I remember the first time I saw Alex Chilton. I was in college in Atlanta, and I had met this sort-of-weird couple (they were probably “on the drugs”) through, I don’t recall exactly, some sort of common musical interests. I think I probably had a class in common with the guy.
Anyway, once they discovered I was Really Into Good Music – I don’t recall what artists I mentioned to seal the deal for them – they set about on their evangelizing task: to convert me to an appreciation of Alex Chilton.
I hadn’t ever heard anything by Big Star at that point — this was 1985 – but certainly I knew the Box Tops hit “The Letter.” My band of the time might have even played it; I don’t recall. I’ve certainly played it many times since then. I had read bits here and there about Big Star, and knew that some tastemakers appreciated them. But they were obscure: two albums, no hits, out of print.
In any event, this couple was mostly interested in showing me Alex’s particular brand of genius via an album called Like Flies on Sherbert (sic). Now, gentle reader, if you’re familiar with this particular slab of vinyl, you might understand that their approach was full of what we might call dubious wisdom. Like Flies on Sherbert is one of the most shambolic, dissolute, messy affairs ever committed to tape.
I have to admit I wasn’t impressed. I did hear a spark of some sort, but it was too sloppy for me. (I didn’t like the Replacements in those days, either. With age sometimes comes wisdom.) But luckily they didn’t give up. They next spun Chilton’s then-current release, an EP called Feudalist Tarts. Now this I liked. With a loose-limbed funk New Orleans feel, the six-song disc was full of delights. Not a powerful disc, the EP was really a subdued affair. And as I learned from the spare liner notes, it was recorded in a single day in a studio called Ardent in Memphis, Tennessee.
So I was mildly hooked, and these two characters knew it. Looking back it’s clear they had no motives beyond that of trying to turn on somebody to this particular artist. “He can’t like all those other acts and not know about Alex. He’s gotta hear this.”
So of course next was Big Star. The guy had vinyl copies of #1 Record and Radio City. (This was at the dawn of the CD era, and neither they, nor I, nor anyone I knew had a CD player). These albums were very rare, so they told me, so I couldn’t borrow them for long; just long enough to make cassette copies.
I did. And the experience of listening to those songs opened up a new world for me. Of course now it’s common to say that Big Star belongs up there on the list with Badfinger, the Raspberries and a select few others. I made a trip to a reliable used record store and was lucky to find new, still-shrinkwrapped copies of the first two Big Star LPs. They set me back $20 apiece – a lot of money for a record in 1985. But it was well worth the investment.
Not long after all this, Alex came to town for a concert. He and his sidemen — Rene Coman on bass, Doug Garrison (I think it was him) on drums; that was it. The trio set up onstage at the then-and-now-legendary 688 club, where I had seen Iggy Pop a few years earlier (with Glen Matlock on bass) and entertained the fairly-full-but-not-packed room.
The guy I knew warned me that Chilton was an erratic live performer, that he could be prickly and distant onstage, that you really didn’t know what you were going to get from him, ever. But he and the band were great. When Chilton played a couple of Big Star songs, about a third of the room turned something between reverent and ecstatic. The other two thirds didn’t know the material, I guess. The guy had warned me that Chilton didn’t always play Big Star stuff, that he was trying to live all those critical plaudits plaudits down.
A guy was standing next to me at one point. He was a slightly odd looking fellow: modified Prince Valiant haircut, big round thick-framed glasses, FFA jacket covered with award patches. I thought for a minute, then turned to him an asked, “are you Mike Mills?” He was. REM were serious acolytes of Big Star, I later learned.
I never got the opportunity to see Alex onstage again. I never saw the re-formed Big Star (Alex and Jody Stephens plus Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow — both of the fantastic Posies – taking over for Andy Hummel and Chris Bell). I eventually picked up the albums on CD, and a bunch of Chilton solo albums (including the shambling but brilliant Bach’s Bottom, but, still not yet a copy of Like Flies on Sherbert) and have amassed a small collection of Chilton and Big Star bootleg audio and video. And I bought the fantastic box set last year.
But none of it is the same, now. Neither better nor worse, it’s just different. It will be heard through different ears with Alex’s passing. A few hours ago, as news reports tell it, he died of a heart attack. He was 59. My condolences to those close to him. The rest of us, we still have the music. I’m expecting that future listens to Third/Sister Lovers will now be even more pathos-laden.
Goodbye, Alex. Thanks for sharing.
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Great write-up, Bill. I love the title track of "Like Flies on Sherbert" and "Hey! Little Child" (one of four or five songs in Chilton’s repertoire about older men liking underage girls, it sounds better on his "Live in London" LP), but that album is chaos, not controlled chaos. I agree that "Bach’s Bottom" is a better shade of shambolic, but even it tries your patience at times. Apparently producer Jon Tiven still hated Chilton’s guts almost 30 years later.
Where did you go to college in Atlanta? I went to UGA for three years; my freshman year was spent at the North Carolina School of the Arts.
And is the Chilton show you saw the same as this one? I read this account just a month or so ago:
http://chuckprophet.com/blog/alex_chilton/
Robert — Wow. Thanks for the link. Yes, that was the same show I attended. I had forgotten that Green on Red was the opener. The 80s were a LONG time ago.
I was at GSU downtown 1982-1986, back in the days when they (thankfully) had no football team; no dorms; and the frat boys and girls got a hallway, not a street. GSU had a great radio station (WRAS) that played what we ( by “we” I mean “I”) now look back upon as “good 80s” stuff. They sponsored great concerts too: Cheap Trick, Tubes, etc.
And I do need to go ahead and track down a vinyl of LFOS. Will probably pay a premium for it, now.
My dad used to teach at Mercer University in Macon, and I believe the Greeks eventually got their own street there as well.
Did WRAS and WREK have a rivalry? From Macon I could hear neither, and by the time I moved to Atlanta in ’98 after college I wasn’t listening to the radio that much.
In the summer of ’94 my ex-girlfriend bought me a ‘Like Flies’ CD in Europe as well as the CD here — http://powerpopcriminals.blogspot.com/2008/09/tribute-to-alex-chilton-not-singer-but.html — but we were exes, obviously, and I wasn’t too happy about that, so I eventually sold both. But I didn’t sell ‘Like Flies’ until I could find Last Call’s 1996 reissue that contained five bonus tracks. I bought that version at a Tower Records in Vancouver. And the five bonus tracks don’t add much, but at least this version isn’t laced with teenage heartache.
WRAS vs. WREK: well, only kinda.
In my day (first half of the 80s) WRAS (Georgia State University) played sorta-underground rock stuff like the Cure, REM, Hoodoo Gurus, dB’s, Let’s Active, Tommy Keene, Plasticland, Long Ryders. People forget now, but in those days, in the South at least, almost NOBODY played that stuff on the radio. It was simply not done. WREK was a serious station, run like a business by students interested in music biz careers. At 50k watts, the highest-powered college radio station in the country. Then, at least.
WREK (Georgia Tech), on the other hand, had a “diversified” format. This meant — no exaggeration — you might hear a classical orchestral piece followed by a Sex Pistols track. “Hipper” perhaps, but not exactly viable. Run by hobbyists, mostly.
I *did* browbeat a WREK deejay into doing an “in-depth radio interview” with my (cover!) band in 1985. I wrote the questions, controlled the interview, and did my own post-production editing on the interview pre-airing. Could’ve never gotten away with that at WRAS.
Now you’ve actually got me almost nostalgic for my college years. I’m (reluctantly) traveling to Atlanta on business soon; I’ll tune into 88.5 and see what’s on these days. Probably damn Arcade Fire…blecch.
WREK sounds a little like UGA’s student-run station, WUOG, though in college I didn’t appreciate the diversity. The DJs weren’t listening to that obscure stuff on the boomboxes in the station’s offices, so I felt like they were being dishonest by promoting it so heavily on the air. But that’s like arguing that kindergarten teachers who say bad words off the clock should come clean and say them in front of five-year-olds at work. I had an immature outlook, to say the least.
I love your story of controlling an interview to promote your cover band. And now that you’ve identified WRAS’s number on the dial, I definitely remember a guy from my church talking about 88.5 when I was still in high school. Its reach definitely extended beyond Atlanta.