Big Star / Alex Chilton

(1978 – Included on "Third", PVC, 1978)

It's rather bizarre that the greatest masterpiece by the band that, more than any other, helped coin power pop should be the one least equipped with crystalline melodies fired off with fervor and energy. Aside from the sparkling "Thank You Friends", the joyous hymn of "Jesus Christ" and the granite-solid "You Can't Have Me", Big Star's Big Star "Third" is essentially a collection of soul-spat fragments, often born crooked, like the limping opener "Kizza Me", sometimes dated, like the romantic ballroom sway of "Oh, Dana", and other times listless, like the anesthetic swoon of "Big Black Car". Nothing to do, in short, with the sunlit flashes of #1 Record or the epic vibrations of "Radio City", one of the greatest guitar pop records ever cut.

On "Third" there's no "Thirteen" to narrate, with the delicacy of a coming-of-age novel, the shameless innocence of a thirteen-year-old crush; no "Ballad Of El Goodo" to transfigure fragility into a beauty you want to inhale with full lungs; no "Back Of A Car" to accompany you through a midsummer dream, foot on the gas and eyes fixed on the horizon; no "September Gurls" to push you — on some mild September day — into the arms of a stranger you could fall for. Instead, there are demons; the kind that not even the opaline serenade of "Blue Moon" can chase away.

You have to live with hell in your head, in your soul, to cut a record like "Third" and write things as devastating as "Kangaroo" and "Holocaust". Indeed, when these two aborted poems were conceived, Alex Chilton's life was anything but a triumph of joy. It was 1974, and the first two Big Star albums — partly due to Ardent's meager promotional investment, the label affiliated with the legendary Stax — had turned out to be resounding commercial flops. Overwhelmed by a despondency that would curdle into chronic depression, guitarist Chris Bell — who would die on a highway on December 27, 1978, the day before Chilton's twenty-eighth birthday — had left the band right after the release of the first album. Bassist Andy Hummel followed suit just a year later, leaving Chilton alone with his own nightmares, brooding over the wreckage of a crumbling relationship (with Lesa Aldridge), a life spiraling down the same ravine, and a mental balance tipping dangerously from fragile to precarious. All that was left for the Big Star frontman, now backed only by surviving drummer Jody Stephens, was to drown his disappointments in a handful of songs vomited out during sleepless nights, when the soul's retching became more urgent than the stomach cramps induced by alcohol, drugs and Demerol. Too bad nobody wanted to release those songs, which sat in a drawer for another four years, until PVC bought them and put them out under the name Third. It was 1978, and the Anglophone music scene was awash in that kaleidoscope of decadent creativity called new wave, of which Big Star's third album embodied — the paradox of an immense, visionary band — an early post-scriptum.

The sickly, hallucinated atmospheres of "Kangaroo" and "Holocaust" fit perfectly with the cultural climate that was giving birth to the murky hedonism of Only Ones and Magazine, the dark cabaret of Tuxedomoon, and the goth aesthetic of Joy Division and Sound. It's no coincidence that this fertile musical brew produced two sensational covers of exactly "Kangaroo" and "Holocaust", courtesy of This Mortal Coil, a sort of hyper-band assembled by Ivo Watts-Russell of 4AD featuring all the label's standard-bearers, from Dead Can Dance to Cocteau Twins. The new versions of Big Star's two most striking songs somehow closed a circle, acknowledging Alex Chilton's role as an extraordinary bridge between the most amphetamine-fueled psychedelia of the Sixties (the inevitable Velvet Underground, the Stones of "Their Satanic Majesties Request", the acid-dosed Fab Four, the possessed Pretty Things) and the new wave of twilight musicians emerging from art schools. Between the two, perhaps the archetype of a certain strain of new wave — not so much in sound or style, but precisely at the level of attitude — is "Kangaroo"; the point of no return, on the other hand, is undoubtedly "Holocaust".

"Holocaust" is music in the shape of silence, but it has nothing to do with the vital conceptualism of John Cage, even though at first glance it seems like pure avant-garde: mournful piano, aphasic cello, and guitar bleeding slide-guitar hisses. Little by little, though, the song takes on the guise of chamber music from beyond the grave, a requiem without peace, a gospel lament rising from the depths of the self (the female choir humming spectrally in the background). "Holocaust" is despair staring you in the eye the moment you find the courage to look in the mirror. It's the grief we carry within us from the moment we're born; the tragedy of having come into the world, to borrow from Calderón de la Barca. "Holocaust" hurts; a physical, tangible hurt. Getting through its four minutes means doing yourself a kind of violence. A violence that's preparatory and necessary for catharsis, because pain purifies. And this isn't the nonsense we were fed in catechism to demonize pleasure, nor the posturing of some terminal nerd who, instead of going out and getting some healthy sex like his peers rightfully do, sits around flagellating himself with existential dramas good only for the stupid pride of feeling different. And, unknowingly, ready for the coffin.

Chilton's resigned singing is truly mute stone, an epitaph of the flesh, a euthanasia of the spirit. In "Holocaust" there's Christ — the man — suffering on the cross, abandoned even by God the Father; there's Conrad's Lord Jim, choosing death to redeem the sins of his own life. More prosaically and less heroically, in "Holocaust" there's each of us, the sacrifice we're forced to be without even realizing it. Walking holocausts, lambs waiting for an Easter that never comes, trembling meanwhile at the slaughterhouse. Music isn't listened to, it's "felt", like the range of emotions we're capable of experiencing; the ones conveyed by the seventh track on Big Star's third — and, for almost thirty years, final — album are deep, black emotions, as if it were one long night lasting three minutes and fifty-five seconds, inducing grim, merciless reflection.

Luckily, that's just one of the plausible readings (there may well be more comforting ones) of a hermetic song whose subject is hard to pin down. What's certain is that it has nothing to do with Nazism or the genocide of the Jews, which is the first association that comes to mind reading the title.

Still, there's little reason for comfort: the scenario of the incipit is bleak and desolate regardless: “Your eyes are almost dead/ Can’t get out of bed/ And you can’t sleep”. Dead eyes, a lack of energy that pins you to the bed, insomnia: is it illness? Is it depression? Is it a sickness of living itself? Whatever it is, its cause is an unfillable absence: "Your mother's dead/ You're on your own". So the poetic cores of "Holocaust" are death (as a child, Chilton had lost a fourteen-year-old brother in a domestic accident) and the sense of inexorable solitude it leaves behind: “Everybody goes/ As far as they can/ They don’t just care/ You’re a wasted face/ You’re a sad-eyed lie/ You’re a holocaust”. It's a lucid, concise reflection on the meaning of life; perhaps only Conrad himself put it more clearly and directly: "We live, as we dream — alone".

Few musicians have had the nerve to venture into the heart of darkness that is "Holocaust" and attempt a cover. Placebo tried, with a dreadful, aestheticizing version that strips away its essence. The Bubblegum Lemonade tried, at least attempting to turn it into something else: a devitalized jangle-pop, more shame than glory if we're honest. Howard Devoto tried, before anyone else, with the aforementioned This Mortal Coil, delivering a reading that's at once classic and ethereal. There's nothing to be done about it — you have to be great to stand up to the greatest. At 4AD they were clearly aware of this, so much so that they titled the album containing "Holocaust" and other sacred reinterpretations of Tim Buckley and Roy Harper with an emblematic, prophetic "It'll End In Tears".

It'll end in tears, then. If the emotional desert of "Holocaust" doesn't dry those up too.