Thank You Friends
In honor of Alex Chilton, a brilliant musician whose untimely death has hit us hard, we present an OA film, edited by Derek Jenkins, from The Oxford American DVD #2 (Best of the South Issue, 2008).
From "Notes on This Year's Best of the South DVD" by Derek Jenkins, 2008.
Track 8: Thank You Friends
Editor: Derek Jenkins
Sometime during the recording of Big Star's debut album, guitarist and co-founder Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel were messing around with a 16mm camera. Nobody outside the Ardent Studios family has seen these images before. (The remaining footage will be available in a Rhino boxed set later this year or early in the next.) I'm not sure what they were going for. The film, about twenty minutes total, is wholly silent. The images are by their nature experimental, sometimes expressly so. The camera captures the group recording both in the studio and in co-founder Alex Chilton's home. Other footage seems to hint that they had fictional narratives in mind as well: one about a young man (Chilton) registering for selective service and another that could have been yanked from one of their songs, about a boy and a girl in love. All of the threads, fictional and nonfictional, eventually unraveled.
Big Star has since been canonized a hundred times over, whether inspiring songs by the Replacements or being covered by countless garage bands. In one way or another, they've influenced just about every successful pop band of the last thirty years. Their story is no less tragic as a result. The original group, pictured in the film while laying down #1 Record, fell apart in frustration shortly thereafter. Chris Bell, who co-wrote many of the group's songs, experienced a complete mental break, left the band, picked up a habit, drifted around in Europe, recorded at least three more classic songs, and died abruptly a few long years later. Chilton kept the band together for two more LPs that equaled the debut, though by the final album Big Star was essentially an Alex Chilton solo project, and Chilton himself had reached a very dark place.
Like every other song on Big Star's Third, "Thank You Friends" has a volatile mixture of anger and sadness and gratitude and regret, four emotions that pretty much sum up the story of Big Star. Alex Chilton, a twenty-four-year-old veteran of circumstance, had seen it all. In the lyrics, he's at turns smiling and sneering, genuine and snide. His emotional state was such that gratitude to anybody for getting him there almost had to be an ironic gesture. Thanking the people who made "this all so probable" seems just on the edge of indignant. A long line of artistic partners lay in the wake of distribution snafus and corporate unrest. That the song serves as both tribute and indictment only heightens the feelings of loss and faint nostalgia that attend these slight and silent pictures.
If you'd like to purchase a copy of OA DVD #2, which accompanies Issue #61, please click here.
