Replacements, "Alex Chilton" (1987)

(listen)

A lot of time gone by since I'd had occasion to give this one-time staple of the late '80s another listen, and something about it didn't sound exactly right. I thought at first it was the tempo, seemed rushed, but according to Scott Miller in his indispensable Music: What Happened?, "the CD mastering ... sounds like someone lost the thread of a grand compression plan." He swears by the vinyl version. Sure enough, the original music video I turned up sounds more like it. It's a gushing fan letter before it is anything else, by design, and interestingly not only Paul Westerberg but also Tommy Stinson and Chris Mars get songwriting credit. It is thus so much a group effort it is practically heartwarming. If they can't help themselves with the title, they play it more coy in the song itself. Westerberg blurs the name-checking so it doesn't exactly jump out, but there's no mistaking the sentiment in the chorus: "I'm in love with that song." It's perfect. It's exactly the point—the love, not the song. Which song? Any song—this song even. That's up to you, and a good part of what makes this work. It also sounds more like a Replacements than an Alex Chilton song, another nice point. When I manage to stop thinking and parsing so much, however, and let it play as something that wells up and pricks insistently at one's ears, then it really starts to become apparent what they have managed here. It's a song about being in love with music, admirably overcoming any tendency toward striking the pose of disaffection, and simply giving in to the pleasures of a good song.

Chris Bell, "Though I Know She Lies" (1974)

(listen)

Chris Bell's one and only solo album came out in 1992 but he had been gone nearly 14 years by then, dead at 27 from a late night auto accident in East Memphis. He was a founding member of Big Star, mostly estranged from the band after the first album as Alex Chilton came more to take the central role. I Am the Cosmos truly sounds like a lost Big Star album. In fact, it also helps explain some of the curves and bends of Chilton's own post-Big Star career, which veered much more wildly, from real good bluesy stuff to effective noise squalls and back again to these dark nights of the adolescent soul, at which Big Star particularly excelled. In my opinion Third/Sister Lovers is as good as it ever got. That was long after Chris Bell had left the band, but Cosmos, recorded at approximately the same time, is nevertheless at the heart of the project, it can't be denied. Both albums are possessed of a similar eerie spirit, disconnected lost souls wandering the audio hollows of a recording studio. "Though I Know She Lies" closes the original '92 release, letting Bell retreat all the way into himself as the story turns blankly naturalistic, and thus bleak. As far as I'm concerned it's the deepest point reached by the album, which is otherwise the usual story about wanting a girl, told from multiple points of view, enlarged thematically as unrequited love, obsession, depression, yearning and failure to connect, even Christian faith. Just another story about a guy who liked a girl who didn't like him, and there are a lot of those. But seen from certain angles Bell makes it look like looking into the abyss.

2. Big Star, "Nightime" (1974)

(listen)

At the time I was getting to know this song, in the mid-'80s with the vinyl release of the Third album by Big Star with the big blue cover and liner notes by Howard Wuelfing, I was pretty busy myself with a life full of "At night time I go out and see the people," and I felt about it much the same way the singer here sounds, dismal and sour and maybe a little studiously bored. "And dressing so sweet, all the people to see"—there we go. Those details caught my attention but really it was the mood of it that seemed to swallow me whole, even from the first, a sound that runs all through the near-score of great tracks that cluster around this album. But gradually I focused on this song as I came to realize the plight of the singer was my own at the time. "I'm walking down the freezing street / Scarf goes out behind," he sings. It sounds like the loneliest street of all time. I think I walked it too. Then suddenly the song swells into its raw climax, a bleating from the bottom of the soul that never plays quietly in the background for me: "Get me out of here / get me out of here / I hate it here / get me out of here." I connected with what this song was saying and with how it felt all at the same time, and in many ways I followed that trebling vocal performance across a couple thousand miles, Pied Piper style, into a new life in a new city. This is really a dark moment that is captured here, but rendered so purely and so absolutely that it becomes a moment of exaltation as much as anything, and hope too.

39. Alex Chilton, "Thank You John" (1985)

(listen)

From early in Chilton's neo-Memphis going on neo-New Orleans phase of his second half of the '80s, just as he was simultaneously becoming an underground indie darling cum icon of transfixed youth forever. I knew this originally from an EP set called "Feudalist Tarts" that's got a few nice things: cover of Carla Thomas's "B-A-B-Y," cover of Slim Harpo's "Tee Ni Nee Ni Noo / Tip on In," the whole jazz band riffing like a rock band thing alone. But this Willie Tee moment of parable truth out of the beach music scene of the Carolinas was ahead of its time at least in terms of the studied matter-of-factness of the way in which it reveals itself. The contempt the pimp has for the john is done to a ripe turn by Chilton. The business-as-usual interchangeableness of the ho under control is suggestion and allusion. The horns and snaky rhythms keep it amiably rolling forward, flowing and warm and easygoing, which enables Chilton to go as icy cold as he can jettisoning the suave savoir faire of Willie Tee's original and lingering instead on the most suggestive details to draw out the shades of meaning, like lancing a boil with swift furious thrusts. There's nothing subtle going on here: "I know that you've been ballin' / You're as high as you can be ... I know he wanted to handle you / I could tell by the bruises on your arm ... I don't blame you baby for trying to swell his head / 'Cos after all baby he's giving us his bread." Willie Tee's version is more about getting over, but Chilton is bent on making the getting over the gotten over and every thing from his mouth is washed in bitter patina. His frail-voiced wizened hipster youth flirting with the downward spiral is just convincing enough of itself to sell this good and hard. It's unforgettable, even.

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.

Stuff (1985)

Alex Chilton's EP Feudalist Tarts is a subset of this package, which also includes another EP, a single side or three, and various bonus tracks. Following Chilton's move to New Orleans in the early '80s, Feudalist Tarts marks a wonderful retreat to his Memphis instincts. I don't think any of the releases in this compilation, or even the compilation itself alas, did so well commercially, but then neither did Pleased to Meet Me and this is the real thing. Chilton gives Carla Thomas a run for her money on the pouty cover of "B-A-B-Y," has some fun acting all slick on Slim Harpo's "Tee Ni Nee Noo / Tip On In," and brings a breathtaking degree of sardonic, venomous contempt to Willie Tee's "Thank You John." Knocks it right out of the park, in fact. Like I said before, I appreciate Alex Chilton most the closer he gets to Memphis. Moving to New Orleans was good for him, if this set is any indication.

I Am the Cosmos (1974)

When Rykodisc brought out this solo Chris Bell album in 1992, there was cognitive dissonance. Bell was a member in good standing of Big Star on the band's first album, more of a ghost member on their second, and gone for Third. But with this album the relative contributions of Bell and Alex Chilton, or the way we understood them anyway, perhaps required some revision. The songs here are gorgeous, soaring, painful, introspective, melodic, depressing, and always, always deeply felt. Not, perhaps, to the levels of Third. But they sound enough just like the Big Star we know and love to alter the way things seem. It's not just Chilton holding the keys to this kingdom. I mean, talk about recovering lost masterpieces. This is brilliant stuff.

Third/Sister Lovers (1975)

Big Star's more or less last album traces a tortured history—many covers, many release dates, many tracking sequences, many names—which I suppose is "ironically on point" for an album whose music traces a tortured history of relationships gone foul and all life bitter and meaningless. Ptooey on your good times, etc. I have to laugh about it because otherwise I'm crying, etc. When you can sing along word for word with "Nightime" (please, accept no other spellings) and hit all the notes, you have just gained a level in despair. Congratulations. Music this dark and so honestly acknowledging of pain is paradoxically a joy to hear, albeit perhaps a cathartic joy. It's Big Star's best, I think. Don't miss the Christmas carol, "Jesus Christ," or the cover of "Femme Fatale." Winners.

The Letter/Neon Rainbow (1967)

"Neon Rainbow" An album like this is not supposed to sound as good as this one does. Named slash-wise for not one but two Box Tops hits, and otherwise filled with covers of the day: "Trains and Boats and Planes," "Whiter Shade of Pale," "I'm Your Puppet," and like that. That's not fair because there are a few more original songs here (thanks mostly to Wayne Carson, also the author of "Always On My Mind"), but you see my point. It's doing business in the Herman's Hermits fashion, the albums purely afterthought to hit singles. Oh, and by the way, that's really Alex Chilton on lead vocals, and he really is 16 at the time this was recorded. "The Letter" was the big hit but "Neon Rainbow" was the better song. Not only does it sound more like the voice of the Alex Chilton we came to know, it's more his sensibility too: the wide-eyed kid and the dirty, thrilling city at night. The key to Alex Chilton, always, is understanding how everything there always comes back to Memphis. And on this Box Tops debut he gets his share of gems to work, and he acquits himself well. A promising debut, you might say, with little indication where it would ultimately go.

Pleased to Meet Me (1987)

"Alex Chilton" Dead horse metaphor alert: So where were the spiders while the fly tried to break our balls Just the beer light to guide us, So we bitched about his fans and should we crush his sweet hands? All of a sudden the referents aren't so clear now are they? Sooner or later, from Hootenanny to All Shook Down, you have to make the call. Where does it all go wrong for the Replacements? This has to be a candidate, but come on. Bob Stinson or not, Westerberg's songs carry it -- no matter how coldly you might want to reduce the band to journeyman/faceless status. Hey, Chris Mars is at the top of his game. Winning lyric: "Jesus rides beside me He never buys any smokes."

more from eMusic