#1 Record / Radio City: Big Star

Does everyone who cites this as influential, essential rock and roll know these records well? By now, probably. Possibly not when I first grew to love #1 Record, though. While any erstwhile critic, even one of my puny stature, should feel sheepish at hackneyed selections such as this on a Desert Island list, I consider myself totally justified.

Throughout my junior/senior high school years (roughly 1969-1974), there was a nearby FM station that defined AOR in the best sense: it played album cuts and outside the Top 40 artists that I would never had enountered otherwise. This station actually played music I’d only read about in Rolling Stone and, later, CREEM. Do Ya by the Move, DOA by Bloodrock, Dwight Twilley’s incomparable I’m On Fire, and Big Star’s riveting Feel. [Here's a challenge for sharp-eyed readers: see if you can spot how many times on this site I mention this fabled FM station and these songs! Collect 'em all!]

There was also a record store nearby with the unlikely (for the times and the locale) combination of a deep inventory of cool stuff and a knowledgeable owner who would actively proselytize for music he felt strongly about. So when I went into the store known as LMG (short for Lick My Grooves) clamoring about Big Star, I walked out with one of, maybe, a couple dozen copies of #1 Record sold in Indiana the year it was released.

It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to find a copy of the Radio City l.p., still before the advent of CD, and this Big Star twofer that, as others have said, constitutes one of the best bargains in pop music today. You know, it’s so good, and such a great deal, it’s a wonder it hasn’t been deleted.

What remains to be said about Big Star? Like most of my Desert Island selections, I don’t presume to have any revelations to offer about Big Star, so I’ll reiterate what’s been said before:

• Not only does Alex Chilton’s vocal style sound nothing like his Box Tops voice, this British Invasion-inspired pop is a total departure from his blue eyed soul music. Chilton’s contributions to the two group’s music might as well have been made by two different people, they are so radically divergent.
• Chris Bell doesn’t get the credit he deserves in the Big Star Story. Fortunately, his solo work is available (the often brilliant I Am the Cosmos) and supports the case for Bell as a major—if not the main architect of the Big Star sound. And possibly the best songwriter in the group.
• Seldom has a band developed such an enduring legacy with so little music. It’s some great music, granted, there just isn’t much of it.
• While the third album (Sister Lovers, aka Third) is a shocking departure from the shimmering sound and general tenor of #1 Record, Radio City has plenty of songs like Oh My Soul that constitute a radical departure from the first album, too. (And the version on Ryko’s Big Star Live proves, astonishingly, that it can not only be performed live, it can be done by a power trio!) So while nothing could have prepared fans for Sister Lovers, Radio City was enough of a progression from #1 Record to be a surprise in itself.
• Not only do I consider Don’t Lie To Me the equal of most anything else on #1 Record—contrary to what some real critics have commented—other than perhaps Feel, Chilton apparently thinks highly of it, including it on the radio concert, Big Star Live. And it sounds like a truer glimpse of Chilton’s temperament than, say, Thirteen (although lines like “Won’t you tell your dad, get off my back” come close to Don’t Lie’s confrontational tone).
• Speaking of Thirteen, I have to wonder how, or if, any of the Big Star survivors have benefitted from covers such as Garbage’s Thirteen and Cheap Trick’s In The Street. Do kids seek out Big Star after hearing the theme song to That 70’s Show? Do Chilton and the Bell estate realize any substantial income from it?
• Finally (or, if you’re actually reading this, FI-nally!), while Big Star’s often cited as an influence, I find it easier to hear the bands that influenced BS in their music, than Big Star in anyone else’s. Meaning? Maybe it’s easier to appreciate than to assimilate their influence.

Now there’s a new Big Star compilation out, justified, if at all (given the continued availability of the three studio albums on CD, as someone said, possibly on the Not Lame site that sells it), by the inclusion of a previously-unreleased track. I’d like to hear the compilation just to see how the selected tracks flow, if the transition from #1 Record, to Radio City, to Sister Lovers is as jarring as I suspect it is.

So I’m going to go play all three, back-to-back…and I urge anyone reading to do the same.

"Feel" like more of my Desert Island selections? Click here!