Big Star’s third album finally gets star treatment
NEW YORK (Reuters) – It was supposed to be a celebration.
Big Star, mostly unheralded in the 1970s but now revered by generations of younger bands, was scheduled to perform in Austin, Texas in March, last year.
Three days before the show, Chris Stamey, founding member of the dB’s and Big Star acolyte, was planning to fly in and pitch a new project to the band: a series of performances of its legendary third album — alternately called “Third” or “Sister Lovers” — that included a full string ensemble.
That morning, before Stamey left, Big Star frontman Alex Chilton died of a heart attack at age 59. But instead of derailing the project, Chilton’s death gave it momentum.
“There was a greater sense of purpose for this now,” Big Star drummer Jody Stephens said of Stamey’s project.
So, Stamey has assembled a group that includes Stephens, Michael Stipe and Mike Mills from R.E.M., Mitch Easter from Let’s Active and Matthew Sweet, and they are slated to perform the album the way on Saturday at New York City’s Mason Hall.
If you don’t know Big Star, you are not alone, but you may have heard their work. Their song “In the Street” was the theme for TV’s “That ’70s Show,” performed by Cheap Trick. And if that song is unfamiliar, many of rock’s biggest acts of the ’80s and ’90s performing alt-rock, grunge rock and even today’s power pop songs, owe some debt to the band.
Gang Of Four seek contentment on new album
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Jon King and Andy Gill, who founded pioneering postpunk band Gang of Four, are sipping espressos in a Manhattan hotel and explaining how they conceived “Content,” their first album of new music in more than 15 years.
King, 55, whips out his digital camera and displays a photo of a female bartender. “We’re doing a series of photographs of women posing as the woman in ‘A Bar at the Folies Bergeres’ in bars around America,” he said with a mischievous grin.”
“We’ve only got one so far,” Gill, also 55, chimed in. “The next woman is probably going to say, ‘Go (screw) yourself!’”
As the two men chuckle at the notion of modeling New York bartenders after Edouard Manet’s 1882 painting, one can’t help but wonder if Franz Ferdinand crosses the country discussing French impressionist painters.
Five years ago, a music fan, particularly one in Britain, couldn’t spit without hitting a band citing Gang Of Four as an influence. Franz Ferdinand, The Bloc Party and The Futureheads, whose debut album was produced by Gill, all managed to take quirky, punk-funk hybrid music to the Top 10 in Britain.
Bands as varied as R.E.M., Red Hot Chili Peppers (whose debut album was also produced by Gill) and Nirvana have cited Gang of Four as an important progenitor of U.S. indie rock.
The band, which begins the U.S. West Coast swing of their tour this week, careened out of the highly politicized art department at the University of Leeds in 1977. They were the first of several Leeds bands, including the Mekons and Delta 5, that formed in the wake of the Sex Pistols’ storm on Britain.
30 years later, Buzzcocks still in a punk state of mind
NEW YORK (Reuters) – “And I’m surfing on a wave of nostalgia/For an age that’s yet to come.” Pete Shelley, the lead singer of the Buzzcocks, wrote those wistful words 32 years ago, during the short-lived punk revolution that unleashed bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash on the musical landscape in the late 1970s.
Fast-forward to 2010, and Shelley is happily surfing that wave, singing the aforementioned “Nostalgia” as well as older songs such as “Boredom” and “Orgasm Addict” for youngsters raised on the likes of Green Day. Now, those kids can see for themselves how much the fast-paced power-punk melodies of contemporary chart-toppers owe to the Buzzcocks.
On stage recently at The Fillmore in New York, Shelley had conceded only some thinning gray hair and a few extra pounds to the passing years. To his left was guitarist Steve Diggle in a stylish baggy polka dot shirt, demonstrating one archetypal punk-rock pose after another.
“It’s hard to imagine doing anything for 30 years,” Shelley, 55, told Reuters at a downtown Manhattan pub over a Sam Adams lager. “Punk was always more of a state of mind. It’s just one of those strange things that happen. That’s why I always say to people, ‘Go on and do it.’”
And many people did after hearing the Buzzcocks do it. In addition to Green Day, R.E.M. and Nirvana both cited the band as a central influence. And more recent bands like The White Stripes and Arcade Fire owe the Buzzcocks a debt of gratitude.
Shelley is both flattered and baffled by the wealth of bands that claim to be influenced by the Buzzcocks. “There’s been lots of quite famous bands who’ve said, ‘If it wasn’t for you…’ which is good in a way.”
He feels similarly about Iggy Pop. “I bought him a drink once. I said, ‘I’ll buy you a drink because I’ve nicked so much off of you,” he chuckled. He found himself in the opposite spot when Alan McGee, founder of Creation Records — home to The Jesus And Mary Chain and Oasis — cornered Shelley in a pub.
Public Image Ltd, returns to U.S. after 18 years
NEW YORK (Reuters) – “You’re sounding like one of those cynical halfwits.”
John Lydon (a.k.a. Johnny Rotten) sends his trademark cackle echoing into the ears of a journalist who had the temerity to compare Lydon’s revival of the groundbreaking postpunk band Public Image Ltd. to a Las Vegas act.
“This is proper music,” he scolds about the band, who make their first U.S. appearance in 18 years tonight at Club Nokia in Los Angeles.
“I’ve inspired and created all kinds of new genres and yet I still keep coming across spiteful, snipey journalism: ‘Oh, it will be the same old tunes.’ These songs are as valid today as the day I wrote them and they will be until the day I die,” he told Reuters in an phone interview between rehearsals.
Such remarks would sound arrogant out of anyone else’s mouth. But as the man who exploded the possibilities of popular music with punk band the Sex Pistols and who took that music into unknown territory with Public Image, perhaps humility isn’t warranted.
The Sex Pistols defined punk rock in less than two years, 1976 through early 1978, with songs like “God Save The Queen” and “Anarchy In The U.K.” and, in so doing, inspired a generation of bands.
But what is sometimes forgotten is that nine months after the Sex Pistols disintegrated, the man called Rotten reinvented himself as the frontman for Public Image Ltd. and reached the British Top 10 with the song “Public Image.”
Alex Chilton, 1950-2010
To most, Alex Chilton’s was the gruff soulful voice that grabbed you by the throat in “The Letter.” Less than two minutes long, the song by the Box Tops was pure confection: Chips Moman’s rhythm section laying the foundation, Memphis horns punctuating the chorus and the cheesy jet sound effects made the song a chart-topping hit in 1967. Chilton was 16 years old.
Fed up with being a pretty face in the pop music grist mill, he left the band in 1970. When he returned with Big Star in 1972, he traded in the R&B for Beatles-style pop with a harder, driving beat. His voice had jumped nearly an octave. He and his friend Chris Bell penned eloquent elegies of teen angst, exuding hopelessness and defiance, often in the same breath.
Big Star made three albums, “#1 Record,” “Radio City” and “Third/Sister Lovers.” Barely anyone bought them. But as Brian Eno once said of the Velvet Underground, everyone who heard them formed a band. R.E.M., Cheap Trick, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, the dBs and the Replacements are only a few examples.
After Big Star broke up in the mid-seventies, he recorded sporadically as a solo artist and toured relentlessly. His solo material was raw, offhand and sometimes barely listenable. But at their center, he displayed himself as an eccentric music fan inspired by Otis Redding as much as John Lennon.
Missouri University, on a whim, decided to ask Big Star to reform to play a show on campus in 1993, nearly 20 years after the band’s last album. After years of denying and downplaying the band’s influence to the point of being contemptuous of anyone who even asked about the band, he responded, “Why not, I have no other plans.”
The band peaked in the public consciousness in 1998 when their song “In The Street” was selected as the theme song for “That 70’s Show.” Chilton told Rolling Stone in 2000 that he was paid $70 each time the show aired. The recording in most episodes, however, is, Cheap Trick’s (with the offending line “Wish we had a joint so bad” dutifully excised).
Big Star recorded a new album in 2005 with original drummer Jody Stephens, and Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of the Posies. It was the first new Big Star music in 30 years. They were slated to play the annual South by Southwest music festival in Austin Saturday.
Merge Records: 20 years of glorious noise
NEW YORK (Reuters) – In the summer of 1987, 19-year-old Mac McCaughan and his bandmates stumbled on an idea as old as rock ‘n’ roll itself.
Rather than sending demo tapes to major record companies, they followed in the do-it-yourself footsteps of punk-rock idols such as the Buzzcocks and Minor Threat and started their own label. But more than promote their own band, they wanted to document the local music in the college town of Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
That label evolved into Merge Records, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Along the way, the label has garnered mainstream hits by Arcade Fire and Spoon, attracted critical praise for bands like Magnetic Fields, and enjoyed smaller successes with Lambchop and McCaughan’s own band Superchunk.
Its history was been documented in “Our Noise: The Story Of Merge Records” (Algonquin Books), which McCaughan wrote with Merge co-owner and Superchunk bassist Laura Ballance and Gawker.com scribe John Cook.
In an industry where success is measured in the millions of records sold — or used to be, until sales starting slumping a decade ago — Merge has thrived with sales figures in the thousands. The label’s biggest seller, Arcade Fire’s 2007 album “Neon Bible,” sold 420,000 copies in the United States. Spoon’s Merge label debut, “Girls Can Tell,” sold more copies in six weeks than the band’s previous album sold for a major label in a year.
Guided by McCaughan and Ballance’s eclectic tastes and fiscal discipline, the label has succeeded where many others — independent and major — have failed.
“We operate in a conservative way,” Ballance told Reuters from her office in Chapel Hill. “We were never in a position where we’ve had to say, ‘We need a hit’ or ‘Oh crap, we have to sell some records really quick.’”
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