The Album List #3: Teenage Fanclub “Bandwagonesque”

They're from Scotland, you know.

The year: 1991.

The place: Manhattan. I think. Somewhere in New York City, at the very least.

The sitch: Spin magazine releases their year-end issue. It’s the issue with all the lists about what’s awesome and what wasn’t so awesome.

This particular list caused a stir, though, because of what was number one.

1991 was a year where Nirvana’s masterful Nevermind dominated everything. Except Spin. No, they decided to give their number one album of the year slot to a Scottish indie band that didn’t sell all that well and probably few of you have actually listened to in your lives.

I was the one person who thought Spin was the true genius magazine in 1991. Because Bandwagonesque is in my opinion- BETTER than Nevermind.

The Album List: #49 Big Star “#1 Record”

The world would never be the same...

When Alex Chilton died last year, I was quite devastated. He was still relatively young, still touring with both a version of Big Star and his earlier band, the Box Tops.  But it was also very much about the lost opportunities. Alex Chilton could have been the biggest thing in music. He never quite got there.

I mean, he did have a number one hit at sixteen, all hunched over and spotty, singing the sixties classic “The Letter” on TV with the Box Tops. The song is amongst the standards of pop music, covered numerous times, most famously by Joe Cocker.  But Chilton would end up being even better and more influential when he joined an existing trio and recorded with Big Star. The band invented the rules of power pop, an underrated and magnificent subset of rock and roll that favours melodies and harmonies over distortion and feedback. The band would produce three near perfect records in a short span before breaking up.  All three records are fantastic. But this one is just that step closer to pop perfection. Plus it has three songs that if I were on a desert island, I’d be missing terribly.

Remembering A Power Pop Hero

The first time I ever heard Alex Chilton’s marvellous voice was when I was about five or six and “The Letter” came on the radio. My mom, a child of the sixties, would always have some random oldies station on, where the Supreme’s “Love Child” seemed to play every hour, causing me to hate that song with a passion. But “The Letter”, while steeped in ’60s pop, seemed different from most of what that station played. It was a short burst of sunshine and lollipops. It impressed my young self enough to stop listening to “Bullfrogs and Butterflies” and start listening to R.E.M.

Alex Chilton was a mere sixteen when ” The Letter” became a smash single. He would never be that huge again. After the Box Tops disbanded in 1970, he went solo, only to join up with the blue-eyed soul-power pop band Big Star, who hailed from his hometown of Memphis.

Big Star is at turns one of the greatest and one of the saddest rock and roll stories ever. They helped create the power pop movement, influenced by the Brits, the Byrds and Stax Records simultaneously. Chris Bell was actually the original driving force behind Big Star, Chilton joined later, and from the beginning, they made magic happen. I don’t care where you start, but go buy a Big Star album. 

Big Star shined brightly for three short years before record company shenanigans brought them down in 1974, and Chilton then went on to a sporadic but influential solo career. As a new generation of artists began to proclaim the influence of Big Star on their own music ( R.E.M. is an obvious successor, the Replacements wrote a song called “Alex Chilton”, and Counting Crows  singer Adam Duritz is known for changing the “Mr. Jones” lyric from “I wanna be Bob Dylan” to “I wanna be Alex Chilton” in concert). He reformed Big Star in the early ’90s and continued to tour with them and a reformed Box Tops until his death.

Die-hard music geeks all know his name and love him. Everyone who owns a TV has at least heard “In The Street”, a classic track from Big Star’s first album that served as the theme for That ’70s Show. Everyone knows ”The Letter”. Alex Chilton may not have been the biggest music star in the world, but his influence reaches far and wide throughout modern music. And he deserves all the praise being heaped on him now.

Ultimately, all I can hope for is that some kid out there hears “September Gurls” and picks up a guitar and decides that he wants to be Alex Chilton.