The life and times of the legendary band.
Posts tagged big star.
Stop what you are doing right now and listen to this
Alex Chilton – Can’t Seem to Make You Mine
Seeds Cover
The new Big Star Doc is brilliant - but if you wait just a few more years - the real story will surface…
Just wait…
Congrats to @missdinalane producer of @bigstarstory for winning best documentary at Indie Memphis!!@bigstarstory in the hizzouse! (at The Cove)
Alex Chilton - The Howlin’ Wolf, New Orleans, LA; November 24, 1994
Big Star blah blah power pop blah blah Sister Lovers blah blah. Is it possible that Alex Chilton’s truly genius work took place in the 1990s? MAYBE.
Alex Chilton - Alcoholiday (Teenage Fanclub Cover)
Like Jesus reading the sermon you wrote for Sunday Mass.
‘Way Out West’
Only four months after Alex Chilton’s passing, original Big Star bassist Andy Hummel lost his fight against cancer. Unlike Chilton, however, his death was somewhat less reported upon. Hummel’s contribution to the band only ran up to half of the band’s second album, but his two songwriting contributions to Big Star show a talent in rapid development.
Sung by drummer Jody Stephens (Hummel was apparently mortified by the way his vocals sounded on the twee-as-sin ‘The India Song’, his sole writing credit on #1 Record), ‘Way Out West’ may just be one of the purest-sounding Big Star tracks. All the band’s hallmarks are here: high-gloss jangle, clever melodies and ever-so-awkwardly adolescent lyrics (“Sometimes I think that she’ll make me forget what I need most to remember,” anyone?). It’s just that the song wasn’t written by Alex Chilton, who contributes an almost baroque guitar solo, and an extremely nifty detail in the production - any time the word “west” is sung in the chorus, listen carefully to your westward speaker. But Hummel owns this track, without which Radio City wouldn’t be half the record it is.
But more on that later…
Evan Dando - The Ballad of El Goodo
Some time in the nineties, when the Big Star catalogue (including a ‘definitive’ release of Third) made it to CD at long last, it seemed like the band were finally getting their due. Sure, enough bands were dropping the name of Alex Chilton and doffing their caps to his work, but that was as much of a signifier of taste and coolness as anything else. Now everyone else could hear what all the fuss was about, especially if you watched That 70’s Show.
‘Thirteen’ has certainly been a staple, tackled by the likes of Wilco, Elliott Smith and even Garbage (whose vaguely trip-hop rendition - allegedly favoured by Chilton himself - renders it painfully dated, though not without charm). A nineties tribute record manages to gather many of the decades big alternative names, and some interesting versions; Juliana Hatfield’s girlish vocals romp through ‘Don’t Lie to Me’,
Anyway, in typically perverse fashion, my favourite two Big Star covers aren’t actually on that record - although Ardent Studios alumni Afghan Whigs made a stunningly stately stab at ‘Nighttime’. No, the main one to watch is Evan Dando’s take on ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’, shown above in cringe-making Hallmark Card/lyric-montage style, and recorded for (of all things) the Empire Records soundtrack. Because, y’know, why not?
‘El Goodo’ is a big, big song - easy to overdo, and extremely difficult to sing convincingly - but by 1995, when this was recorded, Evan Dando had been through some shit. So a journeyman’s song (written, lest we forget, when Chilton was 21 at the very oldest) gets simply sung by the bubblegrunge star with the Marlboro Man’s voice. No whistles, no bells, no attempt to recreate the gossamer feel of the original. Just Evan Dando telling Alex Chilton’s story.
There’s another cover I want to talk about too, but I’ll get to that in a bit.
