In Big Star’s Radio City, old spells don’t work

In the early months of 1973, a group that dared to call itself Big Star was anything but. The album of brilliant, crisply orchestrated guitar rock they released last year, titled “#1 Record,” both as a joke and as a heartfelt wish, received rave reviews from critics who heard it. But the distributor screwed up and most of the people reading Rolling Stone declaration that the “#1 Record” was “one of the sleepers of 1972”, there was no way to go out and buy the album. A tour of southern town halls and empty auditoriums—even a dingy movie theater—did little to tell the story. Back in their hometown of Memphis, the band split between working on several new songs and fighting with each other with increasing ferocity. When singer-guitarist Chris Bell, consumed by addiction and paranoia, walked into Ardent Studios and destroyed the multi-track masterclasses for the record he’d been obsessively writing and recording for more than a year, it seemed a clearer sign than any other that the band was over.

Had they left it at that, Big Star would probably go down in rock history as a trifle, a band whose all-consuming bad luck somehow resulted in a single, hauntingly beautiful record. Among other things, “#1 Record” is a time capsule, a glittering container for memories of carefree youth: “Hanging out on the street / Same thing we did last week,” Bell bellows over a twisting guitar riff. “Outside”; “Won’t you let me walk you home from school,” pleads Alex Chilton, the band’s other frontman, on the fragile “Thirteen.” This is rock and roll as a pastoral. The songs evoke a magical land of eternal youth, full of self-renewing wonder. Bad moods sometimes cloud the horizon, usually in the form of a broken heart. But usually they’re either sublimated, as in the obliquely anti-black anthem “The Ballad of El Goodo,” or banished through sheer volume, as in the Memphis soul horns that pierce the otherwise tumultuous first “Feel.”

Most likely, Big Star survived Bell’s self-sabotage attack. Buoyed by the warm reception they received at the “Rock Writers’ Convention” – a publicity stunt developed by their label – the band returned to Ardent, now with Chilton at the helm and Bell out of the picture, to record a very different album. . The result was Radio City, which is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year. It remains a record of stunning beauty and drive—undoubtedly the band’s best work, perhaps the best work anyone has done in the group. And yet, despite some of the band’s most popular songs, “Radio City” proved surprisingly difficult to digest, both for individual listeners and in the larger scope of rock history. The sonic identity of “#1 Record” is so strong, bordering on thematic, that it was difficult to hear “Radio City” on its own terms, outside the shadow of what came before.

The alarm echoes throughout the record. The songs are tighter, tighter, more disjointed. On “O My Soul,” the first track, Chilton strums a thin chord on Jody Stevens’ drums. When the band locks into a rhythm anchored by Andy Hummel’s melodic bass, it feels a little manic. The guitar chords of the major sixth are sickeningly sweet. A spastic mellotron gives the song a carnival touch. Periodically, all this riot seems to break down: Stevens’ volumes deliberately break and stumble, as if falling down a flight of stairs. “Oh my soul, mother / I’m losing control,” Chilton sings in his clear tenor. Is it the sound of happy abandon or the next morning? “Never deny it,” the song says. “Go on and have a good time.” Good times are fleeting, beauty should be treated with suspicion, and the party’s almost over—these are the lessons Radio City wants to teach.

What kind of party was ending? Adolescence, the sixties, rock and roll as we used to know it: take your pick. Chilton found early success when The Letter (1967), a Box Tops hit in which he projected a croaking voice well beyond his years, made him a minor teen idol. With its ringing guitars and layered Beatles harmonies, “#1 Record” was partly a tribute to the recent past, the last years of the band members’ childhoods. For this reason, it flattered the sensibilities of rock critics, who saw the band as connoisseurs of what was already being heralded as the golden age of rock. These authors remembered the sixties as if each of them represented a whole world of musical meaning. The Rolling Stone the review identified the main element of the band’s style as “1965” without elaboration; another description described Chilton’s look as “straight up 1966”. Between George Harrison Bell’s painstaking guitar quotes, the flamboyant orientalism of Hummel’s “The India Song” and the album’s sophistication showcasing the British Invasion, “#1 Record” made the ’60s feel like a usable past. rock and roll

At Radio City, this great source is no longer so easily accessible. When the band tries to channel it, something always goes a little wrong. Harmonica honks unbalance the majestic “Life Is White”; a flurry of feedback that sounds a bit like a slide whistle bursts into “She’s a Mover.” On “Way Out West,” the album’s simplest sixties pop tune, Chilton’s Stratocaster is so shrill it sounds like it’s carved right into your brain, while echoing and surpassing Harrison and John Lennon’s “Nowhere Man” guitar solo. . (John Fry, founder of Ardent Studios and producer of the first two Big Star records, emphasized the high frequencies in his mixes to compensate for the high-end losses caused by radio transmitters.)

Having torn the past, “Radio City” is trying to put it back in pieces. “We followed the tradition that was established on the first record for the second record as much as we could,” Chilton later recalled, “but I had no idea what I wanted to write.” In the absence of Bell’s overall vision, “Radio City” was assembled from full-band recordings and sessions Chilton did with an entirely different group of musicians. Songs are also often less cohesive than collections of fragments. One of the non-band songs, “Mod Lang,” is lush with T. rex slime; over fuzzy riffs, Chilton drops random lines taken from classic blues songs in a glam-rock cut.

Some critics found it to be something like this: “an exciting 1965-style rock record,” according to one review. Robert Christgau was one of the few who noticed that “Radio City” was not so much evoking the spirit of 1965 garage rock as digging among its ruins. “The harmonies sound like lead sheets turned upside down and backwards, the guitar solos sound like ready-made shepherds, and the lyrics sound like love is strange,” he wrote. In particular, it was an insightful read for Chilton, who apparently believed that rock ‘n’ roll had died with the advent of Led Zeppelin and at one point declared that he didn’t listen to any music made after 1971.

The most dramatic product of “Radio City’s” combinatorial process is the menacing “Daisy Glaze,” in which a dizzying journey through descending chords turns, signaled by three snare beats, into a terrifying dance. Over crystalline bits of harmonized guitar, Chilton runs through several disjointed lyrics before settling on one, which he repeats: “You’re gonna die! / You will die.” Other songs on the album return to themselves in a similar way. Mumbles or nonsensical lyrics give way to repeated dreaded mantras like “You get what you deserve” or, more simply, “Oh no.”

Coil is a protective pose. These songs, like those on the “#1 Record”, are self-contained. But the nature of their isolation has changed. The snow globe world of teenage romance has turned into a locked room of paranoid foreclosure: “I’m starting to understand / What’s going on and how it’s planned,” Chilton sings on “What’s Going Ahn,” a song of experience that unravels into one lingering chord. Crisp guitar textures that once seemed filled with emotion now sparkle with metallic impersonality, making you want to end all feeling: “I’m thinking, Christ / Take my life to nothing,” Chilton pleads, echoing the Velvet Underground’s “Heroin.” » Even this quoted wish seems cheap, throwaway, not so much a tribute to the classic song of 1967 as a notice from a present in which language has lost its power to shock and charm.

The old spells no longer work. The greatest achievement of “Radio City” is the way it captures this situation, accepts it and makes art out of it. “September Gurls,” the album’s (and the band’s) best song, makes disappointment sound like delight. In less than three minutes of rumbling guitars and pounding drums, Chilton sings about romantic disappointment in gnomish passages: “September girls do so much / I was your Butch and you were moved / I loved you, well, it didn’t matter / I cried all the time.” The chorus consists of five simple words combined with three fast chords: “The December boys got sick.” The fragile, almost fragile treble of the guitar and the rampage of the drums do not hide the pathos of this line, but rather reflect and transmute it. Somehow despair comes back to us as something like hope. Chilton, a serious student of astrology, stood among the wreckage of the teenage world—perhaps the wreckage of rock ‘n’ roll itself—and looked to the cosmos for clues as to where to go next.

Today, Big Star’s reputation rests mainly on the group’s influence. Without a big star, said there would be no REM, no replacements, no Elliott Smith. Instead of commercial success, Big Star enjoys being called your favorite band’s favorite band. And yet, when bands try to channel Big Star, they often end up creating academic imitations of the “#1 Record”, just as Chris Bell imitated the Beatles and the Byrds in the seventies. Big Star itself has become a ready-made part of rock music’s past — but only as a caricature, a band harmonizing on nostalgic love songs. There’s none of the hard-earned, self-destructive beauty of “Radio City” — let alone the gritty “Third,” which came out in 1978, years after the band’s breakup — in this simplistic take. If the sound and texture of “Radio City” is harder to imagine because it’s tied to the moment when rock ‘n’ roll first became historic, the lesson of the record can still speak to us. We’ve tried nostalgia before; now we need to find something else to do with the wreckage of the past.