Big Star

Fwiw I can't imagine 1973 responding to this production AT ALL.

Speaking of "O My Soul," I always thought this proto-disco single by the Everydsy People, "I Like What I Like," bears more than a passing resemblance to the Big Star tune--though Big Star never prefaced a song with the drum beats you hear for about two minutes before this awesome song really kicks into gear. 1973--I have their album, but nothing on it is as good as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eS3GxL2gXd0

the Everyday People, that is

Link to the Miccio piece? No idea it existed.

Actually, Everyday People, 1972, Canadian rock band on Paramount. There was also a '70s US funk group called the Everyday People. Anyway, the single was split up and edited just like "O My Soul" was edited for the Ardent single, which really wasn't a good idea.

Alfred, here's the link to Anthony Miccio's Radio City piece: http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/on_second_thought/big-star-radio-city.htm
February 15, 2005.

And it's Stylus, not Slate, my bad.

speaking of semi-popular, I've always wondered how well Chilton did off the Bangles cover.

Not as well as That 70 cents Show

Bangles money bought him a new car and his land near Hohenwald, Tenn., where he attempted to build a house and on which he lived in a tent for a while around 1991. I think he was making enough toward to have had health insurance, definitely.

Solid cover too:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otx4-esLsBs

Link to the Miccio piece? No idea it existed.

The mistaken Slate credit threw me.

where he attempted to build a house

would read a whole book just about this tbh

thanks, edd. really flattered to have this piece not just remembered but grasped for what it was intended to be - less a dismissal of big star (it's not as prominent in the piece than i recalled, but i adore all of Third and at least the hits-by-accrual on the previous two) than a poptimist reaction to eccentric semi-pop hyped as "pure pop."

with a decade's hindsight, i wish i did less strawmanning and more quoting of said hype. And my reductive language regarding semi-pop is more glibly dismissive and undiplomatic than it would be today ("By revering this album, you are, without question, a pervert." is especially trolling - not sure if I was intentionally referencing Xgau's Bee Thousand dis or just indulging in the same needless goading). but i'm glad you picked up what i was trying to put down. believe it or not, this thing got me whitepages-doxxed on another music board. said offendee never did show up on my doorstep, maybe he calmed down.

i was a midwestern alt-kid belatedly discovering in early adulthood i enjoyed mainstream pop/rock even more than the more esoteric roads suggested in indie circles, and reacting to the cloistered vanities of magnet magazine types (who were pretty prominent in a big ten college radio dj's life). for many reasons cultural and personal, those battles feel barely worth the bile today. i'm proud i went out on "It’s best to love things for what they are rather than what we’d like to think they could’ve been," but i wish i'd made a less obnoxious case.

Glad you posted Anthony. Here's Christgau talking about some of this, way back in 1974 before Tortoise and Neutral Milk Hotel:

Radio City is another case in point. Their cult, which consists mostly of rock journalists, went all to pieces in praising the album's mid-60s weltanschauung last January. But I didn't really hear all of that, not really, until I learned to love the Raspberries' Starting Over, the final proof, simultaneously smooth and powerful (and slick and mechanical), that good art and a longing for the past are not always incompatible. Radio City is not so much the flip side of Starting Over as its underside, revealing all the loose musicianship of the albums the Beatles were making a decade ago--Beatles VI, say--to be a good deal more pain-filled, and daring, then they've ever seemed before, without surrendering any of that music's adolescent semi-innocence.

Rock is art. Remember rock-is-art? Remember how we railed against it? But rock is art more indubitably every year, and as the years progress we're not so sorry we lost the battle. Art does endure, a little, and we come to value endurance as we endure ourselves. We no longer regret the way the strictly aesthetic, no-sale triumphs of Gram Parsons and Big Star coexist with the cultural accomplishments of Joni Mitchell and Stevie Wonder, because even if culture does mean art plus society, art itself can often offer more excitement than all of the most accomplished popular culture in a time when society provides few satisfactions.

And of course, Big Star and Gram Parsons have proven as influential over the (short) long run as either Joni Mitchell or Stevie Wonder. And of course, the claims made for Gram Parsons for country music are probably just as inflated as the claims made for Big Star in alt-rock. I think Grievous Angel and GP and Gilded Palace are great, but I prefer George Jones and Moe Bandy and Vern Gosdin and would have to blame Gram, at least in part, for Will Oldham.

Lol ok I was w u up til the oldham comparison

Yeah, that's way too harsh, that's like blaming the Beatles for Manson (everybody knows it was the Beach Boys). I hadn't thought of Big Star in specific connection to Beatles VI, but that is a wonderful album, though cobbled together for mere Americans (and, it says here, New Zealanders!)only, it stands on its own, even if you're well aware of previous releases, and was a fave of mine long before I played it at parties in 77-78, between Pistols, Clash, Jam, and Costello, never with any objections. Don't usually link from wikipedia, but all of this is accurate, far as I can tell---even pleasantplains luvs it---GET THIS ALBUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatles_VI

(Also played it at parties alongside Graham Parker & The Rumour in the sequence w those others)

(Ditto Andy Fairweather Low.)

(and that live Stiff thing)

Like the Miccio piece a lot. Mentioned above, but Grifters are missing in a big way from the overall story line. Clearly they were poised to try to take the Big Star>>>GBV sound to the masses, and fucked it up. Also one of my favorite bands.

I'd assume that there are about a million stories of "almost stardom" from artists who were actually trying actively to be stars, and that any overlap between those and Big Star is pure coincidence.

Urge Overkill too probably. At the end of the day, the history of the world is that there are great power-poppy bands with great lyrics/hooks/etc. who get close to being stars and then don't because at the end of the day most people in the world don't want to hear that. I don't see anything hugely singular about BS. I like the 3rd, I listen to the other albums, and I think the Alex solo stuff is sometimes underrated.

I apologize if I offended Will Oldham fans. I was attempting to make a point about Miccio's contention that underpowered versions of "pop" get too much credence. Do you have to be a pervert to like Bonnie Prince Billy (whom I interviewed once and was very impressed with, btw, I'm just on the fence about his actual music, most of it)?
I lived in Memphis during the heyday of the Grifters. I regard their "Corolla Hoist" and "She Blows Stacks of Static" and a few other tunes--"X-Ray Hip"--as some of the best music to have come out of Memphis, perhaps the finest Memphis music of the '90s. Fat Possum reissued One Sock and Crappin' this month.

Edd totally otm about Oldham IMO

xpost. Glad to see the reissues (found them on Tidal, thank you) but Grifters are a band that's one well-curated singles-comp away from legendary status. Don't quite understand why that can't seem to happen after all these years.

I first encountered Chilton playing guitar for Panther Burns, and I wonder how many other people my age had that experience. Like trying to process why exactly this was an important thing that one needed to know.

xpost More about possibly (but not really) offending his fellow Parsons fans by saying GP was responsible for WO (sounds like a condition, accurately enough)!

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.)

Artful Dodger is a band I've only ever heard of when mentioned by Edd and Gorge on ILX as on this current thread or on Bands in the "powerpop" chapter of the 1980 new wave guide I just bought for http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=41&threadid=46289&action=showall&bookmarkedmessageid=28 off a seemingly homeless guy set up on the sidewalk of St Marks
I don't think they were considered Power Pop by most at the time, the time being the mid-seventies. Even listening now they sort of remind me of The Darkness, straddling some kind of line between different styles, a Big Rock bombastic presentation with perhaps some different kind of more pop lyrical content.

Some bands that are related to Artful Dodger, at least from the Spotify point of view:
Head East
Crack The Sky
Argent
Sugarloaf
Nantucket
Brownsville Station
White Witch
Wet Willie
Blues Image

Anyway back to the topic at hand. To concede Anthony's point, when I bought the records in the mid-80s I didn't get Big Star on the first several listens. Tbh I was a little disappointed if not horrified, thinking: This is supposed to sound like The Beatles? Not only does it not sound like The Beatles, it doesn't even sound like other stuff that is supposed to and does indeed sound like The Beatles, such as Badfinger, The Raspberries, or solo Beatles. The vocals sound like Robert Plant wailing in Zeppelin or some folky mumbling. Did any one of those early critics even mention the Zeppelin or Byrds influence? I don't seem to recall reading about that until recently. Eventually I decided I liked it and gave up worrying whether it sounded like the Fab Four or not, and that it was some sort of attempt at pop, which was successful on its own terms if not commercially, not finding its audience whether because of distribution issues or because that audience didn't exist at the time, they were either in the past or the future. Also, there seemed to be some undercurrent of depression or failure to be detected, either on the recordings themselves or through knowledge of Alex's career and then much later Chris's.

i first saw chilton at cbgb, probably around the time of that ork ep. (chris stamey, w/braces on his teeth, was in the band.) did i tell this before? anyway before the set he was crawling around on the stage setting up his amp, unassuming-looking in a ratty green t-shirt. i overheard a guy at the front of the stage, who must have assumed he was a roadie, ask him: hey, is this alex chilton guy any good? alex thought for a while and said, "yeah, he's pretty good. sometimes he drinks too much, but otherwise he's ok."

But then again it took me a few listens to get Robert Johnson as well after I bought The King of The Delta Blues singers on the Columbia Thesaurus of Classic Jazz, was that it? Eventually I totally got it. Recently was somewhat bemused by whatever Elijah Wald was trying to say in his book about Robert Johnson: that he wasn't really the real deal, the he was just a second-string songster, unpopular at the time, who was artificially injected into music history much later as a creation of John Hammond, as what the Oulipo would call an anticipatory plagiarist of Bob Dylan? Someone please to enlighten me.
xp

Did he give you the twisted smile, TSF, the grimace?

Re: depression and Big Star - def remember the third album, in the British music press and elsewhere, being described as the ultimate 'downer' alb in the 1980s ("any downs at all any downs at all") - poss enhanced by This Mortal Coil delivering bleakish versions of 'Holocaust' and 'Kangaroo' on their first alb (1984). 'Femme Fatale' aside, Third/Sister Lovers feels closest sonically and emotionally to Berlin amongst Lou Reed's discography at that moment in time.

xpost That's a great story TSF!

Yes, good AC story. Here's mine, forgive me if I've already linked to it too many times: Why is it that every time I'm at a show, I can never identify a single one of the hundreds of shitty, anonymous songs being blasted over the club PA system before the gig starts?

In my view, Artful Dodger is power pop, and in a way they're the precursor to Cheap Trick. "Talk Talk" from their first LP is a definite Beatles-American landmark; the rest of that record, with the exception of the definitely power pop "Wayside," isn't quite as distinctive. Honor Among Thieves is better, more consistent. Vocals weren't sneaky or vexed like Big Star's or Badfinger's. Even did a song called "Dandelion" that wasn't the Stones tune, covered "Keep a Knockin'" like the Flamin' Groovies did. That Spotify list is way off base, in my opinion. Take a listen to the first 2 Artful Dodger records and tell me if you hear Argent or Head East. I don't.

First AC show I saw was in March 1981 in Nashville, with the Panther Burns. His guitar playing was absolutely amazing. "We'll wait until Tav tunes his guitar!" was a line I recall. It was the real deal, avant-rockabilly like I've never heard since. None of the records they did come close to that, though "All Down the Line" on Behind the Magnolia Curtain does come close.

All the critics in the '70s pointed out that Big Star was like the Byrds. I think the sense of a band being really restrained in the service of...piloting the songs makes sense. But there's nothing really all that Byrds-like about Big Star, maybe there's some similarity to the first song on Notorious or something like "Jesus Is Just Alright" from Easy Rider. The Zeppelin comparison has been made; the third Led Zep record has some similarities to #1 Record. "Ramble On" maybe.

And OK, James, I've been reading up on Elijah Wald's work and, for ex., Greil Marcus' disagreement with Wald's contention in Escaping the Delta that Robert Johnson was a derivative songster who reworked previous music and whose reputation was inflated in the '60s. I knew Steve Calt, the blues writer who did the bio of Skip James and who died in 2010. A major guy. I wish I could've spent more time with him. Calt always maintained that the cult of '60s blues that led to Bloomfield, Clapton and Canned Heat came from a misreading of blues as a guitar music as opposed to a vocal music. But Wald, I think, discounts Johnson's guitar playing in order to make his point about the continuum of blues, and I think that he's off when he discounts blues itself in favor of mainstream pop that he claims Johnson and other "blues" performers did. Johnson was not exceptional; his recordings were sonically thin; and white people turned him into a romantic figure. Valid points, but on the other hand, you could say that Charlie Parker was really just turning the work of earlier saxophonists like Don Byas into stuff that later listeners would valorize beyond all reason. Wald's work tends to be about how listening to records has killed real-time music-making; he wrote an entire book about how the Beatles' work helped kill pop as a dance music. His Newport book, from 2015, talks about the confusion about rock-as-pop that characterized the 1965 folk festival.

Chilton identified with Gram Parsons and the offhand approach they took seems real similar. "Just to See You" from the 1970 solo record is a Parsons rip. The route from 1969 and Gilded Palace to the '90s and Will Oldham has to go thru punk, which I always thought was the thing that separated old-school alt-country from modern Americana. If you want to know why Nashville won and Memphis lost in the struggle to dominate music in the last 40 years, you could examine Oldham's career, along with that of many others--songs are just so adaptable, whereas performance styles are a bit more complicated. Perhaps indie-alt-country does performance styles more tellingly than Nashville can--I never bought into the greatness of Emmylou recording with Lanois, for example, his production seemed completely extraneous. So maybe Oldham knows something we don't. I know I'm not really getting to the heart of it here, complicated.

I tried to situate Oldham in pop in this piece from a couple years ago. Don't know how well I succeeded.

Here's Christgau on the first 3 Artful Dodger LPs. They did another one in 1980,Rave On, that I've never heard:
Artful Dodger [Columbia, 1976]
Having barely conquered my addiction to "Think Think," the supra-Beatles raver that opens side two, and having learned that "Think Think" stiffed as a single, I find myself clearheaded enough to report that if "Think Think" didn't make it this band will have to wait till next year, and to point out that next years sometimes come for bands this tight, melodic, and intense. B

Honor Among Thieves [Columbia, 1976]
These kids deserve to turn into teen heroes everybody can be proud of. They respect the rock and roll verities, but in a dynamic rather than an arty or nostalgic way: their instrumental wallop is powerful enough to keep them in there with the heavies, but so deft that the lyricism of their songs is left untouched. A lot of bands around CBGB will spend their lives wishing they could have gotten it together like this. B+

Babes on Broadway [Columbia, 1977]
OK, two nice if slightly deliberate albums of power pop go virtually unnoticed, so you up the power, especially since you're running out of the cute tunes 'n' tricks that provide the pop. But then it isn't power pop any more--sounds almost like Angel, or Queen. Sounds pretty desperate, too. C+

Here's "Think Think" (not "Talk Talk," as I call it above), from Artful Dodger. Too formalist to be popular, despite the heartiness of the vocals?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBEoNzGQEFI

And one from Rave On. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_JUrUPT-Yzs

(Maybe I'll read Wald and Calt's books, but as paraphased here, their points seem irrelevant at best---Robert Johnson may not have been all that in some way or other, but he was as much of a primary and galvanizing source of those songs and their sources and that sound and sensibility as most musos, most listeners of anu kind could find in the 50s-60s, and he still sounds powerfully affecting to me)(and he eventually went platinum, so I may not be the only one)(If the cannier of gifted Brits initially focused more on the guitar than the vocal tradition of the blues, it worked out well enough, as blues, blues-rock and blooze, and if it's creative misprision at best, then maybe Hubert Sumlin, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters, also BB, Freddy, and Albert King, for instance, might be okay with that)

Originally came here to say that say I just listed to the s/t Rock City album, rec in late 60s, released in '03, and it's pretty good power pop: though the pace gets almost leisurely on occasion--not Jody's fault, I don't think; he's ready to rock when Chris is, like when they invite us to "climb the walls" (of the world, not the asylum). "Lovely Lady" starts courtly, suddenly pauses about 2 minutes in, comes back with a drum beat, then, "You don't trust this fairy tale..." also there are three songs that made it onto Big Star's #1, as well they might, and Terry Manning's keys rec to fans of xpost Michael Brown, Garth Hudson for that matter (sometimes touching on CB's interest in religious-tending themes, though neither of them overdo it) and the CD adds a couple of refreshingly extroverted singles tracks by Rock City bassist Thomas Eubanks Icewater version of "Feel" is a bracing finale, oh yeah and Chilton shows up on the "Try Again", sounding very 'umble).
info from label:
http://www.luckysevenrecords.com/RC.htm

Thanks for Artful Dodger!

But there's nothing really all that Byrds-like about Big Star

"Ballad of El Goodo" isn't like the Byrds? AC hung out with McGuinn when he first moved to NYC and, according to the Jovanovic book, McGuinn was a big influence on him.

"Ballad of El Goodo" is kinda Byrds-like. Chilton sings a bit like McGuinn. Chilton also hung out with bluegrass-folk musician John Herald in New York. The early critics also compared Big Star to Moby Grape. I guess I hear the comparison: "8:05" and an obscure but beautiful track from Moby Grape '69, "What's to Choose," which is as downcast as any Big Star tune and as understated. Demo is even more anticipatory of Big Star than the studio version:
demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM77sgB4rpg
album version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jO3kKiTdchE
Maybe someone could do a collection called The Sources of Big Star, like Yazoo records did for Robert Johnson.

For another thread and another time, but I recommend Calt's I'd Rather Be the Devil bio of Skip James. Acid, unforgiving, analytical, disenchanted.

Terry Manning's 1970 Home Sweet Home is one of the first examples of Memphis power pop-Beatleism:
December 31, 2006

When Terry Manning sings about his "dear old mother" in "Choo Choo Train", he doesn't give a damn about her. Written by Donnie Fritts and Eddie Hinton, "Choo Choo Train" is only marginally straighter in the Box Tops' version, which Manning engineered. Home Sweet Home is a record of magnificently conceived and beautifully recorded parodies, and it's not without overtones of something approaching real feeling. Originally released in 1970 on the Stax imprint Enterprise, Home Sweet Home gives George Harrison's "Savoy Truffle" and Jack Clement's "Guess Things Happen That Way" the Memphis anglophile treatment, with Richard Rosebrough's drums locked into a stiff post-soul-music groove. It illustrates how Manning, Chris Bell (who plays guitar on four tracks) and other Ardent Studios denizens created Memphis power-pop by letting local traditions collide with cosmopolitan abstraction. These heartfelt jokes point the way toward Big Star's #1 Record and Radio City.
Artist Terry Manning
Album Home Sweet Home
Label Sunbeam
Author Edd Hurt No Depression Issue #67

Is there something in Nothing Can Hurt Me about how the Ardent guys were way early on The Beatles curve because of some connection with Vee Jay records? Like they had some early copies of The Beatles vs. The Four Seasons or something.

/ But there's nothing really all that Byrds-like about Big Star/

"Ballad of El Goodo" isn't like the Byrds? AC hung out with McGuinn when he first moved to NYC and, according to the Jovanovic book, McGuinn was a big influence on him.

Calt always maintained that the cult of '60s blues that led to Bloomfield, Clapton and Canned Heat came from a misreading of blues as a guitar music as opposed to a vocal music
Believe Francis Davis says something similar if more nuanced in his blues book.

The photo of Alex holding Untitled was the original cover for the first issue of his '70 album, on Ardent. He was a lover of the bayou even then.

Calt was one cranky guy, but brilliant. Kind of the Robert Crumb of blues writing. He always used to say that the white blues guitarists picked someone like B.B. or Albert King as role models because they knew the Kings could never upstage them. We both really liked Snooks Eaglin, who he thought far superior to any of the big-name blues guitarists lionized by fans in the '60s. In a way, his thinking on this is like Miccio's take on indie folk overestimating the worth of Radio City, except Calt was far too saturnine and Latinate a scholar to truck with pop, the Pet Shop Boys never entered his biosphere.

xpost
To oversimplify, in thinking about pop music one might think
1) Somebody made this music for some reason
2) Somebody sold this music for some reason
3) Somebody consumed this music for some reason

One might then try to determine some of those reasons if possible. There are people who only care about one of those questions and dismiss the others, but some of us might be interested in all three. Because of his career and his personality, and his association with one of the mother cities of modern pop music - as well as his adoption of another- Alex Chilton and his projects make for particularly interesting grist for the mill. In that framework of three simple questions and whilst the Rio Olympics are about to close, I would like to recommend Hello, Hello Brazil: Popular Music In The Making of Modern Brazil, by Bryan McCann.

except Calt was far too saturnine and Latinate a scholar to truck with pop, the Pet Shop Boys never entered his biosphere.

I'm a big fan of Brazilian music. Ruy Castro's book on bossa nova is one of the greatest things I've ever read and certainly answers James' three questions. Charles Perrone on MPB is another good one. I'm always trying to turn people onto João Gilberto, who is such a great artist. I wonder if Chilton ever listened to him. He certainly operates in some Ideal World of Pop that consumes him, so there's some similarity. A man and his guitar and you. Thanks for the recommendation.
Where I part company with Miccio, perhaps, and with Chuck Eddy, perhaps--Chuck is a hero of mine and in a way a mentor, but I could never write like he does--is in this question of why people make music. Being a professional is a good reason that I suspect isn't enough for some critics. Tricky territory indeed, if you're a pop fan who also respects what pop isn't equipped to do. A real swamp when it comes to attempting to write actual criticism of pop music.