i never travel far without a little big star

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Alex Chilton by The Replacements

• If he was from Venus, would he feed us with a spoon? If he was from Mars, then that'd be cool Standing right on campus, would he stamp us in a file? Hangin' down in Memphis all the while And children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round They sing, "I'm in love, what's that song? Yeah, I'm in love with that song" Cerebral rape and pillage in a village of his choice Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice Feeling like a hundred bucks, exchanging good lucks face to face Check-checkin' his stash by the trash at St. Mark's Place And children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round, 'round They sing, "I'm in love, what's that song? Well, I'm in love with that song" I never travel far Without a little Big Star, ooh-ooh Runnin' 'round the house, Mickey Louse and tarot cards Falling asleep with a flop pop video on And if he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon? If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe And children by the million wait for Alex Chilton to come around, 'round They sing, "I'm in love, what's that song? I'm in love with that song I'm in love, what's that song? Yeah, I'm in love with that song" Oh, come on Writer/s: CHRIS MARS, PAUL WESTERBERG, TOMMY STINSON Publisher: BMG Rights Management, Warner Chappell Music, Inc. Lyrics licensed and provided by LyricFind
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Comments: 7

• Eb from Fl Keys, Fl Classic. Pleased To Meet Me deserves to be in the top 50 rock albums of all time, and this is such a happy shout-out to Alex Chilton, who was a genius. The Replacements have influenced so much of the rock music since them, a brilliant band.
• Ryan from Anahola, Hi This song is on Rock Band 2. R.I.P. Alex Chilton.
• Kevin from Reading , Pa I recently read a Chilton interview from the 90s and when asked about this song and whether it made him feel honored or proud or something like that, Chilton responded with what sounded like a cavalier, "no."
• Darrell from Eugene, United States Is the real Alex Chilton connected to the family that created Chilton auto repair, motorcycle repair and appliance repair manuals? I have a collection of over 100 Chilton, Haynes, Clymer, Motor, Glenn's and factory-issued manuals (most notably: a 1943 wartime Motor auto-repair manual with Duesenberg, Cadillac V-16 and Cord prominntly featured, a 1959 Fiat 1100 factory-issued manual and a British Leyland-issued Austin Marina shop nanual of unknown vintage)
• Mister Whirly from Minneapolis, Mn Alex Chilton was originally supposed to produce "Tim", and actually started working on the album until the studio thought they needed a "bigger name" and brought in Tommy "Ramone" Erdelyi - who was unfortunately going a little deaf by this time. Some of the Chilton produced demos are still floating artound out there on bootlegs.
• Andrew from Bergenfield, Nj "Feelin' like a hundred bucks/Exchanging good lucks face to face" is a reference to two Kinks albums "Face to Face" and the rare bootleg "Good Luck"
• Dan from Tonawanda, Ny "checkin his stash by the trash at st. mark's place" is a reference to the first time Paul Westerberg met the subject, Alex Chilton.

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Alex Chilton

• The Replacements

23 Comments

Lyrics submitted by krushzed

Alex Chilton Lyrics as written by Paul Westerberg Chris Mars

Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.

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I've listened to this song a couple times, so I think I've got a pretty good handle on what the meaning is:

This band obviously has an affinity for Chilton automotive repair manuals, hence the title of the song. It's a song about working on a car that keeps breaking down, an AMC Venus. (crappy car from the 70's) The odd thing is that it keeps breaking down in front of a particular grocery store, Big Star. The kids that loiter in front of the store love it hear the engine purr when he finally gets it working, though; that's the "I'm in love with that sound," line.

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@Imsoglad <- NAILED IT!

@Imsoglad You are INSANE and I love it

The "I'm in love with that song" is sung in the same style as "In the street" by Big Star, written by Alex.

Instead of the lyrics:

"I'm in love. (pause) What's that song? (pause) I'm in love (pause) with that song."

Try singing instead:

"Hanging out, (pause) down the street (pause) The same old thing (pause) we did last week"

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Is that a joke? cause that is the funniest thing I've ever read if so. fucked up if not haha

Actually it is "I'm in love with that song".

Alex Chilton as it was already said fronted the 70s Power-Pop band Big Star and the Box Tops who had the 1960s hit "The Letter". I have heard Westerberg say on occasion that he just threw Chilton into the song but Peter Jesperson the manager/twin tone guy said that he took Westerberg along once to meet with Alex Chilton and Westerberg wrote it after that experience.

I think this song is pretty universal. It really gets at how it feels to really just have a band hit a chord with you.

Big Star are pretty wicked. I am a big fan of "I'm in Love With a Girl" and "Thirteen" in particular.

RIP Alex...

indeed..rip Alex & thanks for the tunes... also of note- Big Star's influence on the Replacements, especially their later work as they matured (or more so their later work I guess?), has always seemed evident to me. Both great bands, and both seemed very underappreciated- while having a cult following obv., they both seem like they held the commercial appeal most alt. rock bands that have made it pretty big have & hold (i.e. R.E.M., Radiohead, etc... not comparing music, but just talent & songwriting and in just too much talent to ignore ). One of my favorite Replacement tunes that I've been listening to more often lately (by no coincidence, to be perfectly honest).<br /> <br /> <br /> maybe Big Star is more appreciated- esp. now that Chilton has passed and they've regained some mass appeal, but it seems like a lot of people just know the Replacements as that band the fill-in GnR guitarst played for in the 80s... perhaps my perception is misconceived, but I don't know.

meant to write, "and in general just having too much talent..." .. not that the paragraph was structured properly anyway, but that part makes little to no sense as is so yeah.

Big Star was the name of a short-lived, but highly influential and much celebrated power pop band in the early 70's. Alex Chilton and Chris Bell were the two main songwriters in the group. They hailed from Memphis, Tennessee and took their name from a chain of grocery stores that were scattered around the South at the time.

Paul Westerberg (lead singer for The Replacements) was a massive fan of the band, and Alex Chilton's work in particular, so this song serves as an homage to his musical hero. In the mid-80's The Replacements had the pleasure of meeting Chilton, and many of the lyrics reflect these interactions and conversations.

"Checkin' his stash by the trash at St. Mark's Place," refers to the first time Paul met Alex. They were in New York City on St. Mark's Place which is a street near East Village known for its prevalence of alternative cultures, and Chilton was strangely sifting through barrels of trash looking for something.

The chorus, "I'm in love. What's that song? I'm in love with that song," was exactly what Paul said to Chilton when they first met. He was thinking of the song "Watch the Sunrise" off Big Star's debut album, #1 Record, but he couldn't remember the name of the song he was thinking of, so he came off as a bumbling fan.

The Replacements would often have guest musicians whom they admired play on their albums, such as Peter Buck playing on "I Will Dare" and Tommy Ramone playing on "Kiss Me on the Bus." Alex Chilton helped with some of the production of the album Pleased to Meet Me, and he played guitar on the song "Can't Hardly Wait."

Source: I recently read the incredible bio about The Replacements, Trouble Boys by Bob Mehr. They discuss Paul Westerberg's love of Alex Chilton at length.

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@win6low your absolutely right..listen to Big Star and you here so much of where Westerberg got his influence and even some of his riffs

Alex Chilton was the lead singer of a group called Big Star, one of the first pop-rock bands. They did not have much comercial success, but freatly influenced the alternative/power pop music we hear today

Ah, Power Pop. I believe Chilton had originally been slated to produce "Pleased to Meet Me", or possibly "Tim". Big Star was pretty big to the 'Matts, and also to R.E.M. and the dB's. "September Gurls" is a decent sample of their stuff.

It's "I'm in love with that sound". not "I'm in love with that song".

I'm in love. With that song.

This is my favourite Replacements song. The chorus at the end just gets me.

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Behind The Song: The Replacements, “Alex Chilton”

by Jim Beviglia June 17, 2020, 8:30 am 1 Comment

“Yeah, December boys got it bad, as ‘September Gurls’ notes,” Paul Westerberg wrote in The New York Times in March of 2010 in a piece called “Beyond The Box Tops,” which reflected on the death of Alex Chilton a few days earlier. “The great Alex Chilton is gone — folk troubadour, blues shouter, master singer, songwriter and guitarist. Someone should write a tune about him. Then again, nah, that would be impossible. Or just plain stupid.”

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The joke, of course, was that Westerberg himself had written a tune about him, a damn good one at that. “Alex Chilton,” found on the 1987 album Pleased To Meet Me by Westerberg’s band The Replacements, is a song that pays tribute to Chilton by rendering his exploits larger-than-life as if he were a rock and roll Paul Bunyan, which seems to be Westerberg’s way of nodding at the somewhat star-crossed nature of Chilton’s actual career.

After providing soulful, beyond-his-years vocals to a string of hits by The Box Tops in the late ’60s as a teenager, Chilton stepped away from the spotlight to form the band Big Star with Chris Bell. That group helped define the term power pop, music resplendent with guitar hooks and sing-along refrains. But despite the critical acclaim Big Star amassed in its career and all the impact the band had on musicians like Westerberg, mainstream pop success never was in the cards.

Westerberg could relate, since The Replacements cast the same kind of shadow on the rock world, albeit in a more disheveled musical manner, without ever hitting it big. That’s why Westerberg’s assertion in the song that “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton/ When he comes ‘round” is more wishful thinking that fact.

“Alex Chilton” is The Replacements’ approximation of the Big Star sound, as Westerberg’s guitar chunks out ragged riffs and drummer Chris Mars takes us to cowbell heaven. The songwriter creates some fantastical scenarios for Chilton, such as trips to Venus and Mars and a marauding rampage through the land as if he were Attila The Hun. These flights of fancy are interspersed with elements that feel more biographical and almost startlingly raw: “Checkin’ his stash by the trash at St. Mark’s Place.”

Westerberg ultimately keeps returning to the music and Chilton’s special way of putting it across. “Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice,” he sings, hinting at both his tribute subject’s rare talent and his unlikely anonymity.” He puts it simpler elsewhere: “I never travel far/ Without a little Big Star.”

As the song nears its conclusion, Westerberg cuts off the electricity and goes into an acoustic breakdown that captures the essence of Chilton’s pop mastery. What he sings in those moments (“I’m in love/ With that song/ I’m in love/ What’s that song”) not only praises Chilton but also speaks to Westerberg’s contention in that New York Times piece that “Those who fail to click with the world and society at large find safe haven in music.”

“If he died in Memphis, then that’d be cool, babe,” Westerberg sings at one point in “Alex Chilton.” That wasn’t to be, but maybe there’s some consolation in knowing that Chilton passed away in New Orleans, itself a pretty soulful place. In any case, very few artists have left behind such an intriguing legacy, not just with the music he produced, but also with the countless tunes from artists, like The Replacements, that he inspired.

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"Alex Chilton" lyrics

• The Replacements Lyrics

Alex Chilton 1950-2010: A Rock & Roll Life in Reverse

By David Fricke

David Fricke

L ast November 18th, at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in New York, Alex Chilton played what turned out to be his last show with the reunited version of his early-Seventies power-pop band, Big Star . It was also one of his best. You could tell by Chilton’s smile, a wide gleam that the Memphis-born singer-guitarist flashed at his bandmates – original drummer Jody Stephens and singer-instrumentalists Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, both of the Posies and members of Big Star since 1993 – during the adoring applause for songs such as “The Ballad of El Goodo,” a pearl of adolescent-pining harmonies from the 1972 LP #2 Record , and the heavy-jangle delight, “Back of a Car,” on 1974’s Radio City . Those albums were dismal sellers when they came out. But in Brooklyn, they were greeted like classic-rock gospel by alternative-rock and indie-generation fans who knew many of the lyrics by heart.

Four months later, on March 17th, Chilton died of a heart attack in New Orleans – where he had lived since the early Eighties – as his wife, Laura Kersting, rushed him to a hospital. He was 59.

“That smile, with Alex, was so revealing,” Stephens says now of that night in Brooklyn. “There was an honesty there that Alex would never speak. But he would show it on his face.” In the dressing room after the show, Stephens remarked to Chilton “what an incredible audience it was.” Chilton didn’t say a word, Stephens recalled: “He just smiled and shook his head up and down.”

Chilton could go on for hours, with strangers backstage, on topics that interested him: astrology, classical music, landscaping in 19th-century France, the history and politics of the South during Reconstruction. But “he wasn’t good at receiving compliments,” says John Fry, who founded the Memphis studio, Ardent, where Big Star made their records and who engineered many of those sessions. “Somebody would praise something on those records, and he’d shrug and say, ‘Well, there wasn’t much to that.'”

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“Alex found some of the Big Star songs really embarrassing,” Stringfellow says. “For him, it was like having your old diary on display. But that Brooklyn show was a real step up. He seemed like, ‘If people are this into it, how can you hate it?'”

Chilton died with ironic timing, on the first day of the SXSW Music and Media Conference. Big Star were already scheduled as a featured act at the festival, with a panel discussion on their music and influence and a headlining set on the final night, March 20th, at the club Antone’s. Instead, the panel became a memorial celebration of Chilton’s life, and Stephens, Auer and Stringfellow turned the Antone’s show into an exhilarating wake, with guest performances by acolytes and friends such as Chris Stamey, Evan Dando, John Doe of X and original Big Star bassist Andy Hummel, in his first appearance with the group since 1973.

“We rose to a difficult occasion, but I can’t say it was enjoyable,” Stringfellow confesses. When he sang Chilton’s lovesick chorus in “Feel,” from #1 Record (“I feel like I’m dying/I’m never gonna live again”), “it was like driving nails through my heart.”

Big Star’s SXSW Show Turns Into Powerful Tribute to Alex Chilton

The stereotypical rock-star career goes like this: years of struggle and obscurity; then critical acclaim and just reward. Chilton lived that arc in reverse: instant fame with the Memphis pop-soul band the Box Tops; followed by commercial frustration, personal trials and intense cult love in his Big Star years; and finally a long life under the mainstream radar. Chilton, in fact, defined overnight success. “The Letter,” his 1967 debut with the Box Tops, recorded when Chilton was 16, was Number One for four weeks. The Box Tops churned out white-R&B hits through 1968 and ’69, including “Cry Like a Baby,” “I Met Her in Church” and “Soul Deep,” driven by Chilton’s precociously gritty, sexually heated singing. That voice shocked even those close to him. His older sister Cecelia says their mother, Mary, joked with friends that she “never even heard him sing in the shower.”

Formed in Memphis in 1971 with Stephens, Hummel and singer-guitarist Chris Bell, Big Star brought out Chilton’s true voice – cleaner, brighter and dramatically vulnerable, framed in compelling tangles of Beatlesque guitars and adolescent choral sighs. The combination of eccentric musical complexity and direct romantic engagement in Chilton’s teenage-rebel melodrama “Thirteen,” on #1 Record , and his Radio City lust nugget “September Gurls” eventually made Big Star a pop beacon for post-punk bands like R.E.M. , the dB’s and the Replacements . (“I never travel far/Without a little Big Star,” the Replacements’ Paul Westerberg would sing in his 1987 tribute, “Alex Chilton.”)

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It was, at the time, a perfection in vain. The two albums never charted. Bell quit after #1 Record ; Hummel split after Radio City . In 1974, Chilton – drinking heavily and in a turbulent relationship – made 3rd with Stephens. A record of purposely twisted majesty, brutally candid in its rage and hurt, it was not released until 1978, after Chilton and Stephens had put Big Star to rest, “ 3rd was ahead of its time, the same way Brian Wilson’s Smile was,” says Stamey, who was in the dB’s and played with Chilton at the turn of the Eighties. “If you listen to independent releases of 10 years ago, 3rd seems very contemporary.”

But for the past three decades, Chilton chose the life of a reluctant legend. In 1982, he quit music entirely for a time, moving to New Orleans and taking a job washing dishes at a restaurant in the French Quarter. He also turned away from alcohol and drugs. “It was a cleansing period for Alex, a purging,” says Stephens. By the time he and Chilton started Big Star again in 1993, Chilton was a spare drinker – “I saw him have one beer in the first five years I was in Big Star,” Stringfellow says – and only had two major vices: cigarettes and pot.

In New Orleans, Chilton lived modestly but comfortably on tour income and publishing royalties, including a windfall from Cheap Trick ‘s cover of “In the Street,” used as the opening theme for That ’70s Show . Chilton made occasional solo records and performed – on his own, with Big Star and, in recent years, a reunited Box Tops – only when it was a pleasure. “Alex didn’t do things he didn’t want to do,” says Stephens. “He couldn’t fake having a good time. He couldn’t be bothered.”

But Chilton was no contrarian. He just refused to be anything but honest, in his songs or life. “The reputation was there,” Stringfellow says, “and that rankled him. Alex was blunt. When you asked him a question, he’d go, ‘No.’ A lot of people go, ‘I’ll think about that. I’ll get back to you.’ And they never call you back. You never got that from Alex.”

At the SXSW panel, Stamey recounted something Chilton once told him from his dishwashing days. A co-worker at the restaurant had caustically remarked to Chilton, “Yeah, Alex, you’re right, and the rest of the world is wrong.”

“You know,” Chilton told Stamey, “I think he was really on to something.”

W illiam Alexander Chilton was born in Memphis on December 28th, 1950, the youngest of Sidney and Mary Chilton’s four children. Sidney was a manufacturers’ representative and an avid jazz musician. When the family moved from its first home, in a neighborhood called Sherwood Forest (the Chiltons lived on Robin Hood Lane), to a large stone house in the Midtown section of Memphis, Sidney hosted jam sessions with friends while Mary ran an art gallery on the first floor. Cecelia, 10 years older than Alex, remembers her brother as “a sweet kid. He would make popcorn for my teenage friends when they would come over.”

Alex got his first guitar when he was 14 and was soon in his first working band, the Jynx, with his future Big Star partner Chris Bell and Bill Cunningham, who later played bass in the Box Tops. “We were a hot little band,” Cunningham says, “but Alex’s voice just propelled us.”

From the start, Chilton had a forceful way of expressing his likes and dislikes. “He was perceptive and could see clearly through any phoniness,” Cunningham says. “He always expressed himself for clarity, but with brutal honesty.” Cunningham remembers missing one of his backing-vocal parts during a Box Tops gig. Chilton walked behind him and kicked Cunningham in the ass with one of his pointed Beatle boots. “It hurt, too,” Cunningham says. “But it was effective. I never forgot to sing that vocal part again.”

Chilton was just as direct in his gratitude. Session musician Spooner Oldham, who played keyboards on Box Tops records and co-wrote songs for the group with its producer Dan Penn, says he met Chilton for the first time after a grueling all-night writing session for “Cry Like a Baby.” When Oldham and Penn played their demo of the song for Chilton, “Alex looked at me with a big smile on his face, reached out his hand and said, ‘Thank you.’ He was genuine that way.” Then, Oldham adds, “he went into the session and sang like a bird.”

After the Box Tops collapsed at the end of 1969, Chilton made his first solo album at Ardent, an effort that went unreleased at the time despite interest from Atlantic Records and the Beach Boys’ label, Brother (Chilton got friendly with Carl and Dennis Wilson when the Box Tops toured with the Beach Boys ). Issued in 1996 as 7570 , the record includes “Free Again,” a country-pop gem that, like many of Chilton’s later songs, was rooted in painful experience. “Well, I made a mistake/Thought I could settle down,” he sang, alluding to a brief marriage when he was 17. “That was about the time his divorce was becoming final,” says John Fry. “He was feeling free of the Box Tops’ constraints but also in his personal life.” (Chilton is survived by a son, Timothee, from that marriage.)

During a trip to New York, where he played solo acoustic shows, Chilton ran into Bell, who was shopping tapes of his band Ice Water with Stephens and Hummel. The four were soon back in Memphis, polishing the songs for #1 Record in a small practice building next door to Ardent. “Alex and Chris were the leaders,” says Stephens. “Chris had an overall vision for #l Record , but Alex had an opinion about things, usually about something being done a little too carefully.” Fry says Bell “looked for perfection in everything. Alex wanted to get it right but didn’t want to fret about it.” (Bell died in 1978 in a car crash in Memphis, after releasing a legendary solo single, “I Am the Cosmos.”)

Today, Stephens looks back at 3rd with amazement and shock. “It was an emotionally raw period,” he says. Chilton and Stephens were dating sisters – Chilton wanted to use Sister Lovers as a band name. But Chilton’s romance was in constant turmoil, aggravated by his drinking and drug use. Stephens quotes the last lines of the song “Holocaust”: “You’re a wasted face/You’re a sad-eyed lie/You’re a holocaust.” That, Stephens says, “was an emotional atom bomb to drop on someone.”

3rd and Chilton’s 1980 solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert – an equally confounding mix of primitivist R&B and poignant heartbreak (the original “My Rival”) – sealed Chilton’s reputation in the punk era as brilliant damaged goods. In fact, during a late-Seventies spell in New York, playing in punk clubs, Chilton “was in great shape,” says Stamey. “By the end of his tenure there, he felt like he should get out, because there were too many people willing to buy him drinks.”

By 1982, he had split New York, eventually settling in New Orleans. “My mother always said that Alex was the only person she knew who chose New Orleans as a place to get away from drugs and booze,” Cecelia says, laughing. But Chilton enjoyed the relaxed pace of living and the lack of music-industry pressure there. “He wanted a clean start,” says Rene Coman, a local bassist who started playing with Chilton shortly after he came to New Orleans. “It took a long time before he played any Big Star stuff, or even mentioned it.”

In the early Nineties, Chilton bought a 19th-century cottage in the Treme section of New Orleans. His mostly black neighbors marveled at the sight of him cutting his grass with a push mower. Chilton did not use e-mail (Stringfellow did Big Star tour business with Chilton via phone and a fax machine at a nearby Kinko’s) and took long bike rides around town. “He cultivated relationships with everyone,” says Kersting, a longtime acquaintance who married Chilton last August. “Everyone that passed by, he would say hello and have a conversation.” That often included impromptu astrological readings.

At one point in the Eighties, Chilton played in a cover band on Bourbon Street, taking requests, mostly R&B standards. In recent years, he enjoyed performing at the annual Ponderosa Stomp revues – as a sideman for soul heroes like Brenton Wood. Chilton rarely played under his own name in New Orleans. “He wanted other people to have those slots at the clubs,” Kersting says. “He didn’t want to gain from New Orleans. He wanted to give.”

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Chilton’s last live show, on January 24th, was in that spirit: a benefit for Doctors Without Borders at a New Orleans gallery called the Big Top. Chilton declined to rehearse with his trio or write a set list. “He said, ‘We’ll wing it,'” says Anthony Donado, who organized the benefit and played drums. “I guess that’s all you could ask of Alex. He liked music on the edge.”

This story is from the April 15th, 2010 issue of Rolling Stone.  

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The Replacements: 10 of the best

The Replacements were the band who should have been but never were. That doesn’t diminish the greatness of a group who captured being teenage in a way few others have managed

1 Shiftless When Idle

The beginning of the Replacements in 1978 was as inauspicious as any band’s has been. Guitarist Bob Stinson and drummer Chris Mars were in their late teens, Tommy Stinson wasn’t even in his teens and perpetually getting in trouble with the law. His big brother ordered him to take up bass to keep him out of trouble, bribing him with cans of Coke and chocolate to keep him playing. Collectively, they were called Dogbreath, and their big number was a cover of Yes’s Roundabout . One night, frontman-to-be Paul Westerberg was walking home from his job as a caretaker in the district office of US senator David Durenberger when he heard the band practising in the Stinson family home. He was eventually invited to join, and refused to play Roundabout. The band became the Replacements and Westerberg started bringing his songs to the party. In autumn 1980 they recorded their first album, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash : it was sort of punk, sort of classic rock, wholly ragged, but both Westerberg’s ability to write an indelible hook and the band’s gift for finding the perfect way to back it were already evident – his description of the band as “power trash” was pretty much perfect. Shiftless When Idle was one of the first Replacements anthems, a spot-on description of the band’s own beautiful fecklessness. “And I ain’t got no idols, I ain’t got much taste,” Westerberg sings. “I’m shiftless when I’m idle, and I got time to waste.” It was also an early display of Westerberg’s gift for the perfect song title, poetic in its simplicity and choice of words.

2 Color Me Impressed

Punk was a vehicle for the Replacements, and one that could have taken them into a dead end. They realised that though they could play fast and they could play loud, there were always others who could play faster and louder. There weren’t any others, though, who could combine all the things the Replacements did: silliness, melody, empathy, romance, anger, ennui. Stink, their second album – or EP, really – was pretty much their last gasp as a punk band, and its follow-up, Hootenanny , was the first time the band displayed every facet of their personality. That means it’s sometimes a shocking mess, but for all the terrible jokes – if the title track were half as amusing as the band thought it was, it would be twice as amusing as it actually is – it allowed Westerberg’s songwriting to stretch into new places. Within Your Reach was an early effort at what would be revealed as possibly his greatest strength, the lovelorn ballad, while Color Me Impressed portrayed him in his favourite role: the outsider who’s simultaneously superior and insecure: “Everybody at your party/ They don’t look depressed/ Everybody dressin’ funny/ Color me impressed.” In retrospect, though, Color Me Impressed was just a dry run for what came next.

3 Androgynous

The fourth Replacements album was their masterpiece, the one that still gets 10/10 reviews when reissued, that crops up in best album ever lists. It had the perfect cover – the band, looking hungover, perched on the roof of the Stinson home – and the perfect title. After rejecting Kind of a Sewer and The Replacements Get a Soft On as options, they chose to pluck one from rock history in an act of bravado: the album was called Let It Be. The strange thing about Let It Be is that a good chunk of the album, is by most rational standards, throwaway. There’s a song about Tommy getting his tonsils out ( Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out ); a cod-metal track that gleans amusement from someone having an erection ( Gary’s Got a Boner ); a Kiss cover ( Black Diamond ), and a throwaway complaint about MTV bands ( Seen Your Video ), but those songs are somehow necessary. Let It Be’s greatness lies in it being the perfect summation of the life of a young man who’s not yet graduated to being grown up: most “great” albums reduce life to one set of emotions, but Let It Be encompassed everything: reckless stupidity, sexual uncertainty, wild abandon, boredom, excitement. It sounded like all of late teenage life condensed into less than 40 minutes, by someone who seemed as confused as you, but was able to articulate that confusion. Androgynous was one of its greatest moments, a piano ballad about gender ambiguity that espoused the message of the album’s title without ever seeming to preach. Indeed, Westerberg seemed just as confused here as anywhere – and showed his repeated gift for capturing a complicated thought in a single line (“He might be a father, but he sure ain’t a dad”). It’s a strange, beautiful song, and testament to how far he had travelled in a very short time.

4 Sixteen Blue

Let It Be’s Unsatisfied is usually held up as the definitive Westerberg ballad, but this is the one that grabs me every time. His vocal is perfect – for a singer with a limited range, he was startlingly expressive, and his gravelly, battered tone gave him an unusual ability to communicate empathy. Sixteen Blue (another perfect title) is one of the greatest-ever songs about being a teenager. Westerberg was only 22 when he wrote it, and it helped to have an actual 16-year-old around, in the form of Tommy Stinson. It veers from defiance (“You’re lookin’ funny/ You ain’t laughin’ are you?”) to vulnerability (“Brag about things you don’t understand/ A girl and a woman, a boy and a man/ Everything is sexually vague/ Now you’re wondering to yourself/ If you might be gay”). It’s witty (“You’re lying, now you’re lying on your back”) and it’s accepting (“You’re age is the hardest age/ Everything drags and drags). And, musically, it’s beautiful: the melody is perfectly pitched, and it ends with a great miniature guitar solo from Bob Stinson. It’s easy when writing about the Replacements to concentrate on Westerberg’s songwriting, or to talk about the band’s couldn’t-give-a-fuck attitude, but this was a band that was genuinely greater than the sum of its parts, and Stinson was the perfect guitarist: tuneful but fierce and wild. He seemed like someone who was trying to play classic rock and getting it all wrong, creating something even more memorable as a result.

5 Bastards of Young

Let It Be won the Replacements their major-label deal, and Tim was the first album with Sire. There’s a lot wrong with it: the production is horrible, the cover is worse, but it contained some of Westerberg’s best songs yet: Left of the Dial (another great title) was his love letter to the alternative music scene, Swingin’ Party another great hymn to vulnerability (and covered not so long ago by Lorde ). And then there was this, an anthem of defiance and alienation, and the first major-label single from the Replacements. And how did they choose to promote it in the heyday of the MTV age? With a black-and-white video that showed not the band, just a loudspeaker vibrating to the music. At around 1:45 a figure appears and picks up a copy of Tim, then sits down, his cigarette in shot. And aside from different extremities of that person coming into view, blurrily, that’s about it – until he kicks in the speaker and leaves the room at the end of the clip. Bastards of Young stated Westerberg’s ambivalence about being the Next Big Thing – “God, what a mess, on the ladder of success/ Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung,” it opened – and, even, about having fans. “The ones who love us best are the ones we’ll lay to rest/ And visit their graves on holidays at best,” he insists, while “the ones who love us least are the ones we’ll die to please”. It was set, naturally, not to music that expressed any of that confusion, but to one of the band’s hardest tunes.

6 Here Comes a Regular

The Replacements – perhaps unfortunately – became as much a legend as a band. People would go to shows to see them pass out. They would play shocking gigs of tuneless cover versions (one particularly bad performance was released as a bootleg by their original label, Twin/Tone, titled The Shit Hits the Fans ). Sobriety was their enemy. But Westerberg knew alcohol wasn’t always your friend, that it was a passport to loneliness as much as a source of camaraderie. Here Comes a Regular was the inverse of the theme from Cheers . The residents of the bar go there hoping for someone to call out their name, but really they’re going to escape responsibility. “Am I the only one who feels ashamed?” he asks.

7 Can’t Hardly Wait (Tim version)

Can’t Hardly Wait was recorded again and again, with different lyrics, the version that eventually got released being recorded for the second Sire album, Pleased To Meet Me, with horns and strings. For my money, the version recorded for Tim and eventually released on All for Nothing/Nothing for All is better – more taut and raw. More rocking, really. It’s a simple song, little more than a nagging, itchy riff, a not-quite-anthemic chorus, and the usual share of one-liners (“Jesus rides beside me, he never buys any smokes”). As usual, though, there’s uncertainty beneath the triumphant music – Westerberg is shouting that he can’t hardly wait not in a moment of joy, but after climbing on top of a “scummy water tower”. This is one of the Replacements song titles that was custom-made for use in a film: a 1998 high-school comedy took the name and used the song.

8 Alex Chilton

Pleased to Meet Me was probably the Replacements’ best-sounding album, given a big, hard production by Jim Dickinson at Ardent Studios in Memphis. Given the location, it was almost natural that Westerberg would pay tribute to one of his heroes (who produced the version of Can’t Hardly Wait above). At this point, Alex Chilton wasn’t yet the lionised figure he’s become, and writing a song with his name in the title was the kind of thing that would provoke a flurry of interest. Some of the lyrics are a little bit “Did he really sing that?” – “So we will rape and pillage in a village of his choice”. But there’s a delightful sincerity to Westerberg’s insistence, in the song’s bridge, that “I never travel far/ Without a little Big Star.” And the riff was one of the Replacements’ best. The only thing it lacked was a sloppy, crazy Bob Stinson solo – the guitarist had been kicked out of the band by this time, in circumstances that did no credit to Westerberg. In the summer of 1986, Stinson had been ordered by a court to undertake a rehab programme. Three dry weeks later, the band played a five-night stand in Minneapolis and on the last night, Westerberg ordered him to “Either take a drink, motherfucker, or get off my stage.” His then wife, Carleen, told the writer Michael Azerrad: “It was the first time I’d seen Bob cry.” He was sacked a couple of weeks later. He died in 1995 of organ failure, caused by years of drug and alcohol abuse.

I interviewed Westerberg last week for a forthcoming Guardian feature and he told me, half joking, that Skyway was the first good song he’d written. It’s not true: he’d written plenty already by that time. But it might be the most perfect song he’s ever written. It’s nothing more than a simple acoustic love song, but it’s rooted perfectly in place – in the skyways of Minneapolis, the enclosed passages between buildings so the locals don’t have to venture into the winter snows (Minnesota is the coldest of the lower 48 states). A man keeps seeing a woman, he wonders if they’ll meet, and when he gets his chance “there wasn’t a damn thing I could do or say”. That’s all there is to it. It’s sad and true and heartfelt.

10 Achin’ to Be

By 1989’s Don’t Tell a Soul, their penultimate album, the Replacements had pretty thoroughly lost their way. The songs weren’t as good – Westerberg told me he was trying too hard to write anthems – and the production was horrible. It was an outfit who weren’t meant to be a big, commercial rock band trying far too hard to be a big, commercial rock band. It wasn’t just that it wasn’t what their audience wanted, it was also something they were temperamentally unsuited to: by all accounts the post-Stinson years (at least until Westerberg got sober in 1990) were a morass of even more drugs, even more booze and the resultant paranoia. But even so, there were moments of greatness. Achin’ to Be was the last of the great lovelorn Replacements ballads. It would have benefited from sounding rougher, rather than like something custom-built for FM radio (this is the version of the Replacements that was copied by admirers, rather than the completely inimitable band of Let It Be), but it’s still a beautiful song about a woman who’s mystifying but compelling. And its title summed up the very notion of what the Replacements were about: they were achin’ to be; they never really realised what they were.

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Lucky For Some: 13 Artists Beholden to Big Star

As a documentary about the legendary Big Star hits UK cinemas, we reveal 13 bands that might not exist without the men from Memphis

In typically contrary fashion, founding chief Alex Chilton once expressed his distrust of the posthumous popularity of Big Star: “People say we made some of the best rock‘n’roll albums ever. And I say they’re wrong.” Ahead of a UK cinema release for Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, we salute those who begged to differ.

Teenage Fanclub: Third album Bandwagonesque owed much to No.1 Record and Radio City . Aside from a couple of Alex Chilton singles covers ( Free Again and Jesus Christ ), the Fannies’ furthered the connection by naming 1993’s Thirteen after a favourite Big Star tune. Doubtless sick of the comparisons, Norman Blake said later: “Without question they were an influence, but we weren’t into Big Star to the obsessive extent that people imagine.”

Wilco: It’s a fair bet that at least two early Wilco albums, Summerteeth and Being There , would never have arrived were in not for Big Star. Avowed fan Jeff Tweedy also led the band through a terrific version of Thirteen on the 2006 tribute LP, Big Star Small World .

**The dB’s: **The jangling buoyancy and aching harmonies of North Carolina’s dB’s, led by Peter Holsapple and Alex Chilton’s onetime bandmate Chris Stamey, was a natural product of hours spent in the company of No.1 Record and Radio City . “You really cannot better Big Star,” Holsapple once offered. “I still can’t understand why they weren’t enormous.”

The Replacements: “I never travel far without a little Big Star” sang Paul Westerberg on The Replacements’ Alex Chilton , a tribute song from 1987’s Pleased to Meet Me . “We were sort of young and dumb and I was certainly trying to hip the outside world on who this guy might be,” Westerberg explained later. Chilton, who featured on another album highlight, Can’t Hardly Wait , had already guested on the Mats’ previous LP, Tim . The band also covered September Gurls .

**REM: **As REM began to soar in the latter half of the ‘80s, guitarist and mega fan Peter Buck was quick to admit that “we’ve yet to make a record as good as Revolver or Highway 61 Revisited or Exile on Main Street or Big Star’s Third .” On another occasion, referring to the resurrection of hook-heavy guitar-pop, he stated that “Big Star served as a Rosetta Stone for a whole generation of musicians.”

**This Mortal Coil: **Granted, Ivo Watts-Russell’s 4AD charges were eclectic types with a whole raft of influences. But there’s little doubt that Big Star loomed large. 1984’s debut LP It’ll End in Tears included two standout covers in Kangaroo and Holocaust , the latter featuring a guest vocal spot from post-punk icon, Howard Devoto.

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Primal Scream: Label boss Alan McGee made no secret of the fact that Big Star were Creation’s pet band in the late ‘80s. Taking liberal helpings of Big Star (alongside The Byrds and Love), Primal Scream were clearly big fans too, especially Third / Sister Lovers . So much so that they followed up Screamadelica by decamping to Chilton & Co.’s former stronghold, Ardent Studios in Memphis, to record the Dixie Marco EP.

The Posies: The Posies’ Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow felt the love so deeply that the Seattle power-poppers joined originals Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens in a new configuration of Big Star in 2003. They were still aboard two years later for In Space , Big Star’s first studio album since Third / Sister Lovers . “Listening to Big Star for the first time was a pretty profound eureka moment,” Stringfellow has said. “I wondered how this music could be languishing outside of the consciousness of the mainstream. It had everything in place.”

The Cramps: Alex Chilton was so smitten with The Cramps’ live shows in ‘70s New York that he declared them “the best rock‘n’roll band in the world”. He swiftly took them to Ardent Studios in Memphis, where he produced debut EP, Gravest Hits . A year later he took the helm for their first full-lengther, Songs The Lord Taught Us .

Jeff Buckley: Despite his formidable chops as a writer, the legacy of Jeff Buckley largely rests on his astonishing capacity for interpreting the work of others. Hallelujah and Lilac Wine were prime examples, as was Big Star’s Kangaroo , a regular in his mid-‘90s setlist. The definitive take, over ten minutes of existential beauty, fetched up on posthumous live album, Mystery White Boy.

Counting Crows: Counting Crows sang Baby, I’m A Big Star Now on the soundtrack of John Dahl’s 1998 crime caper, Rounders . But the debt to Alex Chilton and Chris Bell was made far more explicit when they covered The Ballad of El Goodo and Thirteen on live LP, 2001-04-29: Shim Sham Club, New Orleans, USA . The studio version of The Battle of El Goodo finally appeared on 2012 covers album, Underwater Sunshine .

Evan Dando: The Lemonheads displayed a rare talent for bundling adolescent angst into classic pop melodies on ‘90s peaks It’s A Shame About Ray and Come On Feel The Lemonheads . The Big Star influence (they covered Mod Lang in the ‘80s) carried on into Evan Dando’s solo career by way of fresh versions of Thirteen and The Ballad of El Goodo .

Nada Surf: New York combo Nada Surf are one of the newer breed of alt.rockers with an ear for big harmonies and Chiltonesque white-boy soul. The band wear their influences proudly, not least on a cover of Third / Sister Lovers nugget, Blue Moon from the Chilton tribute album.

UK Screenings of Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me

Cambridge: Arts Picturehouse, 1,2,3,6 August

Norwich: Cinema City, 11 August

Exeter: Playhouse, 11,13 August

London: Greenwich Picturehouse, 18 August

Edinburgh: Cameo Picturehouse, 18 August

Southampton: Harbour Lights Picturehouse, 18 August

London: Arthouse Crouch End, 18,24 August

Brighton: Duke’s at Komedia, 24 August

Liverpool: FACT, 25 August

London: Hackney Picturehouse, 31 August

London: Stratford East Picturehouse, 1 September

Manchester: Moston Small Cinema, 5,6,7 September

Freelance writer for Classic Rock since 2008, and sister title Prog since its inception in 2009. Regular contributor to Uncut magazine for over 20 years. Other clients include Word magazine, Record Collector, The Guardian, Sunday Times, The Telegraph and When Saturday Comes . Alongside Marc Riley, co-presenter of long-running A-Z Of David Bowie podcast. Also appears twice a week on Riley’s BBC6 radio show, rifling through old copies of the NME and Melody Maker in the Parallel Universe slot. Designed Aston Villa’s kit during a previous life as a sportswear designer. Geezer Butler told him he loved the all-black away strip.

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Alex Chilton

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About Alex Chilton

"Alex Chilton" is a song by American rock band The Replacements from their fifth studio album Pleased to Meet Me. The song is a homage to Alex Chilton, lead singer of The Box Tops and Big Star. Chilton was a guest musician on Pleased to Meet Me, playing guitar on the song "Can't Hardly Wait". The song is available as a playable track on the music video game Rock Band 2. The song is also heard in the background of the bachelor party scene in season 1, episode 3 of Psych.

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The Replacements are an American punk rock band formed in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1979, and are considered pioneers of alternative rock. The band was composed of guitarist and vocalist Paul Westerberg, guitarist Bob Stinson, bassist Tommy Stinson, and drummer Chris Mars for most of their career. Following several critically acclaimed albums, including Let It Be and Tim, Bob Stinson left the band in 1986 and the band experienced several line-up changes; Slim Dunlap joined as lead guitarist and Steve Foley replaced Chris Mars in 1990. Towards the end of the band's career, Westerberg exerted more control over their creative output. The group disbanded in 1991, with the members ultimately pursuing various projects. However, a reunion was announced on October 3,… more »

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Written by: CHRIS MARS, PAUL WESTERBERG, TOMMY STINSON

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Know any other songs by the replacements don't keep it to yourself, image credit, the web's largest resource for, music, songs & lyrics, a member of the stands4 network, watch the song video, more tracks from the album, pleased to meet me.

• #1 I. O. U.
• #2 Alex Chilton
• #3 I Don't Know
• #4 Nightclub Jitters
• #5 The Ledge
• #6 Never Mind
• #7 Valentine
• #8 Shooting Dirty Pool
• #9 Red Red Wine
• #11 Can't Hardly Wait
• #20 Tossin' N' Turnin' [*]
• #22 Cool Water [Alternate Take][*]

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Never Travel Far…Without A Little Big Star – R.I.P. Alex Chilton 1950-2010

Alex Chilton NYC 1977

[Photo via godlis.com ]

Paying tribute today to the sad passing of one the most influential musicians of a generation , the one and only Alex Chilton succumbed to a heart attack today in his home of New Orleans at the much too young age of 59. From his teen years in the Boxtops to co-founding the seminal band Big Star in Memphis in the early ’70s to his later solo work, he’s influenced everyone from REM to T he Replacements to Wilco and is still influencing young bands today. His legendary status was bolstered by the recent resurgence in popularity of Big Star , who were even scheduled to play at the renowned SXSW music festival in Austin, TX this coming Saturday. He was equally adept at writing a glorious jangly pop gem like Thirteen or September Gurls as he was at mining the tortured underside of his psyche in songs like Holocaust, quite possibly the darkest saddest song ever written.

I only had the privilege of seeing him play live one time back in the late ’80’s but did get lucky enough to sit and chat with him at the bar for quite a while and it still remains one of my favorite musical memories. An immense void was left in the music world today.

R.I.P. Alex Chilton 1950-2010

The Box Tops – The Letter Buy The Best Of The Box Tops

Big Star – Try Again (early version) Buy Keep An Eye On The Sky

Big Star – Thirteen Bu y #1 Record

Big Star – September Gurls Buy Radio City

Big Star – Holocaust Buy Third/Sister Lovers

Alex Chilton – Bangkok Buy Lost Decade

Big Star – Downs Buy Third/Sister Lovers

Big Star – Motel Blues (Live) Buy Big Star Live

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Big Star ‘#1 Record’ 50th Anniversary Concert in L.A. Has Jody Stephens and Guests Reviving a Rock Classic That Very Slowly Got Its Due

By Chris Willman

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“I never travel too far / Without a little Big Star ,” Paul Westerberg of the Replacements famously once sang, getting children by the millions — or at least hundreds of thousands — to check out an under-appreciated band of the ’70s in the 1980s. If you want to hear Big Star’s music played live, that generally involves traveling very far, in a time machine. But not in Los Angeles tonight, where Jody Stephens , the sole surviving original member, will join up with a cast of estimable singers and musicians to present a full evening of Big Star songs, including a full 50th anniversary run-through of the band’s classic debut album, “#1 Record.”

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At a rehearsal Friday night at the Alex (a 1920s theater that was not actually rechristened just for this occasion), Stephens and members of the ensemble spoke with Variety about what it means that “#1 Record,” a flop at the time, is being remembered and celebrated a half-century after it seemingly sank into obscurity.

The “#1 Record” tribute will not be strictly limited to L.A. It presages a short tour of a handful of dates that will go down in December, albeit without the orchestra or most of the guest singers. Those coming gigs will just feature a five-piece band, albeit a fairly all-star quintet, consisting of Stephens on drums, Mills on bass and Sansone, Stamey and Auer on guitar.

It may be a little bit ironic that the debut is getting its revival due now, after there was a Wild Honey benefit and subsequent tour in the mid-2010s themed around the swan song “Big Star’s Third,” a much more peculiar, patchwork and subdued album than “#1 Record.” Wouldn’t it have made more sense to celebrate the most commercial and accessible Big Star album first, then get to “Third” later? And yet there is a substantial cult that likes the final album better than the first, precisely because of its darkness and relative weirdness. “Yeah,” says Auer, “but nothing about Big Star’s career has been very predictable, has it, really?”

One of the unexpected developments has been young people taking a liking to Big Star decades after the group came and went like a shooting star. Among them are the band the Lemon Twigs, consisting of two Long Island brothers now in their 20s, whose devotion to Big Star is well known; they had Stephens sit in on their latest album, and used to perform a Chilton solo song in concert when they were first coming to fame as a teenaged phenomenon.

“I heard them for the first time when I was 14 or 15,” says singer Michael D’Adarrio. “My girlfiend at the time was into Big Star, and then they were my favorite band after that. I became Chilton-obsessed.”

“The man is Chilton- deranged ,” corrected his brother, Brian D’Addario.

For Stephens, the respect is mutual. “When the tour comes in December, that’ll be a five-piece thing, so this is kind of a one-off,” he said. “It’s pretty exciting to have the Lemon Twigs, Brian and Michael — there’s a lot of energy there — and Susanna Hoffs. Of course Mike Mills, Pat Sensone, Jon Auer and Chris Stamey are kind of core members. This week we also have Luther Russell, my partner in Those Pretty Wrongs, joining us for some things, and we’re doing a pretty long song (from that current band) called ‘It’s About Love,’ because Chris thought it would be appropriate to share with people in this day and age, which it is. And it’s always just mind-blowing to have strings. I try to play quieter drums when the strings are playing, because I’d rather hear them, you know? It’s a unique experience in having an orchestra that joins us and then we pare down to five people — it’s a pretty dynamic performance.”

Singer-songwriter Chris Price, who sings lead on “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and found himself getting roped in to add harmony vocals on other songs during rehearsals, is a big fan of “#1 Record” as the album that contains most of the “hits” and happens to be more rocking — including “In the Street,” which many years later became the theme song for “That ’70s Show,” via a Cheap Trick cover.

“This is definitely their most polished record, of the three,” Price said of “#1 Record.” “It feels like the title was meant to be ironic or tongue-in-cheek, but it is a very polished record that has a ton of real commercial appeal and has endured for 50 years as a one of those pristine, great records of that era. I know they get associated a lot with sort of inspiring every garage band — like everyone who heard them formed a band. But Big Star was making top-tier-sounding records. I mean, the stuff that came out of Ardent in those days was some of the best sounds that anyone was making, especially on ‘#1 Record.’ But obviously all of their albums are great for different reasons. There’s no need to compare the three when you have them all.”

Auer puts the band’s obscurity in their shoulda-been heyday down to label disinterest or lack of ability to promote. “It’s like the record label is the delivery service,” he said backstage. “You can have this great piece of art and if it doesn’t get delivered properly, then no one’s ever gonna receive it. And it happens to a lot of bands, right? But I think Big Star is a big example — arguably the top example — of the band that should have been more successful but wasn’t. To have that much good stuff be that mismanaged for that long, and look at it now… over time it’s risen because of just the sheer quality of it, I think. I mean, ‘Ballad of El Goodo,’ how could that not have been a hit, or ‘September Gurls’? It’s as good as anything you heard on ‘70s radio, easily. It’s shocking. It wasn’t their fault.

Luther Russell, Stephens’ current musical partner in Those Pretty Wrongs and a participant in this weekend’s show, said he was one of those who got into “Third” before “#1.” “I heard about this band Big Star from being a fan of The Replacements when I was a kid. And I was walking around San Francisco with a buddy, 16 or 17, and I bought some records on the street and one of ’em was ‘Big Star’s Third,’ and that’s the one I started with. I was like, ‘What the fuck?’ That was the first one I had, which is a very strange place to start, but then I worked my way backwards. When I did get ‘#1 Record,’ I was like, ‘Oh! This is, like, Beatle-y; it’s very clean pop. Like, I didn’t realize — I thought they were just this weird band. So it’s cool just sitting back and listening to these guys play the first record back, where you get a real appreciation for it. It’s pretty stunning — just good rock ‘n’ roll.”

“Actually,” said Auer, “you could say that ‘#1 Record’ is the true Chris Bell/Chilton collaboration record too, even though it sure sounds like parts of ‘Radio City’ (the middle album) were written by Chris Bell, before they parted ways (prior to its recording).” (Auer’s appreciation for Bell’s contributions is well known, as the Posies made his ‘I Am the Cosmos’ a staple of their set from the late ’80s forward.)

“But I guess ‘Third’ is the cult record. I always think of ‘Third’ as being like Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ or something — that dark record. Starting with that is like starting with Lou Reed’s ‘Berlin’ and working your way back to ‘Walk on the Wild Side’ or something.” But when they were making the debut album, Auer relays, “Chilton called it ‘power pop for audiophiles.'”  

The fact that all this mostly volunteer effort is for charity makes the concentration of hours that go into such a careful reproduction worth it. Paul Rock’s Wild Honey charity, which he started to help autistic youth like his own son, has been putting on these benefits since the ’90s, with salutes to the Beatles, the Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys, the Band … there seems to be a “B” theme going, although they’ve snuck the Kinks and some others from the alphabet in, too.

“Not to keep heaping praise on people,” said Auer, “but I mean, how many better organizations are there than Wild Honey doing things for the right reason? This definitely qualifies as a labor of love, and I wholeheartedly support that.”

Said Stephens, “Aside from the music, it’s the people that get together for it that enhances that experience and makes it a community of people getting together. You know, it’s about love,” he added, quoting his own song title. “What can I say?”

Stephens’ ever-amiable presence and still-powerhouse drumming are a big part of the draw for many of the musicians. “Jody was very young — I think he was only 19 or 20 when he recorded the drums for the first album,” said Russell. “That’s pretty staggering, I think, because they’re pretty iconic drum parts. And he does ’em now note for note. And he still looks 19, the son of a bitch.”

“That’s right,” agreed Auer. “If Dorian Gray was a drummer.”

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Monitor Mix

Alex chilton: i'm in love with that song.

Robin Hilton

Live at the Rhythm Festival, Clapham, Bedfordshire, Aug. 2008

Alex Chilton is gone. And it hurts. After I read the news about Chilton's passing , I went onto Facebook to check in with friends I can't be with here at SXSW in Austin. Many of them are musicians and artists, and never had I seen an entire news feed filled with variations on the same despair.

Alex Chilton's band Big Star changed lives. They changed lives because when you heard them, it unlocked an entire -- and utterly lovely -- world. Big Star's music filled a void you didn't even know had been there. With Big Star, music felt limitless, freer, but also more whole. How did they do that? By turning ears and hearts into stadiums and packing them until you felt like you were going to explode.

I first heard of Alex Chilton in the Replacements song that bears his name. "Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes around... They say, 'I'm in love with that song.' " Later, Paul Westerberg sings, "I never travel far without a little Big Star." When I used to tour with my band, I would think of that Replacements tune as we traveled from one town to another. Touring is fragmentary and disjointed by nature, and you have to find home in what little there is of it -- in your favorite song, in your favorite band -- and then I'd think of Westerberg's own anchor, Alex Chilton. I knew then that I was part of a continuum; one of longing, of listening, of hoping and of always reaching, both forward to the unknown and back to what I hoped would always be there. And I felt like I'd found my home.

Musicians and fans have always passed around Big Star songs and albums like a secret handshake. When you found out someone hadn't heard #1 Record or Radio City , you were so excited to provide that missing link, to pass on all the glimmer, the jangly guitar, the big chords, the melodies, the American anthems that let you keep your teenage self -- for some of us long since faded -- close, etched upon your skin. And suddenly, you realized that every great band or musician you love also loved Alex Chilton and Big Star; it's certain. More importantly, it's crucial. I remember seeing Elliott Smith cover "Thirteen," and I wanted to climb inside every line of that song, to be both the lover and the beloved, the outlaw, to merely exist in the wondrous realm somewhere between Smith's version and Big Star's.

Really, we all just want to be part of the song -- of the band, and of music itself. There were a lot of us who counted ourselves as belonging to Big Star, to Alex Chilton. And we felt lucky to be included. Every time I hear "Mod Lang," "Don't Lie to Me" or "Ballad of El Goodo," I don't just think, "This is an amazing song." I think, "This is what music should sound like." Always and forever.

See video and read an account of the Big Star/Alex Chilton reunion-turned-memorial show at SXSW 2010.

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ALEX CHILTON Lyrics

If he was from Venus, would he feed us with a spoon? If he was from Mars, wouldn't that be cool? Standing right on campus, would he stamp us in a file? Hangin' down in Memphis all the while. (chorus:) Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round They sing "I'm in love. What's that song? I'm in love with that song." Cerebral rape and pillage in a village of his choice. Invisible man who can sing in a visible voice. Feeling like a hundred bucks, exchanging good lucks face to face. Checkin' his stash by the trash at St. Mark's place. (chorus) I never travel far, without a little Big Star Runnin' 'round the house, Mickey Mouse and the Tarot cards. Falling asleep with a flop pop video on. If he was from Venus, would he meet us on the moon? If he died in Memphis, then that'd be cool, babe. (chorus)

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“I never travel far without a little Big Star.” – Alex Chilton, The Replacements

There is this moment at the end of the documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me , and it is perfect. The shot is a second long at most — probably less, now that I think about it — and it somehow encapsulates my fifteen-year admiration of a band that most people will never know or care about: John Fry, prolific audio engineer and record label founder, is hunched over the controls in Ardent Studios as he mixes a new cut of Big Star “September Gurls” for this documentary. He leans back in his seat a little, his arms crossed, and smiles. Cut to credits. It’s a smile that reaches back 40 years and outlines all of the joy and pain that came with his friendship with the members of Big Star. It’s the smile of someone who can’t shake off all of the sad memories attached to the Big Star story, and it’s the smile of someone still stunned by how good that song is. John Fry is integral to Big Star’s legend, a friend and peer and co-conspirator; I’m just a guy who liked their music. But it’s impossible for me not to say, “I get it.” I did my best not to tear up at that grin, and — as a quick glance around the theater proved — I wasn’t the only one.

Nothing Can Hurt Me (2012, directed by Olivia Mori and Drew DeNicola) attempts to compact the world of Big Star into two hours. The film (the result of a successful Kickstarter campaign ) is quite good, especially when it comes to the je ne sais quoi that makes the influence of the band and its music so interesting.

If you’re not at all familiar with Big Star, here’s a summary. Big Star formed in Memphis, Tennessee in 1971 after four musicians got together: Chris Bell (guitar, vocals), Andy Hummel (bass), Jody Stephens (drums), and former Box Tops frontman Alex Chilton (guitar, vocals). The band seemed destined to fail from the moment they started recording: they wanted to make melodic, Beatles-indebted rock during a decade that wanted nothing of the kind. They released #1 Record in 1972 to critical acclaim, but commercial silence, due to promotional and distribution mishaps from the band’s record label. Bell left the band, and the remaining trio recorded Radio City . Again, critics raved, yet sales were abysmal—even more so than with their debut. By the time the band got together to record their third album (titled Third or Sister Lovers , depending on who you ask), Big Star was down to just Chilton and Stephens. Record labels didn’t want to touch the slow, weird album, and it never saw a proper release until 1978…four years after the band broke up. At this point, the Big Star cult was growing — young Anglophiles all over the country started to get ahold of the band’s music, many of them journalists or burgeoning musicians. As the 1980s dawned, the band’s music would help serve as a blueprint for much of the power pop, new wave, and alternative rock (however you want to define that) that was to come down the road. Big Star’s songs and albums started showing up on “Best Of” lists left and right, even though the general public still had no clue who Big Star was.

Nothing Can Hurt Me fleshes out the band’s earlier history, infusing interviews from Big Star fans. The filmmakers interviewed dozens of people, and their love of the band radiates. We hear from musicians who loved and were influenced by Big Star (Cheap Trick, the Flaming Lips, and Teenage Fanclub, to name a few). We hear from producers and engineers who worked with, and then came to admire, the band. We hear from critics and journalists who, after hearing Big Star, decided it was their mission to proselytize on the band’s behalf. We hear from friends and family. And we hear from the band — mainly Stephens and Hummel, but also a few audio recordings from Chilton. Bell tragically died in an automotive accident in 1978, and Chilton’s death in 2010 motivated the filmmakers to start this project. Even more of a blow: Hummel passed away shortly after his segments were filmed. Much of the material here won’t be revelatory to Big Star fans, though it’s great to see much of the story told through anecdotes and experiences, especially since most of the folks interviewed have such a strong tie to Big Star’s music and what it meant in their life.

It’s hard for me to write this without thinking about my own Big Star story. I knew I was supposed to be a fan of Big Star before I ever heard their music. As I was getting into more esoteric music as a young teen, I kept seeing the band’s name. Bands and artists I admired, like R.E.M. and Matthew Sweet, spoke reverently of them in interviews. Big Star was named-dropped constantly in a book on the history of rock music that I permanently borrowed from a friend in high school (sorry I still have your book, Gruber). My takeaway from all of this exposure: Big Star was unjustly ignored during the band’s short life in the 1970s. By the time I finally heard Big Star’s music when I was 16 (30-second clips of “September Gurls” and “Back of a Car” in a listening booth at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, of all places), I had bought the hype. Those were 30 magic seconds, and I needed more. I quickly ordered the two-for CD combo of #1 Record and Radio City and immersed myself in its sonic wash forthe next few years.

Is Big Star the best band of all time? Probably not. Are they even my favorite band? No. But no other band has come close to putting me in this sort of emotional headlock, even when I recognize the shortcomings in their music. #1 Record , as the documentary acknowledges, is an oddly sequenced album that suffers a bit from Bell’s good-but-not-great rock tunes. Third/Sister Lovers is basically a Chilton solo album that’s as unlistenable and chaotic as it is genius. Radio City , though, is pretty much the perfect album: ragged, insanely catchy and desperately heartbreaking. It’s the template for every sad-sack power pop album that’s been released since, which is understandable considering how good it is. And even though Bell was out of the band by the time of its recording, Radio City still bears his songwriting stamp on a handful of songs. There are better albums and artists out there, but those bands and their music wouldn’t exist without Big Star.

In fact, Bell’s ghost looms the largest over the Big Star story. While Chilton often gets singled out as Big Star personified, Bell was the initial agitator for the creation of the band. His dreams of making a hugely successful British-invasion-by-way-of-Memphis act left some sort of psychic imprint on the band, even after his departure from the group. I think Nothing Can Hurt Me also handles Bell’s post-Big Star life graciously. After his stormy exit, Bell moved to Europe and tried to put his life together. The documentary interviews his brother and sister, who emotionally recall Bell trying to figure out his drug abuse, sexual inclinations, and newfound Christian beliefs. After moving back to Memphis, Bell cut an album’s worth of material (including “I am the Cosmos” and “You and Your Sister,” both heartbreakingly good tunes that tower over Bell’s material on #1 Record ). It’s weird: his chug-a-lug guitar workouts on Big Star’s debut are some of my least favorite moments in the band’s catalog, but I also realize how vital he was to the mix, and the documentary accurately summarized how powerful Bell’s vision was for the band. There would be no Big Star without Chris Bell.

If Nothing Can Hurt Me falters, it’s how fast it skips over Big Star 2.0. Chilton and Stephens’ reformation of the band in the early ‘90s (with Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of The Posies in tow). The quartet, which played sporadic gigs, eventually released a fourth Big Star album, In Space , in 2005. I think many fans dismiss the album outright as not really being a Big Star album, but a glorified Chilton solo album. Still, In Space has a handful of wonderful tunes, and deserves more than the three seconds the film devotes to showing the album cover. Stringfellow and Auer at least show up a bit later in the film, gushing about how much the band meant to them.

Let’s go back to John Fry’s smile. I was trying not to lose it after that final shot. It brought back a bunch of memories: checking the post-Hurricane Katrina news with dread, because Alex Chilton was among the missing in NOLA; reading about — and eventually bawling over — Chilton’s sudden death, just days before a performance at SXSW; the countless times I hit “back” on my CD or MP3 player to hear a Big Star song again; and the first time I heard the beautiful, chiming single-coil guitar tones on “September Gurls.” Thing is, everytime I hear that song is like the first time. This is a band that always hits me in the heart, and I really can’t explain why. Maybe that’s why I think Nothing Can Hurt Me really works—it manages to capture that feeling and put it on the big screen.

Paul Westerberg sang, “I never travel far without a little Big Star.” And I don’t—my iPod always has some Big Star on it, in case I need it. And I know I’ll always need it.

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STUCK IN THE '80S

"I never travel far, without a little Big Star" ... Alex Chilton dies at age 59

Singer/guitarist Alex Chilton died Wednesday (http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBIT_ALEX_CHILTON?SITE=FLPET&SECTION=HOME) in New Orleans at age 59.

"Alex was an amazingly talented person, not just as a musician and vocalist and a songwriter, but he was intelligent and well read and interested in a wide number of music genres," said longtime friend John Fry, the owner of Memphis-based Ardent Studios (http://ardentstudios.com/).

Chilton's reign with the Memphis-born band Big Star lasted just a few years in the early '70s but it was enough to create three albums, all of which appear on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums (http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5938174/the_rs_500_greatest_albums_of_all_time) of all time: #1 Record, Radio City and Third/Sister Lovers.

"What would be ideal would be to make a ton of money and have nobody know about you," Chilton told the Associated Press back in 1987. "Fame has a lot of baggage to carry around. I wouldn't want to be like Bruce Springsteen. I don't need that much money and wouldn't want to have 20 bodyguards following me."

Chilton's influence on bands from the '80s is said to be surpassed only by the Velvet Underground. As Whitney Matheson over at Pop Candy says today (http://content.usatoday.com/communities/popcandy/post/2010/03/rip-alex-chilton/1), "There's a good chance all of your favorite bands/musicians have covered Big Star at some point in their careers."

In 1987, the Replacements made their case for his legacy, releasing a song entitled simply Alex Chilton:

Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes 'round

They sing "I'm in love. What's that song?

I'm in love with that song."

The tributes to Alex Chilton are starting to fill the Internet. Here are some that caught my eye:

Ann Powers at the L.A. Times (http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2010/03/rip-alex-chilton-american-music-man.html): "Chilton was a seasoned knockabout who insisted on showing me ... that history is simply what people make out of their damage and their rudeness, their lust and their ambitious beating hearts. For that lesson, and all the laughs, I will never forget Alex Chilton."

From the Commercial-Appeal in Memphis (http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2010/mar/17/memphis-musician-alex-chilton-dies/): "When some people pass, you say it was the end of an era. In this case, it's really true," said Van Duren, a fellow Memphis musician who knew Chilton for decades. "It puts an end to the Big Star thing, and that's a very sad thing."

Posted by Steve Spears at 09:22:30 AM on March 18, 2010

Who's ready to hang out with Richard Marx in Clearwater?

On Thursday, Richard Marx hits Tampa Bay for his FIRST EVER acoustic show. But before he wows the audience at Clearwater's Capitol Theatre, he has to endure hanging out with yours truly and an intimate group of friends backstage.

Musicians are sometimes cagey about how they spend their preshow time. Some crave silence and total privacy and save the fan time for once their set is over. Others (Rick Springfield, Naked Eyes, Foreigner) love to press the flesh or even imbibe in a little liquid fun. (Looking your way, Loverboy.) I've seen it both ways in person, but I'm relieved to know Marxie is the social type.

If you're still on the fence about going to see the show, time's running out, but there are a few seats remaining (http://www.rutheckerdhall.com/). Just go back and listen to our podcast interview (http://pod.sptimes.com/stuckinthe80s191.mp3) with Marx for inspiration. Or if you prefer, you can read our print interview. It's right here, waiting for you (http://www.tampabay.com/features/music/richard-marx-set-for-first-acoustic-concert-at-capitol-theatre/1080350).

Posted by Steve Spears at 03:00:00 AM on March 18, 2010

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