Big Star

yeah they really are the ultimate critics band -- wasn't their biggest gig (at least in the 70s) a rock critic convention?

yes, that's basically the focal point of the first half of the film.

It's remarkable to think that Big Star, let alone the VU (was Big Star the first band to cover the VU?), was a hard to find relative obscurity as recently as the '80s, given what an influence both those bands were on so much of what came out of the college rock scene at the time. Was it really just critics that kept (either) act alive? I imagine musicians passing the LPs around like totems helped at least as much. Not to mention critics who were also musicians.

(was Big Star the first band to cover the VU?)

Bowie

On Pin Ups, or around then? He was definitely in there, but I'd say scenester rock star who hung at Max's and produced Lou Reed that same year (72?) is trumped by kids stranded in Memphis, even if they got there a year or so later.

think this is from 67 or 68
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beUcnN9ULhA
i dunno, VU records might've been slightly hard to come by before the mid 80s, but they must've had a much higher profile than big star thanks to Lou Reed's relative rock stardom in the 70s. i don't think more than a thousand people even knew the name big star before the mid 80s?

I don't think you can overemphasize how obscure the VU was. I mean, it took 25 years for the Sex Pistols album to go platinum, and that was one album with historic hype behind it. Want to say the VU, like Big Star, was mostly out of print in the early '80s.

This was actually recorded before the release of The Velvet Underground and Nico
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPwCSem3cUQ

I believe somewhere in this 11-part interview, Mo claims to have not known the band was influential until the mid'80s:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdV_THMjeKk#at=77

Mott the Hoople covered Sweet Jane on All the Young Dudes (1972). so no

I dunno, I didn't have a problem finding/buying the VU & BS albums in the early-mid '80s, but then I was going to school, then working, in NYC.

I saw Chilton at Folk City (a $3 night booked by Ira Kaplan) circa '85, maybe, and I'm p sure the audience knew those BS records well.

ha well, half the people in the audience at folk city that night were probably interviewed for the documentary.

from quite early on, Big Star were always a biggish cult band in UK and European music-hipster circles - music journalist Max Bell wrote a 4-part story on them in 1978 for the NME - and by the time i was buying albs in the mid 1980s most big star and chilton-related discs were pretty easy to find in london (and there's that great 1980 live in london alb recorded at dingwalls in camden).

xpost But Mott had that direct Bowie connection as well, at the exact same time. Bowie gets massive credit for being the first to glom onto the VU, but again, he was part of that scene. Big Star couldn't have been farther from that scene.

Who was the first to cover Big Star? Replacements? Bangles?

Michael Jackson

there have been bands that critics liked more than audiences basically for as long as there were professional rock reviewers. but what i'm kind of curious about re: big star is that the hype seems to have been that they WOULD have been huge (at least on the first two albums). That rather than them being a challenge to the audience, the audience would have eaten them up if only they'd hear them. I know around the same time Xgau cracks that the Move's "Do Ya" was "rated single of the year in the rock press, apparently the only place it was distributed," so whether or not Big Star was the first critics fave to be presented this way, they're definitely one of the more enduring of the first class.

actually, I think Todd Abramson had take over booking the indie-darling sets from Ira K by '85 at Folk City

Big Star couldn't have been farther from that scene
well i dunno, they covered "Baby Strange"

xposts EMI reissued the first two lps in Britain as a double album just prior to Bell's death, bringing to mind Xgau's definition of a "legend in one's time" (which he said re:the New York Dolls, who got a similar reissue treatment at the same time).

Who was the first to cover Big Star? Replacements? Bangles?

― Josh in Chicago, Friday, June 28, 2013 12:25 PM (19 minutes ago)

1979, Australia!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOsO3Ib2Wzk

Wanna say that Game Theory might have been the first US band?

db's probably had some big star in their repertoire early on, right?

I dunno, I didn't have a problem finding/buying the VU & BS albums in the early-mid '80s, but then I was going to school, then working, in NYC.

All the VU records (except for Loaded which, bizarrely, never went out of print) were reissued in 1985 so yeah, those were easy to find then.

Some Big Star was available on import in the US, but not that easy to find (and pricey if you did find it).

Big Star couldn't have been farther from that scene
well i dunno, they covered "Baby Strange"

I meant literally far from that scene. Think there were a lot of T. Rex or Lou Reed records in Memphis record stores in the early '70s? Maybe. I've talked to a lot of people 10 years older than me who grew up in the midwest or the south beholden entirely to what would be played on AM radio. That's the Replacements in a nutshell: they grew up listening to AM radio, and became what they became when they later bumped up against hip stuff like Big Star and Johnny Thunders and the Only Ones.

I don't get the Bowie/Mott dismissal. Technically they were even FARTHER away from the VU scene than Big Star was, what with the whole Atlantic Ocean thing. Bowie rescued Reed's career and was the first high-profile booster of the Velvets.

bang a Gong was top 10 single in the US in 1971. Walk On the Wild Side was top 20 in '72.

Some gays are always on the lookout for cultural totems who aren't Liberace.

^choice

xp i've lost track of what exactly we're arguing -- i'm going to say that while both bands were obscure, big star were more obscure. based on extensive research!
more interesting thing maybe is when the college rock/indie "canon" started to come into place and be solidified ... i guess it probably has to do with REM interviews.

woah! that garagey r&b VU cover is amazing! yardbirds covered VU live too. an early VU covers comp could be cool.

not vu, but an early lou/cale song if I recall correctly:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyaus17wWZ4

here ya go - http://www.philxmilstein.com/probe/index.htm#session419

covers of VU material during VU lifetime:
1. The Banana: There She Goes Again
2. David Bowie: I'm Waiting For The Man
3. The Riats: Run Run Run
4. The Riats: Sunday Morning
5. The Yardbirds: Smokestack Lightning/I'm Waiting For The Man

early VU ref. in song:
6. David Bowie with The Riot Squad: Little Toy Soldier

alt. VUs:
Oklahoma:
7. Velvet Underground Ltd. of Enid, Okla.: Correct Me
8. Velvet Underground Ltd. of Enid, Okla.: Why Don't You Love Me

Australia:
9. Velvet Underground: Somebody To Love
10. Velvet Underground: She Comes In Colours

well those dudes have bar-story material for life

(Speaking of Southern AM, "Walk On The Wild Side" was at least Top 20 in mah neck of the woods; ditto mucho Bowie, from "Space Oddity" ownward). Big Star were much more obscure than VU, even in the early 70s Central Southeast: I only heard about 'em in a few rock mags, no rock clubs; I only heard 'em via radio promos sold for 99 cents in a B'ham headshop. But they were inspiring to hear and hear about, as the Winston-Salem High School kids, already rocking but not yet as the dB's, would doubtless agree (if they heard 'em that early). The VU made their living playing live, and ranged pretty far afield at times (that Texas live album was fascinating: the band that did not play no blues revealed their roots after all, with no pandering--hey Moe Diddly)

But if only I'd gone more often to the right clubs in Memphis...

from that VU covers comp tyler linked:
The Banana: There She Goes Again
1967, orig. unrel. (10 copies made); rec. by U.S. GIs in Qui Nhon, Vietnam (on generator-powered equipment); band name aka The Electrical Banana

how did that Yardbirds cover come about? that seems pretty odd

yardbirds played with the VU a couple times.
I wrote a lil about it (w/ mp3) here: http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2013/01/15/the-yardbirds-im-waiting-for-the-man-vu-cover-live-1968/

But if only I'd gone more often to the right clubs in Memphis...

― dow, Friday, June 28, 2013 3:37 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Hey, not every place can be as hip as TGI Friday's.

yeah, that was funny in the Eggleston clips, was TGIF a Memphis thing to start?

xpost Tyler, that list of covers is awesome!

Shakey, I didn't mean to dismiss Bowie at all, at least not in the truly negative sense. I just meant that Bowie was a) a collector of sorts, a notorious train-jumper/scene-hopper/in search of the next big thing guy, b) a superstar in 1972 who was spent plenty of time in NYC and c) obviously was so enmeshed in the NYC scene that he produced/wrote for Reed the same year he wrote for/produced Mott, whom he had cover the VU. So not a dismissal, per se, just that Bowie seemed more or less a Lou Reed peer/pal rather than an upstart who discovered the VU.

Obviously plenty of people in America were listening to Bowie, T. Rex et al. by the mid-70s. Looks like Bowie even played Memphis in 72. But if you were not in a major city it was pretty easy to miss stuff, let alone stuff with shit distribution. And again, big star (ha) or not that Lou Reed might have been, VU albums were largely out of print til the mid-80s, Big Star was apparently even harder to come by, and to this day neither of them has I imagine sold jack shit.

Huh, this is interesting:

The Riot Squad were a London-based pop group who saw Mitch Mitchell of The Jimi Hendrix Experience, singer Graham Bonney and a young David Bowie come and go from their ranks during their 1964 to 1967 run. Some earlier Bowie biographies have no mention of this brief stage of his career.

Ian Shirley wrote a history of The Riot Squad for Record Collector magazine, here’s an excerpt about the three months that David Bowie fronted the group, via David Bowie.com:

In early March 1967, the band divided, with Gladstone, Crisp and Clifford going off to form soul band Pepper. Evans retained The Riot Squad name, along with Butch and Del. He was quick to recruit Rod Davies (guitar), Croak Prebble (bass) and a new lead singer.

Evans recalls: “I saw David Bowie with The Buzz at the Marquee and thought that he was fantastic. I approached him and he agreed to join.” Though Bowie had a growing reputation in London, like the Riot Squad he lacked a hit record.

Butch was underwhelmed when Evans informed him he’d offered the future Ziggy Stardust the job: “I thought, ‘Oh no, I don’t like him.’ We had supported Bowie months earlier. His presentation was superb, but his material was terrible.” Saying that, when Bowie turned up for their first rehearsal in a Tottenham pub, Butch admits he “fell in love with him because he had such charisma and he looked so cool when he walked in”.

The band had a few days to work up a set-list before their next gig and Bowie took charge in helping to knit together a running order. He even brought in a track from an unreleased LP by a US band called The Velvet Underground, “I’m Waiting For The Man.”

Bowie’s manager Ken Pitt returned from a trip to New York with an acetate of The Velvet Underground & Nico in late 1966 and his young client was immediately infatuated with the album. A song written by Bowie around that same time, “Little Toy Soldier,” quoted an entire chunk of “Venus and Furs.”

So, I totally stand corrected, Bowie was a really early adopter!

the earliest [you can dl all those early VU covers at the link too]

but i think chilton deserves some credit for honing in on the softer side of the VU -- not sure who else was doing that at the time, seems like most bands latched on to the amphetamine rock of "waiting" and "white light" along with just the good time vibes of "sweet jane." big star did "candy says" too.

I know Eno (who certainly heard the first album when it came out) has always cited the third album as his favorite and the one that ultimately influenced him the most. "What Goes On," etc.

yeah, true! and wasn't it eno who said "big star's first record only sold 1,000 copies but everyone who bought it went on to become a rock critic"?

bang a Gong was top 10 single in the US in 1971. Walk On the Wild Side was top 20 in '72.

― the Spanish Porky's (Shakey Mo Collier), Friday, June 28, 2013 1:13 PM (1 hour ago)

What if I told you that "The Letter" spent 4 weeks at #1 in 1967
http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/009/889/Morpheus2.jpg

lol tyler

re:TGI Friday's - It's mentioned in notes to the box that after Memphis passed a "liquor by the drink" law, Friday's established their first location outside of NYC there in 73 or so. It quickly became a favored hangout for the Ardent gang.

Curious that R.E.M. is always cited as being influenced by Big Star, since compared to the power-pop crew they bore very little resemblance at all (as opposed to, say, Wire or Gang of Four or that sort of thing). Even Mike Mills, who has been touring Big Star stuff (playing Chicago tonight, I think, but I'm seeing Rush) has been quick recently to cite the idea of Big Star as an influence more than the music.

Like, the Replacements, Posies, dBs, Game Theory, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, Matthew Sweet, Elliott Smith, sure - you can hear bits and pieces (or, you know, outright copies) of Big Star in all those bands. But not really in REM, not to my ears.