When I Come Home So Cold at Night: Big Star at SXSW 2010
No matter how meticulously I planned for the upcoming SXSW music festival, I couldn't guess what it would be like returning for the first time to the city I used to call home. With an overwhelming sense of regret for having left Austin (for Little Rock, AR) and, conversely, for having stayed as long as I did, I couldn't imagine a more appropriate or grander finale than seeing Big Star live in concert, the band that wrote the soundtrack to youthful ambivalence and dislocation.
In 1971 Alex Chilton, the once-teen-singer for The Box Tops, returned to his hometown of Memphis and partnered with songwriter Chris Bell to form Big Star. With their sparkling harmonies, atmospheric guitar tones, and confessional power pop, Big Star was the sound of America with too much treble, as music journalist Bob Mehr describes them. The facetiously titled albums #1 RECORD and RADIO CITY received critical accolades but failed to achieve commercial success due to their record labels—Stax's, then Columbia's—failure to promote and distribute them.
Almost 40 years after the record industry's criminal neglect of the band, why was Big Star closing out SXSW, an event that pooled hopeful bands and discriminating business scouts together in a glad-handing parade of false expectations? Was it another example of Chilton's searing sense of humor? Or was it, following the release of Rhino's Big Star box set, a final shot at commercial viability? Though the irony wouldn't have been lost on Alex Chilton, he never got to deliver the punch line. At the age of 59, his heart finally gave out.
While driving up on Austin's DayGlo skyline, "Alex Chilton" by The Replacements played on a local station, confirming the news I'd received just hours earlier of Chilton's death. "If he died in Memphis then that'd be cool," sings Paul Westerberg in his anthemic hero salute, which sounds every bit as dewey-eyed as "Thirteen" and as hot-blooded as "Feel." Alex Chilton inspires something between iconoclasm and gushing fandom, an effect the song's namesake had on many. The circulation of bootlegged copies of Big Star's three albums won them a small but devoted following. By the ’80s the fan base had expanded and many Big Star aficionados were inspired to form their own bands including REM, the dBs, and Teenage Fanclub.
SXSW organizers had recruited Alex Chilton and friends to discuss Big Star's late-career and enduring relevance in an event titled "I Never Travel Far Without a Little Big Star" after a line in The Replacements' homage. Though these plans were upset by tragedy, Chilton's death underscored questions of the band's legacy.
Over the next few days, rumors and conjecture about the Big Star showcase circulated the festival. No one could possibly fill the shoes of Alex Chilton, and yet the need to celebrate the life and music of Big Star's iconic frontman had never seemed more pressing. In the spirit of Chilton's artistic doggedness, family and friends decided that the show would go on. With the help of Chilton's many talented devotees, the concert was reworked into a tribute show, and the panel discussion took an elegiac turn.
The festival's director even dedicated SXSW 2010 to the memory of Alex Chilton. Expecting a big turnout, I arrived at the Convention Center early and parked myself on the front row. The hollow conference room steadily filled with the chatter of expectant photographers, journalists and musicians, all facing the spotlighted stage. I overheard conversation bits about Ray Davies' wrenching version of "Til the End of the Day" dedicated to Alex, about Jeff Tweedy being a possible guest vocalist and about the need to stand in line at least six hours in advance to get into the venue. But the crowd grew silent as the panelists filed into their seats.
Bob Mehr, a writer for the MEMPHIS COMMERCIAL APPEAL, took center stage as the moderator and introduced the other speakers. To his right sat the original members of Big Star—Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel—and Chilton's longtime friend and collaborator, Chris Stamey. To his left sat members of The Posies and Big Star 2.0—Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow—as well as power pop veteran Tommy Keene. Making an appearance via Skype video chat, Ardent producer John Fry traded stories with the other panelists, lightening the mood with memories of the late idiosyncratic artist. Stephens told of an epic standoff between the prickly Chilton and Charles Manson over a gallon of milk while partying at Dennis Wilson's house, to which Mehr quipped, "Charles Manson finally met his match." Hummel recalled how Chilton after penning "Daisy Glaze" tagged the song by George Friedrich Chilton in the blessed key of America. Stephens also told of Chilton's caustic wit, remembering the time he asked Chilton who had just collected the band's paltry gig fee if the money was all there, to which Chilton replied, "Yeah just barely."
After paying tribute to Chilton's uncanny personality and the humor he wore like armor, the conversation inevitably turned to his fraught career as a recording artist. John Fry described his frustration at Columbia's refusal to promote SISTER LOVERS, which record executives treated as if it were radioactive. Chris Stamey remembers how after hearing #1 RECORD, he thought Big Star was going to blow up but couldn't find a vendor anywhere that stocked their records. Stamey explained that Alex was incapable of telling a lie, a trait that made him an outlier in the image-for-sale industry. But no one handled the complexities of Chilton's legacy better than Tav Falco, a friend, and collaborator in Panther Burns. Reading from a letter sent by Falco, Bob Mehr offered these closing thoughts: "Was he resentful because he had given so much and had received less than the key to the temple of abiding good fortune and fame immemorial? Was he content in his rickety eighteenth-century cottage on the edge of the French Quarter surrounded by his guitars and aquatints and cognoscenti of musicians who celebrated him as we do now? The answers mean little and the questions even less. What matters is that those whom he touched were touched immutably."
In spite of the windchill and the six-hour wait, I decided to camp out at Antone's until the show's start. But my pining, planning, and unguarded expectations were served thusly: Due to projections of a high turnout, SXSW decided at the last minute to close off the Big Star show to all but the elite badge-holders. Being turned away after having come so close, I felt what many of the 1800 bands at the festival were probably feeling that Saturday night, the disappointment of an unceremonious end. I wandered the streets trying to hatch other plans and find a bottle of cheer, only later deciding to claim some slab within earshot of the Big Star tribute. I strained to make out the muffled voices and submarine melodies but could discern little more than the crowd's uncontained approval.
About halfway through the set, the bouncer I'd been chatting up finally took pity on me and let me in just in time to see Andy Hummel come out of retirement to perform "Way out West," his ballad of long-distance pining. Mike Mills' voice rang out exultantly on "Jesus Christ" while Jon Doe's jangly version of Chilton's torch song "I'm in Love With a Girl" seethed with the inevitability of heartache. But the night belonged to Chuck Prophet's grit-and-bear-it delivery of "Thank You Friends," a song that might have been the tribute's theme. As the voices of fans and artists swelled together in the shimmering chorus "All the Ladies and Gentlemen who made this all so possible," Alex Chilton's music made us feel at home in our unrealized hopes, those abiding and those foregone.