Alex Chilton RIP 2010

The NPR obit has been amended to say he was cutting his lawn when he dropped to the ground. What a comfortingly domestic way to go.

Yeah, saw that a little while ago. I don't want to die mowing my lawn because I fucking hate lawns and having to mow them, but dying in my tracks while out working in my vegetable garden would be the best way to go, I think.

The NPR obit has been amended to say he was cutting his lawn when he dropped to the ground.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nM975_Ld9S0

http://idler.co.uk/conversations/conversations-alex-chilton/

pretty rad old interview that frequent mentions of astrology upthread reminded me of. seeing him with the box tops last year he just seemed so happy, bopping about, and iirc in the interview above he's talking about earning enough money to have the next six months worked out, then starting again. seemed to have a good life.

also i don't think we've brought up the time he socked charlie manson yet. lot of stories to get through.

"the time he socked charlie manson"

yeah?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9LGwzGnx5w

Via the Commercial Appeal, Bob Mehr's story a year and a half back about Chris Bell. It seems an appropriate complement now.

e socked charlie manson"

yeah?

― zingzing, Thursday, March 18, 2010 11:00 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

seem to recall some discussion in the big star thread; there isn't actually much more to the story, just a graf in the jovanovic book saying he did just that, not having placidly taken to the family's attempts to lure him in.

Just listened to his demo for Big Black Car from the boxset- so so sad...I'm really at a loss for words.

RIP

Been spinning his work all day long. I never got to see him perform, damnit. "High Priest" was my gateway in, still love that records and the associated EPs.

schlump, i can imagine he'd punch just about anyone, and manson was certainly someone worth hitting, i suppose... i guess he was visiting with dennis wilson? (dennis is someone i'd compare him to, in a lot of ways...)

i've been listening to this live album from berkeley in 1985. it's great. he's reconciled with his past to the point that he plays things straight, but he still whips it out on the guitar. i'm totally a lost-period chilton fan, but when he played it with reverence, he's just as compelling. i love this man.

it doesn't take his death to remind me that he's possibly the greatest rock star of all time, but it does reinforce it. sad, but happy.

I have always been a Chris Bell guy but this is really sad. Spinning Third tonight.

Damn.

Crank it:

Cranking it.

wish we had a joint so bad

RIP Alex Chilton

Thoughts from Mr. Westerberg, plus Craig Finn and Patterson Hood:

http://music-mix.ew.com/2010/03/18/alex-chilton-paul-westerberg-patterson-hood-craig-finn/

oh man "Motel Blues", search that shit

totally cried today listening to "For You". the guy wrote like a good half dozen or more of the finest songs ever recorded in this sorry modern era.

("For You" is by Jody Stephens)

goddamn, Mark Linkous and now Chilton, this is a rough month

― Whiney for No Apparent Reason (some dude), Thursday, March 18, 2010 1:46 AM (3 minutes ago)

this is exactly how i am feeling at the moment

― First and Last and Safeways ™ (jjjusten), Thursday, 18 March 2010 01:51 (Yesterday)

Thirded.

haha sorry Jody (xp). Doesn't Chilton still sing it though?

also "Motel Blues" is by Loudon Wainwright (although yeah Alex's version is great)

is "it came from memphis" worth getting? it seems that the copies from the ny public library aren't available for loan, which is kinda shitty. ("kinda" in that they're available for research and "performing arts," which i don't understand.. what that means...)

by that, i mean will i learn anything significant about chilton or the memphis sound (particularly post-big star) with which he was associated?

So many people have said the sorts of things that I would like to say about Alex. It really boils down to the intimacy. The one on one. I always felt like he was singing about what I was thinking and feeling.

I was 19 when I bought a Big Star compilation on Line Records. I think it was called Big Star's Greatest. Silver cover with a giant red star on it. This would have been around 1991. I wore that thing out. And then the Fantasy "#1 Record/Radio City" disc landed. Wow.

Big Star traced some connection between my intense love for the Beatles and the alternative rock I grew up on throughout the 80s. But more than that, Chilton, particularly from Radio City on, was singing about being the underdog. The awkward, uncomfortable young adult. All these girls come and go. I loved you, well nevermind. That stuff resonates when you're scared, insecure and looking for reasons why you feel that way.

But beyond that, there was that voice. So pure, so crystalline. It's like the best fucking voice in the world. And that guitar. That bell-tone out of phase Strat through a wound up Twin. Compressed - Byrdsian, Nowhere Man chime. It all conspired to create some Parsifalian ideal of the perfect pop frontman. At least in my mind.

Something about the way Alex combined his voice, lyrics and guitar really affected me in a way no other musician ever has. I really thank him for that. And that's why I'm really, truly gutted by his passing. It was said above, but I feel like I lost a friend. Someone I never met, but a friend none the less.

That's the true magic of music. That a song can reshape your entire outlook, a vocal can send shivers down your spine. A guitar figure can make you ecstatic. Alex Chilton managed to do that to me for nearly 20 years, and he'll do it for the rest of my life.

amen

'It Came from Memphis' is good: not a whole lot of it is about Alex, really, but also, it all is. Really insightful on figures such a Dickinson, on John Fry and Manning, on the Memphis bohemia that nurtured Big Star.

x-post

so that craig finn thing:

But there are so many songs that just give me so much joy. ‘Thank You Friends’ is one of my favorites. As someone who spends a lot of time thinking about positivity in rock n’ roll, I think that’s about as positive a rock song as has ever been written.

lol what?

sure bobby g is a berk but the fact is he and mcgee did as much as anybody in the uk to promote and enshrine chilton's reputation in the 1980s and beyond, dude has earned the right to blah abt him now

Oh yeah, what a surprise, two guys from Glasgow who liked Big Star and Alex Chilton, how novel of them. Give Bob his due though, at least he didn't claim to have been at the first Big Star rehearsals or to have played synth on the title track of "Like Flies On Sherbert". On the latter, had that blasting on the headphones as I walked (dawdled) to work this morning, walked into the building as the last notes of the title track (Bobby and all) died away...

i'm totally a lost-period chilton fan, but when he played it with reverence, he's just as compelling. i love this man.

yeah: there's something super satisfying, in terms of career arcs, in the teenage rock star turning into this guy who loved playing standards with pickup groups, putting out let's get lost and jamming on ah ti ta ti ta ta

Yeah, I always thought Alex was being deeply sarcastic in Thank You Friends

x-post

you can hear it either way, but in the context of that record it sure sounds like the friends who made this total collapse all so "probable" are being blamed as much as they're being thanked

It's a great song, any way you slice it.

But not surprising that Finn, who is neither stupid nor unaware of rock history, chooses to interpret it literally, given his interests in rock'n'roll as a source of positivity.

yeah - it's not like Finn doesn't write songs that are ambivalent and conflicted about the positive power of rock'n'roll himself

I think it can be taken both ways: sarcastic because he's thanking his "friends" for success that never materialized, but he is also genuinely thanking his friends for keeping him alive through the dark times.

can't believe craig finn died

Heaven needed another Springsteen fan.

weird i guess i never ever thought about "thank you friends" as being sarcastic.

deeply moving song to me.

he is also genuinely thanking his friends for keeping him alive through the dark times.

i think this interpretation is fine as long as you dont listen to the vocal.

I never paid attention to it, so I never thought it was sarcastic. I had the same problem for about thirty years with the song "Reason To Believe."

yeah, it always seemed kinda bitter to me

huh weird. well i'm going to keep interpreting the song the way i need it to be.

I think he might be genuinely thanking his friends for keeping him super-wasted, and acknowledging that maybe more could have happened for him career-wise if that hadn't been the case.

i never heard it as sarcasm, either, but interpreting it that way is an interesting twist!

thanks again, ilm.

i find it very moving too. mainly for the severe disconnect between the vocal and the lyric/arrangement/production. i mean this is why radio city songs are more powerful than
#1 record songs, cos you can hear the anger and bitterness and distaste. that's doubled on third.

frogman otm

It's too bad they never had a number one record. The greatest band ever. Why bother going on.

I've talked about Alex, the whole Memphis thing and all that a lot on here. Getting to burrow under that scene a bit and walk the streets down there, and in New Orleans too, taught me a lot about what it takes to play music. Or at least rock 'n' roll music. I find it interesting that Chilton was into baroque music in the later years of his life. I think Chilton was interesting not least because he kind of saw through what had happened in "rock" "pop" "indie" or whatever that shit was, starting around the time he took some time off to get his head together in New Orleans. I'm basically one of those people who likes a lot of what "rock" and "pop" and "indie" or whatever the fuck that was had to offer, after about 1980, but doesn't really connect with a lot of it all that much. At least compared to how I feel about New Orleans r&b or soul or '60s/early '70s pop. I never though that New Order or even Bowie were exactly good for the general state of music-making. Or Roxy Music; I like Roxy Music, but it never was any kind of template for how I may want to lead my life. I understand there's a big wide world of deracinated music out there and that's how pop works, to some degree. But my latching onto that--what did that ever really do for me?

I think a lot of people felt Alex Chilton was a conservative if not a reactionary, always covering Ernie K-Doe and Chris Kenner and soul shit that was like, nice, but hardly modern. Or that he tried some of the more or less typical experimental extensions of existing pop forms in the '70s and then decided he'd had enough of it. Hard to say. When you saw Alex Chilton you saw something that wasn't always perfect--he could sing out of tune, play indifferently, and coast; but he could also hit it just right in the moment and I, at least, had to sit back and think, "Hell, I couldn't do that in a million years." There weren't any drum machines or overly rehearsed or perfect elements to what he was attempting. I believe that part of what went wrong in American music after about 1980 has to do with the lack of a real tradition--beyond rock 'n' roll and Bowie and the fucking Stooges and all that kindergarten shit. You could call it jazz sensibility, I guess--professionals living in the moment and trying to hit it right, within certain parameters that may seem (no, did and do seem) old-fashioned and proscriptive to indie people who have only a blurry conception of what music used to be, say, in that old-tyme Fats Waller era or whatever. A foreshortened and rather dim idea of what music-making could be. I'm not saying I think everything after 1980 is worthless at all, I certainly like and love a lot of it, from hip-hop to Nashville country to, fuck, the Japandroids or whoever: noble savages with their guitars and all that, all the revisionist young people attending to their Zombies or Gang of Four records, the neo-folkies.

But put 'em up there with some simple--seemingly simple--r&b song to play more or less the way it was intended to be played, hit it and make it work, without the apparatus of irony. Who among them has the wisdom to do that, or the professionalism to make it work? I mean, if Count Basie could play them old standards more or less in the way you'd expect, having paid your money, then tell me why it's an advance that a whole generation or two of musicians have rejected that outright, given their social/cultural advantages? I'm not saying I know the answer, but that it's a legit question. It's like I always tell people here in fucking Nashville: these people here expect music to be a certain way that is just so out of proportion with what music actually DOES or at least what it used to do. Doesn't make sense to me. Of course, here, you just plug into the machine and get some songs tossed off by people whose idea of human experience is pretty lame and make a record that is controlled by fifty people from start to finish, so you're naturally gonna have expectations that have stepped off the actual stage or parlor or room that music used to be made in.

Chilton's career more or less embodied what I'm talking about, and I believe he understood a lot of this far better--because he was a working musician--that what I can express above. Has something to do with humanity, humility and all that shit.

(if you don't mind, could you please keep going?)

Yes, please.

totally feelin you on the lost tradition angle - very true. kinda destroyed by punk's whole "you don't HAVE to know how to play your instrument" thing which is true in some ways but horribly wrong in others and in general bad for maintaining any general level of cultural vitality and continuity