Return to Radio City

The Big Star Legacy

Big Star— #1 Record-Radio City (Ace/Big Beat [UK])

Big Star— Big Star Third: Sister Lovers (Rykodisc)

Big Star— Live (Rykodisc)

Chris Bell— I am The Cosmos (Rykodisc)

"Messy scorching stumblers that suddenly break

into transcendent beauty like tragic summer love

from across the swimming pool. . . "

I’ve always liked the above quote. Derek Chandler, a colleague of whom I am hardly worthy, penned those words by way of describing Radio City, Big Star’s sophomore stunner. Released on Memphis-based Ardent Records in January of 1974, Radio City (along with #1 Record, its marginally more conventional predecessor) was by year’s end out of the few record stores it managed to get stocked in, thanks to the collapse of that label.

There are a million stories like this in the Radio City, perhaps literally that many— countless albums released in the early ‘70s, on labels large and small, seemingly having disappeared into a black hole, a loophole, and/ or a cut-out bin, the majority of them but dimly remembered even by those who willed them into existence. (As It Should, indeed, Be.)

Beyond the fact that most of the original pressings of #1 Record and Radio City miraculously made their way into the hands of rock critics (many of whom heard the band deliver a particularly sharp set at the first / last Rock Writers’ Convention, held in Memphis in 1973), there is not one empirical reason I can conjure to explain how Big Star succeeded in cheating the devil Oblivion.

They were not on a small label— they were on a tiny label, distributed by a small label (Stax). They named themselves after a chain of supermarkets, forgodsake. Their only "claim to fame" was singer/guitarist Alex Chilton’s teenaged stint with ‘60s hitmakers The Box Tops— and Big Star’s music bore absolutely NO resemblance to the Tops’ blue-eyed soul (not that any such resemblance would have been likely to help, commercially, in 1973).

They were a rock & roll band in a town that, at that time, had no real rock scene (let alone industry) to speak of. They used middle-period Beatles/ Byrds/ Kinks as a musical point-of-departure in an era when the real "#1 records" belonged to the likes of Jethro Tull, The Eagles and Terry Jacks.

The front cover of their first LP featured only a light sculpture that implied the band’s name, and gave no hint whatsoever of the album title. The front cover of their second featured a wall adorned with black light posters of Kama Sutra positions, which would no doubt have kept the album out of WalMart and its ilk, had Stax made any effort to get it in. By that time two founding members had quit in frustration, and the "band" proceeded to undertake their first/ last tour (of New York and New England), in the course of which they played for a week at Max’s Kansas City to a total of about twenty people and got their equipment stolen in Boston.

Their third album was released nearly four years after it was recorded— on a tiny label (PVC), manufactured and distributed by an import distributor (Jem).

The only member to continue to pursue a performing career since then, the aforementioned Mr. Chilton has in recent years made a point of disavowing the first two Big Star albums, and making records that bear less resemblance to that group’s than they do to The Box Tops’.

Just some of the more obvious strikes against Big Star vis a vis Posterity.

So.

What is it about the laughably misnamed Big Star that is now prompting hip young redblooded American girls and boys— many of them born in the early-mid ‘70s— to pay high import prices for English and German pressings of #1 Record and Radio City? What could explain the lengths to which sober-minded professional men and women in their thirties and forties have been known to go, just to obtain static-ridden nth- generation cassette copies of Big Star’s live broadcast on Long Island station WLIR-FM, sole sonic artifact of that ill-fated tour? What has inspired The Searchers, The Bangles, The Replacements, REM, This Mortal Coil, Kendra Smith, Let’s Active, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, and countless scads of others to sing anew the praises and songs of Smart Alex and his pals? Why all the current hoopla greeting the umpteen-kajillionth go-’round for that phantom last testament and the first legit issue of the WLIR transcription?

Do you believe in magic?

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Big Star was Christopher Bell’s group when Alex Chilton joined it, and #1 Record is dominated by Bell’s studio technique, even if at least half of the songs are Chilton’s. The richness of sonic detail is breathtaking, the songs are first-rate (even bassist Andy Hummel’s throwaway "The India Song"); the band (drummer Jody Stephens completed the quartet) is taut and tight.

And yet the message scratched into the original LP’s run-off groove— "THE MORE YOU LEARN THE LESS YOU KNOW— could easily be perceived as unwitting self-criticism. The innate expressiveness of the songs on #1 Record is not framed by the multiple layers of Bell’s readymade pop structures nearly so often as it is smothered by them— powerful tho the content may be, the form usually wins out. The same goes for Rykodisc’s posthumous collection of Bell’s post-Big Star solo sessions, I Am The Cosmos, and more so— I for one can’t listen to it for more than eight or ten minutes at a time. Had Chris Bell (rest his soul) never discovered the Beatles, one imagines that he would have whiled away his hours in a basement workshop, constructing staggeringly intricate miniature replicas of old bi-planes and frigates, and not getting enough fresh air.

Through no fault of its own, #1 Record got lost in the marketplace, and Chris Bell just plain got lost. Chilton, Hummel, and Stephens pressed on as a trio, and with Radio City both the sound and the substance of Big Star blew wide open. Where the deeply troubled Bell had used studio wizardry and pop mannerisms as a means to build defenses, Chilton now used the same arsenal to knock down some of the defenses within himself— and within rock ‘n’ roll.

Each LP side opens with a deliciously overblown, hackneyed, banal blob of cock-rock: "Ohh mah soul, mama/ Ah lose control. . . "; "I can’t be/ Satisfied!/ What’cha want me to do!" As each song progresses, the lyrics become ever more vapid and/ or absurd, with the singer shrieking ineffectually like an adolescent Rob Plant wannabe ("I can’t get a license/ To drive-a my car!") or simpering like a wet terrier. Meanwhile, the music behind him gets progressively more inspired, passionate, vibrant, good-humored. As each cut winds to an end, the listener is presented with a conceit so improbable and so brilliantly set up that he/she may not notice it: the Rock Star/Emperor gradually comes ‘round to the true nature of his New Clothes, panics—then realizes he prefers to go naked. For the duration of the side, he wanders among his subjects as an equal, allowing them to see him as he is only just seeing himself.

Part of the continued appeal of Big Star, then, lies in their ability (and willingness) to make plain such barriers between Artist and Audience, between Thought and Expression, and then to collapse them— while at the same time confirming that such deconstruction is not without emotional cost, and that some walls are a lot harder to topple than others.

A more obvious clue to this music’s endurance is the subject matter, and the unique treatment thereof. The balance of the songs of Radio City and Big Star Third are concerned with love and lust, the confusion that results from trying to differentiate between or reconcile the two, and the despair (and the ensuing defensive narcissism) of trying to understand someone of the opposite sex when one hardly understands one’s self. Fairly universal concerns, those. The lyrics are unique in that they are resolutely unanalytical— Chilton refuses to explain or rationalize anything, because he knows he doesn’t understand, and what’s more considers it unlikely that he or anyone else ever will understand. So the texts emerge in a mosaic of conflicting blind fragments: inconclusive observations, swooning love notes, defiant negations, specific remembrances of unspecified things past. Sometimes Alex is the boy with a crush he holds sacred; at other times he manifests a decidedly bad attitude, and is unapologetic.

Any holes in the narrative continuity are ingeniously filled with great sticky globs of musical spackling. Bittersweet vocal melodies, weird harmonies, acerbic guitar solos, unexpected punctuations from the drums and bass— all help to elucidate what the words decline to.

The sound of Radio City is deceptively "live." There are in fact nearly as many overdubs here as on the first album, but they are deployed with greater subtlety.

As a random example, take the willfully callow and callous "Life is White." All one might hear at first blanch is the guitar/bass/drums trio slogging through a torpid, indolent 4/4 as Chilton sings "Don’t like to see your face/ Don’t like to hear you talk a’tall/ I could be with Ann/ But I’d just get bored. . . " As if to underline the singer’s frustration, a distracted harmonica interrupts and proceeds to wheeze incessantly through the remainder of the song. Closer inspection reveals a pair of maracas (or is it just echo on the high-hat?) and a second guitar making wry comments from the corner of the mix. A slightly out-of-tune piano drops in unexpectedly for the bridge, puts in its drunken two cents and passes out before the final verse.

Such touches would seem to bespeak only whimsy on the part of the producer, if the end result didn’t capture and amplify the mood of the song so uncannily. To fully appreciate what these minor details contribute, one need only compare the tracks on Rykodisc’s Live album with their Radio City counterparts.

As spirited as this historic radio performance is, there often seems to be something missing, and it’s not just that the guitar isn’t loud enough. Despite deejay Jim Cameron’s game attempt at "interviewing" Mr. Chilton, despite the latter’s delightful solo acoustic set ("El Goodo" puts the studio version to shame), despite (gulp) the death-defying "Daisy Glaze," I can’t quite recommend Live to those who don’t have the first two albums. But those who do will no doubt want it. I love it, myself.

As 1974 and Ardent Records neared their mutual omega, Chilton and Stephens teamed with demented producer Jim Dickinson and a cadre of session musicians in a race against time to complete a third Big Star album before the record company’s money ran out.

They almost made it. Nineteen tracks were completed, but the project was abandoned before Chilton and Dickinson had a chance to sequence them into a coherent album— or even to decide whether said album would fill one long-player or two.

Since then, numerous labels here and abroad have licensed the material and put out their own versions of Big Star’s third "album." The present Rykodisc issue purports to be "the definitive edition," as Jim Dickinson and Alex Chilton were consulted as to the sequencing of the nineteen tracks (two of which have never been released before).

What Rykodisc doesn’t tell you until you’ve bought the disc and read the liner notes is that Dickinson and Chilton could not, at this late date, agree on the sequencing, or even on what songs were to have been included on the original LP. So "Dream Lover," which Dickinson insists is the album’s conceptual cornerstone (and personally I’d much sooner trust his memory than Chilton’s), is once again relegated to "bonus track" status— a dubious concept in itself, given that there is no LP counterpart this time.

What an ungodly mess this CD is. The compromised sequence makes absolutely NO conceptual, musical, or emotional sense. Which is why the lord made programmable CD players and cassette recorders— go ahead, make your OWN Big Star Third! You should, because the raw material you have to work with is astonishing.

The angst factor of Radio City is upped exponentially on Third, as is the propensity for eccentric production/ performance flourishes. "You Can’t Have Me" ends with a faded-out drum solo; "Femme Fatale" is haunted by a ghost piano; the acoustic "Kanga Roo" (sic-- it’s mis-spelled as one word on this reissue) gradually drowns in feedback, sustained mellotron chords, and storm-at-sea drums. The lyrics are even more inscrutable than before, "Holocaust" lifts its melody and chord progression from a Yoko Ono song ("Mrs. Lennon," from Fly), and all in all there’s not much rockin’ out here.

But gawd. . . the melodies, they’re so bee-YOO-tee-full!!!

And so in spades are Carl Marsh’s string arrangements (and oboe playing)— fully the equal of Robert Kirby’s exquisite orchestrations for Nick Drake. And the heartwarming "Blue Moon" and "For You"; the spectral "Nighttime" and "Big Black Car" (Rykodisc, or somebody, forgets to co-credit Chris Gage for that one); the giddy "Stroke it Noel"; the heartbreaking "Take Care"— all rank among the loveliest songs rock music has produced, and not only counter-balance but contextualize the weird stuff.

Those who already own the perfectly serviceable PVC disc of a few years back will be curious about the previously-unreleased material here. "Till The End of the Day" is a straightforward kover of the Kinks klassic, which is to say that it’s only slightly less incongruous in this context than "Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On."

On the other hand, a truly warped rendition of the Nat Cole standard "Nature Boy" sums up Big Star Third even more cogently than "Dream Lover." "The greatest thing you’ll ever learn," the sad-eyed sprite advises Alex, "is just to love and to be loved in return."

Amen, Butch.

—- Charles Olver (1992)

Postscript: since this article was first published, the #1 Record/Radio City two-fer CD has been issued domestically by Fantasy/Stax.