ALEX CHILTON DIED TODAY :(
JOEJOEJOE
Posts: 10,672
Very sad...he was 59.
His band, Big Star, was supposed to play a show on Saturday at SXSW.
His band, Big Star, was supposed to play a show on Saturday at SXSW.
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....but I love the Replacement's ode to Alex.
R.I.P.
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
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EV LA1 08
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Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Alex Chilton (born William Alexander Chilton, December 28, 1950, in Memphis, Tennessee – March 17, 2010 in New Orleans)[1] was an American songwriter, guitarist, singer and producer best known for his work with the pop-music bands the Box Tops and Big Star. Chilton's early commercial sales success in the 1960s as a teen vocalist for the Box Tops was not repeated in later years with Big Star and in his indie music solo career on small labels, but he did draw a loyal following in the indie and alternative music fields.
Chilton said in the September 1994 issue of Guitar Player that he considered himself a "musical performer, not a songwriter" and that some of his songs sound only "half-baked" to him. Nonetheless, his compositions have been performed by a number of artists, including This Mortal Coil, The Bangles, Wilco, Graham Coxon, Garbage, Son Volt, Counting Crows, Elliott Smith, Jeff Buckley, Cheap Trick, Superdrag, Evan Dando, Cat Power, Yo La Tengo, You Am I, Placebo, Xiu Xiu, and His Name Is Alive.
The Replacements wrote the song "Alex Chilton" in his honor, for their 1987 album Pleased to Meet Me.
such as? specifically, the Counting Crows.
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
RIP alex.
take a good look
this could be the day
hold my hand
lie beside me
i just need to say
Always a great musician.
RIP
Shit.
Get all three Big Star albums. Or just get the recently released compilation album which includes all of their studio songs and more 'Keep An Eye on The Sky'.
One of the best bands of all time.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JC0Wa3P_dO0
Thirteen:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pte3Jg-2Ax4
"He's been popular, his music is pervasive, and yet he's virtually unknown," Memphis music journalist Robert Gordon once told the Tribune. "He's a magnificent obscurity."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTSJYZyouek
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OryFZwd0HNA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD9mCp8SifM
Look at how seriously they took this t.v appearance
Tony Sachs
The Huffington Post - March 18, 2010
Remembering Alex Chilton: Icon And Iconoclast
I had the opportunity to meet Alex Chilton a few months ago, at the afterparty for a Big Star gig in Brooklyn. We stood no more than a few feet away from each other for an hour or so, but I never wound up interacting with him beyond saying hello and getting an autograph. First off, he was talking with a couple of attractive women, and it's rude to interrupt a guy in the middle of that. And beyond that, what was I going to say to him? That his music had touched me profoundly for decades? That I'd spent countless hours listening to it, reading about it, analyzing it and debating it with my friends? By all accounts, he didn't seem to give his own music much thought, so why would he have cared about what it did for a total stranger?
Alex Chilton died yesterday, but the guy that rock fans worshipped -- the musician who almost 40 years ago founded Big Star, and in the process helped give birth to power-pop and alternative rock -- died decades ago. The guy who could break your heart with a ballad like "Thirteen," who wrote the most beautiful punk-rock song in history with "The Ballad Of El Goodo," who made doing nothing seem irresistibly cool with "In The Street," who created the pluperfect pop song in "September Gurls" -- that guy was killed by his own cynicism and disgust back in the mid '70s, when Big Star collapsed under the weight of their own expectations, record company snafus and resounding commercial indifference.
You can hear that death in Big Star's never-quite-completed third album, recorded in 1974 and released years after the fact as Big Star's 3rd and, later on, as Sister Lovers. It's a beautiful, harrowing, and often impenetrable work, revealing depths of emotion that must have been too powerful for Chilton to ever put on tape again. As a solo artist, he reinvented himself as a punk rocker of sorts. Most of his songs sounded dashed off rather than composed, and he seemed to take more interest in deconstructing soul classics or pop ballads than writing originals, anyway. He was too talented to not turn out some gems in the two-plus decades of his off-again, on-again solo career, but they seemed almost accidental, like he didn't want to care too much.
A few years later, when the punk, indie and alternative rock revolutions redefined the meaning of fame and success, Chilton might have been able to wear the band's commercial failure as a badge of honor. Their small but fervent cult following could have been a point of pride and not frustration -- even for a guy who, as a teenager in the late '60s, had tasted fame and success with the Box Tops. But in retrospect, it seems like Big Star came along just a few years too soon.
At any rate, the fame that eluded Big Star the first time around grew in their absence. Fans belatedly discovered the band's three classic albums (#1 Record, Radio City and 3rd/Sister Lovers) through word of mouth, the critical raves that accompanied the records' periodic reissues; and praise from bands like R.E.M. and the Replacements, who piqued my own interest in 1987 with their classic tribute song "Alex Chilton."
Chilton finally agreed to reform Big Star for one show in 1993 with original drummer Jody Stephens, plus Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of The Posies replacing co-founders Chris Bell and Andy Hummel. It seemed to be a one-off at the time, but the foursome played together sporadically for the rest of Chilton's life -- they had a gig scheduled at Austin's SXSW festival this Saturday. Every show felt like an opportunity for us to thank Chilton in person, and show him the love he'd been denied at the time. But we were saying thank you to a ghost -- by then, Chilton was beyond caring. The shows seemed like nothing more than paydays to him. The set lists rarely changed. He'd get more animated playing a cover of Glenn Miller's "Pennsylvania 6-5000" than any of the Big Star catalog. He appeared oblivious to whatever magic the audience gleaned from those old songs.
Improbably, a new Big Star album, In Space, appeared in 2005. The songs that sounded the most like classic Big Star belonged to the other three members of the band. Chilton's own songs were largely improvised-sounding funk workouts. Fun at times, but not what the fans wanted -- which almost seemed to be the point by then. The record, which turned out to be his last, was almost universally ignored.
To the end, Alex Chilton was one of a very rare breed -- a veritable rock icon who also managed to be a first-rate iconoclast, especially when it came to himself. His ceaseless decades-long puncturing of his own myth practically became a myth in itself. I still have no idea what I'd say to him if I had a chance to relive that night in Brooklyn. But I wish I'd at least mumbled a quick "Thanks for everything," even if it might have fallen on deaf ears.
'The guy who could break your heart with a ballad like "Thirteen," who wrote the most beautiful punk-rock song in history with "The Ballad Of El Goodo..'
The Ballad of El Goodo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cn1t6l7UUPc
Vegas 93, Vegas 98, Vegas 00 (10 year show), Vegas 03, Vegas 06
VIC 07
EV LA1 08
Seattle1 09, Seattle2 09, Salt Lake 09, LA4 09
Columbus 10
EV LA 11
Vancouver 11
Missoula 12
Portland 13, Spokane 13
St. Paul 14, Denver 14
Sorry, I've no idea.
If I knew where it was I would take you there.
I love this song - Kangaroo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP2t6flT ... tube_gdata
anyway
R.I.P. :(
Eddie: Dublin & London
Synchronicity.
Different '80s band dude.
Funny thing is, I had the Replacements' Alex Chilton as the Answer Tone for my iPhone for the last few days, and now this.
Alex Chilton: rock's forgotten boy
Big Star's singer had an impact far beyond his band's commercial appeal
* Sean O'Hagan
* The Observer, Sunday 21 March 2010
"I am the world's forgotten boy," howled Iggy Pop on "Search and Destroy". But as the years, and then the decades, went by and his legend grew in his absence, that description seemed to fit Alex Chilton more and more. Now, suddenly, the forgotten boy of American rock is gone, dead from a heart attack, aged 59, last Wednesday in New Orleans, his adopted home since he left Memphis, Tennessee, the city that made him and warped him.
Alex Chilton defined the term cult hero. He was difficult, mercurial, endlessly self-sabotaging and, for a brief time, utterly brilliant. His 70s group Big Star remain almost unknown to the mainstream but are one of the key abiding influences in rock music of any calibre, their short life only fuelling their near-mythical status. "I never travel far without a little Big Star," sang the Replacements on their strange love song, "Alex Chilton". Several influential rock groups, from REM to Primal Scream, Teenage Fanclub to Wilco, would echo that sentiment. REM's Peter Buck once described Big Star as "a Rosetta stone for a whole generation".
Chilton found fame early, aged 16, as lead singer of the Box Tops, who scored a hit on both sides of the Atlantic in the summer of 1967 with the tough blue-eyed soul song "The Letter". He formed Big Star in 1971 with Chris Bell, Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel, and, the following year, their debut album, No 1 Record, was greeted with critical acclaim but disappointing sales. That set the tone for much of what was to follow in their brief tempestuous lifespan. The follow-up, Radio City, was also lauded by music writers but failed to even dent the charts. The group's swan song, Third/Sister Lovers, was made by Chilton and Stephens with the help of the great Memphis producer Jim Dickinson in 1974. By then, Chilton was out on the edge. "I was getting pretty crazy and into some pretty rotten drugs and drinking a lot," he told the music writer Barney Hoskyns years later. The result was a darker, more raggedy affair that was deemed too uncommercial for release on its completion. It finally surfaced in 1978 and remains, arguably, Chilton's most influential, if uneven, album. On songs such as "Holocaust" and "Kangaroo", Chilton sounds just this side of unhinged.
In 1978, Big Star's other troubled genius, Chris Bell, died in a car crash, having ingested downers and alcohol before speeding away from a Memphis studio into the night. By the mid-80s, Chilton was everywhere and nowhere, having fallen out of sight while a whole generation of British guitar groups were in thrall to the lost genius of classic jangly pop-rock.
Chilton himself, post-Big Star, surfaced only intermittently, most notably on his wilfully lo-fi solo album Like Flies on Sherbert, from 1979, and as a producer of the Cramps album Songs the Lord Taught Us, released the following year. "There were guys with guns, man, all sorts of crazy things," the late Lux Interior told the music writer Nick Kent when quizzed about the making of the album. "He's a real southern boy, is Alex. He believes in the Lord and the Lord sure as hell takes care of him."
Or maybe not. The God-given, if temperamental, genius that had fired the young Alex Chilton forsook him in the long years of silence that led to Big Star's reunion in 1993. A late album, 2005's In Space, never rose above the workmanlike. Ever truculent, Chilton insisted to anyone who would listen that his later work surpassed the classic songs he created with Big Star in the 70s. He always seemed more annoyed than flattered by his cult status and the reputation that preceded him; that warped Memphis streak again.
It is tempting, with hindsight, to see Chilton as a product of the drink- and drug-fuelled arty Memphis milieu of the late 1960s and early 70s. It was the same milieu that produced William Eggleston, the wayward genius of modern American photography, whose famous blood-red ceiling graced the cover of the Radio City album. Jim Dickinson, who knew Chilton more than most, described the 23-year-old he worked with as "a kind of art brat" and "a walking illustration of the cost of early success. He had absolutely nothing to show for it when he came in the studio with me to do the third Big Star album, but Alex was man enough to step up and do it again, and get fucked again."
You can hear the art brat and the disillusioned loner in Big Star's music, as well as a commitment to songs of beautiful simplicity and music that can sound raw as hell one minute and extraordinarily refined the next. For a while, the whole just about transcended the sum of the wildly disparate parts, then everything imploded. Ever since, Alex Chilton's myth has tended to outweigh his genius.
Listen, though, to "September Gurls" or "Watch the Sunrise" or "Thirteen", and marvel again at that brief moment when Big Star welded pop melodies and song craft with rock dynamics like no group before or since. Remember Alex Chilton that way – as a pop wizard briefly, blissfully, brilliantly free of the southern demons that dogged him ever after.
My personal favourite has to be "Thank you friends", I think I've put that song on every compilation I've made for friends in the last decade.
Great musician and songwriter
I'd never heard the original - it's great. Yeh, the Lemonheads cover of this was pretty solid too. I remember it being on one of the 90's Gen X movies like Empire Records. This guy made some good music. Too bad it took his death for me to hear it.