The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing

Jim White: THE ORIGINAL HICK-HOPPER

If you are far away from your loved ones, under that exquisite black velvet night that is otherwise going to waste, you need to believe that somebody will thinktoplayasongofJanis’sallthewaythrough.YouwantsomeDJtoreleaseher sand-papery, slide-rule purr once more into the general traffic of radio dustmotes . Because you need to believe some girl who doesn’t yet know fear will lie down for the first time with a boy who doesn’t yet know mistrust, and they will teach each other the best things about themselves—You know you got it, chile, if it makes you feel good. And it won’t matter if the boy and the girl can hear Janis’s voice or not. It’s out there, and it’s irrevocable. BOOK OF GREAT MUSIC WRITING 93 1SMIRNOFF_pages.qxd 8/27/08 10:43 AM Page 93 Chris Bell THE LEGACY OF BIG STAR’S “OTHER GENIUS” by John Jeremiah Sullivan One thing you do not find much of in It Came From Memphis, Robert Gordon’s history of the deeply, richly twisted cultural scene that occupied that city from roughly1950–75,istragedy.(Withinthesceneitself,thatis;outsideofit,thewhole periodcouldlookprettytragic.)There’sawfulness:peoplerushingheadlonginto bad ends, talent going unrecognized, that sort of thing. But overall, the sense Gordongivesofthetimeandplaceisoneofantic,attimesfrustrated,exuberance. The freaks were out, day and night, and they found one another. One result was rock & roll. Another was professional wrestling. The story of Christopher Bell, which Gordon includes, is an exception, a tragedy, though in other ways it remains quintessential: He was a rich white kid fromanaffluentMemphisneighborhood,whosewell-greasedpaththroughconventional society got ambushed by rock in high school, he formed the requisite coverbands(theawesomelynamedChristmasFuturewasone),playingnotroots musicperse,butthe“new”stuff:Hendrix,BritishInvasion.Eventuallyheangled his way into Ardent Studios, where he became an apprentice engineer, taking actual morning lessons (8:00 A.M. sharp, drunk or sober) from the studio’s founder,JohnFry.AtArdenthemet,orwasreintroducedto,AlexChilton.They’d known each other in high school, but since then Chilton had become marginally successfulastheleadsingeroftheBoxTops(“Givemeaticketforanaer-o-plane ...”).WhenChiltongrewtiredoffame,heknockedaroundGreenwichVillageas a desultory folkie, then came home, not really knowing what to do with himself. He and Bell reconnected. They tried out new tunes on each other. Chilton was 94 1SMIRNOFF_pages.qxd 8/27/08 10:43 AM Page 94 impressed enough that he tried to drag Bell back to New York with him. The idea was to play as a duo, but Bell didn’t want to leave Memphis. So Chilton stayed. Theresult,withAndyHummelonbassandJodyStephensondrums,wasBig Star. And the less said about Big Star here the better, since Chris Bell’s nearanonymity has much to do with his status as the “other genius” in that much written-about,muchemulatedband.SufficeittosaythatBigStarinventedpower pop,looselydefinedasunapologeticallyprettyandsophisticatedmelodies,with prominent harmony, played loudly and, at times, with an edge that approaches punk.(Didn’ttheBeatlesdothis?youask.Yes.Butpopfanslivebyrazor-thinand barely defensible categories, and this is one.) Big Star made three records, each of which has multiple all-but-perfect songs on it. The third album, most often called just Third, is the masterpiece. It’s a huge, dark, haunted house of a record, everysongaroom,andstylisticallynoonesongseemstohaveanythingtodowith any other. But Chris Bell had nothing to do with Third. It is an Alex Chilton project in all but name. Bell’s presence fades from Big Star neatly, album by album. On the first, #1 Record, he was the dominant songwriter, sang half the lead vocals, and coengineered .Onthesecond,RadioCity,hecontributedonlytothesongwriting.That’s sayingquitealot,inthiscase,sincewehaveitonAndyHummel’sauthoritythatBell was the principal writer on “Back of a Car,” a song that Rob Gieringer, in Judith Beeman’s excellent, short-lived Big Star ’zine (also calledBack of a Car), describes simplyandwithoutexaggerationas“oneofthebestpopsongseverwritten.”Bythe timethethirdalbumcametoberecorded,Bellwasnolongeramemberoftheband, andseemseventohavebecomeestrangedfromtheband’ssocialcircle. What happened was, in its particulars, a rock & roll cliché. Bell couldn’t understand why Big Star wasn’t famous. They had made a first-rate record, he believed (correctly, as the last thirty years have shown). What could possibly be the problem? The critics liked it, sure, but Bell wanted the screaming crowds at the airport. He needed to feel reciprocation from the world. Chilton had seen all that already, some version of it, and knew what it was worth—or knew, at least, that it couldn’t be counted on. But the career defeats and the audience indifference were more than Bell’s fragile psyche could bear. Making things worse was the tendency of the media to focus on Chilton, when they chose to pay attention to Big Star at all. At...