The urgent, jangling power-pop that Alex Chilton made with his band Big Star turned him into a cult icon and inspired the sound of a raft of bands that followed, from REM to Teenage Fanclub.
Like the Velvet Underground, for reasons of bad timing and rank bad luck, Big Star’s influence on popular music was not matched by commercial success during the group’s lifetime. Although the first two Big Star releases, No 1 Record and Radio City, subsequently found a prominent position on lists of the greatest albums of all time, they were virtually ignored by the record-buying public on their release in the early 1970s.
By then Chilton had already tasted the biggest commercial success of his career with his first band, the Box Tops, with whom he enjoyed a No 1 hit with The Letter, when he was 16.
Yet it was his work with Big Star that eventually made him a legendary figure in rock music, a status that was reinforced when the Replacements wrote a song named after him. When the group came together in 1971, rock music was at its most pompous and self-indulgent.
Chilton and the band’s co-founder Chris Bell rejected the prevailing styles of the time and returned to the simple virtues of the kind of melodic pop made by the Beatles and the Byrds in the mid-1960s. Such retro-ism was regarded as highly radical at the time and the band withered away in the face of record company incompetence and public indifference.
Chilton’s subsequent solo career faltered and stumbled as he cut an erratic figure with more than his share of drug problems. His solo music moved beyond Big Star’s power pop into more eclectic fields but by the late 1980s the group had been lionised by a generation of younger artists. His songs were covered by the Bangles, Cheap Trick, Wilco, Garbage, Counting Crows, Elliott Smith and Jeff Buckley among others and he reunited with original drummer Jody Stephens to recreate Big Star both in the studio and on stage.
Born William Alexander Chilton on December 28, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee, his father was a jazz musician and when he was still only 15, Chilton joined local band the Devilles as lead singer. By 1967 they had changed their name to the Box Tops and working with producer Dan Penn, within months they were No 1 in the American charts with The Letter, featuring an astonishingly mature and soulful lead vocal from the teenage Chilton. Further hits followed with Neon Rainbow and Cry Like a Baby (which made No 2 in 1968). But by 1969 Chilton was one of only two original members remaining in the line-up and the following year he folded the group.
For a while he worked solo and the material he recorded during this period was eventually released many years later on the albums Lost Decade and 1970. During a brief sojourn living in New York, he was invited to join Blood, Sweet and Tears but turned down the offer and returned to Memphis, where he asked Chris Bell, an old friend, to form an acoustic duo with him. Bell had a better idea and asked Chilton to join his band, Icewater, alongside drummer Jody Stephens, and bassist Andy Hummel.
With a new name borrowed from a chain of Memphis supermarkets, the band became Big Star and signed to the city’s Ardent Records label. Ten of the dozen songs on their 1972 debut album, No 1 Record were credited to the Bell-Chilton team in a direct echo of the Lennon-McCartney tag, as acoustic balladry, effortless melodies, pop energy and guitar power combined to create a near-perfect album which led Billboard to declare that “every cut could be a single”.
Sadly, at the time indulgently over-long concept albums rather than three-minute pop singles were the order of the day. Stax, distributors for Ardent Records, failed to promote the album and the record was a commercial flop.
This failure exacerbated tensions within the band and within months Big Star had acrimoniously broken up, only to reform soon afterwards, without Bell. Their second album, Radio City, appeared in 1974 and was another masterpiece, with Chilton’s songs given a tougher edge minus Bell’s sweeter pop touch. Despite good reviews, once again the record label and distributors failed to do their job and Radio City sold little better than its predecessor.
Chilton returned to the studio with producer Jim Dickinson to record Big Star’s third album. A solo project in all but name, it included brilliant, innovative and sometimes harrowing Chilton songs such as Kangaroo and Holocaust but was deemed so uncommercial that it was not released until 1978, four years after it was recorded.
When it appeared under the title Third/Sister Lovers, Big Star had long ceased to exist and Chilton was living in New York, where he hung out at clubs such as CBGBs and his musical interest had shifted towards punk rock. After releasing the solo single, Bangkok (1978), he produced the Cramps, sunk further into drug dependency and recorded a messy album of cover versions called Like Flies on Sherbert (1979), which, like everything else with his name on it, has since attained cult status.
He also played and recorded with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and recorded a live solo album before drifting out of music for a while in the early 1980s when he worked at various dead-end jobs in New Orleans, which was to remain his home for the rest of his life.
He resumed his solo career in 1984, recording a couple of EPs on which he blended soul, New Orleans jazz and various other elements and Cliches, an album of jazz standards in 1994. By then, Big Star had gained cult status on the back of high praise from the likes of REM and the Replacements, who in 1987 wrote and recorded a song called Alex Chilton, which contained the lyric:
“Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton,/ When he comes ’round they sing,/ ‘I’m in love, What’s that song? / I’m in love with that song.”Buoyed by such belated acclaim, in 1993 he reformed Big Star with Stephens on drums and new members Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow from the Posies for tour dates and a live album. In 1998 he also unexpectedly reformed the Box Tops for a new album and live dates.
In Space, the first new studio album under the name Big Star in 30 years, was eventually released in 2005, just three weeks after Chilton had been evacuated from his New Orleans home during Hurricane Katrina.
He died of a heart attack in the city, three days before he was due to perform with Big Star at the South x South-West festival in Austin, Texas.
He is survived by his wife, Laura, and one son.
Alex Chilton, musician, was born on December 28, 1950. He died on March 17, aged 59
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