Alex Chilton S&D

Of course the third Big Star record is an Alex Chlton solo album and it's one of the greatest LPs ever made, in my opinion, greater even than "Radio City."

So I would say get "19 Years," "Sherbert" and "Destruction" and you'd have it. Alex has been treading the same water for years now, though--I've seen him be brilliant live and I've seen him just go thru the motions. Some experimental genie seems to ruin many of his efforts, which I guess is kind of a good thing, since how many performers even try anything new, ever? As a commentator on pop-music history, he's been intermittently great--there's something very second-hand about his passion, which doesn't mean I disregard what's real about his passion. Very strange guy, but I rate him very high as a guitarist, despite the fact that he's among the most mannered of all rock guitarists.

"1970" is decent, I always liked "Just to See You" and "All I Really Want is Money," both of which circulated for yrs on tapes...I never liked "Free Again" at all. What they do to "Sugar Sugar" is nice. It's good juvenalia, I guess.

The Big Star reunion CD is all right--they left off the best thing about that show in Missouri, though: AC leading his backup band thru the very demanding changes of Gene Chandler's "Duke of Earl" as an encore.

Will, it is "Desafinado."

skin as soft as buttermilk

guys which of his solo albums/compilations are worth checking out? i'm going through a big star phase and i'd like to explore chilton solo too. i know it's depressing stuff, i'm down for that

solo chilton isn't that depressing really -- it's fun! definitely start with like flies on sherbert

omg that french tv clip

The album called 1970 rocks balls and isn't depressing at all; the cover of "Jumpin' Jack Flash" tops the Stones' original (acc. to me)

Search: the 1987 CD version of High Priest on Big Time, which includes the Feudalist Tarts EP and the "No Sex"/"Underclass" single.

...but is apparently rare as hell, because I can't find any copies for sale anywhere.

Wow, this edition is apparently really rare. I wonder what I could get for it.

yeah, 1970 is good, he's trying out different things like country rock, funk, almost bubblegum-y ballads

fuck the "Jumpin' Jack Flash" on 1970 is tight. The drum sound in particular is amazing, as you'd expect from a Terry Manning production, as is the bass. And Chilton's lead guitar mines the song's implicit funk, brings it forth. The vocal is good and hoarse too but the rhythm section sells this one.

kinda cool
Ray Davies , whose new album See My Friends contains special contributions from artists like Billy Corgan and Bruce Springsteen, recently talked about working with Alex Chilton. The Big Star icon died earlier this year, but he recorded “Till the End of the Day” with Ray Davies before he became sick.

Speaking to ClashMusic, Ray Davies elaborates on the collaboration: “Way back in 2004 I was in New Orleans, recovering from an injury, and I was befriended by a neighbor called Alex Chilton. Alex had been in a band called Big Star, and had sung on a record called ‘The Letter’ by The Box Tops. We didn’t talk about music much, but he did say to me before I came back to England, ‘You know, I’ve recorded one of your songs, ‘Till the End of the Day’, with Big Star, and I’d love to do another song with you. And he asked me to write some songs for him – I felt really flattered, because by then I had found out about his history. A very unassuming guy.”

Then, in 2009, Chilton and Davies did indeed get together to record. Davies recalls: “In 2009, on July 4th, Independence Day, he came up to Konk Studios. He was a real character – he was wearing a New Orleans beret, he had a cigarette holder, he was a chain smoker, and I think a recovering drinker – and he said, ‘Let’s do it!’ I said, ‘What would you like to do?’ He said, ‘Till the End of the Day’ and ‘Set Me Free.’ So I just had an acoustic guitar and a rhythm box, because I hadn’t organized anything. I played guitar and Alex sang.”

http://www.gibson.com/Files/aaFeaturesImages2010/ray-davies_see-my-friends.jpg
artists listed on the cover of this tribute makes it look fucking horrible

http://www.empsfm.org/education/index.asp?categoryID=26&ccID=127&xPopConfBioID=1436&year=2011

Wish I could make it to Los Angeles and hear this Holly George-Warren presentation on Alex Chilton at the February 2010 EMP Pop conference

She's writing a bio of him that is scheduled for a 2012 release.

ooh that does look good. interesting that there's a bio in the works. would read.

thought i'd bumped one of the AC threads to say this a while back but either way, damn, cliches still sounds exquisite to me

I picked up Cliches in a used cd shop last year and still haven't gotten around to it. This week!

would be really interested to hear from anyone else who likes/hates it etc, i'd never heard anything about it before hearing it. it's a really good showcase for his guitar playing, &c, but it's also just such a satisfying fit for him, knowing how into the standards he was, & how much working in that sorta context was what he was drawn to, eg playing with pick-up groups etc.

It makes me feel great listening to it, his guitar is so enveloping.

Also note the Box Tops reunion album is surprisingly alright, with a few of the tracks absolutely essential for AC fans.

Cliches is really great, I wish there were five more Chilton albums like it. OTM about his guitar, he was such a fun player.
haven't heard the box tops reunion album! which songs are the good ones?

"Flying Saucers Rock'n'Roll", "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Little Latin Lupe Lu" are my faves. All covers, I believe, but then few can choose covers and make them their own like Alex.

cool, i'll check it out.
listening to cliches right now, you can really tell how much chilton loved these songs. sometimes his covers sound kinda jaded (guess i'm thinking of Set/Loose Shoes), but this one just overflows with warmth/affection. his friendliest record?

Set/Loose Shoes

No, that's the one irredeemable album he ever released, as far as I'm concerned. Beyond tossed off, really embarrassing when you think about how much raw talent he's got.

i like some of the stuff on Set, but it definitely just keeps going downhill as the album progresses. it's too bad, because the material itself is great, and I can imagine alex doing far better versions of those songs.

Picked up that new 1970 sessions disc over lunch, excited to dig in.

I have an earlier reissue, pfork review raised some things that struck me as odd - like complaining about a "rave-up" at the end of "Every Day As We Grow Closer"...? that must have been tacked on, I'm guessing? cuz there's no such rave-up on my copy

in general it's like half a great album imho

Well, even half a great album means more good Chilton in my life.

I remember coming across a 45" of Teenage Fanclub covering "Free Again" in the early 90s and being really frustrated that I couldn't find the original. just took 20 years lol.

free again, although a diff version, was available on an alex chilton comp that came out in the 90s. it's from roughly the same era as the 1970 version i think

19 years: a collection it was called. came out in 1991

hm yeah, can anyone report back as to what the differences between this and the earlier 1970 album are? if you've got that, do you need the new one?

From what I can tell from the tracklists alone, subtract "Funk National" from 1970 and add the following new tracks:

13. All We Ever Got From Them Was Pain
14. I Want You To Have My Babies
15. Another Place, Another Time And You
16. Every Day As We Grow Closer (Original Mono Mix)
17. The EMI Song (Smile For Me) (Original Mono Mix)
18. Free Again (Original Mono Mix)
19. Come On Honey (Original Mono Mix)
20. All I Really Want Is Money (Original Mono Mix)
21. I Wish I Could Meet Elvis (Original Mono Mix)
22. The Happy Song (Original Mono Mix)

"Funky National"

oh cool that Another Place, Another Time And You is being put out officially -- it's on a big star bootleg, always wondered why it wasn't on the recent box set. guess it was more of a chilton solo thing. an instrumental, verrrrry pretty.

listened to Free Again this morning -- really a nice collection of songs. Think I prefer the 1970 sequencing, but that might be because I'm more used to it. shocking that these tracks remained unreleased for so long -- to my ears there are at least three or four hit songs. amazing that some record exec didn't hear them and want to put 'em out. no idea if they were shopped around extensively or what. obviously chilton was trying out a wide range of styles, but i can imagine a lot of these becoming radio staples in the early 70s, even more so than his big star tunes.

which songs are you talking about?

the hits? Every Day As We Grow Closer, The EMI Song (Smile For Me), Free Again ...

http://hasitleaked.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/artworks-000054834936-lp94sw-t500x500.jpg

On the night of February 13, 1997 Alex Chilton and his band were getting ready to play their second set of the night at the Knitting Factory in New York City when the lights went out. What happened was this album, a spontaneous off the cuff performance. This is Alex thinking on his feet, in the moment, bouncing songs and ideas off the folks that stuck around for a real one-of-a-kind exchange. This is as close and personal as it gets. Much of the material will be new to even hard core fans, there's Johnny Cash to the Beach Boys.--Amazon Release: Oct.8

1. Last Bouquet 2:44
2. Step Right This Way 2:50
3. Let's Get Lost 2:20
4. D-I-V-O-R-C-E 1:40
5. Raining In My Heart 3:14
6. Lovesick Blues 2:33
7. Girl From Ipanema 3:15
8. My Baby Just Cares For Me 3:49
9. Motel Blues 3:08
10. Someone To Watch Over Me 1:35
11. Footprints In The Snow 2:49
12. A Case Of You 2:02
13. Wouldn't It Be Nice 2:57
14. Surfer Girl 1:59
15. Solar System 2:50
16. I Walk The Line 2:05
17. If I Had A Hammer 2:56
18. You Can Beat Your Heart On Me 2:51

looove his take on my baby just cares for me. let's get lost too.

Have you heard this whole set? How's the rest?

get back, typo!

Alex's guitar style is one weird thing after another. I can't think of any other rock guitarist who was more varied while at the same time so, not limited, but consistently identifiable even when he was aiming for what I believe he was interested in: a kind of anonymity. The stealth of the rhythm guitarists he liked, which had to include Teenie Hodges, Cropper, Reggie Young, Bobby Womack, Dave Davies, John Lennon and Snooks Eaglin. And basically every R&B guitarist who played chords and a combination of those chords and figured stuff behind a vocal. Also, Little Beaver on the Miami stuff with Betty Wright and his own great Party Down album. And Johnny Guitar Watson and Carl Wilson. Also Hendrix, whom I think Alex has more than a little affinity for and with whom Alex could've easily played with. That's a very odd set of reference points for a "rock" guitarist, like he aspired to be the guy in the background on a Brenton Wood record. It's also a style that seems to disappear in front of your ears--weightless, not really "bluesy" but totally blues-oriented, not "heavy" but strange, strangulated, and decidedly off-kilter amid the standard usages he favored. However the heck he did Radio City, that stands as a monument to anti-rock rock guitar as surely as anything by Johnny Thunders or Lou Reed. Whatever he's playing underneath the lines in "She's a Mover" that go "now all night" and "she's coming from," which in cover versions just gets turned into the chords themselves, very easy shit, is completely ineffable and functions as commentary that's never over the line into embellishment, but is obviously intended as commentary. That's an extremely subtle gift, and every single thing he plays on that record is actually just about the simplest stuff you can play. Not necessarily harmonically, but certainly it never strays from the most basic things. What remains so uncanny about Radio City is, if you listen to the thing enough and then stop to remember, this is rock 1973, you begin to realize that's its just one step over and across from completely standard playing, like the fucking James Gang and Rick Derringer and so forth, but it has a totally different feel. "September Gurls" in particular is so, so simple.

Also uncanny is the stuff on the third Big Star album. "You Can't Have Me" is just like I to IV chords, yet listen carefully and he's also juicing them with subtle dissonances and wide voicings--big chords. There's the barest hint of "jangle" in one section that disappears like Windex in the heat. "Thank You Friends" is like American Studio Craft, as if it's some Ronnie Milsap record produced by Chips Moman in 1970, just the barest hint of something outside the normal I-II-IV_V progression, a suspension that hooks you in. And again, just very simple. The Chilton space is one where things are up on the beat, and rendered in a tempo neither very slow or very fast, a medium tempo that allows for reflection. I think his least effective, but still interesting, guitar playing comes in 1977, when he does indeed sound something like Neil Young or Tom Verlaine. He's barely on his marks, skidding around and making a comedy act out of making the changes, but he makes them, mostly. Again, the basics: the version of "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It" on the CBGB-recorded One Day in New York set is exemplary blues-rock guitar 101, chugging along as the rhythmic pulse and one slangy lick that anchors the turnaround, the psychology of which he totally respects even as the "solo" careers almost out of the picture, like Richard Lloyd in Tops Barbeque in Memphis. Take it down into your own thang, son, and don't forget the sauce while you're down here with us.

Marshall Crenshaw is a better guitarist, I think, obviously, but Alex and Marshall Crenshaw are almost doin' the same thing, in general, and Crenshaw's "Seven Miles an Hour" is my single favorite thing he ever did, except for a song called "Passing Through" which is as beautiful as the most melancholy Big Star tunes, and it's Alex cleaned up, more uptight, in a carefully arranged room full of white furniture and 37-year-old ex-beauty queens both Alex and Marshall wish they knew better.

Weightless guitar, Reggie Young meets Hendrix meets Mick Ronson and goes out for a grilled cheese sandwich. Pretty much how I remember his guitar playing when he was in a good mood and on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcZk3PYeTkk

Wow, thanks! Also,
...exemplary blues-rock guitar 101, chugging along as the rhythmic pulse and one slangy lick that anchors the turnaround, the psychology of which he totally respects even as the "solo" careers almost out of the picture, like Richard Lloyd in Tops Barbeque in Memphis. Take it down into your own thang, son, and don't forget the sauce while you're down here with us is pretty much my impression of how he fit (esp. instrumentally: vocals are also respectful enough, while slightly campy, w/o irony [of lol what am I goofy white pop-rock boy doing here] getting too underlined) w Hi Rhythm on the xpost live one-off (I'm assuming it's that, but hope he did perform with them again at some point, recorded or not).

Alex had never met the Hi players in toto, except for Charles Hodges, who played on one track on Man Called Destruction, and never played with 'em again.

Did you note the "(Theme From) A Summer Place" quotation solo at the end of the first song on that video?

Excuse the typos. Alex also was actually literate, so I guess I need to be more careful. Also, I think the bio by George-Warren is very flawed. There's not one bit about his style or approach in a practical sense. No discussion of how he got his guitar sound. Very light on his last decade. Alex needed a very tough person who was also a discerning ear to how musicians achieve their effects, which she's just too travails-of-thwarted-star to bother with. I actually can't think of one piece or book that gets him. I've read just about every interview ever done with him and listened to every interview I can find. From that you begin to get the picture. Alex was both a synoptic student of pop and rock and a guy who actually contributed to it, fundamentally at a Sun Records level. Which is completely singular.

Edd, judging from the most recent thread revive, I think you are the one to write the book on LX.

Or if that's too stressful maybe we can have you hypnotized like the guy in PKD's Time Out of Joint so that you can write the book while you think you are doing something else.

Just was moved through the ILX pachinko game from the Doris Day to the Terry Melcher thread, which led me to listen to his jaw-dropping Is It Tone Deaf Or Genius? take on “Stagger Lee” which somehow reminded me of Alex’s approach.

Edd is now one of the lobes (along with ov mastermynd---Dickinson-Chilton-inspired---thee spirit and letter, incl. covers ov "Bangkok" and "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It," also a dystopian vision of Spooner and Karen Oldham----It Came From Nashville: https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0267189080_10.jpg

In late 2020, after figuring out that the only thing I wanted to do musically was a kind of cabaret-style retrospect of some great songs I thought other people ought to know about, I assembled a group of Nashville musicians at Sundog Recording Studio with engineer and producer Michael Esser. We recorded six songs drawn from the mists of the 1970s, and added one instrumental I wrote myself. We cut with almost no rehearsal, and trusted to the unguarded moment to guide us in our reconstructions of these timeless tunes.
...Fayetteville, Paris, Nashville, Memphis, man, it's all the same on this record.
https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/album/varnished-suffrages
https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/album/varnished-suffrages

Sorry, I meant (along with *Michael Esser*)

Also meant *"1980,"* a dystopian vision of Spooner and Karen Oldham.

Nice!

Good production job Edd

For AC's 75th birthday, Chuck Prophet reposts his Magnet comments on meeting him/playing the same club, as a 22-year old Green On Redder:
https://chuckprophet.substack.com/p/alex-chilton?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=524994&post_id=182886205&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=4iue&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

Two '87 sets from trove ov legendary Chicago taper Aadam Jacobs, one '88 show posted by Thriftkid:
https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22Alex+Chilton%22

Thriftstorekid, I should have said.

Also (thx to ilxor peisistratos on JR thread)
Government Center---Alex Chilton Sings Jonathan Richman 2007 & 1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccsASP0aofY

^love this

From RIP Brian Wilson:

Numerous anecdotes have been reported about Wilson's obsession with the song:

Alex Chilton, the former lead singer of Big Star, recalled receiving middle-of-the-night phone calls from Wilson asking him to sing on a recording of "Shortenin' Bread"' ("He was telling me I have the perfect voice for it").[31]

two posts by kurt schwitters:

Alex Chilton loved LOVE YOU a lot. This Love You cover done in the style of Big Star is so f'n good.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=evuWI44bRmU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK8fOnD2yos

Seem to recall somewhat recent discussion of Carl Wilson playing the first Big Star record for Brian while Alex was on the phone iirc.

Reposting Terry Manning telling the story:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjsPl9A4Tiw

Oho, thanks! Still got Terry and Hi Rhythm ripping through "I Can't Stand The Rain" live at the high school prom upthread---also way up there, we talked about and took off from this and this kind of thang---but somehow never posted it?

Alex Chilton & Hi Rhythm Section---Boogie Shoes: Live on Beale Street

http://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=OLAK5uy_lsWkaPCRp-lNbza4gY5Ti1cXylq-jhEbA

"Rain" was also unreleased, don't recall if it was finished.

I did a Chilton deep dive last year and there's so much good music spread across his career. His Black List EP has one of his last great originals: "Guantanamerika." But it's his cover of "I Will Turn Your Money Green" that kicks serious ass.

Peter Stampfel also likes to do that last one iirc

Yeah that mid-late 80s period is all good, lots of hidden bits like "Rubber Ball" as well.

Just caught up to this nice Chilton remembrance that Edd Hurt wrote back in December.

https://chapter16.org/pop-polymath/