March 18, 2010: Farewell, Alex Chilton...

Jeez... here's some genuinely terrible news. Alex Chilton, power-pop icon who sang big hits with The Box Tops when he was just a teenager but made his biggest impact as the frontman of Big Star in the early '70s, died yesterday of an apparent heart attack at the age of 59. Chilton's history was both incredibly fortuitous and intermittently unfortunate. While most 16-year-olds were still struggling to tune their telecasters, Chilton was growling like a 60-year old bluesman on The Box Tops' classic number-one hit "The Letter".



After a few more major singles with the Memphis group ("Cry Like a Baby", "Neon Rainbow", "Soul Deep"), Chilton branched off in 1970 and joined Big Star the following year. Big Star never made an impression on the charts or the radio to compare with that of The Box Tops, but their influence was powerful. With ironically titled albums like #1 Record and Radio City, Chilton, guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens effortlessly cranked out gut-wrenching power-pop like "Feel", "In the Street", "When My Baby's Beside Me", "Mod Lang", and "September Gurls". These songs stood in stark contrast to the bloated hard rock, corporate rock, and prog rock that prevailed in the early '70s. With completely-stripped acoustic numbers like "Thirteen" and "Watch the Sunrise", Chilton proved he was more emotive, more personal, and more tuneful than most singer-songwriters of the period.



By Big Star's next record, Third/Sister Lovers, the band's lack of success had caused Bell and Hummel to depart. Chilton and Stephens went into the studio to cut their third album with assistance from hired musicians, and the results are often rated as the band's best LP. While I personally prefer their earlier, more guitar-oriented recordings, many Chilton/Big Star-cultists are fascinated by the weirdly insular, manic-depressive combination of big, Brian-Wilson-esque production and distraught/demented lyricism on Third/Sister Lovers. Its oddness coupled with the dire sales of #1 Record and Radio City kept Third/Sister Lovers from being released until 1978--four years after it had been recorded. By that point Chilton had finished (for the time being) with Big Star and co-founder Chris Bell had died in a car accident.

Alex Chilton



With the break-up of Big Star, Chilton bounced around as a solo artist and with a few bands like Alex Chilton and the Cossacks, but his most significant post-Big Star work was as the producer of the first two Cramps records. In the '90s he started playing on and off with reformed versions of both The Box Tops and Big Star, and even recorded a record with the latter group in 2005 called In Space.

Chilton and Big Star have helped to shape indie-rock and power-pop since their uncommercial early-'70s hey day. Groups like R.E.M., Cheap Trick, Elliott Smith, and Yo La Tengo have covered Chilton's songs. The Replacement paid tribute to him on their 1987 LP Pleased to Meet Me with their classic single titled...appropriately enough... "Alex Chilton". He'll be missed.

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