Big Star

yeah radio city might be my fav now, i dunno sisters lovers rules too

i like i am the cosmos more than sister lovers, challop i kno. radio city is my favorite of everything though. for some reason i thought it was speculated that chris bell was involved with those two albums more than had previously been supposed, no idea if that is accurate at all.

that's not the impression i've gotten from anything i read or the doc

Chilton's solo career is only disappointing if you don't actually understand Alex Chilton

bell wasn't at all involved with sister lovers afaik -- he had a hand in writing "back of a car" (and i don't think he was credited originally), but i think that's all he really contributed.

The 33 1/3 back has Bell co-writing 'O My Soul' and 'Back of a Car' before splitting.

Supposedly Bell started some of the other slow songs on RC for Chilton to finish. There's an old Fry quote about how Bell had some material he "devested his interest" that landed on the album.

those credits are what i must have run across re "been more involved with" and then mentally exaggerated, thank you guys for clarity. xp

Chilton and Bell (and the other members) prob benefitted from a precarious balance of opposing forces--competition as well as co-operation, creative friction, all that good stuff.

have always had a hard time imagining what that relationship was really like based on what's out there, always seemed to me like chris bell was a self-defeating homo which doesn't do the official record any favors. idk xp

33 1/3 book on Radio City has a bit of info
http://books.google.ie/books?id=7U9xj4EE8RgC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA86#v=onepage&q&f=false

But Lennon and McCartney lasted a lot longer, in terms of creative output; think their relationship went back further, maybe deeper (equally focused, creatively and career-wise).

Chilton's solo career is only disappointing if you don't actually understand Alex Chilton

― Οὖτις, Monday, August 18, 2014 6:44 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^
& also i mean i love bryan maclean as much as the next guy but seriously chris bell wave big star fandom is p ridic

ps go buy some lx chitlin records u bozo

Bryan MacLean!

I was trying to think of some other examples of that type of revisionism. Kim Deal and the Pixies to an extent I guess

revisions of albums by bands

george lucas' mix of the white album

William Friedkin's Exile On Main St.: The Version You've Never Heard

Let It Be Naked

Tbf Jim Dickenson may have had as much to do with the greatness of Third as Bell did with #1. Though of course Radio City is more than enough to ratify Chilton's reputation.

Per revisionism, Bill Berry gets more credit for REM now than he ever did in the band.

"The drummer's more than half of it."---Norman Mailer on the Stones.

(I'm starting to think that's true of every band I care about, in any genre.)

My point wasn't that Chilton wasn't a talent – just a different kind of talent than Big Star maybe suggested he was.

Supposedly Bell started some of the other slow songs on RC for Chilton to finish. There's an old Fry quote about how Bell had some material he "devested his interest" that landed on the album.

Tend to agree with NTI. There are certain big, grandiose pop music moves that one associates with Big Star which Alex eschewed later in his career for which it is easy enough to draw the conclusion that in fact he didn't come with them in the first place.

Got the impression frm interviews he thought that ws all kinda juvenile stuff actually. RC/3rd're two of my fav records, never rly listen to #1, listen to solo Chilton a lot more than either, the single aside Cosmos is stodgy

didn't come UP with them

this all just sounds a little too much like What Music Documentaries Can Teach Us, to me, & i'm pretty sure where this leads is it seeming like the dandy warhols are actually a pretty cool band, all of us eventually becoming the guy at the party gesticulating about some guy's private press song suite of new england devotional songs. i don't think that untangling big star's sweet recipe is really reducible to an eyes-closed/spoon-to-mouth interrogation of their ingredients.

think we need to spend as much time with rad shitty alex chilton records as we do listening to moby describe the intensity of his teenage moments trembling to joy division

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqt9uI9hrF4

(PS I/Alex (iirc) meant "juvenile" as in young/youthfully dramatic, not in a necessarily disparaging way)

xpost never heard that before, it's fantastic

My pal Josh played "Thank You Friends" last night on the Fenway organ:
https://twitter.com/jtkantor/status/501781916862148609

this all just sounds a little too much like What Music Documentaries Can Teach Us, to me, & i'm pretty sure where this leads is it seeming like the dandy warhols are actually a pretty cool band, all of us eventually becoming the guy at the party gesticulating about some guy's private press song suite of new england devotional songs. i don't think that untangling big star's sweet recipe is really reducible to an eyes-closed/spoon-to-mouth interrogation of their ingredients.

think we need to spend as much time with rad shitty alex chilton records as we do listening to moby describe the intensity of his teenage moments trembling to joy division

This is an excellent post which perfectly sums up the turn towards thought-provoking this thread has taken recently. To be honest though I still have a lot of questions about Chilton that neither books nor documentaries have been able to answer, how someone could go from making "September Gurls" (I think about this song a lot) to making "shitty" records in such a short span of time. Why did he come unravelled so quickly and spectacularly?

I have this working hypothesis, very artsy and flaky, that "Daisy Glaze" is the first glimpse of "apocalyptic Chilton" and that he had actually seen something prior to its writing—I don't know what—that caused him to go quite mad. He kept his shit superficially together and over time admitted to the lesser crime of being an incompetent, zany alcoholic weirdo to conceal the more painful truth of having stared into the abyss and come back alive to tell the tale.

seemed to me like chris bell was a self-defeating homo

use other words, mattresslessness

I think the only relevant piece of biographical info you need is that Chilton's musical interests were broad enough to span the Byrds, Bach and Jimmy Newman and that all of the music he produced stems from that

Which Chilton records are we deeming "shitty"? Flies on Sherbert and Bachs Bottom are indeed a mixed bag, but Live in London, High Priest, the Black EP, Man Called Destruction, a few other EPs and singles and Cliches are all great.

personally I totally sympathize with Chilton being frustrated by fans who wanted him to keep making the same kind of music he did for a fairly brief period in his youth, it must be annoying to have people tell you that you're supposed to stay eternally 23 and miserable (see also David Byrne comparing requests to reunite your old band with requests from random strangers for you to remarry your ex-wife). His interests were always broad - gutbucket R&B, country, British pop, garage rock - his catalog reflects this. And the simple fact is some of those genres don't call for the meticulous studio craft of early Big Star, they aren't well served by it. The Cramps would sound terrible with a bunch of chiming guitar overdubs and vocal harmonies.

songs the grizzly bear taught us

Fwiw, I think a record way too many people slept on by Chilton was A Man Called Destruction. Great, funereal brass arrangements, inspired track choice. "What's Your Sign Girl" is an awesome kind of summary of everything he was up until that point.

Around Third I guess he became a p fullblown alcoholic, that might explain a lot

Οὖτις otm, also

. To be honest though I still have a lot of questions about Chilton that neither books nor documentaries have been able to answer, how someone could go from making "September Gurls" (I think about this song a lot) to making "shitty" records in such a short span of time. Why did he come unravelled so quickly and spectacularly?

The impression I got from reading Rob Jovanovic's bio (which IMHO is not too good to be honest) is that A) Big Star was never really a fully formed, ongoing "band" but more of a one-off project which resulted in #1 Record. With that album not being successful, they sort of disbanded, but when they found out it had been very well received by the critics, they came together again for "Radio City". So, for all the greatness that's in those 2 albums, I'm not sure they're really representative of Chilton's sensibilities; to him it was probably just another attempt to see if he could achieve success in his own terms. I mean, it is probably representative of his sensibilities, but just a part of them, and there's much more to him than that.

And B) Big Star was pretty much done with commercial success in mind. They wanted to make it in their own terms, but they really wanted to make it. I think Bell was totally disheartened #1 Record went nowhere in the charts. And Chilton, he has that tension between wanting to make it, being rejected by the audience and then answering by sabotaging his own career. Which is more or less the same tension that feeds Paul Westerberg and the Replacements. So those are, to me, two reasons for him going totally bonkers.

Speaking of I'll take Chilton's erratic solo career over Westerberg's mediocrity

being rejected by the audience

My impression was that there wasn't an audience to reject them: distribution was so poor, and promotion non-existent, that the few who were even aware of them couldn't buy Big Star records if they'd wanted to. Didn't most (all?) copies of Radio City languish in a warehouse during the Stax/CBS bustup?

Yeah, that's possibly true. In any way, they didn't achieve the success they expected.

Yeah, I have somewhat mixed feelings about the documentary, but one thing I got from it was that everyone involved thought #1 Record was going to be a hit before it came out.

Note to self: Don't name your album "No.1 Record" even if it is your first release.

Ha, yeah, but on the surface, it didn't seem that outlandish at the time: Ardent was part of an established company, industry rags were hyping it, and Badfinger and the Raspberries were having hits (i.e., Big Star's music wasn't as anachronistic for the time as it's made out to be in retrospective accounts).

The fact that they didn't tour at all was a pretty obvious, and avoidable, misstep, though.

I think they had great expectations for #1 records because Bell had a clear, focused vision of what his music and his band should be, which was only reinforced when he found an akin teammate in Chilton, who also had some considerable commercial pedigree. Which didn't allow him to see that they had many things going on against them; not being a proper band was one of them, being in Ardent/Stax and coming out from Memphis another one; it must have been like, I don't know, having a technopop outfit in the early nineties Seattle. Their personalities were probably the main setback for them, though. None of those four guys was a trooper.

(i.e., Big Star's music wasn't as anachronistic for the time as it's made out to be in retrospective accounts).

This is otm. I read about them for years as a teenager and pictured them as this incredibly contemporary-sounding group that was misunderstood for being ahead of its time. When I heard #1 Record and Radio City for the first time, they didn't sound as revolutionary as I expected.

Obviously they're incredible and I love each of their records deeply, but I've never bought the band-out-of-their-time components of their critical narrative. Like in the documentary, Mike Mills or someone says that their records were just released 10 years too early, and they didn't make sense until the 80s. I don't really hear that when I listen to them.

Anyone seen the Third tour? The whole idea sounds a bit horrible on first glance and this video doesn't change my mind: http://www.chunkyglasses.com/content/brett-harris-solo-artist-big-stars-third-player

To be honest though I still have a lot of questions about Chilton that neither books nor documentaries have been able to answer, how someone could go from making "September Gurls" (I think about this song a lot) to making "shitty" records in such a short span of time. Why did he come unravelled so quickly and spectacularly?

One thing that came across clearly in the Holly George-Warren book was how big the Box Tops were; I guess I'd always kind of thought of them as a one-hit wonder.
He was 17 when the Letter went to #1, but they ended up with 3 top 20 singles (or one less than the Stones in the same era).

And while Chilton was obviously a music industry veteran when he hooked up with Ice Water, Bell and Chilton would have been 21 and 22, respectively, when #1 Record came out.