Big Star

ill the End Of the Day

Yes

yes, it was on the Ryko reissue

xp

Now all I need to complete the triple is a Kinks recording for which I can ask "is that a Steely Dan cover?"

Here ya go, JR:

http://i.imgur.com/NZUQnPI.jpg

:)

I didn't see much use to the Big Star box that came out a few years ago--apart from Chris Bell's "Country Morn" lyric, a.k.a. "Watch the Sunrise," and the Chilton demos, which could've been one disc, it didn't really say much to me. The live 1973 set just proved to me that they weren't a very good live band, even then exhibiting that Chiltonian offhandedness and almost-good revamping of outside material (almost a good version of "Hot Burrito #2," but in the end, it just needed more than drum wallop and half-assed rhythm guitar). But maybe the graverobbing here for the third album will mean something, hard to say, since it was their most studio-manipulated record in every way and the one that most benefited from the tension between naturalistic performance and expressionistic music. I've watched a lot of live stuff from Chilton lately via Youtube and so far I've not found one performance that was really good all the way thru, though I remember a Nashville show around 1986 that seemed particularly committed--good version of "The In Crowd"--and so I kind of think that yes, the myth of Big Star really is a myth, an example of someone whose talents (Alex) were always a bit just beyond his ability to really find a suitable form for. Chris Bell was far too immersed in being the Beatles or the Creation or whoever it was that he visualized moderately rocking on a foggy morn in a fsr-off land to suffer from the same, what could I call it, indecision that Alex always had. Seeing him many times, I always got the feeling: this guy doesn't really know how he feels about what he's doing, and the Italisn covers and the Danny Pearson astrology song and the licks that almost coalesce, and the insistence on delving into hoary rock-and-roll history via schlock covers of "Satisfaction" and Charlie Rich were all just smokescreens. You'd go along with it, you'd recognize the real skill he had as a great rhythm guitarist and a great singer (in a way--his ability to really hold the notes decreased as he smoked all those American Spirits and all that weed, a real shame given what he did on the Big Star records and intermittently, on the Elektra demo "She Might Look My Way," probably the best post-Big Star recording he ever did), but then it would inevitably give off a Bad Aura. Mannerism pure and simple. No other performer I ever saw exuded such a duality of purpose. He played his guitar way too loud all over the Hi Rhythm Section in 1999 in Memphis, and did "Big Boss Man." A waste of the nuance that the Hodges brothers could bring, but then he was happy playing Huey Piano Smith covers, just his guitar, on a 1998 date with Davis Rogan in New Orleans.
The third Big Star record was the first one I ever heard, the wrong side as a matter of fact: "Da da da, da da da, da da da da," it went, what the fuck is this, and then "Jesus Christ." I mentioned nuance above, and that's what the third album is about, and suggestiveness, too. Who was this guy playing this guitar stuff on "You Can't Have Me" and "Thank You Friends," who was this singer on "O, Dana" and "Nightime," and where did they get those strings? There's a heroic dimension to the third record that's a result of a cutoff point imposed by Dickinson and Fry--enough, this is enough, let's make sure Alex doesn't turn it into another example of his inability to commit, his inability to cop to the little pop fantasy world he wants to live in, all Jan and Dean and offhand remarks and backlit abandoned movie sets. Dickinson was right: it was the last time Alex did the thing for real, and part of its power is how you can hear him overcome that ambivalence on virtually every song on the record. Then, when Alex finally emerged a decade later, the movie set had been dismantled. His later stuff is Mr. Arkadin versus Kane and Ambersons, or maybe Edgar Ulmer versus Fritz Lang. So maybe the new box will shed some light on all that, but I doubt it.

The Chilton acoustic demos were my favorite thing about that last Big Star box set -- I think even with the Sister Lovers stuff, it showed off the overall intentionality and craft that went into those songs. And I enjoy the 1973 live tape, though it is ragged in parts. I don't know, I'm lookin forward to hearing this new set, but yeah, there is something that feels a little like they can give the Big Star legacy a rest after this.

Wow, Edd Hurt goes to the head of the class yet again.

otm - edd should write a Chilton book

I agree, the live 1973 set has its allure. I just wish someone had recorded the 4-piece live, who knows what they could've sounded like. Bell was such a creature of the studio, though. Really a shame that he couldn't have stuck around to play for the people.
Over the years, I've gotten to know Jon Tiven, whose work for various soul and r&b performers I've often taken issue with, and whose view of Chilton and Bell, and the Big Star story, is jaundiced, to say the least. Of course, the stuff Tiven did with Chilton is not completely awful, but it's not really all that good, except for a few things that ended up on that long-ago Singer Not the Song EP. Tiven tried to turn Alex into a "tuneful" power pop singer when Alex was already in the throes of doing stuff like "The Walking Dead" and the weird mono-chord version of "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It" he did at Ardent around 1975. I like Jon as a person, and I think he likes me and has some kind of respect for what I do, but I've always defended the third Big Star album in the face of what Jon says, which is that all Alex was doing was ripping off Lou Reed. Lou Reed never had the access to the pop sensibility that Alex dismantles, and exalts, on the third album.
I don't think anyone really gets at this stuff with Big Star or with Alex, at least not in any form you could sit down and read. A lot of people sense what I said above, that there was something off about Alex's work after 1974. He could have so easily gotten in with a real producer and made some real records after he came back in 1984, it seems to me, even given his bad reputation among record-label folk. It's a real shame that his guitar style wasn't used in a more expansive context, by someone who could get to the avant-skronk-jazz-R&B thing he almost does in so many of his performances. Something like "Don't Stop" on his 1995 album almost gets there, as does maybe "What's Your Sign Girl." Almost. It's the fantasy world of pop that Alex lived in that maybe got in the way, which isn't to say that I don't love what he did with Brian Wilson's "Solar System" or Goffin-King's "Let Me Get Close to You" or Penn's "Nobody's Fool," the latter which could've been so great had it only been produced.
I'll be interested to see how the press interprets this new box. No doubt the same platitudes will be trotted out. As with something like Orson Welles' first movie, the third Big Star album was quite well understood in 1978 when it appeared--Creem got it, and it was probably from that review that we all went out and bought it, before we got that U.K. reissue of the first two albums.
Maybe there's something like a book in all this, I don't know. I always felt, for better or worse, that I understood what Chilton was trying to do, because I shared his ambivalent feelings about pop and its relationship to "progressive" music and the more conservative impulses of pre-1960 popular music. But it took me years to comprehend just how twisted he must have been by his family trauma and the fact that he never really had an adolescence. Or how soul-sucking it must have been to have achieved success, only to doubt your own involvement in it and fear that no one would take you seriously. Perhaps this is why he never could really collaborate--when he did, with Bell and with Chris Stamey on the nice "Summer Sun" single in the '70s, the results could've been amazing. And I like to contrast the non-work ethic of Chilton with the discipline of Marshall Crenshaw, the one figure in the era who is most like Alex, and who never gave up trying. So while I think the third Big Star album is one of the greatest records of all time, I wonder sometimes why people keep on digging into this Big Star stuff, perhaps it's not healthy. If I had the opportunity to write about all this, I'd do it, but god only knows who would be interested after that Holly George-Warren book (which has its merits but doesn't delve into the music as much as maybe it could).

xpost O yes, and he has written so much already over the many years since his AC interview; here's one of my fave raves: http://www.nashvillescene.com/music/article/13012262/mod-lang As always, a trove of insights, about the man, the band, the roots and influence, down through thee ages---also, as in this latest post, he can write as a frustrated fan, but/and also also, what he mentions in "Mod Lang" piece as "desiccated glamour" accurately reflects continued appeal: the way success and failure, attraction and repulsion etc go 2gether like flies on sherbet. If you came across him in a "rock novel", of course you'd say, "Oh no, fuck another 'rock novel'!" But the musical reality is skeezy-plus compensation, often enough, I think.
Ditto somewhat dodgy, campy but always listenable and sometimes rockin' OUT live solo tapes I have, from an early-ish 80s ("still haven't paid by the Bangles") Tuscaloosa dive, somewhat later Public Radio, etc. (ditto the radio interviews, outtakes etc. Edd long ago sent me, on tapes labelled as Memphis Oblique.)

I don't recall the specific 70s Creem review Edd refers to, although they were republishing xgau's Consumer Guide columns from the Voice, so their coverage prob incl. this:

Third [PVC, 1978]
In late 1974, Alex Chilton--already the inventor of self-conscious power pop--transmogrified himself into some hybrid of Lou Reed (circa The Velvet Underground and/or Berlin) and Michael Brown (circa "Walk Away, Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina"). This is the album that resulted--fourteen songs in all, only two or three of which wander off into the psycho ward. Halting, depressive, eccentrically shaped, it will seem completely beyond the pale to those who already find his regular stuff weird. I think it's prophetically idiosyncratic and breathtakingly lyrical. A-

Dunno how much of the pop elements in VU records came from Cale and Yule (though some Reed-only copyrights are lyrical and/or popwise as hell); dunno how much of Left Banke came from Michael Brown's Dad, Harry Lookofsky, who later did some deft string arrangements for Blood Sweat & Tears' first (Al Kooper-Brecker-Brothers, etc. era) garishly engaging LP, also Quincy Jones' Sounds...And Stuff Like That!. Really want to check his own Stringville
Xgau also liked the live-in-Missouri Big Star 2.0 album, and I go him one better by even liking In Space

The sometimes-but-not-always soggy solo saga!
http://www.robertchristgau.com/get_artist.php?name=Alex+Chilton

(Haven't heard those last three, but know where he's comin' from re previous.)

It's Robert (Robot) A. Hull's April 1979 review of Third that really gets it right. I can't find it archived anywhere except at the subscription-only Rock's Back Pages site, but i recall it. That's 1979, so it must've been another review somewhere that we read that got us onto the Big Star stuff, because I know I'd already been into it by then (and bought my copy of Sherbert in November of that year).
I think Michael Brown is a somewhat good analog to Chilton, though I really don't hear much of the Left Banke in the third record (strings do not make it like the Left Banke). But I suppose the tunecraft and fragile nature of LB toons like "She May Call You Up Tonight" had their impact on Chilton, who seems to have listened to a hell of a lot of '60s stuff like that, including the Zombies, We Five, the Mamas and the Papas...I was at the Missouri show in 1993, I'll never forget them lurching into "Duke of Earl." I think there's a new, complete version of that show that's out. Set/Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy is heinous except for his Ollie Nightingale cover, his Brenton Wood cover, and maybe one other. What he does to Gary Stewart's great "Single Again" is just unforgivable; points for covering Stewart's masterpiece, but he couldn't sing it in some one-take vocal and expect it to fly. If he'd worked at it for a couple weeks in the studio, got it right, it could've been amazing. Man Called Destruction almost works, I quite liked it at the time, but now it sounds typically one-dimensional, except a couple cuts. The only really produced record he did after the '70s.

Found the Hull review, at ebay--no credit given to the writer, of course. It's here.

whoa a studio version of "Baby Strange." hell yea.

this one song justifies the release IMO.

thanks for those great posts, Edd

^^^

whoa a studio version of "Baby Strange." hell yea.

― billstevejim, Tuesday, August 16, 2016 11:34 AM (35 minutes ago)

this one song justifies the release IMO.

― billstevejim, Tuesday, August 16, 2016 11:35 AM (33 minutes ago)

We talked to the lady at the park admission and she said nobody can dance...

I'm sorry...

[boos]["Why not!??!"]

I don't know... ask her...

In the meantime: don't dance...?

I was at the Missouri show in 1993...

― Edd Hurt

offtopic: Any recollection of openers The Palace Brothers?

No, I'm afraid I don't remember the Palace Brothers at all. I should've taken some notes, I guess.

Oh yeah, xpost Hull's description of the *actual listening experience* triggers reader's memories after all: The album even seems to begin at the wrong speed with ‘Stroke It Noel’, a sagging melody that suddenly bursts into the flowery ebullience of the Left Banke. Fortunately by the second cut (‘For You’), the speed accommodates warm sentiment smothered in baroque orchestration.

And But what causes Chilton's work to finally congeal is not introspection but exploration – a search outside himself for a musical structure that will contain all emotional flux. is the crux-- Chilton's 70s and maybe later reverie, pop x and vs. antipop, dancing not-dancing this messaround---and of course hard as hell to do, in a way that artists and other listeners can live with, without wandering away. And this is re the "indecision" Edd notes, which can use you more than you use it, creatively or otherwise.

Later he settles, in an okay way, solo, BS 2.0, even sep. oldies circuit shows w the Boxtops, back and forth. But when you tend to be unstable, you can over- and undervalue stability, to some degree(s). I dunno man, In the meantime: don't dance...?

thanks for those great posts, Edd

― ro✧✧✧@il✧✧✧.c✧✧ (sleeve), Tuesday, August 16, 2016 1:40 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^

^^^^^^3X

Some of what crippled Alex was simply his own intelligence. I think he took to heart the idea behind a lot of old R&B music that the words could be super-banal, of the moment, and crass, with references to--and I think this is crucial--the larger world of pop that existed parallel to R&B and soul. In this sense he was quite different from any revivalist of old-tyme music that he really ought to be compared to, in the '80s. The trash aesthetic meant something a bit different to Alex than it did to David Johnansen or someone, just as his idea of roots music wasn't exactly X's or Dave Alvin's. Third is a really amazing example of someone wavering in and out of pop, which also makes that record different from all the records it inspired, perhaps the most interesting being His Name Is Alive's Mouth by Mouth, and certainly Alex at least paid lip service to moral gravity--"Thank You John" is a good example--in a way that his epigone Scott Miller could never summon, because Scott Miller didn't conceive of pop as an area where you could make those moral distinctions. I saw him with the reformed Box Tops twice and it was always kind of creepy, as if this guy had had part of his body removed (that he didn't play guitar was a big part of it, because his guitar style was definitely the most worked-out part of all his scattered parts). And all the old Box Tops shit was about Morals, from "Down in Kentucky" to "Fields of Clover" (the greatest non-hit Box Tops tune ever) to even "The Letter." Audience members used to get impatient with Alex's "indecision" and his detachment--"More, faster!" they'd shout, and Alex would just hunker down more and keep on walking the line between concentrating on what he was doing in an unsmiling way and making those moderate tempi and post-R&B guitar moves stand in for what he was trying hard to not feel. The songs were vehicles, obstacle courses he mastered by hewing to what he heard in the records he imitated. The most he ever strayed from the original record, far as I can tell, is on "What's Your Sign," but he also did a Frederick Knight tune called "Claim to Fame" that to this day I never heard the original of, so he obviously knew something about songwriting he didn't want to give away. And as a matter of fact, you can do most of the songs on the third record alone with your guitar and piano, but you can't really play "O My Soul" that way, and that performance is like the Grand Tour of post-R&B guitar playing that he could've replicated endlessly, if he'd been a true formalist.

Re moral gravity and moral distinctions even upper-case Morals--as toll bridges, or something else, anyway w shadows and gravity, whatever they amount to---but also his detachment---so making me think of outsider-pattermeister Harry Smith compiling The Smithsonian Anthology of AmericanFolk Music?? Except of course Chilton is in a different artistic situation: a registered cult artist *and* s guy with a guitar, whose show preview writes itself, coming to Yourtown, and hoping not to be taken for granted---but is this something like what you mean?

"patternmeister", Ah mean.

"O My Soul" is like a master class in Strat.

Yeah, dow, moral gravity, concern with some kind of morality, concern with his inability to make sense of it all, fear that these transient things will be lost, like Harry Smith. Or maybe the dead rock writer and incurable romantic Paul Nelson, who worshiped Chet Baker to the point that he bought every scrap of outtake and live performance to be had and stored it all, annotated, in his little sublet in the shadow of New York City. Moralists who are obsessed with power are strange people. Chris Bell was terrified half the time, it sounds like to me. Alex wanted bodyguards, hit men, sex objects, songs that he could fall back on. A romantic. Harry Smith, yep: looking for patterns everywhere. I'm sure Alex had a reason for choosing those songs, a pattern in his mind. Lowell Fulson's most pro forma record, check. I think you can hear this operating on the third Big Star record--Jerry Lee, Lou Reed, "Nature Boy," originals that sound like half-remembered songs from someone's addled childhood, and the Kinks to boot.

thank you edd hurt for everything you have written in the past 24 hours.

where are those 33 1/3 people when you need them

thank you edd hurt for everything you have written in the past 24 hours.

― fact checking cuz, Wednesday, 17 August 2016 03:52 (41 minutes ago) Permalink

yeah totally. great stuff.

Sentiments echoed here. I'd be interested in more about the thread you trace from Third to Mouth By Mouth which I've always felt was a less-fully-realised sibling to Home is In Your Head. I've always felt Chilton was at odds with his gift whereas Defever was indulgent of his, if that makes sense.

loving your posts edd

excited abt 3rd expanded reissue not least because it means i might now be able to find an affordable vinyl copy

edd hurt you have long been my favorite poster on ILM & this thread is a sign post to that

where are those 33 1/3 people when you need them

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

listened to the Third demos on the way to work this morning, those songs scrubbed up well

I'm excited about this! I listened to Big Star *way* too much growing up and I'm kind of sick of these songs now. But the chance of hearing Alex's voice again, in its prime, with his best set of songs, and in - presumably - a more intimate setting - that sounds really appealing and interesting in a specific way, the way that the grab-bag of stuff on "Keep an Eye" wasn't.

^this, I guess

Sentiments echoed here. I'd be interested in more about the thread you trace from Third to Mouth By Mouth which I've always felt was a less-fully-realised sibling to Home is In Your Head. I've always felt Chilton was at odds with his gift whereas Defever was indulgent of his, if that makes sense

I traded an e-mail or two with Warn Defever back when I reviewed Detrola, which is the last HNIA record I've heard, actually. I've always been a fan of Mouth by Mouth, which does strike me as a more controlled version of Third. Defever kind of came at putting together a band in a conceptual way, somewhat like the way Bell approached Big Star. Similar studiomania. I always thought Mouth by Mouth was the one record--I like Stars on ESP too--where he kinda got it all together and made a coherent statement. I always thought it was a record by someone who fundamentally liked pop but couldn't resist the urge to make it more allusive. I do think Defever has been more indulgent of his gift, just like I think Scott Miller--the Game Theory-Loud Family guy, not the alt-country musician who is still alive and well-- was also too indulgent of his. The version of "Blue Moon" on Mouth is one of the best Big Star covers, too.
Seems to me the folks compiling this Big Star stuff could do worse than to talk to someone like Defever, who seems like the quintessential scattered suburbanite who got twisted around by the third album and probably the other stuff too. Karin Oliver was kind of the Lesa Aldridge of the best period of HNIA, apparently Warn gave her zero autonomy and regarded her as just a voice. So the progression from the third album to 1993 would be from cult of personality to the effacement of personality, perhaps.

That's really interesting Edd, I second the sentiment that a book on Chilton from you would be a very interesting read. I need to listen more to Mouth By Mouth too.

I'll second what EH said about Tiven… I worked with him in the early '90s, when I was quite enthralled with B.S, and the cult got much much bogger. and occasionally asked him about AC. Without fail he indicated visceral disdain for him, which clearly resulted from some extremely bad interpersonal experiences going well beyond anything involving what he should or should not have done musically. Tiven was somewhat pompous and obviously annoyed that AC was being hailed as such as big deal, but there can be no doubt that AC was a difficult mufugger in those days.

I worked with marshall C. at the time as well, and asked if he knew of Big Star in the early '70s and what he thought of them now. He said he didn't think much of the band in the '70s, and seemed to be similarly annoyed that this fuck-up was receiving all this acclaim, whereas he was perceived as a charming, hugely skilled journeyman, but not a dysfunctional star-crossed Nick Drake-ish dude that creates such fascination. I remember specifically that he said that he thought Bell was a spoliled little rich kid.

thank you edd hurt for everything you have written in the past 24 hours.

Because I was just wondering if it was time for my semi-annual foray into the rolling country thread.

Actually now wondering if Edd or anyone else ever crossed paths with the guy who did play guitar in The Box Tops and later turned himself into a session musician, Gary Talley, whose birthday happens to be today, I just learned.

I guess it is sort of mildly interesting to me that somebody else came out of that band and had a more conventional career in the music business because if one were to take Alex at face value, it was such a traumatizing experience that it is a wonder any of the members could leave the house afterwards.

Gary Talley has lived in the Nashville area for years. He's known as a guitar teacher. I did interview him briefly a few years ago, to do an Nashville Scene critics' pick on something he was doing at the time. Nice guy.
Jon Tiven and I have had a mostly congenial relationship, although I panned his record with P.F. Sloan in 2006, which he got pretty exercised about. I thought at the time that Sloan, whom I'd seen put on a great performance at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe (temple of pretentious singer-songwriterdom/pretty cool place where you can see some pretty amazing performers, you know), wasn't well-served by Jon's aesthetic on the record they made together. But I got to meet P.F. Sloan and hang out with him at Tiven's house, where I remember these geese or ducks kept honking and quacking around this pond he had in the back yard, pissing off Jon in a comic fashion: "Won't those goddamn ducks shut up so we can talk," etc. P. F. Sloan was fucking great at his show, and in fact reminded me of Alex Chilton in his somewhat desiccated glamour, but the record was pretty lifeless. Some of what Jon has done has been in the realm of reviving old soul performer's careers, and since he usually gets them to do his songs....well, you know, it's what it is. I didn't so much mind his job on Howard Tate, whom I also got to meet once and interview, or his more recent work with Steven Kalinich of Beach Boys-associated fame. He also produced Bebe Buell and I got to see her throw her big old butt around the stage one time at Jack Clement's studio on Belmont Avenue in Nashville, with Jon and his wife Sally backing her up. Sally Tiven is a really nice lady, they've welcomed me into their house on several occasions. I've on occasion wound Jon up: "Hey, tell us about that time Alex tried to jump into bed with you..." He would tell the story in an aggrieved tone. But the fact of the matter is, I don't much enjoy his shit with Chilton on that amusing Bach's Bottom LP, which I bought back in around 1981 or whatever and have since discarded, and I actually don't love his production of Van Duren's Staring at the Ceiling LP all that much, either--"Grow Yourself Up" is better in the demo version Van did with Jody Stephens at Ardent, though I do enjoy "Oh Babe" and "Chemical Fire" and "New Year's Eve" and some of that record. It just lacks the space, the production values, that Van needed. Van's still at it and still good, he's far more similar to Chris Bell and to Emitt Rhodes or Eric Carmen or McCartney than he is to Chilton. His recent work with Vicki Loveland is nice, and in fact, they're playing in Nashville (most likely Van Duren's first Nashville show ever) next month in a Big Star tribute show headed by a young guy named Robert Gay, another fan of power pop. I think Van even knows Emitt Rhodes and has recorded with him.
I do think Marshall Crenshaw is everything Alex could've been; I rate him very highly and those first two records of his made the same kind of impact on me as the Big Star records. Not to denigrate Alex. They're great in different ways. I interviewed Marshall last year. Hoo boy, what a difficult guy, not a fountain of warmth or one who suffers fools gladly. I was actually intimidated by the prospect of talking to him and it showed, it wasn't my best interview, but then, anyone who goes into interviewing with some notion of being beloved is a hack, and in the end I got him to talk about stuff. I've done a ton of interviews. I should've asked him about Alex. And of course, Marshall makes a big deal out of the fact that his stuff derives from American music, not British Invasion music, which is actually completely accurate. He's the heir to Goffin and King if anyone is.
Here's my takedown of Tiven's P.F. Sloan record. I hated to do it, because I really liked Phil (as he was called) and was real sorry to alienate him by writing a bad review, which is what happened. Whatever, I don't move in those circles.