Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
I want to make an album of real genius, to sit alongside the Stones' 'Exile On Main Street', and Big Star's 'Third' (Peter Buck, R.E.M. 1991)The definitive biography of Big Star, the most influential band of the last 30 years.Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three albums – #1 Record, Radio City and Third – are still felt today. Big Star bucked the musical trend of the Seventies. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio friendly Power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists such as Primal Scream, R.E.M., the Bangles, the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, Garbage, St. Etienne, Pavement and Travis regularly speak of the Big Star legacy.After singing in 1960s boy-band The Box Tops, Alex Chilton joined up with Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens and Chris Bell to form Big Star in late 1970. Chilton and Bell quickly formed a Lennon-McCartney type partnership at the heart of band and began turning out tunes laced with the best pop sensibilities of the Beatles and Badfinger, the guitars of the Byrds and the harmonies of the Beach Boys. But creative tensions, haphazard distribution, and marketplace indifference sent the band into a series of splits, solo-projects and short-lived reunions that left them on the brink of oblivion. Thirty years later though, and most guitar bands in the world will admit a debt to Big Star and their three albums remain unqualified successes.Drawing on interviews from surviving band members (including Andy Hummel's first interview for 30 years) and the major players at the Memphis based record label Ardent, Rob Jovanovic has written the definitive history of Big Star, the forgotten band.
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Big Star
The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Rob Jovanovic
For Carolyn
Table of Contents
2 ‘They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles’
3 ‘He wore a black T-shirt, nobody wore those, and torn jeans’
4 ‘All the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand’
5 ‘We just figured we’d all be killed anyway’
6 ‘Bob Dylan never had anything on John Harold and he knew it’
7 ‘It really does sound like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing’
8 ‘Mississippi didn’t like guys with long hair’
9 ‘The beer bottles were dancing across the tables’
10 ‘We got fired after the first show in Michigan’
11 ‘He turned to me and shot Demerol down his throat with a syringe’
12 ‘The singularly most heavy moment of my life’
13 ‘Look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers!’
14 ‘Another stray American in London’
15 ‘Alex Chilton, Rock Legend, Back’
16 ‘He was rather nonplussed to be sought out while wearing a paper hat’
18 ‘We toasted his health with cheap beer and snacks from Taco Bell’
19 ‘We had to have girls because we were entertaining the troops’
20 ‘Without being overly threatening, I pushed him into a corner’
In October 1972 the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen number-one singles achieved by acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade. Iggy Pop was holed up in a studio recording Raw Power and David Bowie had just given birth to Ziggy Stardust, but the album charts were dominated by heavy rock (Black Sabbath’s Vol 4), progressive rock (Yes’s Close To The Edge) and inane pop (David Cassidy’s Cherish). Since the Beatles had disbanded two years earlier, the short, catchy guitar-pop song had all but disappeared from vogue. But there was a quartet trying to keep that musical torch burning. Big Star, a Memphis band that took the best elements of the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Byrds, was ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and lengthy, self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening they were playing a show to less than a hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.
Like most of the shows that the band had already played, they got only an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never heard a Big Star record but they did know who the lead singer was: Alex Chilton had sung a handful of hit singles with the Box Tops a few years before. For the show, Chilton, like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel, was wearing a casual shirt and jeans, had shoulder-length hair and was constantly fiddling around with his amplifier. This casual attire was at odds with the glammed-up sartorial excesses and lavish stage productions that the superstars of the day were blasting their audiences with. Tonight the three-pronged guitar attack drowned out Stephens’s melodic drumming and almost all of the vocals. It was the usual problem they faced having played so few shows together. On #1 Record, their recently released debut album, the balance was perfect. On vinyl the guitars chimed and the vocals soared. Here it was a battle that the vocals lost. And this was not helped by the obvious discomfort of the other vocalist, Chris Bell. At this point in his career he still hadn’t conquered his stage fright and his hands kept shaking violently.
During the quieter moments, such as when Chilton stepped forward to sing an acoustic version of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’, the crowd talked over the top and downed beers. For the rest of the set they were happy to stomp along with the instantly catchy, rousing choruses of ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ and ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, even if they’d never heard them before. Lead vocal duties were shared between Chilton and Bell but all four band members sang back-up. Chilton’s vocals recalled the deadpan delivery of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn while Bell’s were more like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
Big Star ran through all twelve songs from their only album, a couple of new songs called ‘Got Kinda Lost’ and ‘Back of a Car’ and added covers by T-Rex, the Kinks and Neil Young. At the end of the show, as the crowd filtered out, the band packed up their own equipment. Although this was only the band’s seventh live show, it would be the last with this line-up. Bell would quit before the end of the year; another album (Radio City) would be recorded by the remaining trio in 1973 before Hummel quit and then just Chilton and Stephens would be left of the original line-up to record the band’s third and final album of the 1970s.
Everyone who heard #1 Record agreed that it was a masterpiece, but a combination of bad luck and record-label mismanagement meant it was almost impossible for any fans reading the great reviews to actually buy a copy. Similar problems affected
