Big Star

Rob Jovanovic

Description

“We’ve sort of flirted with greatness,” R.E.M.’s Peter Buck admitted. “But we’ve yet to make a record as good as Big Star’s Third.”

Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three original albums—#1 Record, Radio City, and Third—continues to grow. Big Star bucked all the musical trends of the 70s. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio-friendly power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists as diverse as Primal Scream, R.E.M., The Bangles, The Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, and Wilco have spoken about the Big Star legacy.

In the decade since the original version of this book was published, Big Star have made a belated fourth album, In Space, and released an acclaimed four-disc retrospective, Keep An Eye On The Sky. The band have also lost two original members, an influential producer, and the photographer of their iconic logo. But interest in the group is as high as ever in the 21st century, with new bands such as Yo La Tengo and Hot Chip—and even pop superstar Katy Perry—carrying the flame.

Now fully updated, and drawing on firsthand interviews with the band, family members, friends, and the major players at Ardent Records, this is the definitive history of rock’s forgotten band.

Sujets

• Musique
• Histoire de la musique
• Music
• Musician
• Individual Composer

Informations

• Publié par: Jawbone Press
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781908279378
• Langue: English

Extrait

Big Star
The Story Of Rock’s Forgotten Band
by Rob Jovanovic
A Jawbone Book
Revised and updated edition 2013
Published in the UK and the USA by Jawbone Press
2a Union Court,
20–22 Union Road,
London SW4 6JP,
England
www.jawbonepress.com
Edited by Tom Seabrook.
Jacket photograph © Charlie Gillett Collection/Redferns/Getty Images.
Volume copyright © 2013 Outline Press Ltd. Text copyright © Rob Jovanovic. All rights reserved. No part of this book covered by the copyrights hereon may be reproduced or copied in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in articles or reviews where the source should be made clear. For more information contact the publishers.
Contents
Prologue
1 “Why do you come so far?”
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 wearing a paper hat.”
17 “It sounds like gunshots.”
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.”
21 “Thirty years from now you guys are all gonna love it.”
22 “He didn’t care what people thought. He just did his thing.”
Postscript
Illustrations
Bibliography & Sources
Appendix I: Timeline
Appendix II: Discography
Appendix III: Concerts
Acknowledgements
Prologue
In October 1972, the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade achieve number-one singles. 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. But one band was trying to keep that musical torch burning: Big Star, a Memphis four-piece who took the best elements of The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and The Byrds, were ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening, they were playing a show to fewer than one hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.
Like the rest of the handful of shows that the band had played to date, tonight’s drew no more than an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never even 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 earlier. For the show, Chilton—like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell, and bassist Andy Hummel—was wearing a casual shirt and jeans and had shoulder-length hair. He was constantly fiddling with his amplifier. The band’s casual attire was at odds with the glammed-up excesses and lavish stage productions of the day.
Big Star ran through all twelve songs from their recently released album, #1 Record , plus a couple of new songs (‘Got Kinda Lost’ and ‘Back Of A Car’) and covers of songs by T.Rex, The Kinks, and Neil Young. During the quieter moments, such as when Chilton stepped forward to sing an acoustic version of ‘The Ballad Of El Goodo’, the music was drowned out by the sound of the audience members talking and drinking. For the rest of the set they were happy to stomp along with the catchy, rousing choruses of ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ and ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, even if they’d never heard the songs before. Lead vocal duties were shared between Chilton and Bell, with the others singing backup; Chilton’s voice recalled the deadpan delivery of The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, while Bell’s was more like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
On #1 Record , the balance was perfect: the guitars chimed and the vocals soared. Tonight, however, the three-pronged guitar attack drowned out Stephens’s melodic drumming and almost all of the vocals. They had faced this problem before, having played only a few shows together, not helped by the obvious discomfort of Bell, who was suffering from stage fright, and whose hands kept shaking violently.
At the end of the show, the crowd filtered out and the band packed up their own equipment. Although this was only Big Star’s seventh live show, it would be the last time this line-up would perform together. Bell would quit before the end of the year; the remaining trio recorded another album in 1973 ( Radio City ) before Hummel quit too. Only Chilton and Stephens remained from the original line-up when Big Star came to record their third and final album of the 70s.
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 Radio City , and by the third album things had untangled to such a degree that no one really cared any more. Four years would pass between the album being recorded and then finally released.
And yet after the final breakup, the band’s music somehow managed to transcend the misfortune the musicians had faced, and in the late 70s and 80s Big Star began to achieve cult status on both sides of the Atlantic. Writers and musicians began talking about this great band that most people had never even heard of, and who they could only hear on bootlegged cassettes. By 1992, the clamour had grown so loud that Big Star’s albums were reissued on CD, and the band finally received some long overdue recognition (and record sales).
Now, more than 40 years after the release of their first record, Big Star are hailed as a great band that suffered from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given a little bit of luck, their story might have been very different. Over time, they have proved to be the missing link between the power-pop bands of the 60s and the alternative rockers of the 80s and 90s. But back in 1972, no one was playing catchy three-minute songs anymore—especially in Memphis, where soul was king.
1
“Why do you come so far?”
Memphis, TN, pre-1960
Memphis has a rich and varied history. One of the earliest records of the area being inhabited comes from Hernando de Soto, who found Native American Indians there in the 1540s. For 250 years, Spanish and French forces occupied the area, until the United States took control and built Fort Adam in 1797. Two decades later, the Chickasaw Nation granted the land to the United States, and in 1819 the city of Memphis was founded with a population of fewer than 100 people.
Since then, Memphis has been wounded by civil war, survived widespread yellow-fever epidemics (with 5,000 lives claimed by the disease in the 1870s), and forced its way through the reconstruction and reform movements. But it is best known for its music. It is considered the Birthplace of the Blues, it was a major player in the evolution of rock’n’roll, and it was a hotbed of soul music.
Many factors have contributed to the musical history of the city, with its geographical position and racial mix being two of major ingredients. At the head of the Mississippi delta, as the river runs north to south—from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico—the city of Memphis spreads east from the river’s banks. Its position meant that it picked up a large amount of passing trade from migrating workers and entertainers travelling between Chicago and New Orleans. By the turn of the 20th century, however, it was also the murder capital of the United States, even though the population barely exceeded 150,000. Drugs and drink were easy to acquire, there was a thriving back-room gambling culture, and prostitution was rife in and around the Beale Street area, which was one of the only places where black men could sleep with white women. Many of the city’s downtown establishments operated a racial curfew: at around two in the morning, the whites went home and blacks were allowed in for the rest of the night. The music of the time was mainly of the rowdy alehouse variety, but that soon changed, thanks in large part to a man by the name of W.C. Handy.
In 1903, Handy settled in Clarksdale, Mississippi, just south of Memphis on Highway 61. Thousands of blacks worked in the cotton fields nearby in the stifling heat, and legend has it that one day, Handy, an accomplished cornet player, became transfixed while waiting for a train by a young black man plucking away at a battered guitar and singing the blues. Two years later, Handy moved to Memphis and became a regular player on Beale Street, where he helped bring the blues to a wider audience. In 1909, his song ‘The Memphis Blues’ became a massive hit, and is now thought of as the first blues song to be committed to sheet music. In dragging the blues away from the cotton fields and into places where a white audience could hear it, Handy had changed Beale Street and Memphis forever.
While liquor and drugs formed an underground economy, Beale Street was the only place in the S