The book is still a long way off yet, but gathering pace and growing by the second. Here is a very brief taste of things to come.
Phone calls to Seattle, flights to Memphis and train trips to London. Invites to Paris, faxes to New Orleans, messages from New York and Texas. Meetings in Nashville, visits to cemeteries in Germantown and the woodlands of Mississippi. Emails in the dead of night.
Provisional chapter plan v2.0 (June 2002)
Chapter Time Mainly covers
1 1900-1950 A cultural history of Memphis
2 1950-1960 birth of rock'n'roll, early years band members
“As a young child, I remember Chris being curious about many things which to me were much too involved and complicated. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be. He loved comic books and for some reason, I particularly remember that he really liked Brenda Lee!” David Bell
3 1960-1966 Early bands, the Memphis scene
“Me and my brother were really lucky, our parents were really tolerant of our pursuit of music and they would let us practice in the house, and it was a small house, the den was very ‘live’ it had panelling on the walls and it was broken tile floored. I’m sure it was impossible for them to really escape. Back around that time there were tons of kids in the neighbourhood and we found a couple of guys with guitars, one of whom could sing, and we had a neighbourhood band.” Jody Stephens
4 1967-1969 The Box Tops
“We actually drove all the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot dog stand at a fairgrounds. When we showed up, the promoter didn’t believe we were the Box Tops, expecting a black band. Alex had to sing the first few words "Give me a ticket for an aeroplane..." and the promoter grinned and said "That's it!"” Danny Smythe
5 1967-1970 Musical (& otherwise) adventures of Hummel & Bell
“Chris, our friends, and I were totally absorbed in the anti-war thing beginning around January of 1970. It was just what was going on. We wore STRIKE silk-screens on our clothes and everything. I was a member of the ACLU and participated in a huge march on Nashville at which the radical Jerry Rubin spoke.” Andy Hummel
6 1970 Chilton quits Box Tops, moves to NY, solo album
“We did it (the ‘1970’ album) in one or more 10 or 11 am sessions, too early, it felt very sterile. Many of the tracks were cut with me on drums, Alex on electric or acoustic guitar and Terry (Manning) playing Hofner bass through the board. Terry was in the control room. It seemed like an up-tight experiment, but some things did turn out.” Richard Rosebrough
7 1971 Formation of Big Star
“We were just into recording. I mean as a young musician, what could be better than to play around in a recording studio all the time. Chris had already started writing a little and Alex had a lot of songs he had written so we just recorded and recorded, mostly late at night when no one else was around.” Andy Hummel
8 1972 #1 Record, mini tour, Bell leaves
“I was pretty depressed with the way things had gone because I had made a tremendous personal investment with the group and I couldn’t see myself getting into anything as good as that again. To me the combination of the four of us, regardless of our personal difficulties, was the epitome of what I could get into musically as far as creative input was concerned. I felt that the second album would have been phenomenal.” Chris Bell speaking in 1975.
9 1973 Rock Writers convention, R City sessions, more shows
“The mailing of Big Star's 2nd LP took several weeks just to assemble all of the printed material to mail out with it. Our mailing lists were on metal plates and we would manually run the labels or mailing jackets and send them over to Stax where they were mailed. Needless to say, the Stax mail department thought we were nuts plus a big pain in the ass for generating so much mail from such a small company. I used to joke, that no active music enthusiast had to buy the LP's because we sent them to everyone.” John King
10 1974 (1st half) Radio City tour, Hummel out, Lightman in
“The second trip was badly planned but we did get to see London, Ontario and Niagara Falls so I can’t complain. Alex and Jody were homesick during that trip because they were dating the Aldredge sisters. Towards the middle of the trip Lesa was able to join Alex for a while. It was winter when we left and spring when we got home” John Lightman
11 1974 (2nd half) ‘3rd’ sessions, Lesa, Dickinson
“I was with Alex when he withdrew the last of his Box Tops money. Then he had to move back home because he couldn’t afford to rent anywhere.” Lesa Aldridge
12 1973-1974 Chris Bell goes solo, 1st trip to Europe
“He (Richard Rosebrough) was at the COSMOS session. He worked at Ardent and brought over a stereo Fairchild tube limiter / compressor from Ardent to Shoe that night. The compressor was turned up full and that's what really helped the record.” Warren Wagner
13 1975 Jon Tiven, Chilton dives into debauchery
“When it came time to start recording, I said "What are we going to do for tape?" Alex took a couple of boxes, and said we can use this. So we rolled, and it wasn't until we started mixing that I realized what we had used were outtake boxes for Sister Lovers, which became readily apparent when we came to the end of the last song and I heard a take of "Lovely Day"” Jon Tiven
14 1975 Chris Bell in London
“As I recall, I was press officer at CBS Records, and was quite friendly with Max Bell, at the time the NME wunderkind. Max had been in touch with Chris and thus with David, and he brought them round to CBS, where Tom Sheehan and I worked. We went for a drink with them - Chris was trying to get some label interest in what I understand later became the 'I Am The Cosmos' album, but no-one was interested.” John Tobler
15 1976 Holland, Walk’n’Wall, Chilton goes solo
“Chris Bell was electrifying onstage. He had a charisma, and his command of the guitar, electric and acoustic, was truly wonderful. I was thrilled to be playing those great songs with Chris and Jody. I will always be thankful for that experience.” Van Duren
16 1977-1978 Chilton in NY
“We had a trio, sometimes called the Cossacks. As I remember it, he took me under his wing and tried to show me how to make records and write songs (he was producing me at that point), and I tried to help keep the shows working and help organized things a bit. It was a great time, very educational.” Chris Stamey
17 1978 Van Duren, Tommy Hoehn, Chris Bell
“Mitch (Easter), Will Rigby and I drove to Memphis in spring of 1978, and we sought out Chris Bell, who we found working at Danver's restaurant. He took us around various places in town, eventually ending up over at Sam Phillips Studio, where Alex, Richard Rosebrough and others were working on what would become Like Flies on Sherbert.” Peter Holsapple
18 1979-1980 Like Flies On The Cramps NY-London-Memphis
19 1979-81 Panther Burns
“I saw the Panther Burns show without being sure that I was really seeing a band. Things were so disorganized that at first I thought that Chilton and a bunch of drunks had been just screwing around as a warm-up to the band's first set. But it was actually the whole show that I was seeing. Alex was drunk and stopped the set to take a piss off the side of the stage. The next day Alex called and said that the band wanted me to play bass with them and invited me to come over to play that afternoon.” Ron Miller
20 1982-1985 Chilton in N.Orleans, Jody in Suspicions + more
21 1985-1990 Solo days, the myth grows
“I was in a pop band called Will and the Bushmen, and our first single had the b-side ‘Dear Alex’ a Chilton / Big Star tribute that predated the Replacements'. Bobby Sutliff of the Windbreakers gave me my first cassette of Big Star. It had #1 Record and Radio City on it. This was in 1984 or 1985. It literally changed my life and perspective on music.” Will Kimbrough
22 1991-1992 The re-issues
“There were quite a few Big Star fans at Ryko, although the President of the company did not get it. We convinced him it was a worthwhile project and called Ardent. In the middle of the negotiations we started asking about the Chris Bell stuff. Sub Pop was after it at the same time, but they were dragging their feet or something and David Bell decided to give it to us. The woman who was putting it together at Sub Pop was pissed!” Jeff Rougvie
23 1993 The Posies, the reunion
24 1994-1997 The new Big Star on tour and Chilton solo
25 1997-2003 The past, the present, the future, the enigma?
So far, over 150 new interview subjects have been tracked down giving rise to over 100,000 words of new quotes, a figure that is growing daily! I don’t want to give too much away, just give a flavour of the book – there are lots of myths to debunk and just as many more to confirm. All the above quotes are from new interviews carried out by myself, except for the Chris Bell quote.
The (as yet untitled) book will be published by 4th Estate (Harpercollins)sometime in 2004.
Links
Be sure to check out http://http://www.frontlinearts.com/bigstar/ for all things Big Star in nature
and you can find 4th Estate at www.4thestate.co.uk
Please check back soon for more updates and further information.
All site content is (C) Copyright Rob Jovanovic 2002 unless otherwise noted. No site content may be reproduced in any form without first obtaining written permission.
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