Ann Powers at the LA Times blog
I have a tattered souvenir from a Big Star store in Memphis, picked up on a pilgrimage to the South that I made when I was barely 21, when I set forth to find some mineral traces of the blues and early rock heritage I’d only read about in books.
What I found on that journey was Alex Chilton. I’d already come to love Big Star’s catalog, introduced to me via the mix tapes my friends and I made for each other as we built our own twisted history of Americana from what the band X once called “the unheard music.” Alex Chilton was a wandering, heretical patriarch of our new religion. Bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. found him inspirational. (Members of one such group, the Posies, would later play with a reformed Big Star.) College radio DJs turned Big Star’s catchy but unkempt songs into the hits they should have been the first time around. The band had been active in the 1970s, but they belonged to us, the kids fighting off the shadow of the Baby Boomers who’d been too dumb to realize how great it was.
We shook our messy hair to Big Star’s strutting rockers, like “In the Street” (the band’s best-known song, thanks to Cheap Trick’s version for “That 70s Show”), and “September Gurls,” party anthems that were like Led Zeppelin hits for the kids who got beaten up by real Zeppelin fans. And we slow danced to Chilton’s ballads, especially those from Big Star’s third album, “Sister Lovers,” made after the band had basically fallen apart. 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.
When I was in my musical “formative years” an appreciation of Big Star was like a secret mark you wore to identify with others who “got it”. Fragile Beauty “September Gurls” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNKSs1J38EA) with that great line “I loved you, well, never mind I’ve been crying all the time” – no words.
If you don’t own “Sister Lovers” – well, you should. As Ann says in her article – “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.”
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Knew the name when started seeing mentions of his death on Twitter but didn’t really remember until started running through songs on Rhapsody and hit “You Get What you Deserve”. Suspect a lot of “dumb baby boomers” no longer had the luxury of time to explore and exchange new music when Big Star came along in the early 70s. It wasn’t as easy as it is now.
The “Keep An Eye On The Sky” collection of recordings, demo versions and live performances that was released last Sept. is an interesting listen.
just seems right to add a note about the passing today of another of Big Star’s original members, bassist Andy Hummel