Savagely Beating On the Humdrum

There are the obvious ones, the big burnouts everybody knows; the drug casualties, the victims of mental illness, the hapless passengers in plane wrecks, the suicides… Here I'll focus on two figures from the early seventies whose work I absolutely adore. BIG STAR : Chris Bell and Alex Chilton Chris Bell,  guitarist and leader of Big Star. It was Chris Bell’s vision — mid-sixties’ style rock music, amped up seventies style and with sensitive lyrics, that propelled Big Star. Though he only played on one album, it’s clear from subsequent albums that the band was still, in some way, following his template— and if there was any doubt, it was made absolutely clear in Alex Chilton’s r’n’b-flavored solo albums: Chilton was the pretty boy with the voice, but Big Star was Bell’s baby. The one record he did play on the (now-ironically-titled)  #1 Record  might be the greatest record of 1972 — and I will die defending it as the best-produced album of that ...

Help! It has more original songs than  Beatles for Sale  (as if that should be some measurement of quality — it isn’t), but the two stellar Lennon singles, “Yesterday” and “I’ve Just Seen a Face" aside, most of the songs are second rate. “You’re Gonna Lose that Girl” is good fun, but “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” is candy-floss Dylan that is saved only by the beautiful vocal in my opinion; the mid-tempo McCartney rockers are dull and the George Harrison songs are awful. “Tell Me What You See” is supremely annoying. All of these songs have interesting bits: the Beatles certainly always tried their hardest to make songs work. “Act Naturally” I kind of like but “Dizzy Miss Lizzy”—compared to the Beatles other Larry Williams covers, especially — is a sloppy mess. I think it would have been improved by taking off the Harrison songs, and the covers and adding the two B-sides, the pleasant enough “Yes It is” and the really rockin’ “I’m Down” which kicks “Dizzy Miss ...