(Note: Usually on Friday I do a rundown of all the links I've collected throughout the week deemed appropriate for this site (aka, women stuff). However, given Alex Chilton's untimely death , I'd feel like a heel if I didn't at least point out some of the better tributes that have been trickling in since yesterday morning.)
Like nearly everyone else who came of age in the 80s and early 90s, I would have never heard of Big Star or Alex Chilton if it weren't for the Replacements song of the same name. To be honest, it was never my favorite song. I didn't really get why a marginal cult icon would be singing about an even more marginal cult icon, but as a newly indoctrinated 'Mats fan, I figured anything endorsed by Paul Westerberg must be good. I bought #1 Record/Radio City, Big Star's first two albums which had been conveniently packaged as a single set, and I was hooked. For a kid who'd recently been weaned off top 40 pap and shitty hair bands, this was mind-altering stuff: all shimmery guitars and "oohs" and ahs." (Alex Chilton had the best high "ooh.") I'm not much of a believer in the redemptive power of music, but if the Replacement were my gateway drug, Big Star turned me into a hard-core addict.
Twice I had tickets to see Alex Chilton as a solo act, and both times I bailed. Once because I was wiped out after moving from one crappy apartment to another, slightly less crappy, apartment, and once because I didn't want to brave a summer storm. Hell yeah I regret that.
Alex was scheduled to play SXSW this weekend, possibly hipping a new generation to his music. Creative Director Brent Grulke said in a press release issued yesterday shortly after the news broke: "He wrote the most accessible pop songs that turned into something quite sour on closer reflection. It was impossible to know what he was thinking. But it was always worth pondering, because that's what a truly great artist makes us do. " Elegy after elegy trickled in. The LA Times's Ann Powers wrote in a particularly moving piece for PopMatters:
"Alex Chilton was a wandering, heretical patriarch of our new religion. Bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. found him inspirational... College radio DJs turned Big Star’s catchy but unkempt songs into the hits they should have been the first time around. The band had been active in the 1970s, but they belonged to us, the kids fighting off the shadow of the Baby Boomers who’d been too dumb to realize how great it was."
Annie Zaleski, who blogs for the Riverfront Times music blog, A to Z, remembered the 1993 Big Star reunion, which happened in Columbia, MO, by digging up a handful of personal accounts from fans who were there. Whitney Matheson of Pop Candy posted several videos starting with Alex Chilton's Box Tops days all the way through to Elliot Smith's tender cover of "Thirteen:"
"...one of my favorite Big Star covers is Elliott Smith's moving version of Thirteen. Somewhere, perhaps these two talents are now making beautiful music together."
I don't know where to end other than to include another song, one I was chagrined to find out was a cover of a Loudon Wainwright lll song, "Motel Blues." I prefer Big Star's version anyway. So much vulnerability captured in a song whose lyrics are, frankly, kind of creepy.
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