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Alex Chilton, 1950-2010
UPDATE:
Teenage soul savant, power-pop progenitor, indie rock idol and Memphis music legend Alex Chilton has died.
The Memphis Commercial Appeal confirmed the news Wednesday night, but rumors flew through South By Southwest, where Chilton’s influential 1970s band Big Star was scheduled to play Saturday night at Antone’s.
“Chilton, 59, had been complaining of about his health earlier today,” according to the Commercial Appeal. “He was taken by paramedics to the emergency room where he was pronounced dead. The cause of death is believed to be a heart attack.”
SXSW director Roland Swenson found out late Wednesday and said he was not sure about the status of Big Star’s showcase, which could become a memorial show. The other members of Big Star are scheduled to be on a panel on the group’s history and legacy Saturday afternoon. (Big Star co-founder Chris Bell died in 1978.)
Chilton’s singular career had a couple of distinct phases; each phase practically had its own fanbase.
Boomers might remember him as the 16-year-old whose gritty-beyond-his-years voice powered songs for the Box Tops such as the smash hit “The Letter” and the Memphis soul classic “Cry Like A Baby.”
When the Box Tops folded in 1970, Chilton joined with songwriter/guitarist Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens to form Big Star. Chilton scrapped his gruff soul voice for a higher, thinner tone, as Big Star’s British pop-rock obsessions demanded Beatles-style harmonies.
Big Star was a commercial failure, but their 1972 debut album, “#1 Record” and the 1974 follow-up “Radio City” aged into cult classics, worshipped as precision-tooled power-pop perfection by bands from the Replacements (who wrote the song “Alex Chilton” about their hero), to R.E.M. to Cheap Trick (who turned Big Star’s “Out in the Street” into the theme song for “That 70s Show”).
The final Big Star album “Third/Sister Lovers,” is essentially a Chilton solo album with Stephens on it. Largely a collaboration with the late Memphis producer Jim Dickinson, it’s a dark, strange album, its fanbase a cult within the Chilton cult. An excellent Big Star box set, “Keep an Eye on the Sky,” was released last year by Rhino Records.
In the mid-’70s Chilton changed again, making tossed off sounding EPs and albums that fascinated some fans and annoyed others - instead of using his sweet Big Star voice, he often mumble-sang like he just fell out of bed.
But for fans, albums such as “Like Flies on Sherbet,” “Bach’s Bottom” and the brilliantly named bootleg “Dusted in Memphis” embodied a falling-apart, spit-and-bailing wire song-style that very few bands could quite master, though Pavement came the closest.
He also dabbled in production, helming brilliant early records by the Cramps and the Gories and playing the sideman in rockabilly weirdos Panther Burns.
Chilton continued to record and tour sporadically throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, his and Big Star’s cult building fan by converted fan.
In the mid-’90s, Big Star reformed with a newly minted line-up including Chilton, Stephens and Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies. That band performed often over the next decade-plus.
In the Replacement’s fastasia “Alex Chilton,” Paul Westerberg sings of a place where “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ‘round.” That never happened in the real world, but his cult loved his music with the passion of a million fans.
Chilton is survived by his wife, Laura, and a son Timothy.
— Joe Gross
EARLIER:
Expect to hear a lot more Big Star covers this year than usual. The news shot through SXSW Wednesday evening that Alex Chilton, who was scheduled to appear with Big Star Saturday at Antone’s, has died of an apparent heart attack. He was 59.
SXSW director Roland Swenson said he just found out and has not been told the status of Big Star’s showcase, which could possibly become a memorial show. The other members of Big Star are scheduled to be on a panel on the group’s history and legacy Saturday afternoon.
Although Chilton was not well-known aside his cult of followers, he helped create the alternative music that made a festival like SXSW possible, if not inevitable.
— Michael Corcoran
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By Da Blade
March 18, 2010 8:46 AM | Link to this
The influence of Alex Chilton cannot be overstated. Like many others, my favorite era is the Big Star. Incredibly brilliant music produced in a short span of years. I firmly believe there should be a spot for Big Star in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (joining fellow cult icons The Velvet Underground). But there was so much more to Chilton - the early Box Tops era, the renegade solo career, his under-appreciated work as a producer (see: the Cramps), and the final chapter of his career where he came to terms with his full legacy (always doing his own way, of course). Alex Chilton will be sorely missed.