Never Travel Far Without a Little Big Star

Alex Chilton is dead. It hurts to actually type those words. One of the greatest songwriters in the history of popular music, the man who wrote some of the most heart-wrenching pop songs ever to exist...is gone.

I first came across Chilton's music without ever realizing it. As a child, I spent many car rides with my mother listening to the local oldies music station. By ten years of age, I became acquainted with more pop songs from the 50s and 60s than most ten year-olds did in 1998. One of these happened to be Chilton's first brush with fame: "The Letter" by his first group, The Box Tops. To be honest, while I liked the song, it seemed interchangeable from any of the other songs I heard on the radio at that age. Hell, I was ten; what did I know?

A few years later, in high school, my friend Ed gave me a biography of R.E.M. from his dad's bookstore. At the time, I was convinced that R.E.M. was the greatest rock band ever to make music, so I read the book constantly, poring over the various influences Peter Buck name-checked in various interviews. The Feelies, The dBs, The Velvet Underground, Pere Ubu...and Big Star. The name caught my attention: simple, yet confident (almost arrogant, considering I'd never heard of them before). If they had Peter Buck's stamp of approval, I had to hear them. Try as I did, I couldn't find anything they had done with the limited resources I had. (It took me years to catch up with everyone else and discover illegal downloading.)

In my senior year of high school, I walked into Tower Records near the Roosevelt Field Mall in Long Island, gift card in hand, looking for some new CDs to obsess over. Looking through the racks, I stumbled across that familiar name. Big Star. Except there was a CD there: #1 Record/Radio City, the band's first two albums. I grabbed it immediately, thinking I had just found the Golden Idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark. This band had been such a mystery to me, and now I had their music in my hands.

I sat in my room with my headphones on, listening on my $20 Discman while poring over the essay on the band's history in the CD booklet. It all seemed so tragic: Chilton and Chris Bell started the band and spent months writing and recording #1 Record, only to be subject to commercial indifference. Bell leaves, wondering if anyone will care about his music, gets hooked on drugs and dies in a car crash. Chilton makes two more records with Big Star, Radio City and some record called Third/Sister Lovers, only to suffer a nervous breakdown and break up the band in 1979.

As I read this sad, sad story, one thing escaped me: why the fuck didn't anyone care about this band in 1972? The young man sitting in his room with his headphones blasting "Feel" in 2005 thought that he was hearing the second iteration of the Beatles. Chilton's gift for melody rivaled Lennon and McCartney, and he had the rare gift of writing songs in a universal matter, yet tapping into something intensely personal with the listener. "Thirteen" brought back the memories of middle-school crushes, a time when puppy love was both scarily complicated and the simplest thing in the world. "The Ballad of El Goodo" was a defiant statement of confidence, yet the quiver of Chilton's voice served as a reminder that the nagging sense of doubt was still within us; it was up to us to fight it off.

By the time "I'm In Love With a Girl" finished, I had one of those life-changing experiences that happen with records. Abbey Road, The Joshua Tree, Murmur, Daydream Nation, and now #1 Record/Radio City. Try as I might, few of my friends "got" Big Star when I forced it on them. Maybe I was a bit overzealous in proclaiming them the second arrival of the Beatles, but I still think I'm right about that.

Chilton's career seems like a strange journey to me. He gave up on the music that he loved in the 1970s because he thought no one was listening, only to find out that so many people not only listened, but they loved it so much that they even wrote songs about it. He re-constituted Big Star with members of the Posies in the 90s, recording one studio record and one live album while touring sporadically. On the live record, Chilton sounds instilled with confidence. At last, it seemed, he was vindicated.

Rest in peace, Alex. Your music changed me and so many others in ways that you may not have thought possible. We'll miss you.

More Sunshowers.

Sunshower Orphans live at The Tank on July 24th (video taken by me):



If you haven't checked out the band's music yet, do it now. If you haven't downloaded the FREE digital single for "Lies in Sepia", get that taken care of.

Seriously, these guys are going places. This is some of the best music to come out of New York in a while, and that's saying quite a bit.

Spastic Fit of Rage

Okay, I've fucking had it with these guys:



Ruining perfectly good pop songs by switching around time signatures and song structures for the sake of doing so? Fine. Recording a damn near unlistenable record with one's aging granny? Okay, I can deal. But this, Fiery Furnaces? You've got to be fucking kidding me.

At first, I gave the Friedberger siblings the benefit of the doubt; perhaps they were talented songwriters who were just giving into the wrong urges. But no, kids; you're just the most unbearably pretentious duo ever to come out of Brooklyn. Congrats.

Honestly, John Cage would probably call you guys pompous cunts.

Dancing in the Sunshowers

My good friends Sunshower Orphans have released a digital single through Holiday Records, which can be downloaded here. Glorious drone-pop with arresting melodies and all of that weird-sounding goodness that comes from shoegaze. Take note, dear readers.

Grizzly Bear: Now With More Zzzzzzz...

I think complaining about mainstream culture is, ultimately, a waste of one's time. It is an absolutely disgusting thing to behold, and when I did such things (at the age when one feels compelled to complain about Top 40 radio and MTV and what have you), I felt very icky about it years later. Really, you're not accomplishing anything by bitching about how listening to pop radio is horrible and how they play the same 15 songs over and over again. It's a fact of life; we've all moved on. (I like to think we have, at least.)

Similarly, I find it difficult to feel any reaction when an artist proclaimed to be "indie" by the powers that be encounters a modicum of success. One isn't accomplishing anything by calling the Shins sellouts because their record hit Billboard's Top 10 for one week: Nirvana came and went and showed us all that things like that happen. The notion of selling out is overblown, anyway: the archaic notion that a successful band has "sold out" more often stems around the band's original fans no longer feeling as if they're part of a super-secret, exclusive club than any legitimate complaints about an artist making musical concessions for the purpose of financial gain. (To date, I can only think of one example of this.)

Recently, the experimental folk-rock collective Grizzly Bear became the latest to follow in the steps of The Shins, Death Cab For Cutie, and The Decemberists as an indie-rock darling that received its brief flirtation with mainstream success after its latest record, Veckatimest debuted at number eight on Billboard's album charts. The reaction was typical: the indie-rock press was quick to jump on this as an instance of either the cool kids taking over or the unwashed masses developing good taste in between listening to Green Day singles and eating fast food. (Pitchfork's response was typically pretentious.) Now, what does this say about Grizzly Bear? Have the freaky folkies from Brooklyn leaped on to some alt-rock zeitgeist, ready to join Phoenix and The Decemberists in the hallowed halls of artists that get late-night play on WRXP? One listen to Veckatimest indicates otherwise.

Don't get me wrong; Grizzly Bear are a talented band. Their previous record, Yellow House, was an interesting little thing, a collection of muted folk musings on damaged psyches and one flat-out excellent song ("Knife"). The arrangements were complex and intricate, and Veckatimest continues that tradition. It's louder than Yellow House; the arrangements are fuller, giving the songs a sonic heft that they lacked previously. The makings of a great record are here, right in front of us...and yet I'm not completely impressed. I respect what Grizzly Bear have done here: they're clearly more than a bunch of spoiled hipster brats playing lo-fi surf-rock bullshit. However, Veckatimest doesn't resonate the way I think a great album should. It's certainly an impressive piece of work, but each listen makes the record feel like a museum piece: we can look, yes, but we dare not touch anything.

In some ways, Grizzly Bear's talent is a bit of a downfall. The complexity of Veckatimest more often than not keeps the listener at arm's length, preventing one from really enjoying the record. This is not to say that any sort of complex pop music is impossible to love: as a recent example, the last two Dirty Projectors albums have done similar things (albeit with less instrumental window dressing), and those records are successes in ways Grizzly Bear have yet to achieve. But, the indie rock press have made their declaration, and Veckatimest is now the new Greatest Album That You Must Hear Before You Die. It's a nice record, but one could be forgiven for skipping it.

Thinking Out Loud

Sometime in March, my life sputtered and came to a screeching halt (I blame Hollywood. Stupid limousine liberals...), so this little creature fell by the wayside. So, I'm just going to throw spaghetti at the Internet and see if anything sticks:

-The Pains of Being Pure at Heart are the best group of musicians to come out of this fucking city since Sonic Youth. Their sound, while admittedly trapped some time around 1989, is absolutely refreshing to hear amidst the sea of good and bad bands who are abusing the instant credibility that lo-fi recordings bring these days. Noise and dissonance and art for its own sake is fine (I've been seen listening to this every once in a while.), but I think that the art of writing good pop songs has become undervalued, largely because New York has, since the late 60s, always been a place where pop=bad (Blondie excluded). Keep making great stuff, guys. Here's hoping that the second record won't suck.

-I may have seen the worst movie ever made in the past week or so. Nothing, and I mean NOTHING matches The Spirit for sheer, unadulterated ridiculousness. Boondock Saints had a ludicrous premise and a dangerously unhinged Willem Dafoe? Fine, but nobody, not even Norman Osborn, can ham it up quite like Sammy Jackson. How, exactly, can you respond to this:



No, reader. Do not try to explain it. Do not contemplate how that photo could've been taken out of context. There is no fucking context that could possibly justify the above photograph. It makes no fucking sense.

Makes no sense at all.

-That's all for now. Continue praying to the invisible people who care so little for us all.

Admission of Lameness

I hate nostalgia, for the most part. While looking back on the past with a hint of fondness can be enjoyable, it can ultimately poison the future, since it will never be as good as the memories you are looking back at through red lenses. Ultimately, I try to avoid nostalgia whenever possible. I really don't care how much I liked Bean as a child, because I saw it a month ago and thought it wasn't funny at all. If it can't stand the test of time, it has no value to me, regardless of the value it had to me in my younger years. The past is past, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Easier said than done, though.

This week, I've been watching U2's week-long stint on Letterman in support of their latest record, No Line on the Horizon. Now, I've heard the record, and it's a big, steaming heap of shit. (I mean, really? How good can an album be if the first single is one of the worst songs in existence?) Either way, it's safe to say that the record won't be turning many heads and that it only extends the rut that this 30 year-old band has been in since 2001. It's one shitty album from a group that has ceased to be relevant for a decade. Why, then, do I care?

Because I love U2.

There, I said it. And I am not afraid to admit it.

It started when I was 13 and about to go into counseling for writing a note to a girl that some people interpreted as a suicide letter. Having to hear teachers, nuns, and counselors make assumptions about your impending, self-inflicted death at the age of 16 can get to an impressionable kid who only cares about when he can get home to watch Batman Beyond and play N64. Just when I felt that life couldn't get more complicated, All That You Can
't Leave Behind came along. At this point in time, I hated all rock music made after 1980, so the fact that any new rock song could be this good was important to me. And I guess it just happened to appear in the right place at the right time. Every discussion of that record centers around how uplifting it was in the post-9/11 world, which could be valid, but I remember walking on Park Lane South listening to "In A Little While" and thinking that everything was going to be okay.

This was also the first time my dad took an interest in what I was listening to. My father liked U2, but he cared mostly about their early work that he heard on college radio stations, before they put out The Joshua Tree and became the biggest band in existence. (He likes to point out that he heard "New Year's Day" on New Year's Day for three years in a row.) He hadn't the nerve to talk about music with me because most of the music I liked was stuff he had gotten sick of a long time ago, after it had been played a billion times on AOR radio stations for 15 years. U2 was something he understood, something he could be nostalgic about. A reason to pull out his vinyl copy of Boy and his old, beaten Joshua Tree cassette tape. It was more of that deadly nostalgia for him, but it helped him relate to his son, which has its benefits, I think.

Ultimately, I don't know what to think of U2 on an objective level. I know their 80s work is almost impeccable (There are some exceptions). I know Achtung Baby is a masterpiece and one of the greatest rock albums ever. I also think Zooropa is an under-rated gem that will never get the credit it deserves because it doesn't sound like U2. And, I know that their new records are all shit save for a handful of songs. Oh, and Bono is a huge prick. And The Edge will never be taken seriously because he has such a dumb name.

Whatever. I still love 'em to death.