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 

Alex Chilton 1950-2010

Not since Kurt Cobain's last day has a celebrity death hit me so hard. I guess I never felt that Alex Chilton got what he deserved although he famously (amongst rock crit types) sang otherwise as Side One came to a close on Radio City. Still, the poptimist in me found it easy to ignore him for the last decade-plus. Case in point: I wrote the review below for the long-departed (and decently paying) online music mag Addicted to Noise (swallowed up by MTV.com which then obliterated its writers on September 12, 2001) and probably edited by Billy Altman (I think the overtaxed Melissa Price had bowed out by this point) with equal parts fandom and boredom. It's my de facto tribute to a man who had no interest in death (or sleep). (There are only minimal edits below which means the groanworthy "set" puns are preserved.)

Alex Chilton - Set (Bar/None)
Rating: *** (can't recall out of how many)
Release Date: 2/25/00


Somehow wrinkles don't suit Alex Chilton. The crow's feet and leathery nooks in his face on the back cover of Set come as sort of a surprise if not an insult, as if they weathered his veneer too soon. Then again, nothing has ever arrived on time with Alex Chilton going all the way back to the manly croak with which he sang "The Letter" in 1967 as a sixteen year old Box Top and the pimply cracked voice he's been stuck with ever since he debuted Big Star several years later. His has been a career of square pegs fitting through round holes, a doomed condition that will relegate him to cult obscurity forever. Somehow, though, the little star who wrote 1974's "What's Going Ahn," a tortoise-shelled cri de confusion more gut-wrenchingly beautiful than anything in Marvin Gaye's oeuvre, deserves widespread glory.

But really, most of the above is just cultspeak bullshit. We all succumb to the march of time eventually. The real challenge to an artist whose had as long a career as Chilton is to ride every wave so that getting old sounds more thrilling than dying young. Set proves how difficult meeting that challenge is.

You'd think an album that includes instrumentals of jazz standards, spirited retakes of soul classics new and old, and a cover of country sinner Gary Stewart's "Single Again" might make for forty minutes of unbridled enthusiasm. But Chilton has been playing the archaeologist lounge lizard historian since about 1985 occasionally peppering updates of "Volare" or "The Christmas Song" with his own outré originals. Set in his ways, he's crossed off originals altogether on the set list here settling into a release pattern that will yield a disc of personal favorites every few years or so. No wonder Bar/None changed the title from Loose Shoes & Tight Pussy when it was released in France a few months ago.

Set works best when he indulges his love for black music. Brenton Wood's "Oogum Boogum" and Ollie Nightingale's "You've Got a Booger Bear Under There" retell the history of soul as a series of great oddball trifles and Chilton knows how to make oddball sing - with a goofy falsetto whine, that is. And the delightful reading of the ancient reefer song "You's A Viper" never condescends and should get you started on your Stuff Smith obsession even though another cult hero, Wayne Kramer, already blew the dust off it on Hempilation 2 a few years back.

But the band, including Chilton at times, could scarcely care about the proceedings and they play everything loose and sloppy. Nothing fills in with a snap, crackle, or, worst of all, pop. So the instrumentals are particularly brutal in their pointlessness. "April in Paris" compounds the annoyance with multiple false endings. If anything is putting these songs over, then, it's the intermittent energy and joy in Chilton's voice. But as he retreats further into the past, it becomes increasingly difficult to rally behind him as a cultural as opposed to cult hero.