Big Star

Would you be an outlaw for my love

No other artist has a legacy that owes so much to how commercially ignored they were. Specifically because Big Star shot for commercial success—you can see it in band name, and the album titles of #1 Record and Radio City—and failed miserably. It must have been depressing for Alex Chilton to have scored a #1 hit as the gruffy teenage vocalist for the Box Tops in 1967’s “The Letter,” a blue-eyed soul pop banger that’s notable for it’s extremely short-for-charts run-time (<2 minutes) and also anachronistic for summer ‘67, and then write better songs as Big Star and get no attention at all.

Their first two albums received critical praise but no sales thanks to label issues that made them hard to find in record stores, first from Stax, and then from Columbia, who had assumed control of Stax and was only interested in their soul artists. The result is that Big Star fans—a very small club that includes Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, the Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, Yo La Tengo, and of course, you and me—cherish them even more, saving them from obscurity and elevating them into cult band.

Insofar as the ‘power pop formula’ is crystal-clear production of the Beatles’ melodies (pop) and the Who’s muscle (power), then Big Star perfected it on #1 Record thanks to Chris Bell bringing a little bit of the Byrds’ folk and jangle. And I mean perfected: no other power pop record comes close, 12 songs spanning a concise 30 minutes to imitate the mid-60s’ albums they loved. Unlike Radio City and Third, both of which have filler or songs that flat-out don’t work, there’s barely any filler here, and the only issues I have with the album are the non-transition out of the innocent “Thirteen” into “Don’t Lie to Me” and “The India Song.” The latter—the rare song written by bassist Andy Hummel instead of Chilton or secondary guitarist-vocalist Chris Bell—always sounded like Christmas at Rockefeller to me, and not at all a country known for its architectural wonders, spices or even the spiritualism that the Beatles (specifically George Harrison) was tapping into. Don’t dismiss “ST100/6,” a less than 1 minute ditty that smacks of filler with its demo-like title that ends up as indispensable as any of these other songs with its gone-too-soon harmonies and snaking guitar line.

The acoustic songs, “The Ballad of El Goodo,” “Thirteen,” “Give Me Another Chance” and “Watch the Sunrise,” are exemplary displays of stunning melodies, complex harmonies and, get this, interesting chord progressions. “Thirteen” seems easy, but there’s actually multiple guitar harmonies which is why when Wilco, Elliott Smith or Garbage and so many others cover it, they fall short: they don’t bother with those and hope the gold melody carries them through, and crucially, none of them sing it as beautifully anyway as Chilton anyway, who conveys a boyish charm that is definitely beyond Jeff Tweedy or Elliott Smith. The bare-bones arrangement of “Give Me Another Chance” makes it far more anemic than the rest of these songs, but that chord progression feels special. “The Ballad of El Goodo” is an open-armed embrace against ‘unbelievable odds’ that jangles bright and hard.

It’s not just the acoustic guitars either. The electric guitars zip and sear whenever they are called upon thanks to producer John Fry with input from Chilton and Bell: few rock albums from the early-70s have such an effortless widescreen sound. Songs like “In the Street” (which you might know for its use in That ‘70s Show, albeit not the original), “Feel,” and “When My Baby’s Beside Me” emphasize the power in power pop, and the bigged up guitar on these songs are sharper and more powerful than, say, a lot of Big Star’s more famous contemporaries. The opening chords of “Feel” always makes me think of a clock ticking, building up in suspense until the song kicks into the verse. Adding to the guitars is the muscular hits from Jody Stephens, who slammed on his drums with the power of Keith Moon without the chaos, and his work on the first two Big Star records make me think he’s the most underrated rock drummer from the 70s. All this to say, there was no reason why #1 Record shouldn't have been, well, a #1 record.

Radio City is flawed and uneven, which I attribute to the absence of Chris Bell. Fueling this theory is that Bell claims to have a hand on some of the album’s best songs, “O, My Soul,” and “Back of a Car,” even though he’s not credited on either. (Chilton claims those songs were written ‘by committee.’) While I personally find the album charming, its continued acclaim has much to do with listeners’ need for artists with a ‘perfect discography’: it is merely good, not great. Opener “O, My Soul” is needlessly extended—it just repeats itself twice—and contributes to the fact that some of these songs feel ‘jammy’ when the songs on #1 Record were tight as can be. The rhythmically stilted “Life is White” and lame white-funk “She’s a Mover” add to that: why is this rock band trying to groove? “What’s Going Ahn” isn’t as good as the ballads on the previous album, and the layering of vocals sounds at the end sounds amateurish and histrionic. The only songs that works ‘all the way through’ are “September Gurls” and closer “I’m In Love With a Girl.” (Bruce Eaton, in his 33 1/3 book on the album, pointed out how the album is weirdly sequenced with the potential big hit buried at the end of the record, which is followed by a 1-minute piano demo, and then a 1-minute acoustic ditty.) Beyond those two songs, I love the album for moments, not songs, particularly when Jody Stephens brings “Daisy Glaze” to its climax, and when Alex Chilton interpolates the “Winter Wonderland” melody into his guitar solo on “O, My Soul.” Alas, a lot of future power pop acts lean more towards Radio City instead of #1 Record: rhythmically stilted and louder but not necessarily better.

Andy Hummel left after Radio City to pursue a college education, and so with only Jody Stephens in tow, Alex Chilton recorded a would-be solo album called that the label released as Big Star album after sitting on it for a few years (Chilton: “Jody and I were hanging together as a unit still but we didn't see fit as a Big Star record. We never saw it as a Big Star record. That was a marketing decision when the record was sold in whatever year that was sold. And they didn’t ask me anything about it and they never asked me anything about it”). Third is not power pop at all outside of a few songs like “Kizza Me,” “O Dana,” and “You Can’t Have Me,” and strangely, its best songs are almost, without question, the ones that don’t rock at all. Alt-countrified Velvet Underground cover with French backing vocals in “Femme Fatale”; chamber pop dance at the end of the world in “Stroke It Noel” (“Oh will they come / Oh, the bombs? / But do you wanna dance? / Do you, do you, do you wanna dance”); noise, formless, strange, and swallowing in “Kangaroo”; the sarcastic lead against the sincere gospel in “Thank You Friends” (oh, how Chilton absolutely seethes out the title words). Without a question, it’s a flawed record—it is unhealthily sardonic in parts; the lyric “Some people read idea books / and some people have pretty looks” is inexcusable, although Georgia Hubley navigated it without issue in Yo La Tengo’s cover; Jody Stephens’ “For You”’ lyrics are saccharine but the strings are strong—but it’s my favourite album of theirs regardless. Every Big Star record plays like a series of break-ups and make-ups, but there’s more break-ups on Third which appeals to my loser persona.

In 1992, Third was reissued in its definitive form as Third / Sister Lovers—so named because Chilton and Stephens were dating sisters at the time—which added fun but not revelatory covers of “Nature Boy,” “Till the End of the Day,” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On,” but there is the new addition of “Downs” that’s worth checking out, a song that Chilton deliberately self-sabotaged after someone at Ardent made a passing remark that the demo had ‘hit potential.’ Best of all is “Dream Lover,” laconic vocals and a drugged-out solo (“Play it for me, guitarist”) that would have fit the original album’s vibe.

Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens put out one last album as Big Star in 2005 with Posies members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, and while In Space is better than everyone made it out to be or the awful cover suggested, I still don't personally need it, and the lack of a ‘car’ song (#1 Record: “In the Street”; Radio City: “Back of a Car”; Third: “Big Black Car”) has always been evidence to me that it is not actually a true Big Star record.

In 1978, Chris Bell died in a car accident, joining the ‘27 Club,’ and it wouldn’t be for another fourteen years before Rykodisc released his solo album I Am the Cosmos, whose highlights are “Better Save Yourself”’s scorched earth, “Look Up”’s holy embrace, and both the songs of the double a-side single “I Am the Cosmos / You and Your Sister,” released when he was still alive. The b-side is “Thirteen”’s younger brother (naive and hopeful)—it even has Chilton helping out with backing vocals—while the a-side has Bell turning into a force of nature to win someone back, “Every night I tell myself / I am the cosmos / I am the wind / But that don’t get you back again.” Both songs were later unearthed and covered by 4AD supergroup This Mortal Coil before Chris Bell’s album ever dropped, including tapping Kim Deal and Kim Donnelly to perform “You and Your Sister,” but This Mortal Coil sucks despite all the talent involved (the exception if their debut EP).

It’s been theorized that Bell might have left Big Star because he did not like being overshadowed by Chilton, so I assure Chris Bell that I Am the Cosmos is better than anything Chilton has ever done solo. Like Flies on Sherbert was lambasted on arrival and has been reclaimed by some as a misunderstood record, but Third had the same ramshackle charm while also having the benefit of sounding good. Any critics trying to apply the word ‘punk’ to the album’s DIY production are doing actual punk rock a huge disservice since the first few waves of punk rock all sounded magnifique. Chilton was also getting hornier—he was always horny, with “Back of a Car” sharing the exact same subject matter as the Paul McCartney’s song a few years prior, or the Kama Sutra poses tucked in the corner of Radio City—but also dumber about it: “Rock Hard” turns out to be about nipples, for example; a 1975 take of “Jesus Christ” appears on Bach’s Bottom that has Chilton fake-cumming during the solo (is this ever not embarrassing?). Peep his EPs for the occasional gem, including the title track from No Sex, a sardonic song during the AIDS era, and “Guantanamerika” from Black List that reminds of his Memphis roots with funny rhymes (“Gazing at the stars that have lost their luster / Zieg Heil to the ‘In God We Trust-ers’”).

The best Alex Chilton album is Free Again: The "1970" Sessions, which like I Am the Cosmos, was posthumously released after Chilton’s death. Recorded in 1970 during a transitional period of Chilton’s life between Box Tops and Big Star, it has value as a historical document, but it’s good besides. The appearance of country banjo (“I Wish I Could Meet Elvis”) and pedal steel (“The Happy Song”) that imagines an alternate universe where Alex Chilton was more inspired by the Byrds. It is so heartening to hear Chilton go “Well, I’m free again to do what I want again / free again to sing my songs again” while knowing how creatively stifled he was as a part of the Box Tops where the producers told him exactly what to sing and how to sing it, and so take “All I Really Want is Money” as a at Box Tops producers Chips Moman and Dan Penn. The cover of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” only makes his subsequent covers depressing because he should have been knocking Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas” and the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” easily out the park but his heart was no longer in it by that point. And “The EMI Song (Smile for Me)” looks ahead to the young romance of early Big Star, before the music industry cynicism completely broke Chilton.