Big Star

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.

Well, here's what xgau said about 'em in the 70s; pretty much the consensus, although I was among those more enthusiastic about the debut than he was. Radio City sounds more audacious, more exuberant, also, as xgau said about punk, "bored enough to fuck with it"--"it] being poptones, incl. mastery of, as musician and listener Third is obv. audacious in another way, the mid-70s late night collegetown FM downer classic, Berlin, Tonight's The Night etc. way):
#1 Record [Ardent, 1972]
Alex Chilton's voice is changing. When he was a teenage Box Top, his deep, soulful, bullfrog whopper was the biggest freak of nature since Stevie Winwood sang "I'm a Man," but now that he's formed his own group he gets to be an adolescent, complete with adenoidal quaver. Appropriately, the music tends toward the teen as well, but that provides brand new thrills. Special attraction: a fantasy about India with gin-and-tonic in it. B+

Radio City [Ardent, 1974]
Brilliant, addictive, definitively semipopular, and all Alex Chilton--Chris Bell, his folkie counterpart, just couldn't take it any more. Boosters claim this is just what the AM has been waiting for, but the only pop coup I hear is a reminder of how spare, skew, and sprung the Beatles '65 were, which is a coup because they weren't. The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards, the guitar solos sound like screwball readymade pastiches, and the lyrics sound like love is strange, though maybe that's just the context. Can an album be catchy and twisted at the same time? A

Third [PVC, 1978]
In late 1974, Alex Chilton--already the inventor of self-conscious power pop--transmogrified himself into some hybrid of Lou Reed (circa The Velvet Underground and/or Berlin) and Michael Brown (circa "Walk Away, Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina"). This is the album that resulted--fourteen songs in all, only two or three of which wander off into the psycho ward. Halting, depressive, eccentrically shaped, it will seem completely beyond the pale to those who already find his regular stuff weird. I think it's prophetically idiosyncratic and breathtakingly lyrical. A-

Radio City not only sounds more audacious than #1, it sounds more audacious with each remastering (I'm tempted to spring for the audio Blu-Ray, which will no doubt be available in due time, if it isn't already.) His "semipopular" is about messing with familiar, popular elements; the results may themselves be popular (Van Morrison, The Band) or not so much, at least initially (Stooges,Flying Burritos). Those were his examples in 1970, and he was among those ready for Big Star (a bit frustrated by solo Chilton, but always more inclined to cherry-pick than nit-pick).(So Chilton brought out the Dean's better nature!)

I also prefer Radio City. To me, those two albums point in two somewhat different directions; #1 record is the album that provides the blueprint for all power pop groups, while Radio City tilts towards a bittersweet slacker abandonment which can be seen later on in the Replacements/Pavement lineage.

transmogrified himself into some hybrid of Lou Reed (circa The Velvet Underground and/or Berlin) and Michael Brown (circa "Walk Away, Renee" and "Pretty Ballerina")

Wow yeah that Left Banke comparison... I think of "Daisy Glaze" as this weird middle ground between "Walk Away Renee," the Who's "A Quick One, While He's Away," and Television's "Marquee Moon." The thing about Chilton and Left Banke is that they were Americans who responded very appropriately to British music but ended up as outsiders exactly because of how they ended up sounding. Or possibly because of something else I don't know.

Person it all filtered down to was Elliott Smith.

lol i was just about to post "just pretend elliott smith is alex chilton after time travelling"

So we should all stop theorizing until we've read the Chilton book. Holy shit.

so what do the new remasters sound like? are they any better than the old two-fer (which sounds pretty great to my ears)?

on the box set? the box set sounds amazing.

and has loads of stuff not on the reissues

Haven't got round to reading the book yet
/in_character

From WSJ. This guy busts "Ms. George-Warren's anemic prose," but---though this is one of those reviews or "reviews" where I can't quite tell how much of the narrative is from the book vs. the reviewer or "reviewer" showing off---it's still a pretty compelling presentation, and def. makes me wanna read her bio:

A Man Called Destruction

By Holly George-Warren
Viking, 370 pages, $27.95

Perhaps only Memphis, home to schmaltz-era Elvis Presley, soul label Stax and bars with nicknames like Quaalude City could produce a musician like Chilton. Born in 1950, he came from deep-rooted Southern stock; forebears arrived from England in 1660 and Ireland in the 1700s, and relatives served in the War of Independence and for the Confederacy. Branches of the family settled in Virginia and Mississippi, some as owners of plantations and slaves.

His father, a capable jazz musician, made his living more innocuously, in the lighting business. His mother graduated from college, birthed four children and spent most days playing bridge and drinking cocktails with neighbors. But beyond their bourgeois trappings, they were great lovers of the arts, and after the accidental death of Alex's teenage brother Reid, the Chiltons surrendered to their bohemian instincts and aversion to active child care, moving from suburban Memphis to a large home in post-white-flight Midtown that became a haven for musicians, artists and dipsomaniacs. As one visitor put it, the Chiltons were "free spirits," that classic euphemism for the shamelessly irresponsible, nourishing their children with "cereal, strawberries, and maybe a sandwich," and leaving Alex "to fend for himself entirely, imposing no restrictions or demands of any kind." Their most notable habitué, future photography superstar William Eggleston, befriended their youngest child, eventually providing the 20-something Alex with pictures for his album covers.

Smitten by the Beatles and Ray Charles, Alex developed a singing style one musician called "black as hell." Recruited by local garage band the Devilles, he came to a 1967 recording session after spending the night sleeping with his girlfriend in a cemetery, and sang tired and hung over, with a sore throat that aggravated his already husky growl. The song was "The Letter," the band was renamed the Box Tops, and the 16-year-old Chilton, who had recently attempted suicide (another girlfriend dumping him for reputed mob enforcers seems to have been the breaking point), became a star. Incessant touring, substance abuse and promiscuity followed, as did encounters with role models like Dennis Wilson, who gave him a run-in with the Manson family while Chilton was Wilson's houseguest. There were more hits for the Box Tops, then a drop in popularity, and band members left to pursue higher education and draft evasion.

By age 19, Chilton had a wife and son, whom he'd soon abandon, and an embryonic bitterness, which he would not.

It was at Ardent, a local studio founded by John Fry, a sort of benevolent Fagin who provided free recording time to loitering oddballs, that Chilton began the partnership with Chris Bell that would become Big Star. Supercilious, petulant and clinically depressed, Bell was the tormented yin to Chilton's blasé yang, and along with bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens, they spent months shaping an album according to Bell's perfectionist demands. Sessions were often volatile; Ardent's office manager remembers throwing first-aid supplies at band members to keep their blood off her paperwork, and one emblematic scenario found Bell and Hummel shattering glass, noses and each other's guitars as Chilton laughed it off.

The resulting album, "#1 Record" (1972) rife with love of the Beatles and the Byrds, hooks and harmonies, made the band a paragon of power pop, a label that both categorizes and cheapens their achievement. Songs like "The Ballad of El Goodo," "My Life is Right" and "Give Me Another Chance," are delicious examples of pop songcraft and studio finesse, alive with yearning and a sense of delight in their creation.

"#1 Record" received superlative reviews, inspired high expectations and died. Ardent's distributor was Stax; unsure how to promote a white rock group, they botched the release. It's unclear whether Chilton cared; all Ms. George-Warren offers is "Alex took it in stride" and Chilton's stated desire to stay at Ardent to learn more about production. Bell, however, claimed a conspiracy, quit the band and, according to one witness, carved "pig" into the hood of Mr. Fry's Mercedes. One night, after he was discovered erasing the "#1 Record" tapes, he attempted suicide and was committed.

Though Ms. George-Warren's prose is anemic, the Big Star chapters are heavy with anecdote and portent, and it requires only a small romantic leap to conclude that Chilton and Bell's common tragedy was to need a partnership that neither was suited to sustain. Aside from the freakish creative chemistry, they tempered each other's most self-hampering traits—Bell's anger, Chilton's lack of focus—and without each other, their lives took ruinous turns. Bell floundered, recorded erratically and died at age 27, after taking a Mandrax and bourbon cocktail and driving into a utility pole. Chilton shepherded the second Big Star album, 1974's "Radio City" (featuring the superb "September Gurls"; distribution was botched this time by CBS), but while recording "Third" the next year he was starting to collapse. According to producer Jim Dickinson, sessions began with Chilton "shoot[ing] Demerol down his throat with a syringe." On one occasion, Chilton's girlfriend Lesa showed up with black eyes, and on another, Mr. Fry told Dickinson, "We can't have blood on the console. Please speak to Alex about it." "Third" would eventually be regarded as a classic, but the consensus at the time, in the words of Memphis musician Tommy Hoehn, was that it was "crap." Hit with yet another failure, Chilton cut his wrists and ended up in the same hospital that Bell had been taken to four years earlier.

Somewhere in "A Man Called Destruction" is a story about the mysteries of creativity, collaboration and luck, the agonizing loss of wasted potential, the multitude of factors that must align for artistic success. But potential insights are obstructed by minutiae and redundancies, investigations supplanted by undeveloped allusions about Chilton's resentments. The missed opportunity is substantial; even the trifles portray early 1970s Memphis as a singular world of musically precocious, emotionally fragile man-children struggling to attain some state of grace. Ms. George-Warren gives a glimpse of that lost world, but it remains largely unexplored.

So does Chilton. By 25, he was barely more than impish grin, inclined more to nullity than destruction. He urinated off one stage, was fellated on another. He sat on curbs watching Catholic-school girls go by, prospecting for dates. He smoked pot and drifted through his days like a sixth-year undergrad who doesn't want to leave the dorms. He laughed his way through shambling performances, as if he couldn't believe his acolytes were taking him seriously. These post-Big Star years reek of disdain, not least toward the fans who laughed awkwardly along with him, as if to convince themselves there was actually a joke to witness, rather than the remnants of a great talent.

It's a petty, dismal litany, seemingly endless in Ms. George-Warren's lethargic telling. But in life, it was mercifully brief, and Chilton's life would end positively, if more in resignation than redemption. At 31, he quit drinking, moved to New Orleans and lived contentedly, working at jobs like tree trimmer and "human jukebox," playing requests in a tourist bar. Big Star reissues inspired an international cult ("influenced R.E.M." became the general Big Star legitimizer, and the Replacements' 1987 tribute "Alex Chilton" made him famous for being loved by the Replacements). There would be new records, like "Feudalist Tarts" from 1985, a gritty return to form with covers of songs by Isaac Hayes, Slim Harpo and Willie Tee, residuals and reunions and the comparative triumph of replacing self-mockery with nonchalance.

Chilton died in 2010 of a heart attack, aged 59. To the end, he claimed not to understand the fuss about Big Star. After "A Man Called Destruction," readers might not, either, about the music or the man who seemed to care about so little, except trying to live a childhood he never had, and spiting the people that kept him from doing it.

—Mr. Danziger is the managing editor of the journal Fiction, and a contributing editor at Open Letters Monthly

on the box set? the box set sounds amazing.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, September 3, 2014 6:06 PM (51 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

no, the box set didn't include all of the original albums.

the first two albums have been reissued on CD (separately), supposedly w/ new mastering.

Aside from the freakish creative chemistry, they tempered each other's most self-hampering traits—Bell's anger, Chilton's lack of focus—and without each other, their lives took ruinous turns.

this is dumb. radio city is the best record either of them worked on. and chilton's solo career has a certain integrity and even grandeur of its own--esp. if you take into account the stuff that chilton midwifed/produced, like tav falco and the cramps.

in general there seems to be a certain confusion of correlation/causation that's common to biographies needing to sex things up.

also the chilton/bell acrimony can't really be blamed for bell's death, can it? not hardly.

Let's not blame the biography for the reviewer's comments, since, like I said, I can't tell from reading them how much is based on the actual book. Sure are a lot of reviews like that.

Especially since his description makes them seem like they clashed and egged each other on, more than "tempered."

Let's not blame the biography for the reviewer's comments, since, like I said, I can't tell from reading them how much is based on the actual book. Sure are a lot of reviews like that.

yeah. the new yorker reviews are often like that, basically synopses of the books under review that still manage to be frightfully condescending toward the books' authors.

Even if I'd never heard or heard of Chilton or Big Star, think Carl Wilson's thoughtful description (also gets around to the book, eventually), would make me want to check them out (including the bio):
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/020_05/12773

Up to Bach's Bottom in the book and it's 10/10 so far. Amazing story.

Thanks! That Carl Wilson review is genius, really.

I read a galley of the book in February. I have long known of but have never met nor ever corresponded with Ms G-W, although know a shit-ton of people who do and have. I have never thought she was particularly insightful vis-a-vis what she was writing about: she hacked that shit out. but it always been clear she was very well connected.

She sez in the book that she was around Alex a number of times in the last, oh I don't know, 30 years. and I will mention that my wife, who works at an outlet that received the galley provided to me, told me that Chilton's widow, who evidently only knew him for a relatively short time and is much much younger than he, wrote to my wife's outlet to say, well, fuck HGW, who the fuck does she think she is, I'm his widow, etc.

I only have the galley, with contains no reference, so I can't say how HGW cites all the shit she does. but she did a great fucking job, despite that the WSJ dude correctly points out that she is no wordsmith (for all I know, she has no aspiration as such). But yeah, there's no doubt that the book encompasses every single facet of the guy's life, background, artistry, radio interviews, attitude towards booze, drugs, his legacy, pussy…it would have been beneficial were I to know just how HGW knew all this shit, tho.

I had long suspected that the milieu in which he came up, upper crust Memphis which WSJ guy and HGW reference but which I have no first hand knowledge of, was similar to the one which I grew up in, Louisville KY, which isn't far away. Probly the two are largely consonant w/r/t to music culture, and how privileged people become artists because they can in both places, etc etc… Chilton's experience is one I recognize, probly just by proximity.

. 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.

this is otm for me and plays into how they were processed by the bands they'd go on to influence and be name dropped by--even today, much as i enjoy #1 record particularly, i don't hear a lot of the 'mats (for example) in there.

A band can have influences without trying to sound like those influences

good to know

just saying if you come to work with EXPECTATIONS and then those EXPECTATIONS are changed, altered, and you are surprised by the work, that might be a good thing for you cuddles

what i'm getting at with my question is that the musical influence isn't really apparent to me in say REM or most of the Mats &c, so i'm wondering what the influence *is* that i'm not seeing--sensibility? stance toward success, like someone pointed out upthread? curious what else we might be able to draw out by thinking about it.

inspiration