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Description
Big Star are influential and then some. This mid price compilation forms their first two Ardent albums shows why Messeurs Chilton, Bell, Stephens and Hummel's angular, left-field pop has endured. Memphis 1970s pop legends Big Star will need no introduction to discerning music fans- the twofer of their first two classic Ardent albums #1 Record and Radio City (Big Beat CDWIK 910) is one of Ace Records' all-time best sellers. For the uninitiated however, The Best Of Big Star is a great entr?©e to the fresh and timeless magic of the music made by Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens and Andy Hummel. Ardent Studios-founder and Big Star producer John Fry recently took time to share some recollections of the band with me. What do you recall of the origins of Big Star? The first time I met Alex was when he and Dan Penn were doing overdubs and mixing on the Box Tops' Cry Like A Baby. He would hang around the studio and got to know everybody like [engineer] Terry Manning, and later when Alex kinda finished with the Box Tops, Terry produced an unissued album on Alex as a solo in 1970. Then he hooked up with Chris and Jody and Andy, who had had some bands around Memphis, one of which was Ice Water, and another Christmas Future, which I always thought was a great name. Hanging out at the studio they started having the idea of the band, and in fact diagonally across from Ardent was the Big Star grocery store. The original studio building is of course still there, currently in use as a day-care centre, and I think, well that's not too far fetched from what it was! Your production is very sympathetic to the group and their material. I don't ever really tell anybody that I produced those records. My role was, I guess, a lot like what it is nowadays, where we have a lot of engineer-producers. But the musical production ideas were by and large theirs. They'd hang around the studio and that benefited the guys, I mean who wouldn't love to be in the studio and learn how to do all this stuff? For #1 Record and Radio City the typical pattern would be that I would do tracks with all four band members playing simultaneously, and I would do the overdubs and sometimes Chris or one of the other people would (engineer) them and I would do all the mixing. The third album [Sister Lovers/Big Star Third] was pretty much the same thing, except we hired Jim Dickinson as a producer to sort of try and control the chaos. Did it seem odd to you that a Memphis group was so British sounding, and that Alex's voice was not in the blue-eyed soul style he'd employed in the Box Tops? For all those Box Tops records he was basically coached by Dan Penn to sound like that, it certainly wasn't his natural or normal singing voice. But that's interesting, I think one reason why people have had a hard time defining Memphis music is that it's not homogenous or just one thing, it's always been this melting pot, the crossroads for unlikely stuff to come together. All of us in Memphis grew up -
Tracklisting
- 1. September Gurls
- 2. When My Baby's Beside Me
- 3. Feel
- 4. The Ballad Of El Goodo
- 5. O My Soul
- 6. What's Going Ahn
- 7. In The Street
- 8. Thirteen
- 9. Mod Lang
- 10. Back Of A Car
- 11. Watch The Sunrise
- 12. Daisy Glaze
- 13. Give Me Another Chance
- 14. I'm In Love With A Girl
Disc 1
Side 1
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