Singer-songwriter Alex Chilton died on March 17, just four days before a reunited version of his best-known band, Big Star, was to perform one of the biggest sets at Austin’s South by Southwest festival. The following weeks saw an outpouring of support from many musicians who have, in some way or another, been following in his footsteps. Former Replacements frontman Paul Westerberg sang his praises for the New York Times and Big Star’s SXSW performance became a tribute that brought in John Doe, Mike Mills, M. Ward, Sondre Lerche and a number of others performing Chilton’s songs.
And there’s good reason to celebrate Chilton’s work. Late last year Rhino released the compilation Keep an Eye on the Sky, which compiles all three Big Star albums, a performance from 1973, and a number of miscellaneous demos, alternate takes and bits of ephemera from each period. The material, more than any eulogy, proves that Chilton (as well as songwriter Chris Bell, also a member of the band early on) was an utterly gifted melodicist and songwriter, and one as capable of creating a sound, as he does across the band’s first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City, as he is at destroying it, as happens in real-time across the long-unreleased Third/Sister Lovers.
Across all three, Chilton’s songs are a mixture of brilliant melodic leads and undeniable melancholy, with the latter coming to consume the former the further one gets in the band’s discography. #1 Record‘s second song, “The Ballad of El Goodo,” sports a chorus so unbelievably good, yet working with such conventional elements: huge chords, big, stereo-panned drum fill, straightforward pop vocal harmonies: that it seems a challenge to answer why no one else had gotten it quite that right yet. Even the closest thing to misguided hippie sentiment, “The India Song,” is almost forgivable entirely because of a moment in its verses when the chord progression deviates slightly, yielding an incredible hook in an otherwise mediocre song. #1 Record also features some of the closest things Big Star had to commercial successes; “In The Street,” as covered by Cheap Trick, was the theme to “That ’70s Show” (referred to by Chilton as “That $70 Show,” as he made $70 every time it was broadcast) and “Thirteen,” which conveys a certain sense of adolescent longing that many pop songwriters attempt to get at and few can ever succeed with.
On Radio City the band loses Chris Bell, and on Third/Sister Lovers it loses everything, as the lineup reduces to a core of Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens, who along with a number of outside players deliver their darkest, most desolate songs. Few things convey a sense of being completely and totally lost in some sort of wilderness like “Holocaust” or “Big Black Car,” especially in the frighteningly-narcotized demo presented amongst this disc’s bonus material. Yet the material proved hugely influential, even more than the band’s early work, paving the way for orchestral guitar pop and even slow, sad songs working within three-minute pop structures.
While this set isn’t necessarily vital: most of its previously-unreleased material has appeal more for the collector and the already-devoted than the merely curious: the three albums included within absolutely are. They’re an essential collection of music heard in literal thousands of records since their initial failure and subsequent resurgence.
