Big Star: Radio City (Ardent, 1974)

A shorthand for determining which of the three terrific Big Star albums is the masterpiece is to recognize Big Star as a semipopular band. Semipopular is Robert Christgau's coinage "for music that is popular in form but not fact--self-consciously arty music that plays off popular or formerly popular usages but isn't (sup posedly) designed to sell." So 1972's #1 Record errs too much on the popular side of the equation while 1978's Third/Sister Lovers gets lost in the semi wild. Side one of #1 Record laid down the foundations for power pop, a classic on those terms alone. But side two slips into the genericism that afflicts any strain of pop, power most definitely. And Third/Sister Lovers had such a tortured release history that there's no definitive edition of its sere, clanky psychodramas (although Complete Third reportedly collects every drib and drab recorded during the original 1974 sessions).

Yeah no, Radio City is Big Star's masterpiece, one of the ten greatest albums of the 1970s (do I hear five? Sold!). And yet it's difficult to recommend to non-music critics/geeks, especially any potential customers for the advertised pop. Music lovers of a certain age will notice that the very first sound on the album was replicated by Kenny Loggins for the central guitar riff of "Footloose." But opening track "O My Soul" is "Footloose" fed through a wood chipper. Like many of the songs on Radio City, it lurches forward like a gawky teenager trudging through snowbanks on the way to high school. Sometimes this kid manages a sprint. But usually, he loses his footing. One of the guitar lines sounds like a refugee from a Burroughsian cut-up experiment. Another offers some unfunky chicken scratching. A Mellotron pipes in now and then with extraneous (drunken?) commentary. And the entire things lumbers on for nearly six minutes. Heck a way to kick off a "pop" record.

And it doesn't get much easier from there, at least upon initial impact. Contrary to Chuck Berry's dictum on rock and roll music, the band keeps losing the backbeat which makes Radio City a no go for dancing. Its greatest track (see below) moves so slowly that it's difficult to use a BPM counter glacially enough to figure out just how slowly (84 or 42 BPM depending on how you're counting; I say the latter in terms of feel). However assiduously each song was constructed, most of the hooks and sound effects announce themselves as afterthoughts. Radio City is a temple of attention deficit disorder. Even at its most incandescently chartbound ("September Gurls" went to #1 in the minds of actual-pop agnostics the world over), every number is trying to score some Ritalin. To balance off the lengthy opening track with appropriate perversity, the album ends with two fragments totaling barely three minutes (presaged by #1 Record's last cut, the 59-second moan "ST 100/6").

Nonetheless, Radio City remains one of the most welcoming albums ever recorded, crazy porous and with myriad entry points. Resident pop theorist-practitioner Alex Chilton sounded more like a teen here than when he was an actual teen idol fronting the Box Tops with such hits as "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" in the late 1960s. His put-upon whine helps the zany structures go down more easily. Once acclimated, you hear not forbidding avant-gardery but sweet confusion, a confusion that persists for so many of us long past adolescence as indeed it did for Chilton who never got the glory (i.e., money) he deserved. I hear ache and a willingness to connect in its every intricate detail and suspect that eternity is not long enough to extinguish its ability to garner obsessive listening. 

Grade: A+

This is how I'd rank the songs in order of preference. 1 and 2 have long been etched in stone. 9 - 12 too. Any song in between could fluctuate, e.g., I just bumped up "You Get What You Deserve" two notches. 

1. What's Going Ahn
2. September Gurls
3. Life Is White
4. You Get What You Deserve
5. O My Soul
6. Morpha Too
7. Daisy Glaze
8. Back Of A Car
9. Way Out West
10. I'm In Love With A Girl
11. Mod Lang
12. She's A Mover