Big Star - A man called destruction

May 2012. On stage at London's Barbican, and later at Barcelona's Primavera Sound, a tribute unfolds for a man and a musician who left his mark on many lives. Certainly on everyone there in that moment. There's Mike Mills of Rem, a band that might never have existed without Big Star, or would certainly have sounded very different. There's Norman Blake of Teenage Fanclub, who were Big Star's Nineties incarnation, to the point of naming an album after one of their songs. There's Jody Stephens, who was there with Big Star from the very start, and there are Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, who helped bring them back to life. There's Chris Stamey, who met that man in his most desperate years and became his friend for life.

There are Wilco and Yo La Tengo, Robyn Hitchcock and even Ray Davies, the last of whom shared a track on a record with the man being honored (“Till The End Of The Day”, ironically on a tribute to Davies released a couple of years earlier). There are young artists like Sharon Van Etten and Django Haskins. Sadly absent is Paul Westerberg, who with the Replacements dedicated a magnificent song to him, named after him. When the night closes with a choral rendition of “Thank You Friends” (though perhaps the title should be read in the singular), the emotion overflows, and more than a few eyes grow misty. I understand them, in my own small way. If I've ever had a musical hero in my life, just one, his name was Alex Chilton.

Won’t you tell your dad ‘get off my back’/ tell him what we said ‘bout Paint it Black

(Thirteen, Big Star)

As the title of one of the finest books ever devoted to a city and its music puts it, it came from Memphis. What did? In musical terms, more or less everything. Or at least everything that matters. From Elvis to the Oblivians, for more than half a century these banks of the Mississippi have sent out some of the most important signals in shaping American popular music. Besides the local legends – the King, of course, but also Sam Phillips, Stax, Booker T, Hi Records, right up to… ahem… Justin Timberlake – figures like Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf, Isaac Hayes and Al Green have all orbited around Memphis for shorter or longer stretches of their careers. Not to mention the pale-faced Englishmen who tried to soak up some of the city's magic by recording albums there, from Dusty Springfield to Primal Scream to Spiritualized. Some even went to Memphis to die, like Jeff Buckley.

Today it's probably impossible to grasp the genius loci by wandering among the tourist-trap shops on Beale Street or making a kitsch pilgrimage to Graceland, catching some surviving blues legend in a soulless dive, or visiting what's left of the Sun or Stax studios. But the story of Memphis remains a gripping one all the same. And, fittingly, it has been told like a novel in books such as Peter Guralnick's "Sweet Soul Music" and Robert Gordon's "It Came From Memphis", mentioned at the start of this piece.

The most populous city in Tennessee, with nearly 700,000 residents, Memphis has a population that is two-thirds Black, with a sizeable Hispanic minority on top of that. And yet the white minority, which fled en masse to the suburbs during the racial tensions of the Sixties, played a decisive role in creating that marvelous sonic hybrid simmering in the same pot of r'n'b, blues, soul, rock'n'roll, country and swamp. If there's one place in the United States where integration actually worked, at least on an artistic level, it's Memphis. Black and white together founding labels, setting up recording studios, creating immortal examples of southern music. The exact opposite of Nashville, in other words. Sadly ironic, and in some ways symbolic, that all this happened in the very place where Martin Luther King was killed.

When the reverend from Atlanta dies under a hail of rifle fire on April 4, 1968, William Alexander Chilton is seventeen years old and singing in one of the most famous pop groups of the moment. Born on December 28, 1950 in an old Memphis neighborhood, with an artistic bohemian imprint already evident from his parents' professions (a jazz musician father, a gallery-owner mother), Alex has been hanging around midtown's seediest clubs since he was a kid, often gravitating toward the Ardent studios.

It's there that he meets other teenagers just as smitten as he is with the new British rock wave (Elvis and his pelvis were already old news: the new deities before whom the kids genuflect are called Beatles, Stones, Yardbirds, Who, Kinks). Among them is a certain Chris Bell, born exactly fifteen days after Chilton in the white, middle-class suburb of Germantown (his father owns a thriving restaurant). The two will meet right there, at Ardent, a few years later.

Before that fateful moment, which will mark the beginning of the Big Star saga, young Alex embarks on the Box Tops adventure. Nothing to sneeze at: several million 45s sold, three singles in the upper reaches of the American and world Top Tens, four albums in under two years, exhausting tours, dozens of TV appearances. And very, very little money. At least, far less than the singer and his bandmates – all roughly the same age – deserved given their sales figures. The Box Tops are a textbook case among the long list of green bands manipulated and exploited to the bone by the music business. The silver lining is that the group's mentors, though they turned out to be rapacious puppet-masters as per usual, were also figures of real entrepreneurial and artistic talent, for whom music was far from the last of their concerns.

People like Chips Moman, in whose American Studios the Box Tops would record most of their material, and above all Dan Penn, who alone or with Spooner Oldham wrote some of the greatest Southern classics of all time (need we mention "Do Right Woman" and "Dark End Of The Street"?). Moman and Penn, after cutting their teeth at the legendary Muscle Shoals studios in Alabama, had moved to Memphis looking for some unknown outfit to mold according to their musical vision, as well as certain innovative production ideas swirling in their heads. No sooner said than done: by the end of '66 the two Pygmalions find their Eliza Doolittle in a local r&b quintet, the Devilles. The band had recently recruited as singer the sixteen-year-old Chilton, who'd won a high-school singing contest with his version of Bobby Hebb's "Sunny". Around him – though only live: in the studio it was better to leave things to Moman and Penn's trusted professionals, among them future Memphis Horns man Wayne Jackson and even Bobby Womack – were four other promising young men whose musical ability was not exactly world-class: keyboardist John Evans, guitarist Gary Talley, bassist Bill Cunningham and drummer Danny Smythe.

Rechristened Box Tops (in honor of the Four Tops, presumably), thanks to Penn's sharp instincts they drop the bomb right away in the summer of love of '67. It's called "The Letter" and it goes straight to number one on the charts, trading places with another gem of southern pop from that period, Bobbie Gentry's "Ode To Billy Joe". Barely two minutes long, but enough to burrow into your brain and stir up some less noble part of the body. Written by Wayne Carson Thompson and magnificently produced by Penn (who would man the mixing desk on three of the Box Tops' four albums), "The Letter" sets the musical formula the band would almost never stray from, replicated with equal success on other hits like "Cry Like A Baby" (April '68) and "Soul Deep" (August '69). A blend of airy soul/r'n'b and pop with a Beatles-esque flavor, dressed in impeccably crafted sonic clothes, where the cleanliness of the production never comes at the expense of the interplay between keyboards, guitars, strings, backing vocals and glockenspiel (just listen to an overly frou-frou track like "Fields Of Clover" for confirmation).

The focal point, naturally, is Chilton's voice: a rough, booming voice of a Southern man, a touch affected for a kid who hasn't even finished high school, but one already hinting at uncommon melodic qualities and an innocence barely concealed behind the tough-guy, vaguely Jagger-esque attitude Alex liked to display in the many surviving video clips of the era. Many have pointed out the similarities with his English counterpart, Steve Winwood, but the Box Tops almost entirely lacked the blues meanness of the Spencer Davis Group. Much closer were the blue-eyed soul of the Young Rascals ("Turn On A Dream", "She Shot A Hole In My Soul") or the jazz-pop orchestrations of Blood, Sweat & Tears ("Sweet Cream Ladies Forward March", "Together").

To simplify things, the Box Tops were the Sixties incarnation of the boy band concept. Which goes to show why the Sixties were the greatest decade in the history of music: no boy band of the last forty years, in fact, can boast the same quantity of beautiful – in some cases gorgeous – songs, most of them written by Oldham-Penn. And if you think a compilation can easily settle the matter, well, think again. Each of the Box Tops' four LPs, all originally released on the New York label Bell, has its own points of interest.

On The Letter/Neon Rainbow (November 1967) besides the two singles named in the title (the second a successful attempt by Chilton to play crooner) there's a decent cover, recorded virtually live, of "A Whiter Shade Of Pale" and the country-soul march "Happy Times"; on Cry Like A Baby (summer 1968), actually the weakest of the bunch despite the fabulous title track, it's "You Keep Me Hangin' On" and "Weeping Analeah" that get the Chilton treatment; Non-Stop (November 1968) shows off a great rock-blues drive on the chugging "Choo Choo Train", superb pop elegance on "People Gonna Talk" (despite one too many affected Black-inflected vocal moments) and gospel leanings on "I Met Her In Church"; finally Dimensions (September 1969) reveals the still-green but promising qualities of Chilton the songwriter on tracks like "Together", "The Happy Song" and the gritty blues of "I Must Be The Devil".

Even better than these is a B-side from the same period, an exquisite exercise somewhere between Glenn Campbell and Burt Bacharach called "I See Only Sunshine", but the singer's understandable ambitions as a songwriter are frustrated by the dictatorial Penn, who dictates not only the songs but even how to sing them. After a miserable English tour at the end of '69, Chilton decides he's had enough and quits the group (which, reverting to its original nature as a manufactured product, would carry on for some time without any of its original members).

There would later be a Box Tops reunion in the Nineties, with a few concerts and even an album (Tear Off!) on which Alex and co. stick exclusively to r'n'r and rockabilly covers. But that would happen almost thirty years later. At the end of the decade par excellence, Alex Chilton is ready to turn the page. Having just turned nineteen, the only period of success in his life is already over.

Well, I'm free again, to do what I want

(Free Again, Alex Chilton)

Having filed away the experience of being a… big star that had put him through the wringer at an age when one's shoulders aren't yet broad enough to bear the pressure, Chilton still needed a point of reference. If not exactly a father figure, then at least an older brother capable of guiding him and reassuring him about his own abilities. With his relationship with Dan Penn and Chips Moman having run aground, despite good artistic results, Alex finds his new family at Ardent. Even before it was a small (but very well-equipped) recording studio and an up-and-coming local label, the company founded about a decade earlier by John Fry — a brilliant, freshly-graduated electronics enthusiast with a side parting and a jacket-and-tie look at the opposite end of any definition of coolness — was a gathering place for aspiring rockers consumed by Anglophilia.

In Ardent's back rooms you learned the tricks of the trade by watching producers and sound engineers at work, but people also discussed the latest reviews from Nme and Melody Maker, since Fry was the only one in town to have a subscription to the two British weeklies. And naturally everyone dreamed of recording their own songs. Maybe with the help of a pair of Ardent jacks-of-all-trades, musicians themselves, such as Terry Manning and Jim Dickinson. Chilton had already struck up a friendship with the former back in the Box Tops days, having crossed paths with him during some sessions. They were more or less the same age, and understood each other instantly. It was only natural that the singer's first solo album would be recorded at Ardent studios, under Manning's supervision. Too bad it would never become the "singer's first solo album": the tapes were shopped around to various record labels, but none showed any interest.

Meanwhile Big Star came into being, and the solo project was shelved. It would be brought back to light, literally (even Manning had forgotten where the masters had ended up), only in 1996, when Rev-Ola released it under the none-too-imaginative title of 1970. It was recently reissued as Free Again-1970 Sessions by Big Beat, with a couple of bonus tracks. Although several tracks had surfaced here and there, especially on the double compilation "Lost Decade" released by Fan Club in the mid-Eighties, when the record came out it was a revelation for longtime Chilton fans: there it was, the missing piece between the Box Tops and Big Star. Amid a few tracks recycled from the former ("I Can Dig It", "The Happy Song") and others that would resurface much later ("Free Again"), amid ragged covers ("Jumpin' Jack Flash", "Sugar Sugar") that seem to anticipate the homeless, lawless Chilton of a decade later, a couple of absolutely magnificent songs stand out, windows onto a radiant future: one is the sweet "Every Day As We Grow Closer" (which to attentive ears reveals the vocal harmonies of "Give Me Another Chance", from Big Star's first album), the other is the ballad co-written with Manning, "EMI Song (Smile For Me)", which would have made Brian Wilson proud, if only he'd been in any state to connect with it at the time.

Who knows what might have happened if this album had actually come out, back in those early months of 1970. Maybe Chilton would have launched a successful career, Big Star would never have existed, Peter Buck would have kept working as a clerk in a record store, Paul Westerberg would today be some small-time dealer in Minneapolis… okay, let's stop there. For once, history took the right turn. Perhaps in his final years even Chilton would have admitted as much, having spent much of his life pretending that the band his name will forever be tied to was just an accident along the way.

I never travel far, without a little Big Star

(Alex Chilton, Replacements)

I'll spare you the details here about the genesis of Big Star, and how various projects orbiting around Ardent and the usual Manning (Icewater and Rock City) acted as a prologue to the appearance of the big star itself. By cross-referencing the booklet and songs from Rhino's "Keep An Eye On The Sky" box set (the definitive Big Star collection) and the double anthology CD "Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story" (Big Beat, 2008), you can reconstruct every step. What matters is that on a certain day in 1971, three of those kids with England on the brain (Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel, drummer Jody Stephens) found themselves in the same Ardent studio with Alex Chilton, back in town after an unproductive stint in New York. In Greenwich Village he had tried to reinvent himself as a folksinger, but nothing came of it, aside from a handful of songs (one of which is called "Thirteen"). By now other influences were driving the young musician: the new pop coming from across the Atlantic (the Move, Badfinger), the Velvet Underground, by then on the verge of breaking up but for whom he'd developed an unhealthy passion, and the early solo steps of Todd Rundgren after the end of the Nazz, a story he could, for obvious reasons, fully identify with.

Add to that the total devotion to the Beatles gospel that fuels both him and especially Bell, the latter's obsessive attraction to the sonic explorations made possible by Ardent's 16-track setup, the excellent instrumental (and vocal) skills of Hummel and Stephens, not to mention the technical expertise of the staff under Fry and Manning: all of this, mixed together, produces that miracle of a record that is Big Star's debut.

Few other albums in rock history have captured with such clarity that magical, unrepeatable instant — each of us has lived through it — when the recklessness, optimism and brashness of youth give you the feeling that you can do anything. That every door is open in front of you, you just need the courage to jump in. And the four kids from Memphis had, at that moment, an unlimited supply of courage, recklessness, brashness and youth. What a marvelous display of hybris it was to choose the name Big Star (a name suggested by the sign of a supermarket across from the studio, but how auspicious it sounded!), and even more so to title their first record # 1 Record. No one, among those who've listened to it over these forty years, has ever taken it to mean "number one on the charts", but rather, chronologically, "first record". But they believed it, oh how they believed it. And perhaps one of the reasons this album continues to exert its fascination on generations of pop music lovers lies precisely in the cruel contrast between what could have been and what wasn't, between the joyful self-confidence bursting from the grooves and the listener's awareness of what a chamber of horrors Big Star's future would turn out to be. Hybris punished by the gods. Power destined never to become a completed act, frozen forever in forty minutes of magic: is there anything sadder, and at the same time more poetic?

All of Big Star's music, not just what's contained on this record, lives on an unstable balance, even within its harmoniousness. Light and shadow, innocence and perversion, emotional surrender and cynicism. There's a dark core — some have even called it "unhealthy" — in the band's songs, a typically Southern sense of decay that, like a woodworm, corrodes their romanticism from within. Take as an example the two unattainable masterpieces penned by Chilton on #1 Record. "The Ballad Of El Goodo" is a disarming confession of vulnerability, in which, right as the protagonist claims he can make it "against strong odds" (because "at my side is God" — and the religiosity implicit in so many Chilton and Bell songs would deserve a chapter of its own), something in his voice makes us think he's actually surrendered to the inevitable. "Thirteen", on the other hand, is steeped in a subtler ambiguity: on one hand it's perhaps the most enchanting paean ever devoted to the pangs of adolescence, on the other there's something unsettling in that "come inside where it's okay, and I'll shake you" addressed to the girlfriend (hey, wait a second: what if he's not thirteen?). Musically, both songs are about as close to melodic perfection as one can imagine. Personally, I can still remember the scent of the air coming through the window the first time I heard the "oooh"s and "aaah"s of "El Goodo", or the opening arpeggio of "Thirteen". Because these are the kind of songs you only need to hear once, and they stay with you for the rest of your life. The same goes for the harmonica that comes in to temper the melancholy reverie of "Watch The Sunrise", or for the crystalline melody and the backing vocals wrapped around the promise to change — but again: how much does he really believe it? — in "Give Me Another Chance".

The few who heard these tracks at the time already knowing the Box Tops must have been stunned by the deep change in Chilton's singing: gone are the baritone tones and the put-on roughness, his voice takes on an unexpected sweetness, a pubescent inflection cloaked in fragility. As if the twenty-one-year-old Alex were paradoxically younger than the seventeen-year-old one. Many have pointed out how the dualism between Chilton and Bell (even though both have a hand in each other's songs) recalls that between Lennon and McCartney. And yet the more rock-oriented tracks, in theory the most "John-style" ones, are the ones Chris writes. In the hard-edged atmospheres of "Don't Lie To Me" — the only track on the record that has aged badly — he reveals his full love for Led Zeppelin, while on "Feel" the attraction to the emerging glam rock is evident in the T.Rex-style riff and in the sax-and-piano flourishes that evoke a reworked fifties sound. On the other hand, that same song, like "In The Street", could very well be the offspring of some hypothetical Fab Four of '72 after relocating to Memphis.

Big Star may have invented power pop with this record (and even more so with the next one), as every encyclopedia never fails to remind us, but all they wanted was simply for the Beatles' dream not to fade away. And since the Fab Four had left the field, they'd pick up where they left off. #1 Record is a work thoroughly steeped in post-Beatles spleen, even on more dreamy, "psychedelic" tracks like "Try Again"; "India Song" itself, written by Hummel, seems to play with Sixties mythology starting right from its title.

Taking the process of identification to its extreme, Bell suggests not going on tour, just as his idols had done after '66. The tragedy is that the band effectively doesn't play live, but not by choice: because nobody's booking them. It takes just a few weeks, in the summer of '72, to realize that the album meant to make them what they boasted of being in their very name is the most spectacular of flops. The reviews are almost all glowing, but the vast majority of copies sit in Ardent's warehouse. The blame for the flop lies mostly with Stax, with whom Fry has a distribution deal. The storied soul label has no idea how to promote a product it doesn't fully understand, and as if that weren't enough, its finances are in the red. Besides, in Memphis the guys are considered outcasts even by white audiences, too smitten with the hard-rock, blues and boogie swagger popular at the time to pay attention to a group looking backward, to the Byrds and the Kinks, in order to invent the pop of the future. Demoralized by the disastrous turn of events, disgusted by the business dealings, and aware that leadership of the group has by now been snatched from him by Chilton, Bell walks away from it all. Within a few months he sinks into depression and gives himself over to the embrace of hard drugs.

This is where the Big Star story starts to turn into tragedy. But even though the band is put on stand-by, Chilton's inspiration is still running at full speed. Alex tries to record a few tracks with drummer Richard Rosebrough and bassist Danny Jones, two more Ardent regulars, but it's a reunion with Stephens and Hummel, on the occasion of a show for a music journalists' convention (see, every now and then we're actually good for something), that convinces him to go back into the studio with his old bandmates.

That's how, in the winter of '73, the songs on Radio City came to life. Unlike its predecessor, the record is a patchwork of recordings made at different times, and the songs themselves have complicated origins. "Mod Lang" and "She's A Mover," the toughest tracks, are the result of the sessions with Rosebrough and Jones, while "Back Of A Car" (perhaps the absolute archetype of power pop) and "O My Soul" were half-written by Bell. Despite this, the overall sound is tighter, the atmosphere more coherent, the guitars more shimmering than ever, with cascades of chords that fill the sonic space in an almost three-dimensional way. Few other guitar pop records can compete with Radio City when it comes to the quality of the recording.

But great sounds without great songs would be worthless, and here you literally leap from one marvel to the next. The first half of the album is one unbroken block of melody, propped up by insistent riffs and rhythmic rises and falls ("O My Soul"), or skipping along on an almost ragtime piano ("Life Is White"), or else stretched out and slowed down until it turns translucent ("What's Goin Ahn"). "Way Out West," another fine songwriting turn from Hummel, weaves garlands of twelve-string guitar around a theme of resigned melancholy, while "You Get What You Deserve" is pure emotional poison disguised in the deceptive sweetness of its chords.

On side two, the bows to the rockier Ray Davies in the aforementioned "Mod Lang" and "She's A Mover" — with their solid, unified construction and lyrics built by borrowing blues slang ("Mod Lang" is short for "Modern Language") — serve as a counterweight to the sheer, unfiltered schizophrenia of "Daisy Glaze," a track that's sublime and terrifying at once, foreshadowing future psychological disasters as it turns the romantic pathos of its first half into the nihilistic despair of its second ("And I'm thinking Christ/ nullify my life"). And then, of course, there's Chilton's absolute triumph: "September Gurls" is the quintessence of guitar pop, the perfect triangulation of Beatles, Byrds and Beach Boys. The sense of nostalgia running through it can't quite sweep away the usual layer of Chiltonian sarcasm and disenchantment ("I loved you, well nevermind": you can almost picture him shrugging as he sings it), but then again, that's precisely the constant thread of a record whose underlying theme is the inability to live out one's feelings in any balanced way, forever stranded in the no-man's-land between adolescence and adulthood. An inability to be normal that would go on to deeply mark Chilton's life and career from then on — starting with the record that would seal the story of Big Star for the next thirty years.

"The third Big Star album? It's about disillusionment and decay. Pure angst from east Memphis"

(Jim Dickinson)

"I'm in love with a girl, the finest girl in the world": with this naive declaration of romantic fulfillment, Radio City comes to a close. As if, right at the very end, the psychological tensions running through the whole record resolved themselves into a Valentine's Day card. Naturally, there's unspoken irony at work here. Not least because the "finest girl in the world" is one Lesa Aldredge, a character every bit as difficult and moody as Chilton — maybe even more so. The girl, who plays in a proto-punk band called Klitz ("a kind of Shaggs on tranquilizers," as Jim Dickinson recalls them), draws Alex into a tumultuous relationship that frightens everyone around the musician with its self-destructive nature. But that's not the only worrying sign in the increasingly unstable world surrounding a band that, after yet another disappointment (Radio City sells even worse than #1 Record), is by now falling apart completely. After Bell, Hummel also leaves, unable to cope with Chilton's increasingly out-of-control personality. In his place, for a few months in 1974, appears a certain John Lightman, and it's with him that Chilton and Stephens play live on a handful of occasions. A couple of shows from this period have been resurrected on CD: Live (Rykodisc, 1992) documents a performance on Long Island recorded for a local radio station, while Nobody Can Dance (Norton, 1999) captures one at the Overton Park Shell in Memphis. Together with the live set included in the box set Keep An Eye On The Sky (recorded at a restaurant full of people minding their own business, again in Memphis), they testify to the band's solidity on stage and their skill — anything but a given for what has always been considered a studio project — at pulling off such refined arrangements in a more rock'n'roll setting.

The summer of 1974 is a season of desolation in Memphis. Everything is falling apart. Big Star, Ardent, Stax, the relationship between Alex and Lesa, Chris Bell's fragile nerves, friendships, human relationships in general. What just a few years earlier had been an enclave of creativity and enthusiasm has turned into a collective psychodrama steeped in alcohol, quaaludes, and a barely repressed violence. A total existential collapse, captured with disturbing intensity on Third. Or Sister Lovers, as it would come to be called in Ryko's definitive 1992 CD edition. Or "Beale Street Green," as Chilton originally intended to title it. In short: the difficult third album by Big Star. Except it's not really a Big Star album at all, even though Jody Stephens plays on every track, and even wrote one of them (the ballad "For You," with its exquisite string arrangement). To be honest, it's not even really an album. More a hodgepodge of occasional recordings made at night at Ardent, whenever inspiration — or blood alcohol level — demanded it. Helped along by his partner in crime Jim Dickinson, who indulges his wildest requests, Chilton lays down on tape a series of songs that — with the exception of the sarcastic but melodious "Thank You Friends," the only one that could have fit on either of the two previous records — you'd be tempted to call Picasso-esque. Deformed, fractured, limping, dissonant tracks (the peak being "Downs," the only song in the world in which a basketball is used as a noise instrument) sit side by side with nocturnal ballads whose elegance and anguish are matched only by their morbidity ("Big Black Car," "Nightime," "Blue Moon"); waltzes and nursery rhymes that are utterly out of place ("Stroke It Noel," "O Dana," "Take Care") and yet irresistibly appealing despite their incongruous instrumentation (the carnival organ and sax that respectively open and close "Jesus Christ"), inserted as moments of decompression between ramshackle r'n'r numbers ("Kizza Me," the off-key covers of "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin On" and the Kinks' "Till The End Of The Day").

At the heart of the record lies the cosmic emptiness of "Holocaust" and "Kangaroo," and the grotesque juxtaposition of those two titles alone is enough to give a sense of Chilton's perverse vision. How do you even begin to describe two things this enormous? Psychedelia with no dreams left, the Stones of "Moonlight Mile" and "Sister Morphine" locked up in a psychiatric ward, the Velvets of "Heroin" trying their hand at soul (a perfect description, courtesy of an esteemed colleague of mine), new wave invented in the sweaty, drugged-out nights of the South. It's no surprise that the finest versions of these two songs have come from the likes of Kendra Smith, This Mortal Coil, and Buckley Jr.

Like everything that dares to propose a new standard of beauty, "the third Big Star album" is not an easy record to love. Far from it. It takes time to grasp its meaning, to find your own place among those shadows. For this writer, it took years. And if it can still be hard to connect with today, imagine how it was in 1975. Fry and Dickinson desperately search for someone willing to give finished shape to that magma, shopping around tapes that were considered "unacceptable even as demos" (Dickinson again), but it's all in vain. A cobbled-together version of Third wouldn't come out until three years later, on a small label, to general indifference. At the end of that same year, Chris Bell dies crashing his car into a telephone pole, while in New York Alex Chilton is lost in his own psychotic trip. By now, no star shines anymore in Memphis's hazy sky.

“C’mon baby, fuck me and die”

(No Sex, Alex Chilton)

One evening in the mid-1980s, the leader of an up-and-coming Minneapolis band finds himself at the bar of a club in New Orleans. His name is Paul Westerberg, and he's been told that this is the place where he might run into his idol, Alex Chilton. He asks the bartender what time the show starts, and the guy, smirking, nods toward a corner of the room, where a man with a rag and a bucket of water is mopping the floor. I can't remember where I read this anecdote, and maybe it didn't happen exactly like that (other versions have Westerberg hopping into a taxi and finding Chilton behind the wheel), but for many years that was exactly the image the music world had of the ex-Big Star frontman. A kind of Travis Bickle back from his own personal Vietnam, washing dishes in restaurants, delivering mail, trimming hedges in cemeteries, or doing whatever other job let him live hidden away and, above all, far from music. That's true, but only partly. The years between 1975 and 1985 are, in many respects, a "lost decade" for Chilton, as the title of that compilation we already mentioned put it, but that doesn't mean he produced nothing. In fact, for some, this is the Memphis musician's most fertile period. These are the fans of his more ramshackle side, the ones who believe the real artist isn't the all-melody, pretty-shapes Dr. Jekyll of Big Star, but rather the rowdy, drunk, dissolute, and in his own way almost avant-garde Mr. Hyde of records like Bach's Bottom and Like Flies On Sherbert.

The first, continuing what, after Third, becomes almost a constant, is the release — without its creator's authorization — of recordings made in 1975 under the production of Jon Tiven (a young Big Star fan whom Chilton drives to despair with his anarchic, couldn't-care-less approach). The album came out in 1981, but the same tracks can be found on the EP Singer Not The Song, released by Ork in 1977, and on the semi-bootleg One Day In New York, alongside a handful of songs recorded live at CBGB's. When punk explodes, Alex finds himself, fittingly, in the Big Apple, where he's gone in search of a record deal and to escape the ghosts of Memphis, but he manages to be a dropout even within a scene where he could have been crowned king in exile. He doesn't hang around with the Talking Heads, Television and Blondie crowd, all people he despises and considers fake, but he does get along just fine with outcasts like the Cramps, for whom he produces their first two 45s (later collected on the EP Gravest Hits) and their debut album "Songs The Lord Taught Us." This, in fact, is as good a place as any to start trying to understand the Alex Chilton of those years — a record far better known than any of his solo work, and maybe with the memories of a Lux Interior still unnerved by that Memphis madman who, at one point, walks into the recording booth, points a gun at his temple, and orders him to "sing it better this time." There's probably some exaggeration here too, but still, a man who scares Lux Interior is someone to handle with care. Much like the wrecked tracks on Bach's Bottom, whether covers of others ("Summertime Blues," "I'm So Tired," "Singer Not The Song") or of himself ("Jesus Christ," sadistically taken to with a hammer). Derailed rock'n'roll teetering on the edge of being out of tune and dissonant, the absolute antithesis of Big Star, which would go on to become a reference template for the future.

The fragmentary nature of Third remains the guiding concept, but without that record's romantic, crepuscular morbidity, replaced instead by a debauchery that's at times downright irritating. The same goes for Like Flies On Sherbert, which in 1979 — after the release of the excellent single "Bangkok," backed with a cover of the Seeds' "Can't Seem To Make You Mine," and a failed attempt to form a band hypothetically called Cossacks with future dB's members Chris Stamey and Peter Holsapple — marks a homecoming. Still the same crew of desperate characters backing him up, still Jim Dickinson behind the mixing desk — so to speak — but this time the studio is the legendary Sun, Sam Phillips's own. Thank goodness Elvis had already been six feet under for a couple of years, because if he'd happened to hear these twenty-nine minutes of alcoholic delirium, he'd have called the FBI at the very least.

There's nothing, across the ten songs on the tracklist (as usual split between originals and wildly unhinged covers — just listen to the rockabilly-disco version of KC & the Sunshine Band's "Boogie Shoes," or Ernest Tubb's country classic "Waltz Across Texas" literally mangled), that could call to mind concepts like "melody," "composition," "harmonic structure," "proper mixing," or "arrangement." Everyone's doing their own thing, the bass sometimes drowns out everything else and more often disappears entirely, the drums sound like they're made of cardboard, the guitars screech. Even in an age of rising new wave, those songs must have landed like a punch to the gut. Forget punk: tracks like "I've Had It" and "Rock Hard" already contain the whole of '90s garage/roots and lo-fi, and if you want to know who invented shitgaze, give "My Rival" a listen. And yet, within that wrecked, not even particularly joyful laissez-faire attitude (Chilton is at an all-time low in quality of life and an all-time high in drug and alcohol dependency), you can glimpse the artist's emerging new vision — an "aesthetic of ugliness" that deliberately avoids any superstructure in favor of the purest r'n'r spontaneity, without denying himself the odd experiment borrowed from rather distant musical territories (the almost Kraftwerk-like repetition of "Hook Or Crook," the synthetic hisses on "My Rival" which, by Chilton's own admission, echo the sounds "accidentally" produced by Brian Eno in Roxy Music).

The album, released in 1979 in a limited edition by Peabody and in 1980 by Aura for the European market, as was only natural, vanished from every radar within a week of its release — though it did kickstart yet another cult surrounding the name of Alex Chilton. After a live recording made in 1981 in London with members of the Soft Boys and the Vibrators, Chilton went into semi-seclusion until the middle of the decade. Having pocketed some money from the sale of his late father's house, he moved to New Orleans and joined as guitarist in the Panther Burns, led by his old pal Tav Falco. In the meantime he had said a definitive goodbye to Aldredge and to drugs, a somewhat less definitive one to alcohol, and he slowly seemed to be getting back on track. While washing dishes in the restaurants of Bourbon Street, he realized that a lot of people around the world worshipped him like a god. And that maybe it was time to resurface, once again.

Children by the million, sing for Alex Chilton

(Alex Chilton, Replacements)

The Chilton-mania was one of the most pervasive phenomena of 80s alternative rock, spreading like a kind of underground religion to every corner of the globe. Not even that underground, really. Even if TV series weren't yet using his songs as theme tunes (the creators of Gilmore Girls would do just that some fifteen years later, with "Thirteen"), beyond the dozens of jingle-jangle and power-pop bands drawing inspiration from Big Star, there are Rem, who namedrop the musician in every other interview, the Bangles, who covered "September Gurls", and the Replacements, who dedicated one of their signature songs to him. Among Chilton's hardcore fans was also Patrick Mathé, owner of the French label New Rose, already a refuge for r'n'r sinners such as Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Johnny Thunders, Roky Erickson and — would you believe it — the Cramps and Tav Falco. Between the late 80s and early 90s, New Rose released a series of works — often recorded as a trio with bassist René Coman and drummer Doug Garrison — that kept Alex's profile high among fans of borderline rock. They're not astonishing records, it must be said. The excesses, including the sonic ones, were no longer part of the man's persona, who instead preferred to settle into an r'n'b/funk/rockabilly format that showcased his virtues as singer and guitarist.

Paradoxically (though not that paradoxically) his best results came in the short format of the mini-LP or the EP. Far better is Feudalist Tarts (1985), with its fine touches that veer now toward soul-pop ("B-A-B-Y", from Carla Thomas's repertoire), now toward Dylan ("Lost My Job"), or the funky solidity of "No Sex" (a double 45 from 1986 whose title track got heavy rotation on college radio, despite its subject matter — a sarcastic reflection on the terror of AIDS — not exactly being its main selling point), or again the easy sway between doo-wop, surf and mature Stones on Black List (1990), on which Chilton even reveals a political itch ("Guantanamerika", one of his best tracks in the post-Big Star years) — far better than all of these is a rather flat album like 1987's High Priest, on which he tackles a Louis Prima-style version of "Volare", probably suggested by Tav Falco.

Having discovered he could handle Italian just fine, he tried his hand again with Celentano, covering his "Ribelle", included on 1995's A Man Called Destruction. Fun and sparkling, like the rest of the album for that matter (if you set aside the funeral march of "It's Your Funeral"), but however well played and well sung, tracks like "What's Your Sign Girl" (Chilton had a morbid passion for astrology), "Sick & Tired" and "Don't Stop" are still exercises in style. The same goes for the covers on 1999's Loose Shoes And Tight Pussy, whose raunchy title (it would be released in the United States under the more demure name "Set") clashes with the music, an elegant and thoroughly enjoyable compendium of R&B, boogaloo, soul and tributes to the musician's adopted city ("Lipstick Traces", which Allen Toussaint wrote for Benny Spellman).

On the preceding Cliches (1994), he had gone even further back, unveiling a confidential, jazzy singing style (complete with evergreens like "There Will Be Another You" and "My Baby Just Cares For Me") that was a couple of universes removed from the filth of Like Flies On Sherbert. These influences, however, never reached beyond the 50s and early 60s. But the 70s always come knocking on the door of those who lived through them, and for Alex Chilton, "the 70s" meant Big Star above all else. After refusing to even sing those songs — except on rare occasions, as "September Gurls" on the No Sex tracklist attests — in 1993 he surprisingly gave in to an invitation from a college radio station and played a live show at the University of Missouri in Columbia, under that legendary name. Alongside him were Jody Stephens, with whom he reconnected after fifteen years, and the two Posies members, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow.

The result was a live album that reawakened the dreams of Big Star fans scattered across the globe, but for a true studio record one had to wait until 2005 (in the meantime, there had also been a Box Tops reunion).

In Space, although judged harshly by most critics, is far from a bad record, and while it doesn't come close to the heights of thirty years earlier, it still lines up (especially in the first half) a string of excellent pop songs. Chilton sings with relish, but the impression is that the best tracks, despite him being credited as writer or co-writer on most of them, are largely the Posies' handiwork (the splendid "Lady Sweet", "Best Chance", the Beach Boys-style pastiche of "Turn My Back On The Sun") if not outright Stephens's ("February's Quiet").

Beyond that, it comes across as a decent Chilton solo record, moving between somewhat rowdy funk-rock ("Love Revolution"), fifties echoes ("Mine Exclusively") and oddities born of his passion for certain classical composers ("Aria", "Largo").

In Space, raised eyebrows from the press notwithstanding, nonetheless marks the crowning moment of a cult that had kept swelling over the course of three decades. The resurrected Big Star played everywhere, toured the festival circuit and offered themselves up to a couple of generations of fans who could finally indulge in their myth. Chilton enjoyed these universal displays of affection and the recognition that arrived at the eleventh hour, even if he tried not to show it too much. All told, in his final years he was a serene and fulfilled man, as those who knew him well attest. In 2005 he even withstood Hurricane Katrina, spending a week on the roof of his New Orleans home as the city flooded. But fate had other plans: on March 17, 2010, at fifty-nine years of age, a heart complication took him away. An ending that arrived like a betrayal, just when everything seemed to finally be going his way. But Alex Chilton was never an ordinary man, and I couldn't picture him as a seventy-year-old rocker, singing "The Letter" to pay for his pension. It went the way it had to go, Alex, even if it hurts. I loved you… well, nevermind.

Originally published in "Il Mucchio Extra" 38, summer 2012

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