Big Star

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"?

So if you look up "semipopular" on xgau's site, there are several iterations, as the kids say, but think it all comes back to thee earliest I've seen, from 1970 (in which he also tussles w terms like "artistic" and "musical"). Note that most of his examples already were or soon went on to make money, AKA vox populi, brothers and sisters and hardass realists:
the last two years have seen the development of a new phenomenon, which I call semipopular music. Semipopular music is music that is appreciated--I use the term advisedly--for having all the earmarks of popular music except one: popularity. Just as semiclassical music is a systematic dilution of highbrow preferences, semipopular music is a cross-bred concentration of fashionable modes. I'm not putting it down, for this is the music I am always praising ecstatically--the r&b takeoffs of Van Morrison and Randy Newman and Nolan, the easy electronicism of Terry Riley, the Wayne-Newton-with-a-bite of Nilsson, the self-conscious hillbilly plainsong of Tracy Nelson Country and (a very convoluted case) the Everly Brothers' Roots. Indeed, since writers and musicians usually prefer semipopular music, some of it even becomes popular; The Band and the Grateful Dead and Rod Stewart could all be argued into the category. My favorite examples, however, are untarnished by such associations. First is the Flying Burrito Bros., who on their first album offered the most outrageous combinations of pedal-steel and wah-wah distortion, verbal obscurity and country soul, all through the medium of a lot of ex-Byrd not-quite-stars. But even better is the Stooges, whose sole purported attraction, Iggy, continues to possess every star quality except fame.

I suppose semipopular music is decadent. It wouldn't be the first time that decadence has been the source of acute aesthetic pleasure. And indeed, the way it is so often enjoyed--quietly, stoned perhaps, Yes, perhaps. Yadda-yadda, whole thing here: [
http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/obsolesc.php Note that he seems kind of wry and/or bummed-out by the end, but '70 was a shit year for sure. Also you can see how he was already ready for Big Star.

And leave us not forget his later mention of the "bored enough to fuck with it" aesthetic.

The idea of a relationship between artist and audience that strengthens or tests the artist's original conception...like, country music is all about the conception of the artist meeting the approval or disapproval of an audience who is totally tuned into what she or she is doing. The Gilded Palace of Sin is semipopular--its audience may not have even really existed before the record got out into the world...

really enjoying this thread revival, lots to chew on, thx all

Indeed.

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 posted this upthread, but I still believe Big Star not being known while they were active was, for the most part, down to boring and sad logistics. iirc, the doc stated that copies of Radio City (other than promo/review copies, that is) didn't even leave the warehouse, due to the legal issues Stax/Ardent was grappling with.

Whatever audience there was couldn't have bought Radio City if they'd wanted to.

(Great and OTM posts, btw, Edd)

yeah I don't really buy that there were aesthetic reasons for their failure, the records literally weren't available

Ardent didn't release "September Gurls" as a single until the summer. Since they basically didn't tour very much and didn't have much of a live show, I wonder how effective any marketing Ardent could've done for it would've been, assuming the records got into stores. Would the audience for retro-Beatles that had bought "Go All the Way" bought "September Gurls," and would radio stations have played it? I'm not sure that 1974 audiences would've bought it in any numbers to make them into stars, even with marketing and touring behind them. Was there a context they could've operated in? I think they would've been compared to the James Gang or maybe Rick Derringer by me and my friends in high school back then. I knew enough rock history to understand the '50s revival, but I didn't have any context for the '60s then, I had just discovered stuff like the Who's early stuff and the Barrett Floyd. I didn't begin to systematically listen to the Beatles, who'd I'd absorbed thru osmosis as a kid, until 1979, when I bought Rubber Soul, Hard Day's Night and For Sale, after I knew about Big Star. Anything pre-1967 seemed ancient. Those Beatles records were like new music to me, because I had already dismissed them as passe. It was the '70s.
Can't remember what George Pelecanos novel it is, but there's one set in 1976 that uses someone talking about records they liked as verisimilitude to establish the era, and they mention Radio City.

DJ: "You're been getting an awful lot of critical acclaim for your new album [1974's Radio City]; it's really good!"

AC: "Yeah, uh, that's nice... I hope it sells... we've had critical acclaim before."

...

DJ: "The kind of music you play has been compared to the Beatles in the mid-60s. Do you find the music to be timely? I mean, is it anachronistic to be playing this type of music in the mid-1970s?"

AC: "I don't know. I haven't really decided yet. Somebody may convince me of that yet. I'm just doing what I like to do, you know? It sounds melodious to my ears."

...

AC: "This first one's from our first album, #1 Record, which can't be found anywhere. It's really rare. In fact, I can't find any around Ardent Records anymore."

Big Star Live, 1974

Would the audience for retro-Beatles that had bought "Go All the Way" bought "September Gurls," and would radio stations have played it? I'm not sure that 1974 audiences would've bought it in any numbers to make them into stars, even with marketing and touring behind them.

Maybe not stars necessarily, but at the very least I think decent radio exposure and touring could have pushed their albums into the mid-lower regions of the charts, and maybe made local hits of their singles.

The touring issue is a big one, though. Frampton was brought up earlier, and he toured pretty much non-stop from when he left Humble Pie in 1971 until he Came Alive! in 1976, all the while honing his audience-baiting chops as the halls slowly got bigger. His albums didn't crack the top 100 until Frampton in 1975 -- even with A&M pushing him, and his Humble Pie pedigree, it still took him the entire duration of Big Star's existence to find an audience.

I'm not one for "what if"s, but I think it's safe to say that if Big Star had been able to do extensive tours (granted, an impossibility given Stax/Ardent couldn't provide tour support/promotion) over a period of years, their profile would have been dramatically higher. Not Frampton-level by any stretch, but at the very least an album or two on the charts.

Thread caused me to listen to NCHM soundtrack. I'd seen it but in an environment without really hearing the song mixes. Holy shit, this reconfiguration, less bar band more ... What? Almost chamber-ey is fucking awesome at times. The versions of when my baby's beside me and My life is right, for example, are so nice. 13, wow. The de-zepped versh of o my soul is maybe too much. Haven't got to last few songs. Totally get ppl saying these sound too twee or soft. Different enough and good enough to ensure I'll play shitloads of this.

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.
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