#434 - Big Star - #1 Record (1972)
MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:
Released in August of 1972 this is the debut album by Memphis, Tennessee Power-Pop trailblazers Big Star.
This is also the second of three Big Star albums on The 500 so check out episode #449 with Chris Garcia for more on their third album.
Memphis guitarists, singers, and songwriters Chris Bell and Alex Chilton were both the perfect age of 13 when The Beatles and the British Invasion burst onto the American music scene.
They both pursued musical careers and played with a variety of local musicians including each other in a British Invasion-style beat group, The Jynx.
By 1967 Alex Chilton had been a successful teenage superstar as the lead singer and guitarist in the Memphis Blue-Eyed-Soul group The Box Tops who released international hits like “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” and more successful songs and albums.
After The Box Tops broke up, Alex spent 1970 in New York and attempted to make a solo album before he returned to Memphis in 1971 and seeked out his old musician friend, vocalist/guitarist Chris Bell. Chilton wanted the two to form a songwriting partnership inspired by John Lennon and Paul McCartney to become a duo like Simon & Garfunkel.
Instead Bell invited Chilton to join Icewater, a band he had formed with drummer/vocalist Jody Stephens, bassist/vocalist Andy Hummel, and keyboardist/vocalist Terry Manning.
Prior to Icewater Bell and Stephens played in a band called Rock City and made one album that got shelved.
Some of both bands’ songs made it to this album.
While Chilton’s previous band owed a debt to R&B and Soul records this new project was more heavily influenced by ’60s-era Pop Rock like The Beatles, Rolling Stones, and The Byrds.
In 1972 they went into Ardent Studios who were also their record company to record their debut album.
It was produced by Ardent label-head John Fry and engineered by previous Icewater member Terry Manning who played keyboards and sang on it but everyone involved gave equal credit to Chris Bell for his serious and meticulous studio contributions.
The band changed their name to Big Star, after the Memphis-area grocery store chain, Big Star Market that was across the street from Ardent Studios where they would get snacks during recording.
Big Star’s debut, the aspiringly named “#1 Record” was released that August.
It was critically successful but the inability of their distribution company, the black soul label Stax Records to market a white guitar group stalled its commercial appeal.
They only sold about 10,000 records upon their initial release.
In the frustration the troubled Chris Bell, who had suffered from clinical depression and some substance abuse left the band to pursue a solo career.
Chilton, Stephens, and Hummel carried on for another record but after similar distribution issues Hummel also quit.
The two remaining members recorded a project before breaking up in 1975 that we now know as being the third Big Star record that was finally released in 1978.
Sadly, that same year Chris Bell died in a car accident on his way home from band rehearsal.
His posthumously released solo album “I Am the Cosmos” fulfilled much of the promise of his work on this debut album as one of the unsung heroes of American pop music.
After Big Star Alex Chilton maintained a solo career and some band projects until March of 2010 when he died suddenly of a heart attack just three days before a Big Star reunion show. Original Big Star bassist Andy Hummel tragically died of cancer just three months later.
Surviving Big Star drummer and vocalist Jody Stephens is still active in music and has released solo albums as well as those by the alt-country-rock supergroup collective Golden Smog and his duo with Luther Russell, Those Pretty Wrongs.
Big Star went on to influence countless musicians including Wilco, Beck, Kiss, The Replacements, R.E.M., The Bangles, and Elliot Smith.