4 stars out of 5
OK, I’m counting this as a new movie I saw in the theater this year. But don’t tell anybody that I really watched it “on-demand” in the comfort and privacy of my own home. Hey, this is the new world we live in. Schlep to Manhattan in the heat, humidity, and rain and then shell out 13 bucks, or sit in the air conditioning with my shoes off for only $6.95? For me it was a no-brainer.
I enjoyed both this and the other music documentary that’s currently out, Twenty Feet From Stardom. But the Big Star movie, with its focus on just one band, is a bit more straightforward and linear. A classic “rise, fall, and redemption” tale, except with a whole lot of fall.
Even if you’re not familiar with Big Star (named after a supermarket chain, but perfectly ironic in the context of the film), you’re likely familiar with singer Alex Chilton. He was the faux-gruff teenaged lead voice on the Box Tops’ oldies-radio staple “The Letter.” (“Gimme a ticket for an aero-plane, ain’t got time to take a fast train….”) Years later, a Big Star song was used as the theme for TV’s That ’70s Show. I learned about the band in the 1980s via R.E.M., who Big Star was a huge influence on, and then from the Replacements’ song “Alex Chilton.”
As their story unfolds, you get a ton of interesting little twists. On the one hand, it’s suburban teens forming a garage band. But you also mix in the Box Tops connection, the shadow of Memphis’s Stax Records, inter-band rivalry, industry hoo-ha, and tragedy. The band unwittingly traces a timeline of modern American pop music: soul to British invasion to “classic rock” to punk to alternative. And Memphis is the perfect backdrop, becoming another character in the film: insular, separated, both conservative and edgy, steeped in musical history. Psychologically speaking, Chilton and bandmate Chris Bell are a real handful: Bell wants the brass ring but just can’t get it; Chilton—who had big success very early on—seems to subvert chances at greater fame whenever possible.
The filmmakers do a solid job of piecing it all together. There are tons of vintage photos and video clips, and crucially, many interviews with key survivors. Not that Big Star is quite as “cursed” as Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the number of survivors in their world seems to dwindle all the time.
1989, with the LApes house, I saw Chilton open for the dBs at the Decade, which was like the resident Rock nightclub for Pitt students, akin to Carnegie Mellon’s nightclub…… wait, were there any nightclubs up on your greeny pasture?
I would’ve LOVED to see that Chilton/dB’s show. I remember seeing the Ben Vaughn Combo at the Decade, ATS at the Electric Banana, several shows at Graffiti (Connells and Billy Bragg spring to mind). No club per se at CMU but we had Beat Happening in an art gallery (thanks to Tom Hoffman), Wimp Factor XIV in Skibo….
Yeah some good shows at that gallery. That weird solo guitarist from NY, Guitarwolf?Telecorps (Ed Um) had a pretty good show there. Originally, he told a few of us he just wanted to fill the entire space with Ping Pong balls, which I thought was pretty cool. But instead there were shirts for sale and stuff, a few bands played. Our band Old Wallpaper with Missy K and Jen S played, and we wanked off for a half hour or so. Yeah, Beat Happening, bittersweet memories of that show, with an emphasis on the bitter.