Via Soundonsound.com
Though they never had a chart album or a hit single, and their original line-up played only a handful of gigs, Big Star's influence has been colossal. Their tightly crafted brand of harmony-led power-pop stood in stark contrast to other rock bands of the early '70s, and would later be rediscovered and championed by a whole generation of musicians, most notably REM. Comprising singer/songwriter/guitarists Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, together with bass player Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens, the Memphis-based quartet undoubtedly summoned the spirit of the Beatles on their 1972 debut album, #1 Record.
Despite the album's excellence, however, the public didn't catch on, and marketing, promotion and distribution problems on the part of Stax didn't exactly help sales. Chris Bell, an Anglophile who was greatly influenced by the Fab Four and other bands of the 'British Invasion', was bitterly disappointed by the failure of #1 Record and also hindered by personal problems. Furthermore, whereas Alex Chilton, the former Box Tops vocalist on hits such as 'The Letter' and 'Cry Like A Baby', veered towards live performance, Bell wanted to spend more time in the studio. The result was that Bell parted ways with Big Star at the end of 1972, en route to a stalled solo career and his untimely death in a car crash at the age of just 27.
It was after Big Star had disbanded and reformed as a three-piece outfit that, in 1974, they reached their brief apotheosis with Radio City, an altogether more intense, raw and rough-edged album that contained the group's biggest hit-that-never-was, the much-covered 'September Gurls'. Big Star's subsequent output — a live set and third studio album — never scaled the heights of either #1 Record or Radio City, which featured one last contribution from Chris Bell on the anthemic 'Back Of A Car'.
The new issue of the 