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.