Mark Rozzo on Big Star
Big Star: It Isn't Even a Record
One chill November evening several years ago, I found myself camped around a driftwood fire on the banks of the Mississippi River in Memphis, watching the barges float by and passing a beat-up nylon-string guitar—and, if memory serves, a bottle of Jim Beam—back and forth with a couple of English art-school dudes. This was it: The Great American Road Trip, packed with ironic rest-stop purchases, a glove compartment full of speeding tickets, the obligatory Dollywood flyby (closed but for a forlorn Philadelphian manning the gift shop), and a brush with the Grand Ole Opry that included hash brownies and a stage-side snapshot of Hank Snow, the man who wrote "I'm Movin' On," one of the greatest road songs ever. But down here in Memphis, the three of us had at last fetched up against something real. Mesmerized by a fat Tennessee moon, the winking lights of the Hernando DeSoto Bridge, and a flotilla of Leviathanesque vessels drifting down the black Big Muddy, we felt pretty well hooked up to the cosmic ebb and flow of the continent.
Coaxed out of that sad, generic guitar, the soundtrack for our little slacker encampment leaned heavily on Memphis, from Johnny Cash's "Big River" and Elvis's "Blue Moon" to the pensive end of the Big Star catalogue: "Thirteen," "The Ballad of El Goodo," "Nightime." I really can't remember if any of us ventured the three chords that make up Big Star's "Stroke It Noel," a beguiling number with a walloping drum track and a beckoning refrain—"Do you wanna dance?"—that harkens back to the earliest innocent impulses of rock & roll. Even so, whenever I hear the backwards string quartet of the song's opening bars, I feel myself being pulled back, as if by an undertow, to those nights out on the levee—the black sky, the autumn shiver, the glorious indulgence of youth.
Recorded toward the end of 1975 at Ardent Studios in Memphis and originally released in limited fashion in 1978, the album featuring "Stroke It Noel," and variously known as SISTER LOVERS and THIRD (there was never an official, band-condoned title or running order), has been both relegated as a cutout-bin curio and lauded as a milestone in the history of rock. It's a modestly conceived record, laid down with little expectation of an audience by a band on the ropes. The virtually unknown Memphis combo was led by Alex Chilton, the erstwhile Box Top who, as a Central High School sophomore, sprinkled vocal gravel all over the irresistible 1967 bubblegum-soul hit "The Letter."
Over the course of two previous albums, Big Star had managed to chart a foolproof course for enduring cult status: glowing acclaim and zero sales. After the auspicious debut, #1 RECORD, came out in the summer of 1972, the band's founder and co-leader, Chris Bell, quit, apparently knocked for a loop that Big Star hadn't become bigger than the Beatles. (Listening to this astonishing record thirty-four years later, it's easy to appreciate Bell's dismay.) Stumbling on as a trio, Chilton, along with drummer Jody Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel, cobbled together Radio City, a scruffier redux of the original model and a bona fide classic, featuring the song that would forever become Big Star's calling card—"September Gurls." When Radio City flopped, Hummel, the son of a former Miss America, ditched, citing the pursuit as a "loser activity." By the middle of 1974, Big Star, or what was left of it, was yet again in limbo.
Depending on your point of view, the third Big Star album is either the most underrated or the most overrated record in the post-rock annals of American pop. It has inspired no end of mythology, conjecture, romanticism, hyperbole, consternation, dismissal, and pure aching love. Multifaceted, enigmatic, and totally addictive, it's a magnet for comparison: SISTER LOVERS variously exudes the sad-eyed self-destructiveness of Gram Parsons, the hapless derangement of Syd Barrett, the raw confessionality of Plastic Ono Band, the pop inventiveness of Todd Rundgren, the art-school nihilism of Lou Reed (particularly "Berlin"), the delicate introspection of Nick Drake (who died while the sessions were taking place), and the pastoral touch of Joni Mitchell and Jackson Browne, both of whom were on the band's playlist. I happen to love that it can be all of these things at the same time. In fact, the record surpasses most everything it's ever been compared to.
"What makes it fascinating to listeners is what made it unappealing to record labels," says Stephens, who has continued on as studio manager at Ardent, mentioning that nobody in 1975 wanted to pick up such a chaotic and complex record. "But Big Star was lucky in a lot of respects. We had the freedom to do what we wanted to do, and nothing was reigned in. And if something had been reigned in, it would have polluted all of that sonic imagery and dark, melancholy atmosphere."
Operating in the midst of a deteriorating relationship with their label, Stax, and with dwindling hopes for rock stardom, Chilton and Stephens found themselves in the enviable, scary position of having total creative control. As Stephens puts it, recalling those notorious sessions, "the craziest ideas just seemed to work."
Aside from Chilton, the album's press-averse, contrarian auteur, the man most responsible for making those ideas work was veteran producer and Memphis visionary Jim Dickinson. "I wouldn't have a career but for Big Star's THIRD," Dickinson said one recent morning at his Zebra Ranch Studio in Coldwater, Mississippi. "Literally. It's the one that brought 'em all to me." That's major props for a record that relatively few people to this day know about, coming from a guy who has worked with everybody from Aretha Franklin to Ry Cooder to Bob Dylan (and whose 1969 Muscle Shoals piano cameo on the Rolling Stones' "Wild Horses" became a high point of the documentary GIMME SHELTER). As Dickinson recalls, "The crazier Alex's ideas were, the more I pursued them."
The result was an unfettered Chilton, at last able to wreak havoc in a recording studio, the strictly controlled environment in which he'd toiled, often as a puppet for one producer or another, since adolescence. And what a strange adolescence it must have been: While other high-schoolers were busy doing their trig homework, Chilton was on the road pumping up the latest Box Tops single ("Cry Like a Baby," "Soul Deep"), supporting the likes of the Beach Boys, mugging on the Mike Douglas Show, and partying with Charles Manson. Now, on the verge of twenty-four and already, by the cruel calculus of the music industry, a has-been, Chilton cut loose with some amazing songs, as stark and haunting as they were seemingly dashed off, cries from the heart from a guy who just doesn't care anymore: "Kangaroo," "Big Black Car," "Kizza Me," and "Holocaust," the album's harrowing centerpiece.
The stories generated by the SISTER LOVERS sessions have kept music snobs talking until sunup in dorm rooms, dive bars, and recording studios for nearly three decades: A creeped-out Steve Cropper barely stepping past the door of Ardent's Studio A to lay down a tentative solo on the album's wobbly rendition of the Velvet Under-ground's "Femme Fatale" (with backup vocals from the muse of the album, Chilton's girlfriend, Lesa Aldridge); blood and gin mysteriously seeping into the circuitry of the Auditronics mixing console; Chilton forcing a pint of Jack Daniels on a clarinet player in order to extract the appropriate performance; Chilton shooting Demerol down his throat with a syringe. ("Valium and Seconol and Demerol. Whatever was there, I drank it or took it," Chilton would later say.) But the uproarious sessions were, if you can believe it, oases of calm in the lives of the protagonists. "The period of time between the sessions was worse by far than the sessions themselves," Dickinson admits. "The sessions were like little moments of clarity, really. I mean, Alex was still pretty young—and very self-destructive. But, you know, who ever thought of that in rock & roll? Imagine that!"
The mild-mannered Stephens, meanwhile, looked on in wonder at the chaos around him, bringing forward a gorgeous song in the vein of Graham Nash called "For You." "I was into 'Eleanor Rigby,'" Stephens says, "and I wanted that kind of string section on 'For You.'" At Stephens's initiative, a precocious young string arranger named Carl Marsh, the same age as Stephens and Chilton, came to Ardent to record a quartet on the song. When Chilton heard the goings-on, he was sucked in. "He and Alex hit it off," Stephens remembers, "so he used Carl on the other songs, too. They did a brilliant job of creating an audioscape—like 'Nightime,' those screechy violins."
Marsh's presence colored the entire record, as string parts went down on track after track, lending an air of elegiac sweetness to a bleak and formless collection of desperate songs. One of them, a relatively uninspired Chilton number named "Lovely Day," about waking up in the middle of the afternoon (apparently, Chilton's Box Tops money hadn't quite run out yet), was utterly transformed: Marsh's arrangement called for a sprightly, Baroque-style bourrée, filling in the space of the vocal-free chorus of "Lovely Day." The lead line was played by Noel Gilbert, a sixty-five-year-old veteran violinist from the Memphis Symphony Orchestra who played on records by the likes of the Box Tops, Elvis Presley, Isaac Hayes, and Al Green, and who happened to be a pal of Chilton's father, Sid, a sometime jazz pianist and clarinetist. The sound of those strings, and the sight of Gilbert, a mainstay of Memphis music going back to the 1920s and the guy who played on "Suspicious Minds" and "In the Ghetto," sawing away on the tune inspired a seriously improved melody and an overhauled set of lyrics: "Keep an eye on the sky/Will they come, oh the bombs?" "Lovely Day" (which can be heard on the occasional Big Star bootleg) had morphed into "Stroke It Noel," its puckish double-entendre title taken from a catch phrase tossed around by Chilton's running buddy, Danny Graflund, who loved to exhort the band, when tape was about to roll, to "Stroke it!"
"'Stroke It Noel' is one of my favorites," Dickinson says these days. "Probably my favorite line on the whole album is 'Will they come, oh the bombs?' Alex was really at his peak as a lyricist right there. And that's as optimistic as Alex is going to get: 'Will they come, oh the bombs?'" With its decorous string arrangement masking a whole world of anxiety, "Stroke It Noel" is a roiling minuet for the era of polyester, Watergate, and troop pullouts: "Do you wanna dance?" Why not? Haldeman and Dean are on trial. "Do you wanna dance?" The Vietnam airlift is underway! "Do you wanna dance?" Hey, got any 'ludes on ya?
When Big Star's third album came out in 1978, "Stroke It Noel," the last song recorded, kicked it off—the perfect overture to the musical roller coaster that would follow. In 1992, the album finally appeared in CD format, and the days of chasing down import vinyl or passing around third-generation cassettes of SISTER LOVERS were over. But "Stroke It Noel" was relegated to a position in the middle of the pack, buried in a revised running order that compromises the brooding atmosphere of the archaic vinyl version into oblivion. Dickinson and Stephens agree that no order for SISTER LOVERS has ever been officially determined, nor ever could be.
And really, why would you ever want to? SISTER LOVERS is a musical amoeba that keeps changing shape and meaning, depending on who's doing the listening, downloading, or plucking of chords on a deserted Memphis levee. It remains the ultimate cult album in rock & roll, with Gilbert's violin connecting it—and Big Star—to a current of Memphis music as wide and deep as the Mississippi. "It isn't even a record," Dickinson says. "It's a series of recordings, and people make their own records in their mind out of it. Which is what has personalized the damn thing to so many people."
Including me. On my iTunes, I put "Stroke It Noel" first.
Photograph by Michael O'Brien (Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel, and Alex Chilton).
