Big Star as folk heroes. They would often rehearse in their parents’ homes, doing things parents wouldn’t necessarily approve of. This painting by local artist Lamar Sorrento hangs in Mortimer’s, the restaurant owned by Chris Bell’s family.
Big Star painting by Lamar Sorrento
If you look up at the walls of what used to be the Memphis Cotton Exchange (now the Cotton Museum), founded in 1874, where clamoring brokers bought and sold that hard-won white gold, you’ll see where prices at various ports were updated on a giant sales board. The first port listed, of course, is Memphis. And the next? Liverpool. It’s such a strong connection that the corporate cotton-dealing giant Cargill still keeps merchandising offices in both cities.
Traffic between the cities goes back centuries. Imagine a load of Delta cotton crossing the Atlantic to “the Pool,” landing in the hands of a cotton grader with ears sensitive enough to judge the fiber just by listening to how it pulled. In a twist of history, such fine ears would serve the sons of cotton salesman Jim McCartney very well — especially his eldest, Paul.
Indifferent to cotton, young Paul lusted instead after another commodity brought to Liverpool by those American merchant sailors: the black gold of vinyl. With one record after another, he and the other young Beatles came to know Memphis, after a fashion, under the crest of Sun Studio. And these Beatles, in turn, flooded America with vinyl of their own. It was the least they could do.
Meanwhile, when the first Beatles record was still just a pipe dream, Memphians John Fry, John King, and Fred Smith (yes, that Fred Smith) had a thing for radio gear. As he later wrote, Fry “started tuning in to distant stations, where you’d get a different geographical perspective.” In 1960, while still teenagers, they transformed “Granny’s sewing room” in the Fry family home into a recording studio, and called it Ardent, and the fascination with different perspectives continued. “I remember when the first Beatles single came out on Vee Jay,” Fry wrote years later. “John and I twigged onto it right away, and wanted to find out more about this stuff coming from England.”
But as Beatlemania swept the nation, Fry and friends dug into it a bit deeper than most. As Ardent’s star rose through the 1960s, they became an auxiliary studio for the world-conquering Stax Records. Soul music was the defining sound of the city then; even the Beatles, committed to constant innovation, considered recording at Stax.
And so, when the Beatles threw in the towel at the dawn of the Seventies, Memphis was ground zero for creating a sound that grew from their innovations. The passion of Fry and others in the Mid-South would help stitch together a burgeoning new style, standing along rock-and-roll and soul as the city’s third great musical innovation: power pop.
Terry Manning, who came from Texas to work at Stax, and ended up being a key engineer and producer in the Ardent orbit, remembers how it took shape around players who didn’t quite fit in.
“It was really a bit of an anomaly,” he notes, “because Memphis is so well-known for the R&B music, the Stax, and the rockabilly and Sun blues things. Stax and Hi and American and all the other people were doing either heavy R&B, or in the case of American, R&B-influenced pop music.
“What Memphis wasn’t known for was British Invasion rock, or whatever you call it,” he continues. “The bands locally that were getting the big gigs and played constantly were doing R&B music, doing soul music. White soul, we might say, although it was totally mixed racially. So you had people going out and playing ‘Midnight Hour,’ and then later in the 1970s, you had people doing Lynyrd Skynyrd-type Southern rock.”
While Manning and Ardent generally treasured their association with Stax, they also shared Fry’s fascination with different geographical perspectives.
“Our biggest interest was in the Beatles and all the other British stuff that was happening,” Manning explains. “And we started ordering the English records from John Lever Record Shop in Northampton, England. We would get it all before it was even released on Capitol. And then Chris Bell’s mother, of course, was British, and he was so completely into the Beatles and The Who. And it just mushroomed from there.
Big Star
The classic Big Star lineup, as heard on #1 Record. from left: Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel, and Alex Chilton.
Photograph courtesy Concord Music
“That’s what Big Star was; it was all of us trying to be the Beatles. It really was. We made sure we had four people, just like the Beatles. We had very few credits, almost no credits, just like the Beatles, and we even had #1 Record printed up on glossy paper for the album cover. Because the British LPs always came with the very thin but highly glossy covers. We hated the big, thick cardboard American ones. So we tried to come as close as we could to that. So we were going every direction, every way we could, to be the Memphis Beatles.”
Beatles imitators were legion in the Sixties, but as the Liverpudlians evolved it became more difficult to simply copy their formula: How do you mimic a group whose hallmark is originality and innovation?
Van Duren in the studio, mid-1970s.
Singer/songwriter Van Duren grew up in Memphis as a diehard Beatles fan, his teenage bedroom wall plastered with posters and clippings about the group. “I actually papered over the door!” he quips. “Every hard left they took, I was right there with ’em because of the inventiveness of it all. It’s really strange; you don’t understand what it was like to live in a world where the Beatles existed. Every four or five or six months, there was another Beatles album. And the excitement and the creativity and where it took you — there’s just no comparison anymore.”
By 1970, with the Fab Four suddenly a thing of the past, two sons of East Memphis were just returning home after a year at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville fizzled out in a wash of hedonism. Chris Bell and Andy Hummel were better for it, though. Enrolling at Southwestern (today’s Rhodes College) instead, their top priority was forming a band. Before Knoxville, Bell had already played guitar in bands known for their embrace of British music.
Chris Bell at the Crypt Folk Club in 1975.
“Chris hated it when they wanted him to play ‘Mustang Sally’ or ‘Midnight Hour,’” recalls his brother, David. A friend from that era recalled hearing them play The Who’s “Pictures of Lily,” which, as it turns out, was the song Pete Townshend was referring to when he coined the term “power pop” in a 1967 interview.
The phrase didn’t really stick at the time, however. As a genre tag, “power pop” is amorphous, rarely embraced even by its progenitors. While The Who are seen as precursors to it, the first pure expression of the sound is generally thought to be Badfinger, one of the first acts signed to the Beatles’ Apple Corps label, whose 1970 debut, Magic Christian Music, was partly produced by Paul McCartney. While The Who went on to write rock operas and anthems, groups like Badfinger or the Raspberries combined their power chords with shimmering vocal harmonies and tightly executed songcraft.
Author Michael Chabon articulates the sound best, writing that inventors of the form “were not revivalists. They looked backward to the music they had come of age loving — the astonishing run of perfect singles produced by British and American beat bands of the mid-Sixties — but they did not attempt to play it so much as allow it, in the most acutely nerdish sense of the term, to inform the songs they wrote.”
A showbill promoting several bands for a 1974 concert at the Overton Park Shell.
And that is a good description of what Bell, Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens began creating, with assistance from Manning and singer Tom Eubanks, at Ardent in 1970, first as Icewater, and later as Rock City. The core band played live as a trio, but when Bell heard that the teen star Alex Chilton had left the Box Tops, American Studios’ chart-toppers, he set his sights on recruiting him into the group. Chilton had been working with Manning at Ardent as well, recording the tracks that would one day be released as 1970.
These are the sounds of a talent testing his newfound freedom from the hit factory, spanning genres and toying with vocal affectations. But among the joke songs and hard-rocking guitar boogie tunes are some gentler folk tunes, like the stark “All We Ever Got from Them Was Pain,” or the tune Chilton spontaneously began when sitting at a grand piano at Abbey Road, back in his Box Tops days, “EMI Song (Smile for Me).” Completed with Manning, the song foreshadows the plainer, heart-on-sleeve vocals that Chilton would bring to Bell’s group.
Alex Chilton embraced punk, R&B, jazz, and country and repudiated Big Star for decades, but helped revive the band in the 1990s.
As Jody Stephens, who worked with Chilton through several permutations of the Big Star lineup, recalls, “We were a three-piece, and Alex came to see us at the VFW hall downtown. Probably in December of 1970. We were playing ‘The Bomber’ and ‘Funk #49’ [by the James Gang].” To the band, says Stephens, “it seemed that Alex was pretty into the folk scene, Roger McGuinn and all that.” But Chilton was beginning to master the electric guitar as well, as they would soon discover.
The resulting tale of Big Star, named ironically after the local grocery chain, is now oft-told. Readers who have not yet explored their albums, or the documentary books, articles, and film that followed, should do so. For now, suffice it to say that #1 Record, the band’s 1972 debut, is textbook power pop. Producer/engineer John Fry gave the sounds a stunning presence, full of crunching electric and crisp acoustic guitars, a pounding rhythm section, and ethereal harmonies. The songcraft is meticulous, with verses and choruses unfolding with an almost architectural sense of inevitability.
The fact that the record failed to sell, due to disintegrating distribution and lack of promotion, only enhances its mystique now. At the time, it was a slap in the face. This, and tensions with Chilton, led Bell to quit the band. Big Star carried on as a trio, recording the critically acclaimed Radio City a year later, which also flopped. Hummel left the band, replaced by John Lightman on bass. In the end, the “band’s” grand finale was the inspired Chilton solo project (with just one Stephens composition) Sister Lovers, recorded in dissolute fashion in 1974 and featuring a revolving cast of players.
But, as Chabon notes, “power pop at its purest is the music of hit records that miss. … An astonishing amount of effort and genius and chops has been expended by the practitioners of power pop to create a large number of equally well-crafted, tightly played, buoyant-yet-wrenching surefire hit songs that went nowhere.” For Chabon, this only enhances the genre’s tragic qualities. “True power pop is rueful and celebratory at the same time, glorifying desire and frustration. … Depression stalks the genre.”
At the time, it wasn’t even considered a genre, as Stephens confirms.
“I don’t know that there was an effort to do anything, other than what came naturally for Chris and Alex,” he says. “You do it by what sounds good to you. There’s not a rulebook of ‘Take steps 1, 2, 3 and 4 in how you play it.’ We all played as influenced by all the bands we listened to. A lot of which were British Invasion bands, but, you know, a lot of soul music too.”
Indeed, Stephens can point to specific parts by Al Jackson Jr., the drummer for Stax, that inspired his playing for Big Star. One can also see the soul influence in power pop’s commitment to short, carefully arranged songs addressing emotionally wrenching subjects.
With Chris Bell, there was no shortage of the latter, as the scattered recordings he made after leaving Big Star make clear. Later gathered as the album I Am the Cosmos, they evoke the haunting confusion of someone struggling with faith, sexuality, and life itself. As music writer Bob Mehr has noted, calling it power pop is probably a misnomer, though stylistically it is a natural growth from Big Star.
But Big Star and Bell weren’t alone in pursuit of pop perfection in early 1970s Memphis. With its in-house label in need of product, Ardent revved up to deliver similar sounds from other bands. In fact, Manning produced Cargoe, a band from Tulsa, whose debut preceded Big Star’s by some months.
“Cargoe were such great players,” recalls Manning. “The drummer, Tim Benton, was like a jazz drummer. Everyone was extremely accomplished in that band. In fact, the Big Star guys, when they would go see Cargoe play, they’d say, ‘Oh, we hate to see them, they’re so good!’ They were much more musician-oriented. Not to say that the people in Big Star weren’t good musicians; everyone was. But it was just a different approach. Cargoe were striving to do that, whereas Alex and Chris were just striving to do songs, rather than even thinking about the prowess involved.”
Cargoe’s overall sound, while clearly evoking British influences, also evoked more radio-friendly sounds, like Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young or Hawkwind. They had a minor hit single but failed to have staying power.
The Hot Dogs had a similar sound, with less of the jazz influence, and harder-rocking grooves. “That started out as just Greg Reding and Bill Rennie, and I would go in and play with them, to get it started,” recalls Manning. “And we later added Jack Holder, and Fred Prouty as drummer. And finally we had a four-piece band there.” They failed to strike commercial gold either, though the players would influence the Memphis scene for years. Jack Holder was especially admired as a multi-instrumentalist, and helped to pen hits for 38 Special.
Meanwhile, Ardent wasn’t the only game in town. Zuider Zee set up shop in Memphis after moving here from Louisiana to pursue their careers. Centered on the songwriting of Richard Orange, the band was largely unknown to fellow players in the small power pop scene, spending most of their time rehearsing, recording, or working the road outside of town.
Richard Orange, Gary Simon Bertrand, John Bonnar, and Kim Foreman.
“They had a huge following in Oklahoma,” local promoter and production manager Jon Hornyak recalls. “They were always working, honing what they did. They had their own road crew. And they toured extensively.”
Demos they recorded at the time were released this year as Zeenith, revealing a band equally inspired by British Invasion sounds and the more progressive sounds of King Crimson, topped off with Orange’s remarkable lead vocals. As with Big Star, imaginative, concise songwriting and arrangements abound. And for Zuider Zee, the hard work actually paid off with major label attention. “Zuider Zeeon Columbia Records in 1975 was a big deal,” says Orange. “But they just completely dropped the ball. Probably why you never heard of it was because they never released a single. In those days, radio wouldn’t play you unless you told them what to play.”
Indeed, as Hornyak explains, power pop didn’t fit anyone’s expectations for Memphis. “The labels weren’t looking for that out of Memphis. I was working with Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the labels would come to me and say, ‘What else like Lynyrd Skynyrd exists here?’ And what was really going on at the time was not that at all.”
Yet the innovations of the early 1970s bands in Memphis lived on in the hearts of musicians and fans. Robert Johnson, “the Frayser Flash,” who contributed to the Hot Dogs’ record, was a hot-shot guitarist who made connections while touring with Isaac Hayes and later parlayed those connections into living and working in England, joining Who bassist John Entwistle’s solo band for a time and even auditioning for the Rolling Stones. He eventually released a riveting, high-energy record, Close Personal Friend, in 1977. The shorter, sharper sounds would soon define what would also be called “power pop,” in a new iteration of the form influenced by punk, without the tragic overtones.
The Hot Dogs.
“People say, ‘You invented power pop,’ and I say, ‘Well, I thought Dwight Twilley did,’” says Johnson. “Dwight Twilley was one of my favorites. He and Phil Seymour came to Memphis, and got kind of power pop-ized when they recorded with [former Sun and Hi records producer] Ray Harris. I think he had a big influence on them with the rockabillly slapback and the guitar licks.”
Van Duren in more recent times, still performing.
Other Memphis bands like the Scruffs, Tommy Hoehn, the Randy Band, and the Crime began working around the same time, as the Seventies gave way to the Eighties. To many, this is what power pop implies to this day. The dam broke on this style with the 1979 hit “My Sharona,” and it seemed that the original power pop was a thing of history.
Robert Johnson, "The Frayser Flash," standing in a Memphis restaurant, 1977.
As Van Duren, whose 1977 debut evokes classic Todd Rundgren, and maybe the last creator of the old, tragic form of power pop, recalls, “I never heard the term until, gosh, maybe 1979? They were talking about The Knack and people like that. It’s narrow when you apply it to my work.” Indeed, most of Memphis’ power pop pioneers, devoted to the Beatles’ spirit of innovation more than any formula, would probably agree.
A Collector's Guide
Since being rediscovered in the 1980s, Big Star has snowballed in popularity, with much previously unreleased material and history appearing in recent years. Rhino’s 2009 box set, Keep An Eye on the Sky (re-released in a smaller format in 2014), spans the band’s career, with a smattering of Icewater and Rock City tracks, several alternate takes, and a bit of Chris Bell’s solo work.
The fourth disc is a live show, sans Bell, from Lafayette’s Music Room in Memphis, circa 1973. Omnivore Recordings has re-released the show as a single disc and will release another live performance, at Long Island station WLIR, in January 2019. Though this latter lineup features latecomer John Lightman on bass, this is a very together band delivering a fiery performance. Unlike the Lafayette’s set, it’s not marred by a seemingly indifferent audience.
Stax’s The Best of Big Star is a good introduction, but newcomers should begin with the three masterpieces by the band,newcomers should begin with the three masterpieces by the band, each with its own distinct personality: #1 Record and Radio City (packaged together on Fantasy), and Third/Sister Lovers (Rhino/Ryko). The latter has received a deluxe reissue, Complete Third, thanks to Omnivore, delving deep into demos and alternate mixes.
The tragedy of Big Star’s records flopping was compounded when Chris Bell died in a car crash in 1978. But his legacy is being honored. Omnivore’s 2017 release, The Complete Chris Bell, is a six-LP set with nearly everything Bell put on tape, including the entire Rock City and I Am the Cosmos albums. It’s a good companion to this year’s book, There Was a Light (Hozac Books), an oral history of Bell by Rich Tupica. The well-researched Chilton bio, A Man Called Destruction (Penguin), by Holly George-Warren, offers another perspective, where Big Star is just a moment in Chilton’s cantankerous career.
Finally, Big Star was revived in the 1990s and beyond, with Chilton and Stephens joined by Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of the Posies. Two documents of their live shows have been released, Complete Columbia: Live at University of Missouri 4/25/93 (Volcano/Legacy), and Live in Memphis (Omnivore), a 1994 performance. Their 2005 studio album, In Space (Rykodisc) is becoming more rare. Finally, a tribute to the often lush, unpredictable, and haunting Sister Lovers was staged after Chilton’s death in 2010, featuring Jody Stephens and a host of other appropriate talents. The extravagant production was captured on film and released as Thank You Friends: Big Star’s Third Live (Concord Records). Last but not least, Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me (Magnolia) is a 2012 documentary that reveals the band’s story in all its tragic beauty. Highly recommended.
What of other bands from the era? Cargoe’s eponymous album (Ardent/Stax) has not been re-released, though it can be streamed. Their live performance in Ardent, circa 1972, was released in 2004 by Lucky 7 Records, but we recommend the album proper.
The Hot Dogs’ debut LP, Say What You Mean, can still be found for sale online, but you’ll have to get the 2003 Japanese reissue (on Stax) if you want the CD.
Richard Orange’s 21st Century albums, Supernatural (LocoBop) and Big Orange Sun (Orange Stone Recordings) can still be found.
Zuider Zee’s 1975 debut is out of print, but never fear! To these ears, this year’s collection of demos cut in Memphis in 1972-73, under the title Zeenith (Light in the Attic Records), is even better, with its looser, earthier feel. Among Rolling Stone’s top-10 releases of 2018.
Van Duren’s stunning 1977 debut, Are You Serious? (Big Sound) has not yet been reissued. However, the 2018 Indie Memphis festival debuted a new film, Waiting: The Van Duren Story, focusing on two Australians’ search for the true story of the LP’s creation. Look for that next year. In February, the soundtrack, featuring many cuts from his debut, as well as other recordings from later in his career, will be released on Omnivore Recordings. Highly recommended. Watch the trailer for Waiting.
Robert Johnson’s propulsive debut, Close Personal Friend, suffered from the collapse of Infinity Records soon after it hit the market in 1978, but a 40th anniversary edition was released this year by Burger Records. Look for new material on his upcoming I’m Alive, due next year.
Finally, Tommy Hoehn, who co-wrote a song with Alex Chilton, was considered the great success of the 1970s Memphis scene, and released his debut, Losing You to Sleep on London Records in 1978. It’s more recently been reissued by Milk & Soda Records.
