Chris Bell: Psychedelic Stuff (demo)
(Recorded at Ardent Studios, circa 1969)
Alex Chilton: The EMI Song (Smile For Me) (original mono mix)
(From the 1970 sessions, 1970)
Big Star: I Got Kinda Lost (demo) & In the Street (alternate take)
(From the #1 Record sessions, 1971)
Big Star: Another Time, Another Place and You (instrumental backing track)
(From the #1 Record sessions, 1971)
Alex Chilton: Oh Dana & Kizza Me
(Live on WLYX, Memphis, 1975)
Alex Chilton: The Lion Sleeps Tonight & Interview segment
(Live on "Rock of Ages," KUT-FM, University of Texas, Austin, October 1978)
For a band that only existed for a brief spell, Big Star left a lot of peripheral material in its wake. As with the lost works of Bob Dylan, or The Replacements, Big Star's unreleased recordings are patchy, but taken as a whole they illuminate the band's evolution as clearly, if not more, than the official output.
"Psychedelic Stuff" is the product of Chris Bell's high-school internship at Ardent Studios. John Fry, Ardent's proprietor, grew fond enough of Bell to allow him to record his own music in the studio on the nights when it wasn't booked. Bell must have felt like a kid in a candy shop. "Psychedelic Stuff" is the sound of one teenager's delirious discovery of the possibilities of the studio. It's more of a science experiment than a song, but you can't help but be charmed by Bell's enthusiasm as he excitedly pastes together mimicked bits from his favorite records by The Beatles, The Yardbirds, and The Who. And yet even as an amateur mash "Psychedelic Stuff" reveals something crucial about Bell's future shortcomings. It came easy to Bell to cook up a dazzling display of guitar parts, but finding the song underneath it all would always be a struggle.
Around the time that Bell was stealing studio hours at Ardent, Chilton was recording his first solo album in the same building. Chilton put together 1970 with the support of his Memphis pals Terry Manning and Richard Rosebrough. The album was Chilton's first attempt to establish himself as a solo artist independent of the Box Tops, and its schizophrenic array of Sticky Fingers-style rock, sarcastic C&W, and vulnerable pop music reflect its author's creative indecision. On some songs Chilton still uses the faux-gruff voice that Dan Penn had indoctrinated in him, but in the "The EMI Song" one starts to see the common ground on which Chilton and Bell would build Big Star. Bell heard "The Emi Song" and instantly recognized a fellow Todd Rundgren fanatic.
"I Got Kinda Lost" is a song that Bell labored over for years, and eventually found release on I Am the Cosmos. Much is made of Bell's Beatles obsession, but "I Got Kinda Lost" betrays his love for Neil Young, specifically the Crazy Horse of "Winterlong" and "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere." (A cover "Cinnamon Girl" was an early staple of the Big Star live set.) The demo is an example of how Chilton could help turn a dull Bell song into a great Big Star song. The guitar solo in "In the Street" is the ultimate example of Chilton's ability to deliver a guitar phrase in 15 seconds flat, as if cracking the top off a soda bottle. No guitarist is so free and so tuneful in the same moment, and in the blazing alternate take of "In the Street" he plays like George Harrison touched by the spirit of Jimi Hendrix.
Though it was never finished, the hypnotic, oscillating rhythm of "Another Time, Another Place, and You" could have brought #1 Record to a perfect close. Excising the sappy "Watch the Sunrise" and the tossed-off melodrama of "ST 100/6" in favor of this pensive, stoned instrumental might have made the all-acoustic second side of #1 Record a precursor to Neil Young's downer opus On the Beach. It would have peeled from #1 Record some of its strained mainstream aspirations, and in its final moments built a bridge between the Bell era and the staggered tempos of Radio City, and even beyond that to the lavish dilapidation of Sisters Lovers.
You could say Chilton's solo career starts with his live radio performance on WLYX Memphis in early 1975. For the band's first public appearance since recording Sisters Lovers, Chilton showed up with Jody Stephens (who delivers makeshift percussion), along with an entourage that included his friends Pat Rainer, Randy Romano and Beth Hudson. I can't say that these renditions of "Oh Dana" and "Kizza Me" best the album versions, but in these performances the songs are wrought for every drop of rage and resentment. On the record, "Oh Dana" is played with a collapsing grandeur. Here it conveyed in chokes and stabs. Meanwhile, Chilton chafes the chords of "Kizza Me" and reduces the groove to a lacerating thrust. Sarcasm and self-sabotage would become hallmarks of Chilton's music over the next few years, but I don't hear irony in these performances. At their core these are violent, spiteful songs that demand malevolence to be played truthfully.
By the time Chilton showed up to play a series of Texas gigs in fall 1978, he was intent on not only destroying Big Star's legacy, but his own reputation as a songwriter and singer. Enamored by punk, Chilton's party line was to be as offensive as possible and his performance on Neil Ruttenberg's late-night "Rock of Ages" program was notable for its inclusion of "Riding Through the Reich," a Nazi satire set to the tune of "Jingle Bells." Chilton played several songs from Like Flies on Sherbert, including "I've Had It," "No More the Moon Shines on Lorena," and "Waltz Across Texas." Inspired by his newfound cohorts the Cramps, Chilton was exploring his love for Fifties rock, and the highlight here is "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," which despite its mangled reading emits the night's only genuine good cheer. The background vocals are provided by a now-requisite gaggle of female hangers-on, which on this occasion included Austin scenesters Donna Rose and Susan Bunn, and New York punk photographer Stephanie Chernikowski.
In the interview segments Chilton enthuses about the art-rock of The Cramps, Devo, and Brian Eno. His speaking voice is unbearable, its jaded, effete tone setting the standard for an oncoming generation of rock snobs. It's always shameful to see musicians admired, and even rewarded for this kind of spiteful, condescending attitude, but there's something especially pathetic about Chilton's interview here. Big Star had helped him to untangle the embarrassing baggage of the Box Tops, but here his personal and creative gains appear lost to a new, bigger black hole of self-loathing and disengagement. Chilton was nearing thirty but punk had given him an excuse to regress to the spoiled insolence of his teenage years.
When Ruttenberg inquires after Big Star, the only response Chilton can muster is to blame the break-up of the band on Chris Bell's homosexuality (which was never public acknowledged, or even confirmed). Bell died a few months after this interview, but that isn't what makes my skin crawl. Anyone can empathize with Chilton's desire to escape his past, but his willful desecration of a band that once symbolized cooperative synergy and optimism was proof that even the heart that birthed "Thirteen" could turn black. Selling his former partner up the river in the name of a crude joke asserts a cynicism so all-consuming and noxious that the spirit of the band would never recover. No amount of reunion gigs can change the fact that this is the moment in which Big Star died.
