There have been a number of celebrity-type people who have died recently that I’ve wanted to write about. John Hughes, the man who directed the movies that became both the text and the soundtrack for my coming of age. Michael Jackson, who brings with him a cavalcade of bizarre, mixed emotions that are somehow chased away when I turn on the happy beats of ABC. I let them pass without any written words. But tonight when I learned that Alex Chilton had died I wanted to try to put something down on paper/keyboard. I thought I was speechless, but it turned out I was only almost speechless. I tried typing his name. I had plenty to say.
I learned about Alex Chilton’s death the way I’ve been learning about a lot of deaths lately — via Facebook. Nearly half a dozen status updates, all of them almost identical: Alex Chilton, RIP. My reaction, when I saw each in turn, was the same, too.
No.
No.
No.
He’d had a heart attack, The Commercial Appeal said.
He was 59.
I’d been talking about Alex earlier today with my friend Wendy.
What was your song with your first boyfriend?
What was your song with your husband?
I’d rattled off some Air Supply classics that covered my dramatic high school years. For my husband, I didn’t have a song, though, I told her. I had an album. Which was technically two albums: Big Star’s #1 Record and Radio City. I always tell people that I brought KISS and Elvis to my marriage and my husband, a record collector/record store clerk/former dj, brought everything else. But Big Star (with the now-late Alex Chilton, the then-late Chris Bell, Andy Hummel and Jody Stephens) was the first and best and the most necessary. After all, I was already a huge Replacements fan. There wouldn’t have been a Replacements without Big Star. There wouldn’t have been a Teenage Fan Club without Big Star, either. There wouldn’t have been any Posies. I remember a poster somewhere — maybe on the walls of the WUVT office? — that traced every great Indie Rock Band back to Big Star and I suppose I am destined to spend the next few days searching the Internet, trying to find it.
Even if you’ve never heard of Big Star you’ve probably heard of Alex Chilton, either because of The Replacements song by that name or because of “The Letter” by The Box Tops. Chilton sang for them, too, when he was just a kid. But it was a different Alex Chilton than the one who sang and wrote for Big Star in the earliest days of the 1970s.
You’ll find Big Star on pretty much every list entitled “The Greatest Bands You’ve Never Heard Of,” usually at the top. That was the incarnation I wanted to see, though I couldn’t, because Chris Bell had already died and Alex seemed to be favoring covers at the moment. I chased him where I could find him, a tail chasing a comet, and when he played, there was still plenty of light. I especially loved songs like “What’s Your Sign?” and his rendition of “My Baby Just Cares for Me.” Sometimes his voice was tinged with so much irony and sarcasm that at one Birchmere show I actually remember being a little nervous when it came time for banter. (Not nervous in the way I am when Mark Eitzel starts talking at an American Music Club show, but nervous just the same.) Still, I caught him in D.C. and New Orleans. When there was talk of the Box Tops reuniting and playing at some baseball stadium, we always planned to go, until we found out Alex wasn’t going to be there after all, and then we didn’t.
We listened to old albums and bought new ones. In Memphis, we took photos in front of Ardent Records and the Big Star grocery store. We figured out how to play a bunch of the songs from #1 and Radio City. I remember a whole group of us sitting on someone’s porch singing Thirteen in the late hours of a Blacksburg evening. (That song has the ache and angst of teen-dom down better than any book I’ve ever read, and if I’m ever trying to channel those feelings into my kid writing, that’s what I play. The town in my current Work-in-Progress is named Chilton.)
Those early albums had songs not just for angst, but for every mood. Love. Hate. Hope. “The Ballad of el Goodo” can still get me through any hard time. “I’m In Love With a Girl” and “Watch the Sunrise” are two of my favorite songs, along with the upbeat “Don’t Lie to Me,” “Back of the Car,” “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “My Life is Right,” which I wanted played at our wedding, but the band thought The Byrds would be a better fit for their bluegrass style so we went that route instead. My husband and I had a split second of dread when That 70s Show took Big Star’s “In the Street” for its theme song. Then we were pleased. At that point, it didn’t really matter if our beloved Indie Rock went commercial — I mean, there hadn’t been a band for years and Chris Bell had died in the 70s, and Alex, he finally deserved some love, didn’t he?
I saw Alex Chilton perform under the name of Big Star only once, when my friend Heidi and I went to the Reading Music Festival in England in 1993. We ate bad sausages and waited. There was one train left to catch back to London, Big Star (Alex, with Jody Stephens and some able members of the Posies) was going on after the Boo Radleys and the Boo Radleys would not … stop… playing. I would like to say we abandoned the train and camped out in that field, but we didn’t. We missed Big Star’s last song and raced like hell to the train station. I still blame the Boo Radleys for that and I’ve never given them a fair shake because of it. I still have my Big Star T-shirt from that concert, though. It is — appropriately — black, and I’ll be wearing it tomorrow, thinking about music and words I didn’t say.
If you feel like following:
The Replacements singing Left of the Dial and Alex Chilton in Germany.
Alex and Co. singing Thirteen in 2007.
Thank You Friends with footage by Chris Bell and Andy Hummel.
And, oh, heck, don’t listen to these. If you have any Big Star albums, go play them. And if you don’t, go buy them. It’s as simple as that.
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