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"FacebookPinterest\n\n Damn. This one hurts. Alex Chilton died of a heart attack in New Orleans yesterday; he was 59. Although he had a number-one single with the Box Tops at the age of sixteen (the blue-eyed soul classic \"The Letter\") and produced a body of work as a solo artist that defines the term \"erratically brilliant\" as well as the term \"scavenger hunt,\" he's still best known as one of the singers and primary songwriters in Big Star, the Memphis band he joined in 1971, then took over when founder Chris Bell left the following year.\n\nLike most great rock bands, Big Star were a doomed enterprise; they invented the indie-rock anti-career arc before indie-rock had a name, and any band that thinks decades-hence cult recognition after years of obscurity might be cooler than overnight success is to some extent working off their template. Record-company bungling rendered their debut album virtually unobtainable the minute it was released; they'd called it #1 Record, in a stroke of self-fulfilling irony. That one, and the follow-up they made without Bell, Radio City (which radio never touched) are basically the second- and first-best power-pop albums ever made, the sound of long-haired Southern boys who ached to be the Beatles but achieved something simultaneously tougher and more fragile\u2014teenage music that growled and sneered and pleaded, with crystalline hooks for days. They made one more album, Third/Sister Lovers, in 1974; it came out in 1978. It's harrowing, it's unfocused, it takes the pop glee of the first two records and turns it inside out, bending longing into desperation, pushing hard on the fragility in the music until it cracks. It's really great.\n\nBell died in a car accident in 1978; Chilton embarked on a solo career with 1980's sloppy, willful, frequently exhilarating Like Flies on Sherbert, produced garage-rock bands like Cramps and the Gories, drank, recorded fitfully, fooled around with blues-rock and jazz standards. And he even got to enjoy a little of the posthumous love his old gang had accrued by touring with a not-bad reformed version of Big Star with Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow of the Posies, one of the countless pop-minded indie bands Big Star influenced. (The reunited Big Star were supposed to play Saturday night at Antone's in Austin, Texas, as part of South by Southwest; the show may still happen, as a memorial.) He got the punk equivalent of a Walk of Fame star in 1987, when the Replacements (who mid the sardonic and the sentimental in ways that owed Big Star big time) wrote one of their best songs about him.\n\n\"Alex Chilton\" is an outsider-king fantasy in which \"children by the millions\" turn out for their hero when he comes to town. It was a playable track in Rock Band 2; these days, when you search \"Alex Chilton\" on YouTube, a lot of the clips that come up are from gamers video-capturing their 99 or 100% perfect performances of the song, which is a totally weird afterlife for an ode to a guy who pursued inconsistency as its own reward, who always seemed so wary of his own gifts.\n\nThere's also a lot of actual Chilton and Big Star music on YouTube, of course; some highlights follow. The Big Star records are still in print. \"Walking Dead\" is on Dusted in Memphis, an 1980 bootleg of torn-n'-frayed-sounding Third-era material; now widely available through the usual illegal channels, it's probably my favorite non-Big Star Chilton record of all time. My favorite Chilton recording of the last couple months is a version of the Beach Boys' \"Don't Worry Baby,\" from 2008's excellent Thank You Friends: The Ardent Records Story. It's unfinished\u2014it cuts off after a minute and a half\u2014and this makes it somehow perfect. I played it a lot this year, usually when I was worried. Not sure what I'm going to do now.\n\n \"These moments of discord were to blossom brightly for the rest of his career. Chilton, a reformed drinker and drug taker, was in the '70's and beyond often described as dipsomaniacal and semi-deranged; we know with whatever certainty that he has always been unhealthily victimized by Don Juanism, astrological \"philosophizing,\" and feisty standoffishness. Infantile behavior, in adults, is marked by lack of stability, by peacock preening, by temper tantrums. We have to play their way, or they take the recording studio back home, sulking and stewing with liquor and paranoia. Infants do not like to take orders (Box Tops), share credit (Big Star), or follow orders (solo recordings); they are arrogant and willful, performing \"Volare,\" or deliberately mistuning guitars. They hold grudges. For centuries. Children live for the moment; they cannot sustain relationships or plans; dialogue is out of the question, as is reflection; spontaneous and active, child-like adults who live in the ahistorical moment do not appreciate advice, sage or otherwise; they do not tolerate rules, nor suffer fools; their sandbox is permanently demarcated territorially. But in this case the children's garden has been the fertile source for Chilton's unyielding faith in his voice and his message. For a musician who has taken heat for years for following others, or for influencing so many, Chilton is rather so iconoclastic, both in songwriting and guitar playing, that he more properly should be defined as captain of his own ships, waving\u2014goodbye or hello\u2014during their sinking, as admirals invariably do, or must.\"\n\n \u2014Michael Baker, \"The Glory and Grandeur That Is Defeat: The Music of Alex Chilton,\" published in Perfect Sound Forever, 2004\n\n \"The Ballad of El Goodo\" (#1 Record, 1972)\n\n\"Thirteen\" (#1 Record, 1972)\n\n\"September Gurls\" (Radio City, 1974)\n\n\"Thank You Friends\" (Third/Sister Lovers, 1978)\n\n\"Take Care\" (Third/Sister Lovers, 1978)\n\n\"Nighttime\" (Third/Sister Lovers, 1978)\n\n\"Walking Dead\" (Dusted in Memphis bootleg, 1980)\n\n\"Every Day as We Grow Closer\" (1970, 1996)\n\nThe Replacements, \"Alex Chilton\" (Pleased to Meet Me, 1987)\n\n \"There Will Never Be Another You\" (Clich&amp;amp;#xC3;&amp;amp;#xA9;s, 1994)"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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