By Odin Rasco

“I’m proud that I helped get people inspired,” Charles Thomas, known widely as Ground Chuck, said as he leaned back in his bed and looked at an art piece he planned to finish during hospice. “They  may not even realize that I’m a driving force, may not recognize it. But that doesn’t matter; I don’t care about that. There’s some cool stuff out there, and I try to keep my stuff as original as possible. And I don’t plan on stopping.”

The piece he was staring at was canvas with a silver and green glyph design, just one of dozens of projects he worked on even while he struggled with severe pain and multiple visits to the hospital. Thomas’ hospice care was a grassroots effort, helmed and assisted along the way by friends that he had made during his decades as a fixture in the Midtown arts and music scene. 

“I think everybody that pulled together really wanted Chuck to live the way he wanted to live, and die the way he wanted to die,” said Brandy Jean Curry, a local musician who took over running Thomas’ hospice care in his final weeks. “Chuck brought together so many of us; some of us hadn’t seen each other in years, some of us were friends of friends. It wasn’t one person or two people, it was all of us. When I was asked to help and to be Chuck’s medical power of attorney, I don’t think I could have done it without the support of everybody involved.”

When word first made it to social media that Thomas was entering hospice, friends and acquaintances came out of the virtual woodwork to share memories and pictures and offer help by taking on shifts as caretakers. Over the weeks, multiple Facebook pages were established to keep the growing community informed and memorialize Ground Chuck, with each one faced with a flood of hundreds of friend-requests a day.

“It feels wonderful,” Thomas said in response to how many people had turned out online to share their love for him. “I’ve been doing shit forever, so it’s wonderful to be appreciated and recognized. It’s a very cool thing.”

Thomas died Sunday, Sept. 14, at the age of 56, leaving a legacy as a truly singular figure in Midtown history. Visitors to concerts, bars and art shows across Sacramento were always liable to see him, clad in a leather jacket that bore the nickname he’d been given and fidgeting from tics that were symptomatic of his Tourette’s Syndrome. 

“To the average person, he probably doesn’t look like much; he’s not always clean, but he has a smile that is always genuine when he uses it,” noted Lady Diana, a jazz performer who knew Thomas for more than 25 years. “You wouldn’t know that unless you actually got to know him. This is a gentleman that lives his life on the premise of doing no harm to others.”

The beloved figure known as Ground Chuck was a man of multitudes that defied all attempts to define him. He was described by those who knew him as a multimedia artist, a musician, a standup comedian, a living art piece, a through-and-through punk rocker and metalhead, a living legend and a friend to countless people across the socioeconomic spectrum. Once, in 2008, he was even ranked the 10th-sexiest Sacramentan by Sacramento News and Review.

“He is a Renaissance man with a tic,” mused Darling Neath, owner and director of Archival Gallery who had known Thomas since the early 80s.

The announcement of his passing was met with an outpouring of social media posts celebrating Thomas’s life, including tributes from The Deftones, Two Rivers Cider Company, Zelda’s Gourmet Pizza and hundreds of his friends. 

“RIP to a Sacramento legend. Rest easy Ground Chuck,” wrote the Deftones in a post to Facebook.

In addition to the thousands of lives he’d touched during his days, Thomas had quite literally left his mark on the city as well; his propensity for chalk art and live music helped shape the yearly Chalk It Up! Festival. 

“He just kind of wound his way into all of these communities — the bar scene, the music scene and the art scene — and he’s like an overlapping factor,” recalled Neath, who has been involved with Chalk It Up since its inception. “He was the one that got the bands to come out for the first time. That was when we very first started having music at Chalk It Up. And now the stage is such a big part of it.”

Thomas created chalk art across Midtown for decades, sometimes leaving pieces outside homes and businesses as a kind of thank-you for a favor or friendship. His artwork is how he first met and befriended Evan Edgar, a lobbyist and principal engineer and president of Edgar & Associates, a Sacramento-based environmental engineering and advocacy company. 

“He used to lay down chalk in front of the Rubicon, and that’s where everybody was going back then, 30 years ago,” Edgar explained. “I wanted to have some chalk art sponsored at Chalk It Up, so I just hired him to be my chalk artist for a lot of years. At the Edgar Institute on 21st and S we had a monarch butterfly awareness party as part of my holiday party last December, so I hired Chuck to do the big old butterfly out front.”

In addition to his countless chalk designs that have graced Sacramento sidewalks over the years, Thomas also dabbled in other forms of art, including painting, sculpture and a series of masks.

“I thought he was very qualified as an artist, but a lot of people kind of just put him into an unusual oddball characterization,” observed Richard Graf, an artist who befriended Thomas after moving to Sacramento in 1992 to restore the stained-glass windows at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church. “However, getting to know him over the years, I found myself appreciating his artwork and his perspective on things.”

Though born in Portland, Oregon, Thomas lived most of his life as a Midtowner. When he was five years old, his mother died; the next day, his father moved to Sacramento. In his teen years, Thomas took to the punk rock lifestyle and never let it go, embracing an individualist energy that was magnetic to the people that got to know him or saw him in his element onstage.

“His stage presence when he was singing, particularly in Mental Defective League, was just engrossing,” said Tim Foster, a local musician who has played in bands such as The Troublemakers and The Losing Streaks. “You could not take your eyes off of him and his vocal performances were always perfect. That kind of music, really direct hardcore music, there are rules you sort of have to follow to a degree. Chuck didn’t have to follow them because he lived them.”

In the 90s, Thomas often ran with a group of poor hippies, punks and other “weirdos” that collectively referred to themselves as “DFP” — Dirt Fucking Poor. 

“We all just were street kids; that’s how I met him,” recalled Sailor Dow, a friend of Thomas’ since 1991. “He’s like a chameleon. He knows shit-tons of people in all different kinds of walks of life.” 

Both early birds, Thomas and Dow would sometimes take to the streets in the early morning, scrounge in the dumpster of a local restaurant for bread, grab an egg from Peace Market and whip up French toast. The making of this low-cost culinary confection served as a chance for Thomas to partake in one of his favorite activities: sharing his love for music.

“We’d go to his apartment that he shared with his dad at the time and he would make me French toast and give me a full breakdown on punk rock, like Bad Religion,” Dow remembered. “He would just break it all down and really get into dissecting their music and their songs all while eating a French toast made with Chuck’s dumpster hands.”

Thomas loved music across multiple genres, both as a performer and a listener; he counted King Crimson as one of his favorite bands of all time.  

“I love old school punk and reggae; stuff the Clash turned people onto,” Thomas explained.

He’d performed in and with multiple bands through the years, including MDL and the Sacto Storytellers alongside his friend Kenny Beasley. 

Looking back at his life in mid-August, Thomas expressed an appreciation for the friends he’d made along the way.

“Not everybody might like me when they first meet me,” Thomas said. “But making friends, it’s important. It’s fun, and it doesn’t cost that much money, though some people put a lot of money into me.”