Big Star

To me, Big Star are like a letter mailed in 1971 that arrived in 1985. Like something truly lost in the post

The words of Robyn Hitchcock, delivered with that daydream cadence we've come to know since the days of the Soft Boys, drift gently over the opening credits of the film "Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me", alongside those of Norman Blake, Matthew Sweet, Ira Kaplan, Mike Mills and many other names who owe a great deal to the legendary work of the Memphis band. The documentary is a choral narrative of moved, invested voices and, while it doesn't reveal much that's new to devotees of the Big Star universe, it manages to convey to any viewer the tragic grandeur of a story that still casts long shadows over the course of pop music as we know it today. A story larger than life, in which the dream turns to drama, and the drama, once private, becomes public, in the songs of Alex Chilton — first bitter, then truly twisted — and in the abysses of inconsolable melancholy of Chris Bell, two songwriters who came together to create an unrepeatable album. Then it all ends in the blink of an eye, the promise dying before it even has time to bloom. But here, at the beginning, there's talent and genius, purity and hope. And there's "#1 Record": simply one of the greatest pop albums ever recorded.

"There was always some band or other," recalls David Bell, "and so I'd find myself driving my fourteen, fifteen-year-old little brother around, with amplifiers, gear and everything else." Words spoken with an emotion born of distant yet still vivid memories, recounting the dream and dedication of Chris, a younger brother of immense talent and equal sensitivity.

In the mid-1960s, when this story begins, Memphis is caught up in the whirlwind of the British Invasion, and garage bands start popping up everywhere, finding a home at the city's Ardent Records label and drifting away from the sound historically associated with that place and that decade: the sound of soul, the sound of Stax singles. Chris's devouring passion for the Beatles and the Who, but also for the Kinks and the Yardbirds, drives him to throw himself into countless musical projects that find their fullest expression in Rock City, with Thomas Dean Eubanks on guitars and Terry Manning on keyboards; his friend Jody Stephens takes care of the drums, and it's fair to say that here the core of the future Big Star takes shape.

In the interesting Lucky Seven reissue of their lost album, a dozen originals taped between 1969 and 1970 appear, but what matters most is that Bell offers up self-penned songs that would be reborn on "#1 Record": "My Life Is Right" and "Feel", the latter dredged up from an even earlier musical venture. Plenty of the material still sounds unripe and impersonal, but this is where Alex Chilton enters the picture, and you only need to listen to "Try Again" — perhaps his first recording with Bell — to understand that something wonderful is happening: even in the embryonic version found on "Rock City", the song shines with a light quite different from everything around it, especially in those shimmering acoustic guitars that would become a defining trait of the Big Star sound and of producer John Fry.

Chilton, barely twenty, is already a veteran: at just sixteen the boy had scored massive hits with the Box Tops and the spectacular single "The Letter", a textbook piece of blue-eyed soul written for them by Wayne Carson Thompson; the very young frontman, feeling the grip of a machine he couldn't control and a creative vision imposed from above, decides to walk away from it all at the start of 1970. "Well I'm free again to do what I want again/ Free again to sing my songs again/ Free again to end my longing/ To be out on my own again", Chilton sings with relish in the country-rock that opens "Free Again", the song included on "The '1970' Sessions", a collection of tracks recorded in the period before Big Star's formation that document a change underway: the raspy, cartoonish vocal delivery on some tracks ("All I Really Want Is Money") is still a leftover from his previous experience, which he seems to cynically mock; yet, often, the dark humor gives way to compositions of an entirely different tenor, romantic and shadowy, foreshadowing what was to come shortly after: above all, the beautiful "All We Ever Got From Them Was Pain" and the two demos that close out the collection, the piano-led "If You Would Marry Me Babe" and the huddled introspection of "It Isn't That Easy", revealing a new grain in the vocal blend and a songwriting quality of an infinitely higher order.

The lineup is now complete: alongside the singer-songwriter duo of Chilton/Bell, who seem tailor-made to be compared to the Lennon/McCartney model, the band can also boast Andy Hummel's bass, Jody Stephens' drums, and a magical interweaving of voices.

"#1 Record" came out in June 1972, after months and months of studio work, and it's a would-be icon right from Carole Manning's cover shot, with the star sign and lettering that omits the word "star". Rarely in a lifetime does one get to hear something as pure and dazzling as the sequence of the album's first four tracks, in which the quartet defines its own sonic universe and from which legions of fans would go on to build entire careers as musicians. "Feel" is instantly a power-pop gem, yet deeply personal, unique: the electric guitars sway with a charm both suave and rough at once, and Bell's taut, straining voice bursts joyously from the speakers, while Chilton and Stephens deliver dreamlike, instantly recognizable harmonies; even a sax break sneaks into the middle of the party. A party that has all the urgency of being twenty, but also something more: a clear ripple in the folds of the soul, lyrics that clash with the swagger of the sound: "I feel like I'm dying/ I'm never gonna live again/ You just ain't been trying/ It's getting very near the end". Before the contagious echo of the opener has even faded, a delicate arpeggio makes its way in; and then Chilton's voice, intoning a memorable lyric from the very first line: "The Ballad Of El Goodo" is one of the greatest pop ballads ever written, a meeting in heaven between Beatles, Byrds, Beach Boys and something else besides: that indefinable melancholy which, again, clashes with verses that claim independence and reveal vulnerability, after a life spent "against strong odds".

Of course, many of these considerations stem from the fact that we, unlike the protagonists, know the story, know how it ended, and so we tend to over-read signs into it; still, it's impossible not to detect here the description of a world in which these young men move with difficulty, almost aware, even amid hope, that they would be not merely rejected by it but completely ignored. "In The Street" is another rock'n'roll masterpiece that takes the Lennon/McCartney lesson to heart and adds to it all the soul background of Memphis and Stax, as happened with "Feel". Here too, many would take note; even Cheap Trick, who turned it into a live crowd-pleaser, which then curiously ended up as the theme song for the sitcom "That 70's Show", earning the songwriters some belated royalties.

Closing out the sequence is another ballad: "Thirteen", the most beautiful of them all, an exquisitely delicate piece of folk-pop that Elliott Smith would only need to update to fit 90s angst, and one he often ended up revisiting live (a studio version of his, sweet and shy, appears at the end of the first disc of the rarities collection "New Moon"). A bittersweet memory of the magic of early adolescence, when love, like everything else, is a discovery, and the rock'n'roll of the Beatles and the Stones a true epiphany ("Won't you tell your dad 'get off my back'/ Tell him what we said 'bout Paint It Black"); a perfect single that was never actually released as a 45.

After such heights, the next pair of tracks can only settle for a slightly lower, though still good, level: "Don't Lie To Me" is the hardest-hitting song on the record, though also the most dated and datable, despite a devastating breakdown, while "The India Song" is a tiny, tender, naive acoustic trinket written by Hummel. Side B of the vinyl opens with another marvel, the driving "When My Baby's Beside Me", which brings back the atmosphere of "Feel" and "In The Street" while also foreshadowing the rougher turn of the second album, "Radio City". From here on, it's as if the record slowly slips into a melancholy dream: the last electric flashes come from the chorus of the new version of "My Life Is Right", in which Bell introduces the spiritual themes that would become the foundation of much of his tiny, extraordinary solo output; "Give Me Another Chance" and the aforementioned "Try Again" are further painful meditations on the melancholy of loneliness and misunderstanding ("Lord I've been trying to be understood/ And Lord I've been trying to do as you would/ But each time it gets a little harder/ I feel the pain but I'll try again"), all shimmering caressed acoustic guitars and celestial vocal harmonies, and, in the former, a moving string arrangement.

Then hope claims the space it deserves in "Watch The Sunrise", and once again the sound is the sunshine of a twelve-string guitar, while the closing "ST 110/6", in barely sixty seconds, would become the blueprint for countless future Fleet Foxes, as Kris Needs astutely observes in the liner notes to the album's reissue.

"When our record came out, nobody in Memphis paid it any attention.

Just because we didn't sound heavy, which was how everyone was supposed to sound back then".

Alex Chilton's words, spoken of course some years later, tell the origin of the drama: the record hits the shops, but it's an alien object for Memphis and for the market at large, too absorbed in other sounds; something that Stax, which had a deal to distribute Ardent's products, had no idea how to promote, busy as they were, in those very days, spreading the gospel of Isaac Hayes. The reviews are almost all glowing: "This is the greatest stuff we've ever heard" in Rolling Stone, "one of the album of the year" for Record World, "every cut could be a single", according to Billboard.

But the record doesn't sell. Most of the press coverage, moreover, focuses on Chilton, thereby overshadowing the crucial role of Bell, who had been the founder of Big Star and had contributed to "#1 Record" by bringing in already-finished songs, co-writing nearly all the others with Alex, and closely following every stage of production, giving shape to what still sounds today like a grand pop symphony. Before long, Chris leaves the band and falls into a depression he will never truly recover from; he will die at twenty-seven in a car accident not far from home. The whole project seems on the verge of collapse, so much so that Chilton starts playing with other musicians; but an exchange of ideas with John King, one of the minds behind Ardent, convinces him to give it another go with Hummel and Stephens. More equally overlooked, later rediscovered masterpieces would follow, as would Chris Bell's own songs, anthologized years later by Rykodisc on the immense "I Am The Cosmos".

As for the influence of "#1 Record" and of Big Star's entire body of work, we find traces of it in almost all the most significant guitar-pop from the 80s onward, of which the wonderful Big Star's Third project, touring in recent years, is just one of the most visible showcases; and hearing Georgia Hubley sing "Nightime" straight from the heart, or finding yourself singing "September Gurls" along with the crowd beneath a stage, is an emotion this writer will never forget. Better then to close with the perfect words of Rick Clark, a journalist born and raised in Memphis, written for Ardent's reissues of the band's albums and read aloud by him, with unmistakable emotion, in the documentary from which we set out to tell this story: "They say art should make you feel like time has stopped. Big Star transcended pop's usual escapist conventions, creating music that somehow froze moments which were at once vibrant and truly dazzling, yet also singularly weary. Somehow, Big Star managed to make you feel good in spite of shattered expectations and a sense of ruin. It's that authenticity, in the lyrics and in the urgency of a luminous sound, that has allowed Big Star's vision to survive well beyond their own short existence".

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24/11/2013