Alex Chilton, 1950 - 2010
From Campbell over on the Friends of the Stars site….
As taste makers have now conclusively identified, getting all mawkish and puffy and snivelsome online over the death of a celebrity is no longer okay, OK?
I myself have long railed (at whom is another question) against the vapid pointlessness of Tweeting my big sad face or “Liking” that one of your school colleagues that you no longer speak to wrote “RIP Lenny Bennett, I remember your name from on the telly from when I was young” (I’ll check whether Lenny Bennett has actually died in a minute and consider deleting this or leaving it in for some ineffable comic effect).
So, imagine the problem when one of your deeply-held heroes dies. It’s an even greater problem when that hero is a guy you mostly loved for being awkward, diffident, unsure or, more likely, unwilling to accept his stellar talent and, in short, someone who probably wouldn’t have liked seeing mawkish tributes to himself. If this wasn’t being written about the untimely death of Alex Chilton from a heart attack at just 59 but about Alex Chilton being justifiably but implausibly honoured at the Grammys, I visualise him standing there bristling a little from disdain and embarrassment, a little awkward twitch, not making eye contact, like George Milton from Of Mice and Men in a tight, starched collar.
Alex Chilton’s application to the higher echelons of rock artistry, as opposed to fame and success of course, is quite an untidy scrapbook of achievements really, when you look at it.
The Box Tops were great, certainly the original and best Blue-Eyed Soul group going, but that was mostly about the songwriting of Dan Penn and Wayne Carson Thompson. Young Alex’s voice was powerful and thrilling of course.
Then came Big Star and, well, Big Star weren’t as good as you think they were. This isn’t clever revisionism. It’s fact. Chilton used to say it in interviews and everyone thought he was being difficult or weird. But he meant it and he’s probably right. It’s not a great mystery that no-one bought Big Star back then, they were a ramshackle and dysfunctional, not great live, version of power pop that The Raspberries and others were selling more of. Plus no-one wanted adult pop songs, adults wanted rock gods, kids wanted cutie-pie pop.
BUT when Big Star were good, mostly Chilton’s songs, they were amazing. The Ballad of El Goodo, Thirteen, Daisy Glaize, Feel and of course September Gurls. All copper-bottomed classics.
The third album “Sister/Lovers” is a favourite of some; it’s wigged out on downers and booze and it’s pretty depressed and depressing. There’s a song called Holocaust on it. People dig it because it wasn’t released until later (no wonder) when Big Star’s cult was percolating in those bedrooms changed forever by punk, then indie. The album is a curate’s egg and has some kind of twisted genius bravery to it, but it IS the sound of an unfinished album played by down-on-their-luck Memphis session guys (Steve Cropper’s on it for fucksake) in the mid 1970s totally bummed on sour mash and Quaaludes. It sounds like a progenitor for the early Palace records in places. It sounds like a lot of odd things to be honest.
Then his later, patchy and intermittent solo stuff went through odd twists and turns, veering this way or that both attracted and energised by the East Coast new wave but also, at the same time, totally rejecting it. Listen to Like Flies On Sherbert. It’s a ride. But he also did wonderful things like his cover of Can’t Seem to Make You Mine, Bangkok, Lost My Job. Patchy, random, brilliant and a bit unsettling. Plenty of spikes and splinters in there.
Even when he came back to playing gigs as Big Star and the Box Tops, he looked pretty pissed off by it all. A wiry-thin, awkwardly morose guy, hardly moving, trotting out September Gurls for college audiences who weren’t even born when he first recorded it and no one cared. But yet he kept on doing it, attracted and repulsed at the same time by his whole career.
Makes me sad to think but, from reading comments from his Memphis friends after his death was announced, apparently he was living a pretty settled life with a wife and son. Maybe that’s why he kept gigging as Big Star, maybe he was just cool with it now. Fair enough and I’m sorry it didn’t last for him.
You might read this and wonder why the hell I would give a shit about Alex Chilton’s death, ‘he doesn’t sound like much of a fan’. Well, every word in here is WHY I’m a fan and why I tweeted my big RIP whilst simultaneously not liking people who do such pointless things. Alex Chilton was fucking great.
