(33 1/3)

www.continuumbooks.com

BY FRED MILLS

The Big Star story has been recounted in great detail over the years, most recently by British journalist Rob Jovanovic, whose 2005 biography Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop is a must-read, so it's not as if these characters are the same hazy figures they were back when I first discovered them. Amazingly, then, a new book ostensibly about the making of the second album takes the story to an entirely new level: practically from day one Chilton has resisted the overtures of journalists, consistently downplaying Big Star's overall importance both in the larger sense and how it relates to his particular musical vision. He's consistently been "not available for interviews" during Big Star's periodic revivals (for example, in 2005, when a reborn Big Star featuring Chilton, Stephens and two members of the Posies issued In Space, Stephens assumed virtually all the media-fielding duties), so writers have generally had to rely on the reflections of Chilton's friends, former band members and even other writers to cast an impression of the man.

But in Radio City the book - the latest installment in Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series on classic albums - author Bruce Eaton pulls a bonafide rabbit out of his hat, and Big Star devotees owe him an immense debt as a result. Not only does he get Chilton to go on record about the band, he coaxes in-depth commentary out of the notoriously elusive musician, who holds forth on everything from his childhood and experiences with the Box Tops to his relationship with Chris Bell (good, it turns out, and not adversarial as has often been reported) and detailed descriptions of Big Star recording sessions. Eaton, it should be said, was holding one card that all the other journalists who've picked away at the Chilton monolith didn't: based in upstate New York, Eaton, a musician himself, found himself, through a series of coincidences, playing in one of Chilton's early eighties bands, and although the alliance was short-lived, the relationship was friendly enough to allow the two to remain in occasional contact. When Eaton decided he wanted to do his book, he was able to tap that friendship, Chilton apparently trusting that Eaton's agenda was neither self-serving nor exploitative but rather a sincere desire to set the Big Star record straight. (Memo to fellow journalists: yes, despite all our protestations of doing what we do because we love the music, we can come across as self-serving and exploitative to musicians.)

The best titles in the 33 1/3 series tend to be making-of-the-album stories (sorry, but the ones that read like novels or fantasies or a protracted exercise in autobiography are rarely engaging), and when the author is fortunate enough to conduct interviews with the principals themselves, the books can become invaluable reference works. That's Eaton's Radio City, in spades. He frames his main narrative with a intro relating how he discovered the band and why he thinks it's noteworthy, and a closing section outlining how he wound up playing with Chilton (which itself is insightful as it provides glimpses into Chilton's mercurial personality and musical modus operandi).

But the bulk of this 144-page volume is given over to the events leading up to the formation of Big Star and those surrounding the first album, followed by a blow-by-blow breakdown of Radio City. In addition to Chilton, Eaton's respondents include Stephens, Hummel, Fry, Ardent engineer Richard Rosebrough and Ardent label boss John King, plus the late Chris Bell's brother David who pitches in on the pre-Radio City section, and they all supply incredibly detailed descriptions of who did what, when, where, and how. Even when memories get slightly fuzzy - for example, as it was the musicians' habit to record late into the night at Ardent, often without a producer or engineer on hand (the Big Star members all had keys to Ardent studio), specific session details sometimes didn't get transcribed - the reader still gets a vivid sense of what it must have been like to be part of the Ardent inner circle.

Fry's recollections tend to be the most reliable, summoning up specific notes on how he placed the mics on certain songs, how this particular take differed from that one, even how he approached mixing the album. Yet the three musicians are generally clear-headed in their reminiscences, and as noted above, Chilton supplies his share of invaluable anecdotes, even talking a little about the Radio City aftermath in 1974-75 and the Big Star Third sessions. (Countering another journalist-spawned misconception, Chilton states unequivocally, "[Stephens and I] never saw it as a Big Star record. That was a marketing decision when the record was sold in whatever year that was sold.") For his part, Eaton structures his book as a semi-oral history, interspersing sections of expository narrative as needed between blocks of quotes - many of them quite lengthy, such as nearly ten-page passage dictated by Chilton on his life prior to Big Star. Oral histories can be risky, but in this instance the editorial decision was sound; perhaps Eaton sensed that after all the telling and retelling of the Big Star saga, maybe it was finally time to let the men get it down in their own words, without journalistic filters.

Plus, one mark of any great music bio is that while you're reading it you want to listen to the artist or album in question. When you get to the Radio City song-by-song descriptions, I guarantee you'll be compelled to cue up the record and listen for the parts that Fry, Chilton, Stevens, Hummel and Rosebrough are describing. It's as close to a fly-on-the-wall experience as you're likely to get with Big Star.

Incidentally, Eaton has his own this-is-what-I-was-doing epiphany on Big Star that he relates. Coming across a used copy of Radio City in the bins of a Buffalo, NY, record store one afternoon in '76, he was struck by the William Eggleston lightbulb/room photo gracing the sleeve. "Curious, I picked up the album," writes Eaton. "The sturdy cardboard cover sheathed a nice thick slab of wax. Like a vintage Blue Note jazz LP, it felt like a record made by people who cared about the music and knew what they were doing." At home later that evening, Eaton put the album on while he sat down to write some letters:

"Song by song, it pulled me in until by the end of the first side I had stopped writing and was propped back in my chair with my feet on the desk, listening as the sun set behind the woods outside my window, feeling the June breeze blowing in through the window screen. I flipped the record over to Side Two, and by the time the needle reached the middle of ‘September Gurls,' five cuts in, I was riveted..."

Across the land, over the years, a similar scene would continue to repeat itself. So I ask you, dear readers: where were you when you first heard Big Star?