Boys, We're Going Straight to the Bottom!

Further to last week's slightly insane discussion of the Beatles boxsets, is this. It appears that around the same time that the Fab Four got their belated digital overhaul, the not-so-fabs out of Memphis, Big Star, also got theirs. The shiny new boxset Eye In the Sky is something that I've yet to hear -- if my wife is reading this, Christmas is only a couple months away, honey -- but any opportunity in the meantime to post a classic Big Star cut is an opportunity worth taking.

I suspect that as of 2009, with the iPod generation fast approaching a sort of all-knowing, field-leveling singularity in terms of music consumption, Big Star isn't quite the mysterious cult item it once was. But it's not like we get to hear "The Ballad of El Goodo" on the radio all the time, or "September Gurls" on the Starbuck's playlist (even if we should). And for those who aren't yet au fait with the troubled architects of power pop, I urge you to change that.

The brief history -- vocalist-guitarist Alex Chilton was the 16-year-old prodigy whose husky pipes made the Box Tops' "The Letter" such a memorable bubblegum factory item in 1967. Come the early '70s, Chilton and vocalist-guitarist-songwriter Chris Bell had the cockamamie notion of stitching the melodiousness of the Beatles to the heft of Zeppelin, from their not entirely sympathetic base in the hometown of American rock 'n roll. The tiny label Ardent Records made Big Star its flagship group, even though it wasn't much more than a studio project. Its 1972 debut, #1 Record, remains the blueprint for power pop.

Ardent sold about a dozen copies of #1 Record in total, but, in a stark reiteration of what you might call the Velvet Underground Effect, Big Star nonetheless became the ne plus ultra of influential, obscure rock bands. Its shimmering presence is felt in everything from the '70s underground, to the '80s college rock universe, to REM, to newbie Canadian upstarts Hollerado.

A second album in 1974, Radio City, was edgier, with harder angles, less sugar, and drumming from Jody Stephens that exceeded even the thrilling hyperactivity of #1 Record. The album only deepened the band's appeal, which had taken on a malevolent energy by this point. The hypersensitive Bell had already absconded prior to Radio City, dismayed by the lack of success, Chilton's outré and often-cruel personality, and a growing drug dependency.

Chilton's final, ugly, fractured recordings under the Big Star sign were so fraught with bad juju and despair that nobody would touch them until four years after their increasingly erratic and unhappy author vacated the studio. When it was eventually released in 1978, you couldn't even know for sure if Big Star Third was sequenced correctly. In an interview in 2000, producer Jim Dickinson shrugged to writer Barney Hoskyns, "There is no sequence."

Many consider the bleak, diseased, mangled anti-pop of Third to be Chilton's masterpiece. A depressed Bell, meanwhile, died in a car accident after years of hard drugs, capsized opportunities, and an inability to reconcile his Christianity with his homosexuality. Some have speculated that it was suicide. Chilton pursued a difficult solo career that seemed designed to renounce everything he'd done before. And there you have it.

Regrettably, I've never gotten to see the Big Star that reunited in the '90s when Chilton and Jody Stephens hooked up with a couple of the fellas from Seattle's the Posies -- another band that belongs on the list of grateful acolytes -- for a not-great new album and the occasional show. A flat tire on the way to Bumbershoot in 2000 made sure of that, however I did get to see the mercurial and ever-perverse frontman solo at the Town Pump a long, long time ago. Mr. Chilton delivered a weedy set of standards like "Volare" that evening, with a band that might have passed muster on a Tuesday night at the Yale, but only just.

My clearest memory beyond that was catching the sneer he directed at a gorgeous blond in the front row, who was begging to hear him play Big Star's "Thirteen". He didn't, naturally. Which is probably Alex Chilton in a nutshell. Of course, Big Star without a weird, thorny, self-sabotaging legend at the helm wouldn't be nearly so interesting, would it?