Wings For Wheels

In one of the blog posts that I read about Alex Chilton after his death, I came upon an excerpted paragraph that simply gave me the chills because it explained pop music in a way I’ve never realized it before.  I was going to post it here, but I had already blogged plenty about Chilton and Big Star and wanted to move on. A few days ago, my Popdose colleague Ken Shane sent to our group the link to the full story from which, as it turns out, the paragraph was taken. The article was about Chris Bell, Chilton’s partner in Big Star, and was written by John Jeremiah Sullivan.

Chilton said to Robert Gordon, “Most of the Big Star stuff was searching for how to get through two verses without saying anything really stupid….” Add “playing” to “saying,” and you have as apt a description of the task involved in writing good pop songs as has ever been articulated. Great songwriters learn as much from listening to bad music as they do from listening to what they love. They memorize pitfalls, dead-ends; the how, as opposed to the what, of poor taste and cliché. It’s a strange, hair-splitting science, since, let’s face it, when you’re thinking in Shostakovich terms, the distance between a Brian Wilson objet d’art and a breakfast-cereal jingle is about three atoms wide. For a pop songwriter, each new composition presents countless temptations and traps, moments when the song wants to become “stupid,” wants to go to the obvious chord or rhyme, wants to sound too close, as opposed to just close enough, to what we’ve heard before. The game is to thread your way through these traps without sounding as if you’re trying to be unpredictable—melodically, lyrically, in whatever way. And success comes when you’ve taken all the crap the genre gives you to work with—limited instrumentation, limited melodic possibilities, limited time—and made beauty of it, then disguised the beauty as more of the good ol’ crap we like to hear when we turn on the radio. Isn’t that precisely what makes those classics, like “Baby, It’s You,” so moving, so overwhelming, what makes you have to pull your car to the side of the road when they come on? The beauty in them is subversive. It doesn’t belong. It’s been smuggled in under the radar of suburban teenage taste and purchasing power. That’s why pop music is the art for our time: It’s an art of crap. And not in a self-conscious sense, not like a sculpture made of garbage and shown at the Whitney, which is only a way of saying that “low” materials can be made to serve the demands of “high” art. No, pop music really is crap. It’s about transcending through crap. It’s about standing there with your stupid guitar, and your stupid words, and your stupid band, and not being stupid.

Read that last sentence over and over and you’ll see the entire history of this music we love.

OK, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, and Alex Chilton’s death got me to play a lot of those Big Star songs over the course of the past week.  So I figured I’d record one of theirs that I used to perform all the time. Only problem was that I can’t sing it in the original key anymore (it was always a bit of a stretch), so I had to drop the capo down from the fifth fret, as it was on the recorded version, down to the second. I probably could have done it on three, but decided to be safe). But whether it’s in C or A, it’s still an amazing song, and, for once, I’m relatively satisfied with my performance. That said, I had an earlier take that was even better, but I screwed up the last two notes on the guitar and had to delete it.

The. Last. Two. Notes.

You can also read my thoughts on September Gurls at Popdose. Enjoy them.

My autographed CD booklet of Bach's Bottom

“There ain’t no one gonna turn me around.” – Alex Chilton, “The Ballad Of El Goodo,” 1972

“Children by the million scream for Alex Chilton to come around” – Paul Westerberg, “Alex Chilton,” 1987

Celebrity deaths don’t often affect me. Usually, it’s just an “Oh, that’s too bad.” If I really liked the artist I’ll put up a post here with a few words and some video clips. But it’s rare that I feel a sense of loss when someone famous dies. After all, they’re someone I’ve known, or at least partly known, only through their work and I can’t grieve as I would for someone I personally knew.

The last one to really get me was Danny Federici of the E Street Band. He had just been on stage with the band a few weeks earlier, so many of us Springsteen fans thought he would have a full recovery. But that night in Indianapolis turned out to be a farewell. Not even Michael Jackson’s death moved me too much. The Michael Jackson I loved had ostensibly died in the early-1990s, replaced by The King Of Pop, bearing no resemblance – literally – to the person behind “I Want You Back,” “Rock With You,” or “Billie Jean.”

But hearing the news that Alex Chilton died hit me pretty hard tonight, almost as much as Danny’s did. Coincidentally, I was in the same bar that I was in the night Jackson died. Back in June, it seemed like every other song played was “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” the lone Jackson song on the jukebox. Tonight, I gave the news to the one person there I thought would know who he was. But I had to remind her, “You know, the guy from Big Star? The Replacements did a song about him?” before she recognized the name.

Even though it was St. Patrick’s Day, I wasn’t planning on staying out late anyway. But I finished my drink, settled up, and made my way back home. As I reached for my iPod, I knew there was only one album I wanted to play, Radio City by Big Star. I think #1 Record is a better album, but that’s as much due to Chris Bell’s involvement. Third/Sister Lovers cemented his status as a tortured genius, but parts of it are too fragmented, too bleak, to truly enjoy. Radio City, which was made after Bell’s departure (though he co-wrote a few songs) and also has the rawness of Third/Sister Lovers, was Chilton’s masterpiece.

Listening to it again tonight, it struck me that, at his best, Chilton was three members of the Beatles condensed into one person. He could be as lyrically introspective as Lennon, as melodic as McCartney, and his Strat tone on Radio City sounded like Harrison on “Nowhere Man,” all in the same song, most evidently on “September Gurls.”

Chilton’s story and influence have reached far beyond what his records sold, even the hits he had with the Box Tops, so I’m not going to repeat it here. Still, his work with Big Star defined the sound we know as power pop. Some groups were too powerful, others too poppy. But those first two records are the ultimate blend of guitar crunch and blissful harmonies. It also helped that, as Memphis boys, they also understood soul music. You can listen to my good friends Keith and Mike and I talk about Big Star as part of Episode 28 of Wings For Wheels.