I worry whether this is my last life...

"Jesus Christ was born today...Jesus Christ was born...We're gonna get born..." A friend recently explained to me that Jesus Christ wasn't born today. Farmer's Almanac-type clues in the Gospels prove it, I guess. But everything good in life requires some suspension of disbelief (relationships, for sure)...

Alex Chilton is an interesting case in that regard. He could be a fairly suitable Christ-figure for the music-obsessive among us: Sister Lovers is one of the true miracles ever captured on record, an influence on great bands like the Replacements, occasionally great bands like Primal Scream, and shit bands like R.E.M., The Pixies, Teenage Fanclub--too many to name. The problem with the Christ comparison is that Chilton is and always was an asshole. A big asshole. The Big Star book makes this very clear. He experienced stardom as a teenager in the '60s, through the "blue-eyed soul" craze of The Box Tops. The first Big Star album in '72 really should have made him a star, but when it didn't--mostly, it seems, due to promotional mishandling--he got bitter. The second Big Star album, Radio City, is not very good despite what you've been told. It is ahead of its time--sounds like the 90s, and like '70s pastiche. The critics loved this one too, but, again, the public couldn't find it/didn't buy it.

So Chilton got more resentful and fucked up, unable to live with the fact that he was famed for pre-fab crap as a teenager, but couldn't get heard now that he was older and a serious artist. The resulting record, known as Third or Sister Lovers, falls somewhere between deliberate self-sabotage and spiritual protest. As indicated above, it was delayed in release, from '74-'78, and there really is no official track order. On the Rykodisc reissue you can skip the first two songs, + a cover of "Femme Fatale" that is misguidedly earnest (when Chilton was so capable of being creatively arch, bitter, ironic to the point of dread--he was even better at that shit than Lou Reed), the overrated "Holocaust", and three of the four closing tracks, but in between are twelve songs that make as deep and strong a set as any album ever.

This stuff is a lot more above-ground than pretty much anything I've posted. But I feel the need because many people are told to get the two-fer of #1 Record/Radio City, and to revere Big Star as the prototypical power-pop band, end of story. The band that recorded Sister Lovers is only Chilton and the drummer--not really Big Star at all--with the help of producer Jim Dickinsonthe seediness of Memphis, and various session string/horn players who Chilton got drunk in order to achieve the right emotional content. It worked.

"Jesus Christ" is pure innocence, wonder, and joy: like Christmas for kids. Chilton doesn't mean it, exactly, but he means something..."Stroke It Noel" represents a less desperate, more sublime state of drunkenness than yesterday's "I Came To Visit...", stopping only briefly to express fear that the "bonds" of unaltered reality will eventually return, but expressing it as a question because Chilton is so in-the-feeling, and, when you're in the feeling, maybe it won't ever end...I won't spoil the origins of "Oh Dana". You can read the book if you want to know, but I think it's better to be mystified about it for a while, and then finally read about it. If you do, the "And girl if you're listening...I'm sorry I can't help it..." line will gain a new meaning, superimposed upon the old one. The whole song changes like that, emerging as one of the most complex odes any man has ever written for a woman, full of mixed meanings and emotions, with a depth you can feel, but only really guess at. So private and true, even in its use of meta-youth-fantasy imagery, "I got busted across the bridge", and so on. "Kanga Roo" = perfect folk sentiments, like "I first saw you...you had on blue jeans...your eyes couldn't hide...an-y-thing..." + proto-shoegaze. Opens up just like Loveless when you really need it to, but, sorry, this is better...

Big Star--Stroke It Noel
Big Star--Oh Dana
Big Star--Jesus Christ

p.s. thanks, Lucie, for the comment. Merry Christmas, back. And thanks for being my most loyal audience over the last six months, either you and a friend, or maybe just you at home and at work--somewhere in the vicinity of Potwin, Kansas. On my sitemeter map it shows up exactly in the center of the U.S., which almost made me feel you weren't real...