If the legend of the great Memphis rock and roll quartet Big Star teaches us anything, it is that the cultural past is never as fully settled and sorted as we like to think. It remains open for business. Our storytelling impulse trains us to regard the winners (and losers) of history as inevitable and fated. But, on the ground, where this collaborative cultural process plays out, the past is continually changing and under negotiation: new evaluations and devaluations; the rising and falling stock of influence; the decentering of one demographic and the centering of others; old artifacts gaining new resonance under changing cultural conditions; and, where music is concerned, the maddening, ever-shifting, contrarian politics of cool.
As the current generation grapples more intimately than any before it with the implications of personal integrity vs. artistic merit and how this affects or should affect consumer choice, this too transforms the landscape and iconography of the past in real time. You can watch its skyline change under your eyes, though it might make you queasy if you carry around a Rushmore notion of how things go down. We used to need the NYU Critical Theory Department to explain all this to us. But now we have Big Star.
Everything about Big Star is counter, contrarian, unlikely, ironic, and hard to figure. Nothing is what, where, or when it seems. Nothing Can Hurt Me, the unusual documentary about their convoluted story, might as well be about Waldo or the invisible man—Big Star barely appears in it but for a scratchy phone interview with a somewhat disagreeable Alex Chilton and a handful of still shots.
Meanwhile, the great pop culture moment that finally brought Big Star’s genius to the attention of the masses—the use of their rocking song “In the Street” as the theme song for the popular 1998 sitcom That ‘70s Show—isn’t Big Star at all. It’s a rather ham-fisted cover of Big Star by the fabulously successful ‘70s band Cheap Trick (which, in a compounded irony, actually replaced a previous cover by a somewhat obscure musician named Todd Griffin). So…a fabricated television version of the 1970s uses, for its period ambiance, not one but two ‘90s forgeries of a genuine ‘70s song that virtually no one in the 1970s had ever heard? Welcome to the Big Star experience.
Ironically (a word you’ll be using a lot when telling the Big Star story), the story of the four lads from Memphis both supports and debunks the meritocratic myth of the cream reliably rising to the top. In the arts, it has always been about the handling, the custody, and the advocacy that worthy work receives along the way. The lack of proper handling explains why Big Star’s eminently commercial, ready-for-prime-time, and—let’s be honest—utterly irresistible guitar pop was overlooked in its own time, which is to say in an illumined window running from about 1971 to 1974, within which frame three great records were recorded and two released.
Yes, they were on the wrong label for their purposes (Stax, the legendary Memphis soul factory). They didn’t tour. Personal issues—always those pesky personal issues—derailed the fruitful relationship of their two talented guitarists/singers. The big star of Big Star—Alex Chilton—was, if not attention-averse, then at the very least attention-weird. And in some ways, their music might have been out of step with the times, as what would become known a decade later as classic rock was then coming into focus and turning us away from the bright and brainy tunefulness of bands like the Kinks, the Zombies, and Beatles, from whom Big Star took their lead. I know I am always picking on Foghat, but, seriously, Foghat? Over Big Star? I guess we embraced Brits imitating American bluesmen more readily than some clever American kids imitating British Invasion pop.
So they had a lot conspiring against them. Still, If you’ve read this far, there is a very good chance you know all three of those Big Star records like the back of your hand. Why? How?
Given a mere scrap of sunlight and a drop of rain to nurture it, and the narrowest of pathways to the surface, the cream of genius rose through the cracks in the pavement of the past. I would be fired for that metaphor if I had a job. But that is what happened. Kind of inexplicably, Paul Westerberg wrote a song called “Alex Chilton” and some kids got curious. Meanwhile, a few hipper-than-thou record store geeks who valued “the find” and a few young, non-mainstream artists who suddenly found themselves with a platform in the “college rock” milieu of the early ‘80s started dropping the name and singing the praises of Big Star. People heard them, and listened. The records became widely available for the first time. The music did the rest.
Two of the most important of those young proselytizing artists were the (vastly underappreciated) architect of southern jangle pop, Chris Stamey of The dBs, and Mike Mills, bassist of megastars REM. Both gentlemen, as we will soon see, remain tireless custodians of the music of Big Star.
The Big Star story has a fair bit of tragedy in it, and it could well be told with more than a little rancor and bitterness—lives lost, careers misspent, revenues unrealized. But it isn’t, and here’s why: everybody involved takes their cue from the equanimity, the open-hearted positivity, and the grace of drummer Jody Stephens, the sole surviving original member and the anchor of every subsequent iteration of the band. The lone remaining voice of the canonical Big Star lineup regards it as nothing less than a miracle and a blessing that this music has survived and prospered. Talk to him for a minute and you will, too.
So perhaps the time has come to define what and who Big Star was and is. For our purposes it is a story with three chapters. Guitarists and principal songwriters Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens (both contributing writers as well) are the star-crossed Big Star of myth. They were done by ’74. The last of their three records, the deeply disturbed and beautiful Third, snuck out in ’78, the same year that the talented and troubled Chris Bell, who had left after the first record, died in a car accident.
It was not opportunism that brought Big Star back together to reap some of what they sowed in 1993. (Alex Chilton seemed to be the kind who ran from opportunity.) It was some college kids in Columbia, Missouri. Jeff Breeze and Mike Mulvihill, two KCOU staffers, engineered the first Big Star reunion. “Amazingly,” Jody Stephens notes, “they had gotten Alex’s phone number.” At Stephens’ suggestion, Mulvihill recruited Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow, the principal songwriters of the excellent Seattle guitar pop band the Posies and two young Big Star devotees, to round out the lineup. “Gary Gersh had played me the Posies’ covers of [the Big Star classic] ‘Feel’ and [Chris Bell’s] ‘I am the Cosmos’,” says Stephens, “and they were dead-on in spirit, sound, and vocal harmonies.”
Thus began nearly 17 years of occasional touring—a mere five shows a year or so on average, Stephens estimates—as well as a live album (of that first Columbia show) and one studio record with the Mark II lineup. That phase came to a crashing halt, and simultaneously the next phase commenced, when Alex Chilton died suddenly in 2010. Original bassist Andy Hummel, long retired from the music business, passed away only months later.
“We were supposed to play South by Southwest together in 2010,” recalls Jon Auer, “and that turned into really more of a wake and celebration of life for Alex because two days before that show he had a heart attack while mowing his lawn, basically. He died in the car on the way to the hospital. We were left with either abandoning the gig or trying to forge ahead with the people who were there including Andy Hummel, who had showed up just to sit in. Everybody else was in the air, enroute, and I was the only one already there. Jody was inundated with a bajillion messages. It was left to me to corral and organize everybody, people like John Doe, M. Ward, The Watson Twins, Mike Mills. In retrospect, it was the right thing to do. What else would musicians do? How do we deal with most things? Grief? Loss? We deal with it through music. It is the joy in our lives and also the therapy. So the night became a great safe spot for a lot of people who were in shock.”
In a story characterized by irony after irony, Auer notes one final one regarding Chilton’s problematic relationship with the music of Big Star. “Alex was at a great place in his life. There seemed to be a real sense of contentment in him. Like, we could play Big Star songs on stage together and he would actually smile, instead of it being some kind of musical albatross hanging around his neck. His reasons for feeling that way are a whole other story. But our last show with Alex [in 2008] was one of the happiest times I have ever seen him have him on stage.”
Big Star, Chapter Three, was the brainchild of Chris Stamey. “Chris is a huge fan of Big Star Third, their difficult record, the dark, depressed part of the canon,” says Auer. “Chris had this brilliant concept to perform Big Star’s Third live but to do it with all the bells and whistles. He wanted to get string players and go back to the original arrangements. He presented it to Jody and Alex, then Alex passed away. And it was like, what do we do next? A lot of us thought that would be it. For myself, I was like, well, we wouldn’t want to sully the legacy. How far can you push something before it seems like you’ve gone past the point of it being valuable, jumping the shark?
“It turned into a revolving cast of characters including Mike Mills and Mitch Easter. We took it to Europe and Australia. I stood five feet away from Ray Davies who came on to sing ‘Till the End of the Day.’ If you were in Minneapolis, the Jayhawks were there. In Australia, the Hoodoo Gurus were part of it. It became a traveling roadshow of rotating musical characters who love this music, love this record. It was also a gargantuan undertaking, finding a string section in every city, etc. And everyone did it for the love of it, not that money has ever been a factor in Big Star. No one ever made any money off it, really.
“That went on until 2019. Then the pandemic hit. Then Jody had the idea of returning to a more stripped down format. He wanted it to be more like a band than a group backing an amalgamation of guests, which was wonderful but was always more recital-like, if you will, like a revue.” Thus was born the Big Star Quintet, a stable group of Big Star lifers including Stephens on drums; Auer, Stamey, and Wilco’s Pat Sansone on guitars; and either Mike Mills or Wilco’s John Stirratt (who will be on the Bearsville gigs) on bass. All the lads sing.
“The players who come to the quintet,” says Auer, “there’s nothing cookie cutter about it. We’re not overly reverential. We capture the spirit. You’ve never until now been able to see Big Star live with all the harmonies in place. It’s kind of CSNY-level. Jody is a music-first and friends-first kind of guy and that informs the spirit of the whole thing.”
“I loved doing those Big Star Third Live gigs with all the guests,” says Jody Stephens. “Chris Stamey would wrangle all 29, 30 folks together for a concert. And that just got to be impractical. So a five piece would be a lot more mobile and economical. And the appeal of a five-piece rock band was enormous for me. All of a sudden, we’re a lot more dependent upon each other, and we have more room to express ourselves and be heard in a way that is really true to the sonics of the records. It’s the interaction of the five us—the dependency, the bond—that we all love so much. We get off on it big time. And the audience feeds on that.”
“The heart and soul of Big Star,” says Stephens, “are really in those three records.” The three Big Star releases describe a counter-intuitive arc from immaculate order to glorious chaos. It begins with the ultra-polished debut, 1972’s #1 Record, the pristine sound and arrangements of which are often attributed to the studio-rat perfectionism of Chris Bell. With Bell gone from the scene, Radio City may be the quintessential Big Star record—loose but tight, spacious and roomy, fraying at the edges with more Exile-era Stonesy swagger, and perhaps Chilton’s overall strongest set of songs. Third, for its part, was deemed un-releasable in its own time, dark and weird to its core, but it has emerged as a cultural touchstone for the indie rock generation. It features Chilton’s most daring lyrics and some of his most fragile and exquisite melodies, the druggy, elliptical wobble of such late-emerging classics as “Holocaust,” “Kangaroo,” and “Big Black Car.”
“People have lived with this music for decades now,” says Stephens, “and some people are new to it, but they know about Chris Bell, and they know about Alex, and Andy Hummel and [producer and Ardent Studio founder] John Fry, and some even know about Richard Rosebrough who played drums on ‘What’s Going Ahn,’ and ‘Mod Lang, and ‘She’s a Mover’ on Radio City, and all those people are gone now. Visiting this music the way we do, it evokes all those feelings for those people being passed on, but we still have this music to cling to.”
I adore those Big Star records. And as I blurted over and over to Jon Auer on the phone, the Posies are a critically important band to me. The Stamey/Holsapple record Mavericks is, in my opinion, one the loveliest, most touching releases of the ‘90s. And Wilco—come on–perhaps the most important American band of the last 30 years. The beautiful thing is all this talent aligning under the love of Big Star and the love of Jody. This is not Michael Clarke’s Byrds. This is the original engine of Big Star joined by the artists who made the rediscovery happen, by songwriters of successive generations who were moved and shaped by this music that might never have been heard at all but for their collective love.
“Getting to do these things,” Stephens reflects, “aside from family, this is the highlight of my life.”
The Big Star Quintet featuring Jody Stephens, Jon Auer, Chris Stamey, Pat Sansone, and John Stirratt performs at the Bearsville Theater on Friday September 5, and Saturday September 6. For more information, visit bearsvilletheater.com.
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