40 Year Itch: Music So Loud

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Big Star are the greatest thing to happen to American rock since The Buffalo Springfield

Jon Tiven, Circus

   At the Tulane University radio station, WTUL-FM, in the mid-80's,  the name Big Star kept coming up over and over again in interviews with all the jangle pop bands that came through town: R.E.M., The dB's, Let's Active and others talked about this Memphis band with reverence. I'd even run into Alex Chilton in New Orleans once and could only bring up The Bangles version of "September Gurls". Hard to believe but we didn't have a copy of any Big Star albums in the stacks. Even though the station had a budget to buy albums we'd never been sent, we couldn't find anything by Big Star. Not until I visited Recycled Records in Reno, NV where I was visiting my mom  in 1986. I don't recall what I paid for Radio City or whether anyone at the cash register had anything to say about my purchase. I just knew I had found the Lost Treasure of Powerpopotopia.

 On my Mom's cheap lo fi stereo system, I placed the needle on Side One. The rocking and chiming guitars, the hand claps and the drum fills of "O My Soul" converted me within seven seconds. Badfinger and the Raspberries got nothing on these boys! One perfect song followed the next.

   Writer Bruce Easton, who would get to play these songs onstage with Alex Chilton,  recalls a similar introduction:

Why did it take me so long to hear Big Star? Why wasn't AM Radio cranking "September Gurls" between "The Night Chicago Died" and "Takin' Care of Business"? Apparently that's the result of  label infighting between Ardent, Stax and Columbia.

Radio City is Big Star's second album but the first without singer/songwriter Chris Bell. Compared to #1 Record,  Radio City is more gritty and more of Chilton's show. Most striking to me on my latest listen is how his guitar so organically switches from jangly lead lines to meaty rock god hooks. 

For an album that had a decidedly "cult following " in the 1980's, Radio City was hardly ignored by the critics when it was released. Remember, the New York press had been dazzled by a Big Star show just months earlier. 

 Of the new album Rolling Stone's Ken Barnes wrote 

 Radio City features plenty of shimmering pop delights such as "Way Out West" and "Back of a Car." Sometimes they sound like the Byrds, sometimes like the early Who, but usually like their own indescribable selves. "September Gurls" is a virtually perfect pop number. They may not be as tight or as immediately mesmerizing this time out (the opening tune, "O My Soul," is a foreboding, sprawling funk affair), but Radio City is one of the most high-spirited, thoroughly enjoyable recent releases.

Robert Christgau gave the album an A rating, writing 

 This sounds completely unique if you don't count Beatles '65. Especially if you remember the Beatles as spare, skew, and sprung, which is hard, since they weren't. Can an album be catchy and twisted at the same time? Find out. 

The most ironic review belongs to the Billboard critic who wrote :

This set brings good news from a young Memphis band that nearly expired when their premiere set, a commercial gem, got missed in the rush. Don't expect the new disc to die so easily...

40 Year Itch : Big Star Plays Max's Kansas City

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In early December, 1973 Big Star had just finished mixing Radio City, the band's second album, when they performed for two nights at the New York City club Max's Kansas City. They played mostly to music writers on the first night. Among them was Billboard Magazine's Sam Sutherland.

Big Star at Max's Kansas City

   During the last year several young bands have emerged with a striking command of the tight, vibrant pop and rock styles that made Top 40 radio a high-energy delight in the mid '60's. Big Star seemed among the most promising, despite the disappointing reaction to their debut Ardent LP, but the lucky core of followers who heard that powerful first bow were soon dismayed by the collapse of the band and a parallel lack of general interest in the act.

    Well, weep no more. Big Star is back as a trio, and , on the strength of a hastily-scheduled two-day shot at Max's, there is some strong new material on the way. If anything, the departure of the band's second guitarist and writer has provided a new coherence to the act, which centers logically around Alex Chilton, lead guitarist and vocalist, and composer of the band's best material.

   Chilton, who first emerged as lead vocalist of the Box Tops while still in his middle teens, has evolved into a superb rocker whose reverence for the Beatles and the Byrds is balanced by his own explosive approach to straight-ahead rock 'n' roll.

   The band opened with a solo slot by Chilton, singing "The Ballad of El Goodo" and "Thirteen", two of the most evocative songs on the group's first release. Chilton's aura of fragility was perfect for those songs, one an anthem of self-realization, the second a  bittersweet but loving re-creation of true teen first love that is parenthetically a eulogy for the innocent vitality of rock in the early 60's.

  From there, Big Star shifted into electric overdrive with full force. Chilton's electric guitar taking command. Despite  some rough edges--the band hadn't played, except for a quick rehearsal, in months--the set was a triumph, covering some exciting bases with the new tunes.

  With virtually no publicity outside the industry itself, the second night crowd was lean. Hopefully , this one group that won't suffer the frustrating fate of the best critics' bands: a second LP is due in January, and, with Chilton's presence and some solid material, it would be sad indeed to see Big Star lost in the shuffle.

--Sam Sutherland, Billboard Magazine, Dec 22, 1973