Alex Chilton: Time Draws Nigh

Last weekend I went to see a movie at the downtown Olympia arthouse, which even on a Saturday night was hardly packed—I counted eight of us in total. We were there to see 35 Shots of Rum, and I happened to be the first one in, habitually early to everything as usual. The Capitol Theater is a nicely maintained old barn of a space that also books music. I've seen Jonathan Richman there twice, and Sleater-Kinney many years ago, in 1996, before I lived here. Sitting in the dark with my popcorn I noticed that the music playing was my favorite Big Star album, Third (I've covered it previously). Then, as if God and the universe itself were poking me to get my attention—more likely the college kids putting in their volunteer hours intuitively grasped the historical moment I had been avoiding—the reality of the death of Alex Chilton began to set in. It hurts me to think about. Bursting into the spotlight with "The Letter" when he was just 16, he was eternally youthful in everything he did. I came to his work late, in the mid-'80s, although obviously I knew the hits of the Box Tops ("Neon Rainbow" is the one I like best there). But Third, with its unique presence marked by a hollow, wracking pain that is nonetheless somehow uplifting, with its cover of the Velvet Underground song "Femme Fatale" and its bleak Christmas carol candidate "Jesus Christ" and most particularly its ode to an inescapable bottomless misery with "Nightime," reached me at a point in my life when it was exactly what I needed to hear, all of it, every day. I hated my life in that moment, and I got away from the worst of it within the year, but that album has traveled with me everywhere I've been since, a companion that has been there for me when I need it. It's important to me, and so was Alex Chilton. I'm sorry that he's gone, and I hope he's found a better place.