Big Star – Punk Rock 1974

Ah, the thrill of the chance encounter on a wet n’ cold Wednesday afternoon while hiding out in the warmth of a British Library reading room. I had been distractedly flicking through old NMEs when a thumbnail photograph of Big Star pulled me up short. It was illustrating a 1974 article on overlooked American acts, among them Steely Dan, Todd Rundgren, Jackson Browne, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Joe Walsh and the like. But the piece kicked off with Big Star, true unknowns . . .

 This is a band that just won't budge despite the flatteringest reviews imaginable, much of which puzzlement is rooted in the poor distribution job by Stax on behalf of Ardent – mini-concern based in Memphis and run by ex-DJ John Fry.

With the departure of guitarist/writer/vocaliser Chris Bell following the recording of “Big Star 1” some playing-gaps have begun to show on the just-issued “Radio City”, an exotic, meandering production that needs compound listening before it takes hold, but they still do beautifully as a trio.

The band now consist of leader tortured punk-genius Alex Chilton (former Box Tops chieftain), with Jody Stephens on plug drums and Andy Hummel on bass. "Big Star I" remains highly recommended – an immense pop beauty rotating across the breadth of the Sixties' experience, through The Byrds, The Beatles, and Led Zeppelin

“Radio City" in probably just as great, but we're still getting into it and we’ll be coming back to it by and by.

This March 1974 sub was most likely written by Andrew Tyler (though Nick Kent would be a good second guess). Promises to follow something up that came to nothing were fairly commonplace in the NME so expecting more after Tyler had done his duty and seen if ‘compound listening’ would pay dividends seemed unlikely to be shared with readers. A week later, however, we have his full review and it’s a beauty, not only because he catches what’s so great about this album but also because he takes the still forming notion of ‘punk’ and attempts to give it some shape and substance. Not as one might expect around Iggy and the Stooges or the New York Dolls, but Alex Chilton two or three years before he was kicking around the Lower East Side and hanging out with the Cramps.

To cap it all he puts ‘New Wave’ together with ‘punk’ in his first sentence and in the second paragraph is calling ‘punk’ last year’s thing. In Tyler’s definition punk is a badge of authenticity worn by ‘true rebels and outlaws’:

 So what do we ask of a rock ’n’ roll outlaw? Only that he doesn't grovel for an audience or the industry, that he moves in a kind of agonised innocence and stays clear of gurus and lefties.

 Tyler’s punk outlaw will be a ‘musical visionary’ but not one parlaying some ‘Arts Supplement bilge’. Chilton fits his bill, ‘Big Star leap past everyone of their American and British contemporaries and set Chilton up as one of the Great Misunderstoods of punk rock’. He celebrates Chilton’s ‘snarl’, ‘nervous raw voice’ and ‘untampered arrangements’ against the ‘studio technicalities’ and reverence of the band’s debut. Radio City is full of a kind of bravado that has been missing since Revolver, he writes (and Nick Kent concurs).

What Tyler has to say about individual tracks you can read for yourself as you ponder the idea of Chilton as ‘tortured punk-genius’. Like with Big Star the history of punk rock could benefit from some compound thinking

For further reading that goes way beyond this footnote head over to Grant McPhee’s deep archeological dig into Big Star’s legend HERE

Postscript

October 1973, NME Teazers column suggests Slade to cover Big Star’s ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ . . . Fabulous

An Evening Recital of New Music – MC5 (May 1968)

Mid-way through 1977, when all the reissues of Stooges and MC5 albums were cluttering up the review sections of the British weekly music press, Miles of Better Books fame (at least I think it is him) offered his take on the Mighty Five and the claim du jour they were Punk’s progenitors – he counter-asserts they were a ‘hippy band’ and Exhibit No.1 in his defence is a ‘Programme’ (English spelling for extra cultural capital) for ‘An Evening Recital of New Music as performed by Detroit’s Own MC5 at the Grande Ballroom May 10 & 11, 1968’.

As a bit of memorabilia it would be nice to own but as a historical document I think it fascinating, produced between ‘Looking At You’ b/w ‘Borderline’ – ‘latest underground killer single’ – and Kick Out the Jams recorded five months later.

In the set they would play in October only ‘Kick Out the Jams’, ‘Come Together’ and ‘Borderline’ from the 14 listed as to be performed in May made it onto the album. Many like ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’, ‘I Put a Spell On You’, ‘Ice Pick Slim’, ‘I Believe to My Soul’ and ‘Upper Egypt’ have subsequently been made available on Total Energy discs, so perhaps there are few surprises here, but seeing just how dependent they were at this stage in their development on covers of familiar blues and R&B numbers – Larry Williams ‘Slow Down’ used ‘by revolutionaries to dissolve inhibitions, cause fucking in the streets & give you “sickness in the mind”’– and an obligatory Dylan tune, suggest they, like The Yardbirds, were struggling to create their own songs while still cleaving something wholly original out of the found material.

‘Riot, Punk and Revolution Rock' . . .’ (March 1977)

I’d love to hear what they did with John Coltrane’s ‘Tungi’ [sic. I think that should be ‘Tunji’] – I also love that they give you the album cat. no’s. for both the album’s mono and stereo versions; as they do too for Pharoah Saunders’ Tauhid. From that album comes ‘Upper Egypt’, which they don’t directly cover but use for inspiration (you can hear a version on the CD of the Sturgis Armory show from June 1968). It works in the same way that ‘Starship’ would draw on Sun Ra, I suppose, or ‘Ice Pick Slim’ pulls on Archie Shepp.

I don’t know how common it was to produce a printed programme for a rock concert in 1968, I’m guessing this is a one-off. It does seem antithetical to being a high energy rock n’ roll combo that the Five as Punk forbearers were being credited with; it is certainly pretentious though it is not embarrassing, as the NME editorial intervention calls it. I think of it as a testimonial to the band’s genuine ambition to expand the music they loved in ways that stayed true to both rock n’ roll and to the moment they were working within.

 ‘Black to Comm’, the programme noted, had been part of the band’s set since 1964 and was responsible for forcing out their original rhythm section, because:

In those days it was difficult to relate to new forms. The people could dig exaggerations of existing forms but new founding concepts were intolerable. Even today in some places where we play, it often gives people an excuse to dislike us.

Sounds (May 28 1977)

Sounds (March 12 1977)

One More Questionnaire: Carm Deleff aka Marc Bolan

AMBITION: to make the transition . . . How many questionnaires did Bolan complete over the years? By 1975 he was a past master at the game and this must be among the best (NME August 30, 1975). OCCUPATION: interior mental decorator. That’ll do me . . . HOBBY: Snurding. Yeah, mine too! And he was always THE Mod – CRIMINAL CONVICTIONS: Stealing a G.S (scooter). Go ahead and dig in while you chew on some alligator steak

Iggy and Elton Take CREEM In Their Coffee

I’ve recently acquired a few issues of Creem circa 1971-75 that between their glossy covers are deteriorating as fast as any 50 year-old British inky. I never read the magazine back in the day, I doubt it could have been readily found in Hemel Hempstead’s newsagents, but since those faraway days it has taken on something of a mythic status, hosting, as it did, Lester Bangs, Dave Marsh, Ben Edmonds, Greg Shaw and on occasion Nick Tosches and Greil Marcus. It also, I was surprised to discover, gave fairly regular space for pieces by British writers, mostly from the NME, like Nick Kent and Charles Shaar Murray. There was a regular column, ‘Letter from Britain’ from the always entertaining Simon Frith, whose singles reviews in Let It Rock easily rivalled his American equivalent, Juke Box Jury, that Greg Shaw put together for Creem and for his own magazine, Bomp.

To some extent the magazine lives up to its reputation, it has a terrific sense of community, between the writers most obviously, but also between them and their readers, which was something NME tried to emulate. But what the British weeklies did much better than their monthly American cousin was to create a sense of an unfolding narrative. NME and Melody Maker pulled their readers into the heat of the action, you can see this clearly in the reporting on and around Bowie throughout 1972, each new move he made was eagerly anticipated, reported on and responded to. The music papers produced a remarkable feeling of immediacy (and intimacy). By contrast Creem is all reaction, everything has already happened. It features last month’s story, NME and MM were about tomorrow.

An exemption to the lack of the future tense in Creem is the coverage afforded to the figure of Iggy Pop who runs loose and fast across a number of the issues I have, often he appears as just a note on what he’s doing in London or Hollywood but always with anticipation that he is about to deliver and in doing so change the very fabric of rock culture. Must have been frustrating as hell to have been a proselytiser for the Stooges back in those days, because, at least in retrospect, Iggy was always going to disappoint.

In the news stub above, from January 1974, Iggy is sharing coffee and donuts with Elton John while the Stooges are undertaking a week’s engagement at Richard’s in Atlanta, Georgia. One of those shows was recorded and released in the deluxe Raw Power box from a few years ago and were witnessed by James ‘The Hound’ Marshall, who has written about his teenage road trip from New York to Georgia to see the band [here]. Elton sat through two shows, appearing on stage during one of them in a gorilla costume. He said of Iggy, “I simply can’t understand why he’s not a huge star.’  

He should have asked Pete Townshend, he sure knew why Iggy was never gonna clean up. In the same issue he’s interviewed by CSM about Quadrophenia as well as things like Bowie’s Pinups and the overlaps between the two albums, especially as they relate to rock history and rock stars. On the latter, some of CSM’s colleagues think stars should conform to the image of a noble savage. Inevitably, then, Iggy is raised as a sort of exemplar of the type and the conversation skirts around whether he might appeal to the kid in the ‘Punk and Godfather’. Townshend thinks not. Songs aimed at teenagers need to contain ‘a lot of the tight, integrated, directed, pointed frustration of a fifteen or sixteen year-old . . . But someone like Iggy and the Stooges couldn’t grasp that if they stood on their heads, because inside they’re old men.’ Now that’s an image worth pondering over . . .