Big Star

Actually, P. F. Sloan has passed on. Died last November. Uh, I thought Pickett-Tiven was OK. Not great. Jon's a good guitar player. I did a thing on Sloan's passing last year. His Beethoven album may be the best thing he ever did, too.

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.

Is that the distinction Crenshaw makes, that it's Goffin and King in particular? They strike me as not exactly everybody's definition of Americana, I guess.

No, he didn't say anything about Goffin and King I can remember. But yeah, I definitely discern a debt to Goffin and King in his songwriting.

I'd definitely be curious to know particular songs that show that influence, if you wouldn't mind sharing any! (Don't know Crenshaw's music apart from the hits.)

I can imagine MC is difficult, just not difficult in a way that might appeal to or increase his fan base or even be noticed by them like, um, you know who. I remember him being on Letterman, I think, where he was asked about portraying Buddy Holly in La Bamba, I believe, and he totally didn't want to play along, he dismissively said "I made that movie a year and a half ago."

Found the Gary Talley pick, from 2007. Did I get that right, that he played on "Soul Deep" and "The Letter"? Gotta check that out.

I'm curious where someone would draw lines between Goffin/King and the early Beatles, particularly with regards to some perception of American music vs. non-American music. I tend to believe in the Greil Marcus principle: that the Beatles were "a version of the chair."

Obviously, Goffin-King ended up writing hits for the Animals and Herman's Hermits.

Marshall is not difficult in my view, but then I knew him before I was a working journalist asking him questions that would find presumptuous. It is true that there is a certain reserve that may appear as standoffishness, and I understand that he wouldn't relish being asked about playing Buddy Holly…so mavbe that was a payday he should have turned down.

Tiven's projects with r&b singers always struck me as somewhat gross. Recorded poorly and too much showboating on his part.

Yeah, I got that wrong re "The Letter." Richard Malone played on the recording; Talley joined soon after the record was released. Cogbill played on and produced "Soul Deep," though I think Talley was on it too.

As for Goffin-King, Tim his it on the head, the Beatles were basically a version of the chair that they built. Was there another group that used those dominant seventh chords and thirteenths in rock before the Beatles? Like in the bridge for "What You're Doing"? Or minor sevenths like in "Ticket to Ride"? That was a big part of what listeners perceived as different about the Beatles from the start, as in the bridge to "I Want to Hold Your Hand." A lot of Goffin-Kings will put a major seventh into a basic structure, like "No Easy Way Down," if I remember right. I can't totally speak to what Crenshaw meant, except that his stuff isn't like Chris Bell's--you never get the sense that he's working thru the Creation or the Move so much as he's doing, I don't know, Eddie Cochran, maybe. Or a variation on R&B.
A good example of the harmonic richness that Crenshaw uses in a Goffin-King way is "Passing Through," from Jaggedland, a really nice song. Coulda fit right in to a Gilmore Girls episode https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--v3UMZqgw0
Another good one is "Monday Morning Rock," which also illustrates the mnemonic power of his guitar licks. Totally structural, not a moment wasted. Warm yet full of potential danger and so forth, which is kind of his universe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8Tc7ub7XQ0

Random tangents, but Larry Coryell had a great cover of the Jimmy Webb "P.F. Sloan" on his much-reviled vocal album, which is probably the best thing he ever did. I like the 3rd Big Star album a lot, don't really expect to have my life changed by the reissue. My main interest in Big Star is the idea of screwing up great normal songs (which basically comes to dominate 90s indie). I've probably posted in other threads, but Alex's weirdo version of "Take Me Home And Make Me Like It" predicts Royal Trux with surprising accuracy. I didn't notice the Liz Phair connection on that song until recently.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0GQAWlr3_0

My main interest in Big Star is the idea of screwing up great normal songs (which basically comes to dominate 90s indie)

I used to tell indie rock friends who didn't know Big Star that there was a clear through-line from the Velvets to Big Star to REM to Pavement based entirely around this aesthetic idea

You don't say. Tell me more.

hey I can't say I gave *too* much thought to it

But there's nothing screwed up about Big Star songs, in my opinion. I never could get with the reviewers who described Radio City as "almost falling apart" and "on the edge" and like that. That's classical music-making, right down the line of what your music teacher would tell you to do in her little classroom. Play on the beat and don't overdo it. That goes even more so for the first Big Star album, and that's what I got out of it when I first heard it: it was just classically restrained music made by people who got an idea of discipline from Stax records of the early era. "Knock on Wood" and all of that, "Raise Your Hand." The Beatles really were falling apart by comparison, though you can hear them trying for that restraint on Revolver and Rubber Soul. The third album does have some production and performance quirks, but again, all the forms are completely classical, straight down the line: "Nightime" is quite simple, ditto "Thank You Friends." Those redneck sounds in "Dream Lover" do suggest an, er, outside approach to that song, but I think all the stuff that got laid on there was an honest response to their conflicted environment, which was Midtown Memphis.

Not to mention all the convivial times at TGIFs.

hey I can't say I gave *too* much thought to it

In other news, the other day I finally figured out that Seth and Jon Tiven were brothers, after years of thinking they might be the same person followed by years of thinking they were unrelated.

By album 3, I think things are pretty screwed up. You listen to Kizza Me and She Blows Blasts of Static back to back, and you can trace an extremely direct line, though people always compared Grifters to Sonic Youth, erroneously.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=Z-mO7l0qsH8

Even with the third album, I think I'm not so interested in an analysis of it as falling apart as a metaphor for something. Maybe I'm more interested in what it does than what it doesn't do.

Not sure how the Beatles were falling apart. Are we talking early Beatles?

The Greil Marcus reference comes from his Beatles entry in the original Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll, where he says that the Beatles were a reflection back from across the pond, not of Goffin and King specifically or anybody in particular, but of ALL MANNER OF STUFF that had already comprised rock and roll: "Accompanying the shock of novelty so many experienced on first exposure to the Beatles in 1963 or ’64 was a shock of recognition."

I appreciate you posting those Crenshaw tunes. The second one doesn't sound so far removed from Big Star to me!

Yeah, the Beatles showed Americans, including jaded collectors and more casual listeners, a new take on old familiar shit---like when I finally heard, via Sublime Frequencies and Subliminal Sounds comps, mid-60s Southeast Asian combos finding something I'd missed in seemingly done sounds of thee tymes. Beatles had to delve into early r&b to keep that gig at the Star Club, and--while detouring around rockabilly, apparently evidently learned from the Everly Brothers and other US Southeast-Southwest-Cali sounds, with some back-and-forth, or so the Buck Owens & The Buckaroos reissues, like the Buck 'Em! sequence of recent years, seems to suggest. A given for Dwight Yoakam, among others (also Gram Parsons said he was going for a combination of Buck & Buckaneers x his buddies the Stones).
Big Star was part of that migration, musically, and I never thought of them as falling apart, but second album seem to be deliberately messing with, rather than further refining, the refinements and remake/remodel of the first album's Beatles-associated sounds (the spirit rather than the letter of the B.'s own excursions and inspired or at least bold self-abuse).
"Messing with" via little jolts and leaps, more and more apparent in later remasters, and of course John Fry taught them enough about engineering/production to do that on the board etc., along with what might have been factored in and/or allowed for in the writing, And Chilton took that even further on the third: distress-tested, against the grain and in the groove, pop and antipop, push-pull etc.

"a combination of Buck & Bucka"*roos*, duh

"Big Star was a part of that migration, musically" hearing Southern sounds filtered, reworked by Beatles in a time and place that was Beatles-saturated, lemme tell you---Bs weren't making most of their money on the road, like most bands, and they discovered that Epstein had sold most of not all the ancillary rights, and Apple Corps was more and more of a money pit, so they had to keep putting out the hits, in a way that would have been flooding the market, rather than just immersing it, coming from anybody else.

(And of course Big Star heard Southern sounds reworked by other Brits, like Zep, who later recorded at Ardent.)

most *if* not all the ancillary rights

So is there an accepted or preferred sequence (or even title?) for the third album nowadays? Is the first song "Stroke It Noel," as memorably reviewed a little upthread, or "Kizza Me."

any sequence that doesn't start with Stroke It Noel/For You/Kizza Me and end with Thank You Friends seems wrong to me

^^^ otm. The original tracklisting was the only one that got it right.

see, that seems wrong to me... i really don't think there's a "real" running order for this one.

leading with kizza me on the ryko CD always seemed "wrong," but ending w/ nighttime-blue moon-take care felt "right." but in these crazy mixed up times who's to say what's right and wrong.

Alex Chilton's neighbor in New Orlean's Ray Davies, that's who.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mkJyMxNCtA

Wasn't the sequence that appeared on the '92 Ryko CD the one that was supposed to be official? I seem to remember Dickinson saying so; maybe it's in the liners. I'm always going to hear it begin with "Stroke It" and end with "Thank You," that PVC sequence always seemed right to me. I don't even think it had a working title, did it?
Maybe someone will name a band PVC Sequence.

I made a CD of it once for my own use, and included "Downs" and "Dream Lover" in it, both on "side 2" of it. I never did see much use in "Nature Boy" and Jerry Lee and the Kinks in that album, though they're all interesting tracks.
Steve Simels, a rock critic who wrote about Big Star early on in Stereo Review, posts about a song called "Big Black Car" that a friend of his wrote (Simels played in a band with him). Slim Harpo did a version of it. Alex coulda done it along with "Tip On In" and the other Harpo stuff he used to do. It's here, at the Aug. 9, 2016 entry.

love "whole lotta shakin" but hard for me to see how it would actually fit on the album ... same goes for "til the end of the day." "nature boy" i can see a little more.

After having lived with the PVC sequence for five or six years, the Ryko just seemed off (see also: my admittedly irrational preference for "Black Angel's Death Song" after "Sunday Morning" on my dub of an '80s VU & Nico cassette).

"Downs" is the only previously unreleased thing I can see fitting into the record, though I can see how "Nature Boy" might work, maybe with some echoey guitar skronk behind it.

Spotify has the the Rykodisc/Dickinson track order fwiw. Guess somebody could make a PVC Sequence playlist if they wanted.

Peeked at the Jovanovic book and found at least two egregious spelling errors of the names of extremely important Memphis musicians in the first few pages, even in the "Revised and Updated Edition," namely
*Mike Leach* for Mike Leech
And
*Linden "Spooner" Oldham* for Dewey Lindon "Spooner" Oldham

Don't know if I want to proceed further to see what he says Dan Penn's real name is. Maybe should read A Man Called Destruction and the 33 and 1/3 book properly first.

Ur-post upthread under a very mysterious screenname: Big Star

I have that Jovanovic book, it's okay but not particularly great

there's some ok stuff in the jovanovic book, but he's not a great writer by any stretch. and doesn't have a particularly good feel for the music. man called destruction and the 33 1/3 are much better.

Reminds me I should probably reread Howlin' Wolf bio as well.

Memphis Boys by Roben Ford has tons of interesting info about American Studios that is relevant and interesting, although it is way too long to read from beginning to end, so is best used as a reference.

Speaking of names, you've fused Memphis Boys author Roben Jones with Robben Ford, who has or has had a band or one-off called the Memphis Boys. Totally understandable, and Edd's recently posted pn ilx about American Studios mainman Chip Moman, so circle still unbroken.

also *on* ilx, even!

Lol, sorry, thanks. I spent quite a few seconds just making sure I spelled "Roben" correctly and then dropped the ball for the surname.

fp'd you for that don't let it happen again

Think I was affected/infected by the misspelling bug by reading those few pages of Jovanovic.

For some reason I decided to try to watch Almost Famous on Netflix. It's a truly anti-rock movie in every way except maybe for the big scene where they all get misty-eyed over "Tiny Dancer" after Billy Crudup freaks out on acid. Its total embrace of "rock" got me to thinking about this piece, by Anthony Miccio, that Slate published in 2005. It's a takedown of Radio City that makes all the standard points about how rock ought to be a big shared experience and wonderfully crass and all that. Which of course has some merit as an idea, absolutely. In the essay, which begins with an aside about the 1973 Memphis rock writers' conference which says they "got together for a free dinner in Tennessee or somewhere further south," he goes on to say that the record didn't impress anyone upon first listening, and that Alex Chilton could've never turned on mass numbers of people as could Peter Frampton. The first part of that is false; virtually everyone I ever met got the spooky familiarity of the record on first listen; I certainly did. Second part is true, I suppose. And OK, Christgau with his "semi-popular" formulation is one thing, but for sure there's really no reason why you can't appreciate Art and all that stuff, as opposed to the big statements which are also Art. Miccio: "Someone who thinks the only thing that separates 'Back of a Car' from 'Ticket to Ride' is a promotional budget probably hates pop-as-in-popular music, as it represents a crass, literal, threatening world that they’ll never be confident or disciplined enough to belong to."
It's a pretty interesting poptimist view of a record that I suppose you could say is a rockist favorite. Miccio claims that fans fetishize the album because it represents a higher brand of pop that consumers were too dumb to appreciate, and alludes to the record's "inadequate" nature. In other words, it was an inferior version of stuff that was done better by more healthy, vulgar folk: the Raspberries and I guess, Badfinger. (Artful Dodger really was as good a power pop band as any of them, but to this day they have none of the critical rep that Big Star has, and they were the outward-seeking, slightly more vulgar version of power pop that Miccio seems to favor.)
Miccio has just enough of a point to make you feel a little uncomfortable. Music doesn't exist without an audience, is one way to view it, but this does tend to discount the impulses of musicians, and certainly in Memphis, there was always an inward, self-serving impulse that lay behind blues, for example--people doing it solely for the hell of doing it. I think the supposed opposition between "vulgar-good" and "subtle-bad" that so many critics use is one very big thing that can hobble any true assessment of rock music. And Miccio suggests that Westerberg regrets his infatuation with them, since it got in the way of his writing hummable, hit songs. And anyway, Christgau's idea of the semipopular wasn't all that big a deal; wasn't Fritz Lang's The Big Heat semipopular in the '50s, whereas Hitchcock--who's the more satisfying filmmaker? I say Lang is) was popular? Piece is right here.

"Till The End of the Day" just came on my ipod and I thought, "Hey, which cover of 'Anyway Anyhow Anywhere' is this?" Cleverish intro there by Alex.

"Back of a Car" requires you to commit to the lyrics. It requires you to commit to the idea that, yes, it actually took Alex Chilton four full, discrete verses to adequately draw that picture. Miccio doesn't address the narrative in that piece. He doesn't present a blueprint for how a shortened narrative could have functioned in a superior way.

Your film analogy is apropos, Edd, in that Miccio is a hardline anti-intentionalist and hates the auteur theory perhaps even more than he dislikes Big Star and all their fans. Hopefully he will come along in a little while and, um, clarify his position for us.

Had the same thought about those Shel Talmy covers, Tarfumes.

Tim and James OTM. The point of Miccio's essay is that fans were always making a case for Radio City as something that was really pop and that could fit right in with what was on the radio. But it lacked the power to do so. I think that is a common line on music like this, and quite often wrong-headed: how many times I've heard someone say, "Why this wasn't a hit..." and stuff like that.
I think what he's saying comes close to what I get out of Marcus on Randy Newman, that the scary world of true big-time, mass-audience participation is where real ideas are forged.

what is a "real" idea

What is an "idea"?