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Chillin' with Chilton >> Alex Chilton used to be a Big Star. Today, he's just a legend by CHRIS YURKIW
Chilton is referring, of course, to Big Star, his early '70s band credited with inventing the melody-meets-meat rock later picked up by everyone from the Buzzcocks to Hüsker Dü to Nirvana. And if Big Star has been the most mythologized band by the alt-rock generation, it's as much for the group's lack of commercial success as for the notion that they might have been the first band to start reviving the music of that most inescapable of decades, the '60s (Beatles harmelodics, Kinks kick and Byrds jangle is the stock deconstruction of the Big Star sound). I mean, their first album came out in 1972! Chilton laughs at the irony, as he often does. "I'm glad that people listen to it and tell me it's good," he says. Long pause. "There's nothing bad about that." And with that, another laugh. And that could be yet another reason that still today, a little Chilton reappearance like his current opening slot for the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion can get folks excited: he's the original indie rock cynic. But it's not like he doesn't have good reasons for it. Chilton began his career at 16 as the singer for the white-soul prefab pop band the Box Tops, who had seven Top-10 hits in the late '60s. He left in '69 for creative freedom and a solo career, and from then on it's been a steady, or rather a stable, commercial devolution for Chilton--from Big Star's misses to his crack-up in the later '70s to yet still more mythological days in the early '80s when he moved to New Orleans and washed dishes. By 1984, though, he'd been rediscovered by the Europeans, like an old jazz master, and his rambling R&B, blues and roots-rock even fit that kind of bill. "I was just waiting a while until I had a proper record deal," says Chilton of the time, "and thought, 'Maybe this time I'll be able to make a little money out of it.'" Legend status came in the '80s, but money? It's a word that comes up a lot when you talk to Alex Chilton, but the lack of it, his sporadic recording and, most of all, his matter-of-fact assessment of Big Star and desire to do stuff like fill out his recent albums with covers of obscure soul and R&B numbers probably keeps his myth going. Not that he wouldn't like to cash in, but it doesn't seem likely. In 1987, for example, people wondered if Chilton had lost it when he included a version of the Italian cheese classic "Volaré" on his album High Priest. Today, of course, lounge is back and... And? "People have been telling me I was doing the wrong thing all my life," says Chilton, "and then 10 years later people start thinking it was the right thing. Whenever I start doing anything too spontaneous, the real me starts coming out, and that's when the problems begin." But there's no way Chilton couldn't be spontaneous--whether it's playing "loose as a goose" on stage or goofing in the studio. "That's probably true."
Chilton and his trio open for the
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"There are worse problems than having people be big fans of something you did in the past," says Alex Chilton, lapsed power-pop progenitor, ramshackle roots rocker and enduring pop legend. "I don't mind that, that's fine," he says in his Memphis drawl that turns a word like "fine" into two syllables. "It doesn't mean that I'm going to pander to it, or play it all the time. Well, maybe a little bit, here and there."