RIP: Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton 1950-2010

As I’m sure most of you know, Good-Music-Wouldn’t-Be-Where-It-Is-Today-Without-Him legend Alex Chilton passed away yesterday from a heart attack, age 59. I admit I’m not much of a Big Star fan, though I do own two of their three seminal albums and one of the reunion outings from a few years back, and I certainly recognize his/their worth and importance even if I have to be in the mood for the music. But today as I spun my two-for-one disc of #1 Record and Radio City, I realized it’s sometimes hard to justify the necessity or importance of an artist in the grand scheme of things. Would we have gotten to punk without the Stooges, to Minor Threat without the Sex Pistols, to Creed without Nirvana? Possibly, though perhaps not in the same way with the same result. Influence is an interesting deal…it’s much more than the millions of records sold or dollars made, how many times you’ve been on the cover of Rolling Stone, whether or not you can or ever could sell out an arena. A lot of that stuff is a flash in the pan, part of the fickle nature of the media and the public and more often than not we simply get watered down copycats of those artists clogging up the airwaves more than anything else. I think influence trickles in slowly, takes its time, a few people here and there in various parts of the country/world who when they come together realize they’ve got something secret and special in common and create something new as a result. And while oftentimes the end product is bigger and grander, at least from a visible/commercial standpoint, it in no way diminishes the value of the common source that helped create it. This is the case with Big Star and, to a lesser extent, Alex Chilton as a solo artist. Big Star, among others, basically created the power pop genre of rock music, the bridge from the classic rock of the Beatles and the Kinks, etc that led to artists like REM, Teenage Fanclub, the dB’s and, of course, the Replacements – with Paul Westerberg’s ode to his idol, the blatantly titled Alex Chilton, summing up nicely in both music and lyric everything that the man, his band and his music meant to so many people. Unfortunately Chilton’s most well known song today is the Cheap Trick covered In the Street as the theme song for That 70’s Show, which is fine as Robin and the boys, who I assume were influenced by Big Star, do it justice with a loose-feeling and reverent performance. But the money version, the one you need to hear, is from 1972’s #1 Record, along with about three dozen other songs. Like so many obscure but important artists before him, Alex Chilton is one whose influence is certainly traceable and yet as equally incalculable. Music would not be the same without him and while without him we'd have never known the difference, I'm glad that difference was made. So rest in peace Alex, you’re leaving too soon but you’ve certainly earned your rest.

Check out a few tunes here.

Bands I Should Have Been In… Volume 1

One of the first to crest the retro (new) wave of the early 00s, Interpol borrowed heavily (and obviously) from many post punk superstars like Joy Division, Echo & the Bunnymen and The Chamelons (the latter of which is just flat out awesome ‘cos those boys get no respect). Heavy without being harsh, deep without being bassy, their melodic, two-guitar attack and crypto-emotive vocals hit a mainer that shot straight to my heart and made me lament the fact that I couldn’t find three more like-minded individuals to form a group with (though granted I didn’t look very hard). Their debut, Turn On the Bright Lights, spun my CD player so many times I could just show the volume knob the case and the speakers would automatically start up the opening track without me inserting the disc. Had I the alibi and wherewithal, I’d have mickied the bassist during their second show, dumped him behind the drum risers and slipped into his position without missing a note. Say hello to the angels indeed, bucko!

Your days were numbered, buddy...

Obstacle 1

Say Hello to the Angels

Evil

A Time to Be Small

Continuous Transitions...

It’s a pretty safe statement that REM has always been a band in transition. While they certainly do have a “classic REM sound,” that sound can be stretched and pulled into so many different directions that albums like Murmur, Fables of the Reconstruction and Document can be immediately REM and yet absolutely and only of themselves. If there were a “formula” it would simply be their “basic” guitar-bass-drums-vocals approach to music, and their ability to write fantastic pop songs from a unique and intriguing vantage point. This was certainly the case with their IRS years, albums one through five. Yet I find it interesting that when they went directly to a major label, their current home of Warner Bros, for Green, that they decided to start mixing things up a bit, swapping instruments, adding instruments (mandolin, accordion), trying their hand at a more sparse and minimalist sound on a certain tracks, as well as focusing more on possible radio airplay (everybody stand in the place where you...ugh). And yet there were enough jangle anthems and low E guitar licks to still keep Green within the same mindset if not completely the same feel as say a Reckoning or a Life’s Rich Pageant. It wasn’t until their second Warner Bros outing, Out of Time, that REM really began to stretch out, searching for a connection in every direction possible, from western twang (Country Feedback), to bubblegum pop (Near Wild Heaven), to lo-fi balladry (Low), to rap collaborations (Radio Song), to top 40 (Shiny Happy People) and even out of nowhere, borderline experimentation (Belong). The result is a very mixed bag that misses as often as it hits, though you have to give the boys full points for bravery. And it’s not that any of these songs are really bad (ok, Belong totally stinks), some of them are brilliant (Country Feedback), but this scattershot approach makes Out of Time an album that is wholly inconsistent not only in style, but in mood and atmosphere – something they’d been able to create with every album previous, developing a personality so apparent that after three or four listens you can literally pick up the album, look at the cover and feel the music. I’m not being cheesy, I’m dead serious. But when I pick up Out of Time I feel like a schizophrenic, I feel no connection, I feel nervous, and so I put it back down, reaching for any other album (besides Monster). This record is at its best when the band is doing what, to me, seems natural – plugging in their instruments and playing. This is most evident in the “classic REM” sounding Texarkana and Me in Honey, not to mention Losing My Religion, which, though radio slick and slightly over the top, is at heart a true and fantastic REM song. What Out of Time did for REM was completely open them up to a wider audience, catapulting (yes, I get it) them from college playlist darlings to near household names, and from there they were capable of going just about anywhere they wanted…and they did – and pretty much lost that “classic REM sound” in the bargain.


Shiny happy it up, Stipe...

Further Transitions...

I used to have a coworker named Tim who said when he was in high school working at a record store they would always throw Tom Waits in the CD player (or likely on the record player, Tim was pretty old) whenever they wanted to run people out of the store at closing time (yes, reference intended). That always makes me laugh. It’s true that Tom is an acquired taste all the way back to his third album when he truly began to shed his piano balladeer sentiments and started spewing his tales of hookers and hustlers in a jazz scat style that soon had him adapting his already gravelly voice to a Louis Armstrong gargling battery acid growl. But that change seemed natural and ever imminent. The real gearshift in his artistic direction came about with 1980’s Heartattack and Vine, a heavier, full band effort and about as close as he’s ever come to making a “straightforward” rock album. Playing with time signatures and rhythms, he continues to sing about the life and times of the down and out and maintains much of the jazzy-bluesy roots of previous outings, and yet this album is basically the foundation where he would build and develop the sonic-experimental sounds that gave us one of a kind classics like Swordfishtrombones, Bone Machine and Mule Variations. Further still, four of the nine songs are piano-with-strings ballads and some of the most tender and sentimental of his career, rivaling even the likes of debut heartbreakers like Ol’ 55, Martha and Grapefruit Moon. The glorious thing about this album, and Waits in general, is his ability to find a silver lining in every gutter dog situation, the beauty of his music, which truly exists beneath the grit and the grrr, making even the most sordid of lives seem charming, even ideal. Growl on.

Check out: Heartattack and Vine, Jersey Girl, Ruby's Arms

More transitions...

I am not a Beatles fan.

And because of this I never feel right talking about a Beatles album even though I own them all and listen to several of them on a regular basis. So it goes. But while we’re talking about transitions this week, we may as well throw possibly the most famous band of rock n roll in the mix as well. In my opinion the big Beatles transition album is not one record but two, which is to say the back to back, one-two punch action of Rubber Soul and Revolver. In my mind this is the Beatles’ “mid period,” between the fun, straightforward but sometimes silly pop n roll of their early days, and the studio heavy, anything goes, often overindulgence of their later career, that not only kept them in the charts, but put them on the map as a) a pinnacle for their peers to reach for but never attain (sorry B-Wilson) and b) solidified them with a ginormous golden star in the annuls of rock history for like…ever. Whatever. (I am not a Beatles fan.) But while they were still touring and playing out, that is to say still a band, and not just a collection of musicians sitting around making noise, they put out the two ambitious, groundbreaking, yet highly accessible albums mentioned above. In a word, they started to take their songwriting more seriously, shedding a lot of the la-la love you do-wah-ditty silliness that had the young girls screaming and crying to beat the band (I mean literally, the fans were so loud the boys couldn’t even hear themselves onstage) and replacing it with a deeper, more mature, more moving sentiment akin to realizing the difference between school boy crush and adult love (or the loss there of). Plus, they became more introspective on other subjects such as isolation, loneliness and various forms of social prejudice. Seriously, I’ve got two words for you: Eleanor Rigby. That one right there is a barn hanger. Many fans hold one or both of these albums as among the best, if not the best, that the Beatles had to offer, when they were still accessibly pop-tastic and grounded enough in their subject matter for folks to identify with what they were saying, before they left the planet for strawberry fields and penny lanes. (I am not a Beatles fan.) And even though these two albums aren’t usually my first choice when in a Beatles mood, what I enjoy about them is that they’re still very much rock n roll…more sophisticated than Please, Please Me but with the same energy, less pretentious than Sgt. Peppers but equally as inspired.