Rock's Wasted Talents

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 year, if I must. Its crisp, perfect sound; the attention paid to every detail of the mix: every guitar lick and crescendo, every harmony, every tremoloed echo. It’s the Pet Sounds of rock and roll. John Fry was the producer, but all, including Fry agree that the album sounds the way it does because of Bell. Big Star’s subsequent, Bell-free albums are also brilliant, seminal works of genius, but they are more ragged — not worse, in any way, but definitely different

#1 Record was as well produced and slick as any of the great mega-slick albums of the era — Abbey Road, Dark Side of the Moon — yet despite its slickness, it still rocks. And it was made in a tiny studio in Memphis for a label so disorganized that they didn’t even print copies after it was “released”, dooming it to utter, abject failure. The critics who heard it loved it: literally nobody else heard it.

The lyrics: true encapsulations of late sixties small-town teenage culture:,angst, first love in school, Jesus, staying up all night, joyous anger, smoking pot in your daddy’s car, grooving to the Stones and going to rock and roll concerts. It’s an album that can have you banging your head or weeping at the sheer beauty of the melodies and the sheer perfection of the production.

Chris Bell spent so many hours and days polishing up the album to absolute perfection with the producer, John Fry, that when Stax Records horribly botched the marketing of the album (no more than 10 000 copies were pressed), Bell sank into depression and, of course, alcohol and drug abuse because that what rockers do.

A closeted homosexual and a born again Christian from the Bible belt suffering from clinical depression, the self-loathing Bell did menial jobs and worked on his solo work. He died in a horrible car-crash at the age of 27. Some have speculated that he may have been trying to kill himself.

His work inspired many of the American power-pop bands of the late seventies, and eventually bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. You could hear Big Star’s influence pretty much everywhere in American underground and post-punk music in the USA during the 80s and 90s. His solo album I Am the Cosmos wasn’t released until 1992.

His band mate, Alex Chilton is another waste. A child star, who, as the lead singer of the Box Tops had had a huge hit with “The Letter” in the late sixties, he learned to play guitar, recorded a number of songs and finally joined up with Chris Bell for the #1 Album. Blessed with a big, buttery voice full of soul in his youth, by the early seventies, his vocal sound had changed into something folkier: like an American John Lennon. One of the finest rock singers of the seventies, Alex Chilton persevered with Big Star after Bell left, making a sound with the band that was more raggedy and rough edged, but still with a soft pulsating heart of sensitivity and intelligent emotion. Not to memtion humor, that now-forgotten element inherent to all good rock music.

There is a live album of the band playing in a bar on the Harvard University campus in 1973 on Big Star’s Keep an Eye On the Sky box set. It boggles the mind to hear the chatter of the audience, drinking beer, gobbling inanities to each other, utterly oblivious to the fact that only a few meters away the amazing Big Star, one of the greatest if not the greatest rock and roll band in the world at that time plays a blistering set for the ages. How did they slip through the cracks? Were they so ahead of their time? Was it Chilton’s laziness and unprofessionalism? Was it all just a matter of bad luck?

Later, Chilton seems to have lived the life of a rock and roll ne’er-do-well. A hard-drinking rake and druggie that got run out of his native Memphis on a rail for sleeping with the wrong woman, at one point in the eighties or nineties he was homeless, living in a tent outside of New Orleans. He continued to make the occasional solo album, none of which were particularly successful, but his albums were, for the most part, rather lazy affairs: rhythm and blues played with a pick up band. Fun stuff that owes a lot to early sixties rock and roll but nowhere near what most people would term as brilliant.

Big Star, which was never really successful, was falling apart when they recorded their third album, 75’s Third/Sister Lovers. When it was released in 1978, it became a underground hit,and a new bunch of kids discovered their music. Nearly fifty years later, all three albums are in print, and continue to be discovered anew and Big Star’s place in history is cemented. But what they could have been…