ALEX CHILTON DIED TODAY :(

Ricsard wrote:

Isn't it weird that after like one year I finally listened to the evergreen song 'Alex Chilton' by The Replacements 5 hours ago today on my iPod...and now I've just read the sad news...was it telepathy or just the stupid phenomenon called coincidence? :roll:

anyway

R.I.P. :(

Synchronicity.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/ma ... tar-review

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.

Story of BIG STAR on NPR - An audio story about the '70s band BIG STAR (Memphis, TN).
Recorded on Feb.2, 2010

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNVSjBRaJss