Alex Chilton RIP 2010

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

chilton played it both ways, too,

Chilton later said that when the recording sessions began, he began to think, "'Man these guys don't know the songs...this must sound terrible'. But when I went in the control room and heard what we’d been doing, it was just incredible sounding. Getting involved with Dickinson opened up a new world for me. Before that I'd been into careful layerings of guitars and voices and harmonies and things like that, and Dickinson showed me how to go into the studio and just create a wild mess and make it sound really crazy and anarchic. That was a growth for me."

Dickinson affirmed that Chilton consciously wanted the musicianship to be sloppy. He clarified that he plays guitar on the album despite not being technically proficient: "A lot of the guitar on Sherbert is me. Alex said, 'You still play like you’re 14 years old.' I said, 'Yeah, I play bad.' That's what he wanted."

chilton played it both ways, too,

aw man I thought you meant he and Chris Bell really did have a thing :(

there's kinda a similar strain with Miles (or Sun Ra) in the 70s making people play instruments they weren't familiar with etc. but I think the key difference there is that guys like Chilton and Miles and Sun Ra were exceptionally conscious of tradition, and were trying to figure out how the traditions they were versed in could accomodate that other kind of unschooled/wild playing and expand the existing boundaries.

whereas several generations later you just had kids who literally didn't know anything beyond "Sid Vicious couldn't play his bass - why should I bother learning?"

xp

like, it didn't go any deeper than that - there was no experience, no wisdom behind it

kids these days

I fully admit that I subscribed to this "you don't need to know how to play!" philosophy as a young'un. it's true at first, but obviously if you keep playing you um learn stuff. I do think that what is still completely true is that you do not need to subscribe to any established convention about HOW to play your instrument, but you should have some idea of the sound you are trying to achieve and a technique/method for achieving it.

i really feel like people say "oh punk bands couldn't play" but honestly lots of the great punk bands had some SICK players in them.

like okay who are the fathers of american hardcore? you'd have to say bad brains and greg ginn - dudes could fuckin' tear it up...shit the minutemen were next level and most of the bands that started sorta ramshackle, like huskers or ESPECIALLY the meat puppets, got good really quick...by the time the meat puppets do up on the sun they are on some super crazy grateful dead fast shit

frankly one of the problems with capital P punk bands now is that most of the bands are so guitar center with their chops IMO

if you count the matlock era pistols as the "real" lineup, then all the dudes could play really well

(edd, I'm waiting 4 u 2 continue, even thru this zzz off-topic sidebar)

i really feel like people say "oh punk bands couldn't play" but honestly lots of the great punk bands had some SICK players in them.

this is totally true and I'm not gonna dispute it - it was more the generations that came after it (I'm lookin at you Calvin Johnson) that took this philosophy to unfortunate extremes

calvin johnson was mostly inspired by sid vicious? not seeing it...

no, he was inspired by the "anyone can play three chords" idea/philosophy

at the risk of boring Shasta further, there's a through-line from the accusations leveled against the first generations of punks by its detractors (ie "they don't know how to play!") to the DIY aesthetic that rippled through the American underground in the 80s, who basically took that charge and ran with it as a badge of affirmation, of opposition to existing "professional" orthodoxy. which is where stuff like the naif, amateurish bent of stuff like K Records comes in.

xp

*suggests reviving thread: primitivism vs. virtuoso*

the funny and relatively unique thing about Chilton was that he was both

dude recorded/engineered the gories ffs. can u pls take the zzzz to another thread pls?

sorry shasta :(

continue on with the much more important chilton love.

honestly i don't like using alex chilton for best-practice arguments. using him as a stick to beat "contemporary music" or whatever. we can agree that there is inspired amateurism and inspired professionalism, weird mixes of the two, and then there are many uninspired amateurs and professionals. making big sweeping statements just seems unnecessary.

Thinking about the guy's career arc the closest I could come up with for somebody similar was Jonathan Richman, another guy who at one point renounced his early work, put off many of his fans with his contrarian attitude, did interesting covers, was interested in earlier R and B, kept working on his guitar playing, who after one if his shows maybe you didn't always like what you saw but you always had something to think about. (Note: don't know what tense to use when one guy is still with us and the other isn't) Obviously lots of dissimilarities as well, but still.

One particular "Lost Era" period I revisited over the last couple days are the 1977 Elektra demos, and the Peter Holsapple session from 1978.

This is some of my favorite stuff: really loose and dreamy, with some topical nods to new-wave and pop-reggae. The only thing I can do without are the squelchy high-pitch Farfisa fills/runs that pepper some of the Elektra demos.

like is this the perfect summer song or what?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NUi81X3-zk

Where may one find those? Are they official releases?

try google blog search, i had some 15 year old bootleg on CD that I probably paid $20 for (lol) that I burned a few years ago.

shhhh:
http://www.atomiurl.com/popdose-coms-bootleg-city-big-star-%E2%80%9Cradio-city%E2%80%9D
http://www.tapecity.org/showthread.php?t=29850
http://onlybootleghere.blogspot.com/2009/06/big-star-and-alex-chilton-beale-street.html
etc.

Had no idea that stuff existed. Thanks.

Tennis Bum!

Ann Powers for the LA Times, plus a slew of great comments:

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/03/rip-alex-chilton-american-music-man.html

That record remains one of the most lucid expressions of youthful sorrow in the annals of guitar pop, a perfect encapsulation of the pain of that worst, first heartbreak.

Nice piece, but i don't know about that as an encapsulation of the Third Album: sorrow, dread, horror, pain, not tied to youth or love......it's the darkest record ever sometimes: the horror of the person Holocaust could be about AND the horror of how a person could sing that about anyone.

Also, a little more on Steve Cohen's speech:

Reached later by phone, Cohen said he learned of the musician's death late Wednesday night and had spent a lot of time since then listening to Chilton's music on his iPod, including such songs as "Bangkok," "Tee Ni Nee Ni Noo" and "No Sex." He decided on his way into work Thursday to make the speech on the House floor.

"I miss him greatly," said Cohen, 60, who had known Chilton since he met him at Chilton's father's funeral. "There's just something about Alex. He's my generation and most of us in Memphis knew him and his music. This is a great loss to the Memphis scene."
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Between meetings on Thursday the congressman "spent the day reflecting" on the singer. Chilton's songs, he says, "remind me of episodes of my life and the life of the city of Memphis."

This wasn't the first time Cohen had mentioned Chilton in an official setting. In a transportation committee meeting Cohen says he quoted "The Letter," as a way to make a point about getting fast rail to Memphis. He told those present that if faster rail service was provided he would ask Chilton to write a new song.

Cohen had another personal reason to mourn his friend's passing. He was set to introduce Chilton and Big Star at a May concert in Memphis.

Cohen says he quoted "The Letter," as a way to make a point about getting fast rail to Memphis. He told those present that if faster rail service was provided he would ask Chilton to write a new song.

Lols...

I went into the Amtrak station in Memphis once on a Wednesday to see what time on the following Saturday I could get a train to St. Louis. Being European, I expected choices and baroque ticketing, and was puzzled when i couldn't find a timetable on the wall - eventually I asked: there are precisely two trains - one to New Orleans in the morning, and the same train going the other was to Chicago in the evening. That's it for train services in and out of Memphis.

Sounds about right.

Later in life, he turned his attention to classical guitar, and specifically Baroque music. His widow, a flutist with whom he frequently duetted, said it comprised most of his recent listening.

awesome.

I went into the Amtrak station in Memphis once on a Wednesday to see what time on the following Saturday I could get a train to St. Louis. Being European, I expected choices and baroque ticketing, and was puzzled when i couldn't find a timetable on the wall - eventually I asked: there are precisely two trains - one to New Orleans in the morning, and the same train going the other was to Chicago in the evening. That's it for train services in and out of Memphis.

― sonofstan, Friday, March 19, 2010 7:31 PM (40 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yikes. that sucks.

cohen is a dick about some things, but on the whole he's one of the better congressmen. he's a jew who represents a district that's overwhelmingly black. IIRC he beat back some really tacky challenges from black challengers who basically used his jewiness against him.

kind of awesome that he was listening to some of chilton's 1980s stuff. by any standards, and particular by those of people holding elected office, that's pretty hardcore.

sorry for typos.

it's sad that it's taken his death to inspire me to listen to some of the alex chilton boots and other stuff from the 80s/90s. i have all the "big" records (he said w/ light irony) but haven't dived in much father, fearing i'd just be hearing a bunch of really broken-down shit. but some of it's real good. and even though he had about three different voices, all of them are pretty unmistakable and inimitable. really dig this dude, am very sad he's gone.

Took a bit of searching but I found this post from Will Rigby a couple of years back that Elvis Telecom had linked on the Chris Bell thread, along with a rebuttal concerning part of it via Terry Manning in the comments, worth keeping in mind given part of what Chilton told Rigby and those with him at the time back in 1978. Something all the more strange and moving about it all given that three of the principals in the recollection are now gone. To pull out one part of it:

Alex spent another afternoon with Mitch (Easter) and me (Peter (Holsapple) had to leave early) driving down into Mississippi and onto a levee and being effusive about the Delta blues, with some barbecue in there somewhere. He took us to 706 Union Avenue, what had been Sun Studio but at the time was an unoccupied storefront. He found a way in through a broken back door. It had most recently been an auto repair shop; in what had been the recording room was the abandoned shell of a car—no wheels, no windows, no doors, no engine. There wasn't anything left of what had been a fulcrum of musical change EXCEPT, as Alex pointed out, the acoustical tiles still on the ceiling. He climbed up on the car and liberated one for himself and one for Mitch. To my eternal regret, I declined. (A few years later the site was renovated and now is a tourist-magnet re-creation of the original studio, but I knew it when.)

Meantime Cheap Trick are playing some Chilton songs right now, it seems.

A clarification -- dedicating "Heaven Tonight" to him. A slightly disconcerting choice but it does suit.

when were the first three songs on dusted in memphis recorded? actually, when was all of that stuff recorded? i know next to nothing about that record, yet it's one of my favorites.

Alex's choices of covers were inspired. Can anyone recommend me some compilations of similar source material? I guess it's kinda like the Nuggets of soul, blues and r&b?

Paul Westerberg wrote a very nice NY Times piece about Chilton.