Big Star

In 2009, I interviewed three-quarters of Big Star for MOJO magazine, on the occasion of their forthcoming box set Keep An Eye On The Sky. The missing quarter was founder member and present-day lynchpin, the late Alex Chilton, who, perversely, couldn’t see – or hear – what all the fuss was about…

On a hot June afternoon, amidst a smattering of tourists in the lounge of London’s Columbia hotel, two guys stand out. Dressed in regulation black, Jonathan Auer (new wave blazer/tie combo)and Ken Stringfellow (smart black shirt), founders of Seattle’s power-pop torchbearers The Posies, are in town, moonlighting as guitarist and bassist for the current live line-up of Big Star. Jody Stephens, the Memphis four-piece’s original drummer, is running late, delivering guest tickets for tonight’s show, supporting Tindersticks in Hyde Park. It’s an odd live pairing, but then their only UK appearance last year was the Rhythm Festival in Clapham, Bedfordshire. “It was this old RAF base,” Stringfellow recalls, “with a very odd oldies line up. When we came on, Steve Harley began playing on the smaller stage and the entire crowd left, so we played to an empty air strip.”

When Stephens turns up – lithe and well-weathered, though the lanky haircut betrays his ‘70s vintage – he confirms that these days, over 35 years since the groups first broke up and 15 since Chilton and Stephens reformed the band with Auer and Stringfellow, Big Star is indeed a strange vocation. The revamped band released a garage R&B album In Space in 2005 but the 21^st century Big Star mostly exists as a live proposition. “It’s like being Cinderella,” Says Stephens. “Once or twice a year, I spend about two months practising, drumming along to a live bootleg… for about an hour on stage! But it’s always a gas. The songs still feel great.”

Although three-quarters of their current line-up turn up to discuss Rhino’s beautifully out-takes-heavy 4-CD Big Star box set, Keep An Eye On The Sky, there is one glaring absentee: Alex Chilton, the man on whose shoulders the Big Star legacy rests. We’ve attempted to solicit his comments on the band’s history, but as anticipated, he’d said no. Since 1993, Chilton has only done three interviews (two guitar magazines and lit-loafers diary The Idler). Each time he was reluctant to discuss Big Star. ”

“He won’t do interviews, I don’t know why,” says Stephens, the sole sidekick to know Chilton since 1971.

“If we ever have any questions about Big Star, we ask Jody,” Stringfellow admits.

“I think Alex wonders what all the fuss is about,” is Auer’s succinct view.

The “fuss” is that Big Star were the Dixie Beatles, whose albums, from 1972’s #1 Record to 1974’s Radio City and especially the Third/Sisters Lover (recorded over 1974/75 but released in 1978), brought a combined menace, ennui and exhilaration to ‘70s rock.

“I first heard them in 1989,” says Jonathan Auer. “The manager of the record store in Seattle I was working in heard our little demo tape. He said, ‘if you like this pop stuff, you’ll dig this’ and grabbed a vinyl copy of Radio City. We hadn’t heard of Big Star but it was like, ‘who IS this band?’ When you think about bands from ’72 or ’74, like Grand Funk Railroad, these flat, murky-sounding records… you can’t believe how crisp and hi-fi and sparkly Big Star albums sound. They sound classic, but modern too. There was also this lyrical obscurity and a heartbreaking quality to them. All the backing harmonies had this desperate sound, that heart-on-sleeve thing.”

Big Star’s out-of-place, out-of-time status partly accounted for their pathetic record sales, as did #1 Record’s ineffectual marketing, on the Ardent imprint, by a Stax label eager to break into the white rock market. Band fights, booze, drugs and depression resulted in the departure of founder member Chris Bell in 1972. Radio City suffered the same fate, forcing bassist and co-founder Andy Hummel to choose college over rock’n’roll, leaving an increasingly tearaway Chilton to record with a barely-resent Stephens and producer Jim Dickenson. Third/Sister Lovers was eventually released in 1978, followed by reissues of the first two LPs. The revival slowly began, with everyone from R.E.M and Teenage Fanclub to The Replacements and Jeff Buckley paying homage to the band’s unique sound. Of course, the rebirth meant nothing to Chris Bell, who died in the early hours of December 28, 1978, after losing control of his Triumph TR6 sports car on his way home from his family’s restaurant in East Memphis. Evidently it meant little to Alex Chilton too. “People say Big Star made some of the best rock’n’roll albums ever,” he told me in 1992. “And I say they’re wrong.”

I first met Chilton in spring of ’86, in the dressing room of Harlesden’s Mean Fiddler. A short, bony-faced man with darting eyes, he sat opposite, sipping water (he’d given up alcohol in 1980) and fielded a barrage of questions. He was in London in support of his first studio album in eight years, the very modest six-track Feudalist Tarts, whose southern R&B country-soul hue showed a much tighter, lighter touch than the lurching, down-at-heel vibe of his previous effort, Like Flies On Sherbet. I was truly only interested in discussing Big Star with the enigma behind the band and told him what incredible and influential albums they’d made.

“Well…” he averred, cautiously, “I guess that comes from being around for a long time…Big Star was some sort of ultimate guitar band… I guess. We spent a lot of time recording our albums and did them very carefully and tried to get different sounds of our guitars, things like that. I guess at the time we did it, nobody else was doing it either.” But he was grimacing more than grinning. “In Big Star, I was still learning to write. I still see myself as a poor songwriter. A few songs are good but many are real clunkers,” he said. When we talked again in 1988, he hadn’t mellowed. In ‘92, he was even more equivocal. “I¹m constantly surprised,” he said, pointedly, “that people fall for Big Star the way they do.”

Perhaps at root of Chilton’s antipathy is that he was never a guitar-band kind of guy. Born on December 28, 1950, in Memphis, William Alexander Chilton was raised in a musical family. His father, Sidney, was a Big Band saxophonist/pianist who educated him in swing and jazz, while his elder brother Reid was a doo-wop and soul man. Country was the radio soundtrack to his formative years: “Tracks like Alligator Man by The Greenbriar Boys and Ernest Tubbs’ Waltz Across Texas,” he recalled. “That’s all a part of me.” Then came The Beatles and the Brit-invasion sound of the mid-‘60s, which turned his mind. “The best in my experience,” he told me. “All those light-hearted three minute songs, and the Stax and R&B of that time, before it all turned psychedelic and pretentious…” He bought a guitar, tried to learn how to play, and got caught up in the Memphis music scene.

His first chance to shine came in 1967, with The Box Tops, a Memphis studio project of Dan Penn and Chips Moman, which saw Chilton lend his gritty white-soul vocals to glorious teen-pop-soul 7 inchers such as The Letter and Neon Rainbow. But just 16 when hired, a stroppy James Dean rebel type, Chilton was quickly alienated. But what he felt was Penn’s “oppressive” studio regime. “I just retreated from everything” he told me, “ into drinking and smoking grass and stuff. I realised I’d have to do what they said or else I’d have to go back to school. So I waited till I was 18 and no could tell me what to do anymore, and I left.”

By 1970, fellow Memphis teen Bell was laying Big Star’s foundations with his first band, The Jynx – a tribute to The Kinks and The Byrds – while Chilton was making solo advances at Ardent. Chilton’s first sessions (titled 1970 on release in 1996) reveal a taut, rootsy blend of proto-Beatles pop and the ragged melodic mania of Third/Sister Lovers. But it was all an odd fit, and all record company negotiations included strict caveats, so a headstrong Chilton absconded. He found refuge in Greenwich Village’s folk scene where he practised guitar and songwriting, and met a key influence, The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, and a visiting Chris Bell. Back in Memphis, Chilton looked up Bell, who’d been playing in two Badfinger-style Anglo-American hybrids, Rock City and Icewater, whose fluctuating personnel included Stephens and Hummel. Big Star was born.

“Chris was a very driven, creative guy,” recalls Hummel, “even when I knew him at high school. Alex was bursting with tunes and ideas too. Ardent’s relaxed atmosphere was really conducive to creating music; nobody was trying to turn you into something you didn’t want to be, which was very encouraging to Alex. He was really upbeat then.”

Ardent helped Big Star flourish. The sonic sparkle that bewitched The Posies was down to studio co-owner John Fry, a self-taught technophile who held engineering courses for interested parties (the whole band took them) before allowing them unsupervised rein. It meant the band could record when the muse struck, while Fry’s meticulous mixing brought the recordings to life. No amount of digital reproduction can lesser the first two albums’ intense analogue warmth.

#1 Record followed Bell’s cherished Lennon-McCartney approach as Chilton and Bell embellished each other’s songs. The guitars were especially well thought out. When one played a Les Paul, the other picked up a Gibson; when one played high up the neck, the other played low. “I didn’t know much about recording then but I knew enough about musical theory from my dad,” said Chilton. “Put me in a recording studio and I can fool around and make fairly innovative music. Like, I don’t know where it came from but on Thirteen, I made up this wild bit of guitar in 15 minutes. You don’t hear many 20-year olds doing that.”

But he carped about the rest. Lyrically, he explained, several tracks were written by committee, in the studio, while wasted. “I’m good for a verse before I lay some lyrical or musical egg,” he continued, “so a lot of the time then I was groping toward writing good songs. In The Street was probably my greatest success, and on the first album, When My Baby’s Beside Me and Chris’s Feel are fairly good. But those maudlin ballads…” He tailed off. What about Thirteen? “That’s one of my almost-good songs.” The piercingly sad What’s Going Ahn? “Never even gave it a second thought.” A luminous Ballad Of El Goodo? “It’s not performed well. I didn’t understand how to make the right sound with my voice.” Not even September Gurls – Big Star’s Eight Miles High, and as perfect – gets a thumbs-up; another lyrical clunker, Chilton reckons.

What exactly was wrong with maudlin songs? “They’re no good for anyone except for nursing their depression. There’s some kind of strain of maudlinity [sic] running through today’s youth that isn’t healthy, but they identify with it.”

Fortunately Stephens disagrees with Chilton. “I have another perspective to Alex. There were so many moments of astonishment working with Big Star. Where did those harmonies come from? That melody and guitar lines? How did that song come together? How did John Fry mix it so well? Those records always blew my mind. Maybe that’s a drug that I’m really addicted to, which is why I keep doing these gigs.”

Stringfellow and Auer agree. “How often do you get to be a jukebox for one of your favourite bands?” says the former.

Auer: “At the same time, it’s amazing to think there are certain Big Star songs Alex won’t play. It’s not a gripe as such, but we’ve played the same set for the last 15 years. Last year, we flirted with new songs after Alex said, ‘we got to do something different, a better set; how about some different older songs?’ But when we came to rehearse, he was obviously not into it. He’s capricious like that.”

Stringfellow: “I’ve spent a lot of time hanging out with Alex in Paris because I now live there and he often visits. He’s fun and cool and really nice, and just a prankster at heart, with a twinkle in his eye. But at first, I thought he hated us! He has a very low-key style that’s identical to indifference if you don’t know him, but he responds when it’s time to respond. When we recorded In Space, he was quite collaborative, like ‘what do you guys want to do?’”

Auer: “The question I’m always asked is; is Alex really like his myth? Is he really hard to deal with? The thing is, if you don’t make a huge deal out of things, Alex responds much better than that than if you take things seriously, like we’re trying to keep this piece of history going. I’ve seen him talk backstage for hours about gardening, or the civil war, but I’ve never seen anyone shut anyone down faster when a fan wanted to talk about the band.”

Making In Space, Auer says, “Chilton was in a different head space to 1973. The music was always going to be more R&B based. But I didn’t feel bad contributing songs that would sound close to what you’d expect Big Star to sound like. I may be in the band now, but I was once a fan.”

Stringfellow: “Alex enjoyed that stuff, anyway. It’s true that he was more into being deconstructionalist about the songs, but that’s just the way he is.”

CHILTON ONLY BEGAN TO HAVE HIS OWN WAY when Bell departed. Even then, Radio City followed in #1 Record ‘s footsteps – “when Chris left, I was left with his band, so we just carried on with the same goals” – except with a more volatile, jagged edge born out of more dusk-till-dawn sessions. But Dickinson subsequently gave Chilton the freedom he so craved. “In Big Star, I did a third of what I knew how to, because the others weren’t much interested in country music or recording in an untamed, spontaneous way and getting those crazy sounds that I got on …Sherbet.”

But Third/Sister Lovers came first, with Holocaust and Like A Kangaroo bearing the influence of The Velvet Underground (check the mega-maudlin cover of Femme Fatale) and Gram Parsons, “an expressive, emotive singer…Some of the Burritos’ saddest, most tired records were their best.” Besides alcohol (“you name it, I drunk it”), Chilton was gobbling downers (“that was Chris’ influence. He was always doing Valium. That’s what killed him, taking pills the night of his accident”), though never heroin – “nothing really good!” Chilton cracked up. “Memphis wasn’t like New York or LA where all these great drugs were always available.” But he was nevertheless a mess. “I was getting very destructive in lots of ways then, which I tried to capture on the recordings. I loved the sound of a microphone falling down, things like that.”

After a stop-start year, he’d amassed 19 tracks. Rockers such as You Can’t Have Me indeed resembled Big Star on a Valium binge. “I liked the uptempo stuff,” Chilton conceded, “but I didn’t sing them with much conviction or arrange the band to do anything special.” To make it worse, when the album did get picked up and a track listing was sought, “I was pushed out of the decision-making process and Jim Dickinson just took over. Nowhere did that album conform to what I had in mind, from every mix to choosing the voice tracks or tunes. I never even gave it a title. It should never even have been released as Big Star. Everything that’s ever happened with any Big Star record has been independent of me.”

Thwarted again, Chilton retreated again. 1975-77 were his ‘lost’ years, as represented by The Singer, Not The Song EP (on Ork, who’d released Television’s first single) recorded in New York before reuniting with Dickenson for …Sherbet, a deranged masterpiece or just deranged, according to taste. “Around 1977,” Chilton said, to my incredulity, “I started being able to distinguish a good song from a bad song, so a lot of ideas I came up with were developed into a whole piece. I think it’s a great album.”

… Sherbet was a watershed moment for other reasons. In 1976, Chilton had discovered Freudian psychoanalyst William Reich. “The trouble I’d had in my career and in love had combined to send me off on a journey into escapism. Reich helped me understand that sexuality has the most to do with defining our personality. Radio City was definitely the time of my uncertainty and tension. By 1975, when I was 25, I’d started coming up from being down. Too bad I didn’t do it when I was 18.”

So Big Star reminds Chilton of his immature, self-destructive self as well as musical compromise. He quit drugs in 1976, though took another six years to stop drinking, at which point he moved to New Orleans (where he still lives) and worked as a dishwasher and tree surgeon. “It was good therapy. And it was fun to have a steady income, I can tell you that.”

In all my three interviews with Chilton, he claimed he’d never earned, “a single penny,” from Big Star – “Ardent think we owe them money, so they keep it all, even though we’ve got them a lot of business with bands recording there who want to sound like us,” is how he last put it. His injustice must partly explain his past ambivalence towards Big Star, and the fact Chilton still plays songs he doesn’t think cuts the mustard must be down to getting belated payment – helped considerably by In The Street becoming the theme tune for the late ’90s US sitcom That 70s Show. Stephens also notes that an episode of TV hospital drama House, “did this huge, heartfelt montage at the end to [Radio City's] I’m In Love With A Girl. That only took 35 years to happen.”

Chilton’s priorities have also changed. In 1996, he told The Idler, “My year is basically spent making enough money for six months to have the next six months off. It’s the greatest existence I can have.” On top, Big Star is no longer a vehicle for maudlin Mersey fantasies given In Space’s relaxed gait, in particular disco ‘tribute’ Love Revolution. “The moments I’ve seen Alex most go for it, laughing his head off,” says Auer, “was when he kicked over his amp at the end of playing (KC & The Sunshine Band’s] Get Down Tonight or recording Love Revolution. He loves the ridiculous stuff.”

“A certain mindlessness is essential,” Chilton affirmed during our very first conversation. “Rock’n’roll should shoot from the hip.” His current solo repertoire – choice cut; Michael Jackson’s Rock With You – shows he means it. But for Big Star obsessives, there’s always the new box set, plus last year’s illuminating Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story. Rob Jovanovic has sold the film rights to his book and a documentary is also in the works. Rock’s Most Forgotten Band is now The Band That Won’t Quit. “The fact we’re still playing is pretty remarkable considering our history, and how far back it stretches,” Stephens concludes. But Chilton? “Well,” says Stephens, “I’ve heard a saying; the more you talk about something, you talk the energy out of it.”