ALEX CHILTON AND ME

  Last night I caught a little of the Big Star documentary on TV. I'd call the experience bittersweet, but that trite word seems a weak way to describe the blend of gut-punch anguish, excitement and ambivalence I felt watching it.
  Forgive the back story intrusion here, those of you for whom Big Star is a long-known quantity. Alex Chilton was a precocious singer, guitarist, and songwriter who cut a hit song at an age when most of us are still dressing out for dodgeball. A few years later, he formed a band whose dedication to catchy bubblegum hooks and rock and roll energy didn't sell in a pop world now more Zeppelin than Beatles. His band's studio output then degenerated into a hazy and chaotic bad trip, and a third album that never really had what you could call a proper release.
  Later Chilton's various talents and idiosyncrasies led him into areas that threaded the needle between the roots of rock and roll and the roots of mental illness. It's easy to get the impression that Chilton would periodically drug himself into a state of dislocated mania, round up a dubious entourage that more upmarket rock entourages would sneer at, and enter an unsuspecting recording studio waving a to-do list scrawled and clawed almost to the point of plasma in a fever of nutty conviction.
  He did all of that, but he also did more than just about anyone else to read into the record the Rosetta Stone kinship among soul music, rockabilly, and bubblegum.
His guitar playing, generally undiscussed, was more Cropper than Clapton, but developed steadily until the 1980s, when I saw him play a Bach Gavotte on a Telecaster at the old 9:30 club. He was for me one of the most interesting rock guitarists of that era, and when I wasn't trying to decode his solos, I was scrambling to figure out how to be influenced by his songwriting.
  It's unclear to me how successful my efforts were. I can say that "Soul Parking," my first album with the Graverobbers, was among other things an attempt to borrow some of the sonic flavor of Big Star's third album. A lot of people have an idea that it was my best work.
  The scattered nation of indie pop and despotic record store hipsters has long elevated Big Star to the position of archetypal "real rock and roll" outfit, as their sound represented a perfect marriage of loud bubblegum and dementia. Big Star's recorded legacy was spotty and erratic, but it's larded with poignant ballads, sweetness, trebly and trashy guitars, and haunting melancholia; Chilton's youth was squandered on rock and roll, but the music he played with Big Star was perhaps rock and roll's most convincing document of youth's hormonal mashup of enthusiasm and despair. I stole, or tried to steal, a lot from this unappreciated giant, but it was his ability to capture emotional complexity that taught me the most. Thanks for that, Alex Chilton.