What a nasty one-two punch for Memphis: first Jim Dickinson, then—seven months later—Alex Chilton.
Alex Chilton, December 28, 1950-March 17, 2010
Big Star, “Thirteen” (1972)
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Big Star, “September Gurls” (1974)
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Alex Chilton, “Bangkok” (1978)
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The Replacements, “Alex Chilton” (1987)
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Alex Chilton, “There Will Never Be Another You” (1985?)
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lagniappe
Alex Chilton, the pop hitmaker, cult icon and Memphis rock iconoclast best known as a member of 1960s pop-soul act the Box Tops and the 1970s power-pop act Big Star, died Wednesday at a hospital in New Orleans.
The singer, songwriter and guitarist was 59.
“I’m crushed. We’re all just crushed,” said John Fry, owner of Memphis’ Ardent Studios and a longtime friend of Chilton’s. “This sudden death experience is never something that you’re prepared for. And yet it occurs.”
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The Memphis-born Chilton rose to prominence at age 16 when his gruff vocals powered the massive Box Tops hit “The Letter,” as well as “Cry Like a Baby” and “Neon Rainbow.”
After the Box Tops broke up in 1970, Chilton had a brief solo run in New York before returning to Memphis. He soon joined forces with a group of Anglo-pop-obsessed musicians — fellow songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens — to form Big Star.
The group became the flagship act for Ardent’s Stax-distributed label. Big Star’s 1972 debut album, #1 Record, met with critical acclaim but poor sales.
The group briefly disbanded, but reunited without Bell to record the album Radio City. Released in 1974, the second album suffered a similar fate, plagued by Stax’s distribution woes.
The group made one more album, Third/Sister Lovers, with just Chilton and Stephens — and it, too, was a minor masterpiece. Darker and more complex than the band’s previous pop-oriented material, it remained unreleased for several years.
In 2003, Rolling Stone magazine named all three Big Star albums to its list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.
“It’s a fork in the road that a lot of different bands stemmed from,” said Jeff Powell, a respected local producer who worked on some of Chilton’s records. “If you’re drawing a family tree of American music, they’re definitely a branch.”
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“When some people pass, you say it was the end of an era. In this case, it’s really true,” said Van Duren, a fellow Memphis musician who knew Chilton for decades. “It puts an end to the Big Star thing, and that’s a very sad thing.”—Jody Callahan, Bob Mehr, Memphis Commericial Appeal (3/17/10)
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A day after the death of Memphis music legend Alex Chilton, shock and sadness slowly gave way to fond remembrance by friends, fans and fellow musicians.
Over the course of a remarkably varied 40-plus-year career with the Box Tops, Big Star and as a solo artist, Chilton was a creative chameleon. A teen pop hitmaker, a reluctant cult hero, a champion of Southern roots music, a visionary producer, a punk-rock provocateur and a much underrated guitarist, Chilton had carved his place as one of the most singular figures — both as an artist and as a personality — that Memphis music has ever produced.
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The news of Chilton’s death sent shockwaves through the annual South by Southwest music conference in Austin, Texas. The massive industry gathering kicked off Wednesday night just as word of his passing began to spread.
Chilton had been scheduled to perform with Big Star on Saturday night, part of a headlining set at Antone’s nightclub, and the group was also set to be the subject of a historical panel earlier in the day.
After consulting with Chilton’s wife and festival organizers, surviving Big Star members Jody Stephens, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow confirmed that the panel and performance would go on as scheduled, effectively serving as memorials for Chilton.
“It felt like we had to pay tribute in some form,” said Auer. “In a strange way, it’s amazing that it happened around something like South by Southwest. So many people there are hyper-aware of Chilton and understand what he means musically, so it seems like the perfect place to do something like this.”
The Saturday night Big Star set is shaping up to be an all-star tribute. Though the lineup is still coming together, a variety of artists including X’s John Doe, R.E.M.’s Mike Mills, indie-folk singer M. Ward, the dB’s Chris Stamey, Green on Red veteran Chuck Prophet and Chilton’s longtime New Orleans collaborators Doug Garrison and René Coman are among those expected to appear.
For Coman, the sheer breadth of Chilton’s artistry and the scope of his career remain the true measure of the man. “Alex had such a long career, and all kinds of different stages to it.” said Coman. “The people that stay in it for a really long time and still enjoy it, it seems like they wind up finding different things to keep them interested as the years go by.
If it wasn’t for the music, I don’t know what I’d do.
Indeep, “Last Night A DJ Saved My Life” (1982)
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lagniappe
mail
Cool. Thanks! — Bill
(email from Bill Ryan, Director of the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble, in response to a message letting him know that his ensemble was featured here yesterday; their 2007 recording of this piece was lauded by the New York Times as one of the notable classical CDs of the year and by WNYC’s John Schaefer as one of the five best classical CDs of the decade)
Excerpt, recording (Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble)
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Part 3
Excerpt (ending), live, Tokyo, 2008
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I first encountered Steve Reich’s music in 1971, while in college and living for a few months in New York. At a concert at New York University, I heard Reich and his ensemble perform his then-new piece “Drumming.” Stunning, mesmerizing, it was unlike anything my 19-year-old ears had ever heard.
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The other day, I watched as Steve Reich walked away from Carnegie Hall, where celebrations of his seventieth birthday were under way, and out into his native city. Trim and brisk, he darted into West Fifty-seventh Street, fell back before oncoming traffic, bopped impatiently in place, then darted forth again. He soon disappeared into the mass of people, his signature black cap floating above the crowd. Perhaps I should have lamented the fact that one of the greatest living composers was moving around New York unnoticed, but lamentation is not a Reichian state of mind, and I thought instead about how his work has blended into the cultural landscape, its repeating patterns and chiming timbres detectable all over modern music. Brian Eno, David Bowie, David Byrne, and a thousand d.j.s have paid him heed. On Fifty-seventh Street, Reich-inflected sounds may have been coursing through the headphones of a few oblivious passersby.
Three decades ago, New York’s leading institutions would have nothing to do with Reich. A riot broke out when Michael Tilson Thomas presented “Four Organs” at Carnegie in 1973: one woman tried to stop the concert by banging on the edge of the stage with her shoe. Now uptown is lionizing the longtime renegade.
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Reich changed music, and he also changed how music relates to society. In the face of early incomprehension, he took a do-it-yourself approach to getting his work before the public. Nonclassical musicians were among his models: he saw John Coltrane some fifty times, and marvelled at how the great man would unleash mind-bending sounds, pack up his sax, and disappear into the night. With his namesake ensemble, Reich performed in galleries, clubs, and wherever else he felt welcome. The effects of this paradigm shift can be seen on any day of the week in New York, as composer-led ensembles proliferate.
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The Reich ensemble retains most of its original members, and they remain an awesome force, even as shaggy hairdos have given way to dignified shocks of white. At Zankel Hall, they played Part I of “Drumming,” a phase-shifting tour de force in which bongos are struck with sticks. I was curious to see how they would compare with two sharp young ensembles who had performed the same stretch of music in recent weeks—So Percussion, at Symphony Space, and four Juilliard percussionists, at Carnegie. The youngsters drummed with effortless grace, as if the score were written into their genetic code. But the veterans more than held their own, bringing to bear a kind of disciplined wildness, in the spirit of the Ghanaian drummers with whom Reich studied before he wrote the piece. The energy that blazed up at climactic moments could have powered the hall in a blackout.
The Loose Marbles is a sort of Amalgamated Jazz Corporation that creates subsidiaries around the city, to maximize tips and minimize boredom. The fifteen musicians play clarinet, trumpet, banjo, washboard, accordion, trombone, guitars, sousaphone, standup bass, and guitars, but you’re likely to see only seven or eight performers at any given gig. And since you rarely see the same configuration of instruments twice in a row, you rarely hear the same kind of jazz. If Patrick McPeck is there with the accordion, you’ll hear the Marbles’ repertoire of spooky, minor-keyed, Gypsy-influenced songs. If Alynda Segarra is there, with her banjo or washboard, and Jason Jurzek is on string bass instead of tuba, they’ll be playing songs that sound as if they were first performed in a hobo jungle during the Hoover Administration. In Washington Square, in New York, they split into two groups, one anchored by the tuba and the other anchored by the bass, and they play on opposite sides of the park. Halfway through the day, they’ll mix up the configurations to give both the musicians and the crowd a change of pace. At the end of the day, they pool all the tips and divide them equally. I’ve seen days here in New Orleans where they have a stack of bills that’s so thick it can’t be held in one hand, and that contains a lot of portraits of Hamilton and Jackson.
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The Loose Marbles look like street urchins, and at least a few of them are. The goat-bearded guitar and tuba player, Barnabus Jones; Ruth’s boy, Kiowa Wells; and the banjo and washboard player Alynda all come from a subculture of rail-riding, outdoor-living hobos that was beautifully documented a couple of years ago by the photographer James Heil in Time. . . . But the trumpeter Ben Polcer is a University of Michigan music-school graduate, and the clarinetist Mike Magro, from suburban Philadelphia, is a virtuoso who can hold forth at length about the rare and antiquated Albert fingering of his clarinet.
In addition to their song selection and their remarkably tight and vibrant musicianship, two things particularly excite me about the Loose Marbles. One is how carefully thought out their act is; their inter-war, Mitteleuropean flavor is somehow more than accidental and less than shtick. The other is how much, and how obviously, they all love each other.
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I asked Ben why he and his friends aren’t playing rock and roll like proper twenty-somethings. What is the attraction, I wanted to know, of music his grandparents listened to?
“I’ve played in a lot of rock bands,” he said. “I like rock and roll. We all like rock and roll. But jazz is special. To play it well, you really have to listen to each other.”—Dan Baum
With John Coltrane (saxophone), Wynton Kelly (piano), Paul Chambers (bass), Jimmy Cobb (drums), Gil Evans Orchestra; live (TV Broadcast), 1959
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Take 2
With Wayne Shorter (saxophone), Herbie Hancock (piano), Ron Carter (bass), Tony Williams (drums); live (TV broadcast), 1964
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lagniappe
[Many admirers of Kind of Blue] are forced to reach back before the modern era to find its measure. Drummer Elvin Jones hears the same timeless sublimity and depth of feeling ‘in some of the movements of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or when I hear Pablo Casals play unaccompanied cello.’ ‘It’s like listening to Tosca, says pianist/singer Shirley Horn. ‘ You know, you always cry, or at least I do.’
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Quincy Jones: ‘That will always be my music, man. I play Kind of Blue every day—it’s my orange juice. It still sounds like it was made yesterday.’
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Chick Corea: ‘It’s one thing to just play a tune, or play a program of music, but it’s another thing to practically create a new language of music, which is what Kind of Blue did.’
—Ashley Kahn, Kind of Blue: The Making of the Miles Davis Masterpiece (2000)
Today at 3 p.m., at a church on Chicago’s south side (First Church of Deliverance, 4301 S. Wabash), hundreds of gospel music lovers (including me) will gather to celebrate the birthday of this group’s lead singer—it’s her 84th.
Chicago, gospel’s Mecca and Vatican, remains the one city where traditional singers comprise a community, and retain a small but steady audience.—Anthony Heilbut, The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times (6th ed. 2002)
Both Chicago blues artists. Both guitar players. Both influenced by other kinds of music.
Musical personalities? They could hardly be more different.
Buddy Guy, “Let Me Love You Baby,” live
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Fenton Robinson, “Somebody Loan Me A Dime,” live, 1977
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Back in the 1970s, when I was at Alligator Records, I had the pleasure of working with Fenton, co-producing his album I Hear Some Blues Downstairs (a Grammy nominee). He didn’t fit the stereotype of a bluesman. Gentle, soft-spoken, serious, introspective: he was all these things. He died in 1997.
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