The fault in our stars

How do you solve a mystery like Big Star?

The Memphis-based band that failed to hit it big despite their name and a brilliant debut album in 1973 has been labeled everything — Beatlesque, power pop, emo, alternative — long before its time.

Yet not even a recent in-depth documentary called Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me can quite lasso what was so ineffable and special about the band. Their trajectory was too weird, too wayward — too tragic, really.

Founded by songwriter Chris Bell (with Andy Hummel on drums and Jody Stephens on bass) in Memphis, Tennessee, the trio soon recruited fellow Memphis boy Alex Chilton — who had scored mega-stardom at the age of 15(!) singing hits like The Letter and Cry Like a Baby for The Box Tops. Entwining his vocals and songwriting with Bell’s, Chilton dropped the soul growl of The Box Tops and the band recorded its own version of British Invasion pop crossed with Byrds guitars and Americana. (The documentary’s behind-the-scenes photos, video and studio outtakes help flesh out the scene.)

The Beatles, Kinks and Yardbirds were obvious influences; but unlike so many bands inspired by The Beatles — Badfinger, The Rutles, Raspberries, Todd Rundgren’s Nazz and Utopia — Big Star were not slavish imitators. They were more like a missing link, imbibing the raw, honest emotion of ‘60s British pop with an abstracted rock approach that foreshadowed alternative music of the ‘90s. Listen to the opening track (Feel) on “#1 Record,” Big Star’s debut album: Chris Bell strains for a McCartney howl, straight out of I’m Down. The results are less McCartney and more power pop mixed with something slightly out of control.

Big Star was signed to Ardent, a label under Memphis soul brand Stax, but they had a problem: rock critics loved their first album (which was played on the radio and sent to rock magazines), but people could never find the record in stores, because Stax went bankrupt and the album wasn’t widely distributed. Consequently, Big Star became like an urban legend of what a great rock band should sound like.

Imagine receiving rave reviews from Rolling Stone, Billboard and other music mags, yet never being heard. It’s a problem unimaginable in our age of downloads, where people get the new Kanye or Beyoncé release the minute it drops. Back then, the old record days, distribution and airplay were king.

In the case of Big Star, the deafening silence after their first record was too much for Chris Bell: the chart failure of “#1 Record” drove him to quit his own band. “Maybe we jinxed ourselves, calling ourselves ‘Big Star’ and our first album ‘#1 Record,’” muses drummer Stephens today. Disillusioned, Bell went through years of mental turmoil, turned to drugs, and then to Jesus. After recording a series of solo tracks and a brilliant double-sided single (I Am The Cosmos/You and Your Sister) that harked back to Big Star’s sound, he died in a car crash in his hometown.

Chilton, meanwhile, was just as disillusioned, but when the resurrected trio played at a convention of rock journalists in 1974 — a moment highlighted in Nothing Can Hurt Me — the reaction was orgasmic enough to send Big Star back to the studio. The resulting “Radio City” was mostly Chilton, with a few leftover Bell songs, and it cemented the sound of Big Star: slightly askew, riff-heavy rock with memorable Byrds-like choruses and oblique lyrics. Songs like September Gurls and Back of a Car should’ve been smash hits; instead, despite critical acclaim, the band remained stuck in neutral.

The documentary speculates on why this was so. The rock industry in 1973-4 was geared toward “heavy” bands like Led Zeppelin and Grand Funk Railroad, or prog outfits like ELP and Pink Floyd. Where did Big Star’s curated pop fit in? Nowhere, it seems. Critics gave them hosannas: in truth, they were a critic’s dream band: carefully crafted songs, intelligently arranged, buoyant and smart, with just a hint of chaos underneath. There was a melancholic flavor to both Bell and Chilton’s music that stirred the critical pot. Yet the public didn’t care.

Chilton, growing more disillusioned, and using more drugs and alcohol, returned to the studio in ’75 for Big Star’s “Third” (later called “Sister/Lovers”). With its barren, skeletal songs and string arrangements, it sounded as spooky as Neil Young’s “Tonight’s the Night”; it was the sound of Chilton growing up, falling apart, not caring anymore, all frozen in gorgeous, haunting music. Songs like Big Black Car and Kanga Roo (frequently covered by Jeff Buckley) sound narcotized, all of the ennui perfectly preserved in slow motion.

There are hints in Nothing Can Hurt Me as to why Chilton drifted away from pop genius: he had a tendency to trash his past, first downplaying The Box Tops, then Big Star; by the ‘80s, he was producing The Cramps and embracing punk’s amateurism. Then in the ‘90s, he started touring with a reformed Big Star until his death in 2010.

Perhaps the liner notes to the Big Star CD box manage to pin it down: “It has been said that art should create the sense that time has stopped. Big Star transcended normal escapist pop convention by creating music that somehow froze moments that were concurrently vibrant and startlingly brilliant, and yet oddly spent.”

This “oddly spent” quality may have been the sound of dreams deferred, or gone bad; the sound had a lot of influence on ‘80s bands like R.E.M. and The Replacements, and ‘90s alternative acts like Flaming Lips, Teenage Fanclub and Elliott Smith (and yeah, that was their In The Street used as the theme song of The ‘70s Show). A roster of Big Star fanatics is rolled out to commentate in Nothing Can Hurt Me, everyone from Cheap Trick to Robyn Hitchcock (who likens Big Star to “a letter posted in 1971 that arrived in 1985; it’s like something that just got lost in the mail”); a reunion concert at the end becomes a eulogy for Chilton. Somehow, none of it quite matches the brilliance of Big Star’s three original albums, frozen forever in rock’s never-ending geological shifts.