becoming known, and he was almost like an underground-masterpiece writer, he was satisfied,” he says. “That was a gift for him. He wanted to live his life on his own terms. He’s doing what he wanted to do, so I think more of the sabotage was to fans and executives.”

Cody would tend to agree. In the aforementioned interview with Maggio, he opened up about his brush with superstardom and concluded he did what was right for him.

“I felt catapulted into an experience I’d never had before, which is all I ever wanted to experience,” he said. “That was the whole drive behind why we did what we did. I had that organic experience and that filled my heart. Some people say, ‘Oh, you could have been this or that,’ but I don’t consider myself losing anything. It was all gain for me.”

Of course, Donray has a different interpretation, something that will be largely depicted in the documentary. He breaks it down as a story about “art versus commerce versus momentum,” but he also has another goal with the film.

“I hope this becomes a cautionary tale for teams,” he says. “I don’t care if they’re athletes, entertainers or writers, I hope they see this documentary, call their partners and say, ‘We are not going to be Cody and Donray.’ I hope when this documentary is done, I hear people say, ‘You saved our business relationship.’ That’s success to me.”

While Donray and Cody’s relationship has been somewhat mended over the years, it’s not completely healed; it’s a work in progress.

“We left $30 million on the table,” Donray says. “My cousin was trying to reconstruct the music business and lost his focus on being a musician. Everything became about destroying the business and its unfair practices. He became a revolutionary and not a musician.

“The part he missed is that co-owning your own label, the masters and publishing while having another major label spend millions to tell the world who you are [as with “The Seed 2.0”] is more than a revolution—it’s a miracle. And when you turn your back on a miracle, chances are, they don’t come back around.”

Sans an unexpected voiceover appearance in the 2020 Pixar film Soul, Cody has remained mostly under the radar. He turned down a request for an interview, he’s skittish about being involved in the documentary rollout and he hasn’t released an album since 2017’s My Love Divine Degree.

Gates believes the world hasn’t seen the last of Cody ChesnuTT. “He probably has a vault like Prince did,” he speculates. “He still has music. He just has to go ahead and get it produced or produce it himself—however he wants to do it—and let it come out. An artist can’t just let that creative part of them die.”

Breaking a Masterpiece is expected to arrive in 2025.