Dear Ones Like You Are The Best I Do
It says a lot, perhaps, about where I came from that I got more excited finding out that there’s a new Big Star retrospective, complete with demos and alternate mixes of the songs from their first three (in other words, real) albums, coming out this month than I did about all of the Beatles reissues.
(For those who have no idea what I’m talking about but are excited at the idea: It’s called Keep An Eye On The Sky, and it’s a four-CD boxset that’s pretty much a Beatles Anthology for Big Star.)
I blame it on almost-local boys Teenage Fanclub, but ever since I discovered Big Star, I’ve been convinced that they’re a west coast of Scotland thing, this obscure but essential band that escaped most everyone and yet are somehow well know enough that drunks can sing word-perfect versions of “The Ballad of El Goodo” (As I once heard, amazed, on a train between Glasgow and my hometown). It makes some sense, really; there’s a sentimentality and a fatalism that seems particularly Glaswegian about Big Star’s music, especially on the second album, on which Alex Chilton goes between swagger and sweetness in a way very few have since been able to.
(Never mind “Daisy Glaze”’s tale of drunken, self-destructive aggression, which could be sung by far too many people from my youth: “You’re gonna die/ you’re gonna die/You’re gonna decease!” indeed.)
Big Star were, of course, the little band that couldn’t; the band who took the Beatles and soul and put them together to come up with commercial failure that, years later, people still discover through cover versions or random happenstance and decide how they could’ve lived their lives without them. My favorite album of theirs is still, probably, Third/Sister Lovers, one of the saddest (on many levels) albums ever. It was the first thing I heard of theirs, following up – I think, although I might be misremembering – on a namecheck in a Teenage Fanclub interview and finding the CD in the local library like it was fate, and songs like “Nighttime” and “Stroke It, Noel” (renamed in a spirit of contrariness by Alex Chilton’s self-destructive nature, but still a heartbreakingly beautiful song) seemed perfect, scarily so. Their first two albums are more raucous affairs, from when they were happier and expected the world to come their way, and both almost as good as the somber and fragile Third, but it’ll always be Sister Lovers that I’d take to that desert island if forced there at gunpoint.
Occasionally, I wonder about all the other Graemes in all the other parallel worlds that exist out there according to a million things I’ve read or watched; somewhere amongst them, there are Graemes who didn’t grow up where I did, and who didn’t discover Big Star. There are some reasons why I’m better off than them, I realize, when I think of that.
