Big Star - #1 Record/Radio City
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Music CD Cover
Artist: Big StarBrand: Stax
Edition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 1992-06-10
Music Label: Fantasy
Soundtracks:
- Feel
- The Ballad Of El Goodo
- In the Street
- Thirteen
- Don't Lie To Me
- The India Song
- When My Baby's Beside Me
- My Life Is Right
- Give Me Another Chance
- Try Again
- Watch the Sunrise
- St 100/6
- O My Soul
- Life Is White
- Way Out West
- What's Going Ahn
- You Get What You Deserve
- Mod Lang
- Back of a Car
- Daisy Glaze
- She's a Mover
- September Gurls
- Morpha Too
- I'm in Love with a Girl
Free Music Notes for #1 Record/Radio City
Free Music Review: They'll Show You Somehow
Hit: 5 Stars
Anyone familiar with the mid-sixties pre-psychedlic Beatles is no doubt going to get a kick out of this stuff, especially given that one of its main singer-songwriters, Alex Chilton sings so much differently than he had in the Box Tops. Never the conformist, Chilton actually walked off the stage of a Box Tops gig saying he didn't want to be controlled as the sixties came to a close with so many creative artists making an impact. Later in the seventies, when questioned by a Long Island Radio jock about making "anachronistic music" and what his career had become, Alex summed it up with a curt "pretty scummy". Before this revelation, Big Star blessed the few with #1 Record, a culmination of the very best both he and a spaced out Memphis Anglophile named Chris Bell could muster in the way of perfectly crafted songs. While progressive rock became snottier, more lugubrious and about all that would play on FM radio, Big Star made a record of melodic sheen (In the Street, India Song, Ballad of El Goodo), gloriously juxtaposing sentiment in the lovliest of adolescent ballads, Thirteen, followed by the nuclear holocaustic Dont Lie to Me. It is there where #1 Record is fully realized. They perfected the experiments by earlier similar bands like the Nazz, Raspberries and Badfinger by making the acoustic guitars sound that much more earnest and crisp and making their rockers snarl that much louder. They even address their apparently deep spirituality in El Goodo, My Life Is Right, Try Again and Watch the Sunrise without the clockwork zealot righteousness found in most clergical music. They capture genuine and desperate human conflict of not being holier than thou. With Bell's tortured spirituality coming unglued as the second side of the record came to an end, chronicled on Try again and ST 100/6, Big Star ends their one perfect Pop rock masterpiece on a forboding note.To make matters more interesting, they actually make there next record Radio City better by making it more haphazard and slightly deranged. Given that their next and last record Third/Sister lovers is basically down to Chilton falling to pieces, we have the 2nd record, in subsequent listens, sound like the last gasp for sanity with loads of sinister slop creeping its way in to their pop. While the Beatles melted into psychedlia, Big Star chose a more downward spiral in Radio City attributed in large part to booze and narcotics rather than hallucinogens. Chris Bell had minimal imput and was out of the group to cope with drugs, depression and suicide, while Alex continued to chronicle their personal mess. One gets an inebriated feel from the rollicking stop-start number O' My Soul and the crunchy She's a Mover, then descend into an almost completely bottomed out feel of the Third Album with Daisy Glaze, only to watch it explode as if the song was Stairway to Heaven with a Mandrax prescription. The best cuts on Radio City are the closest to #1 Record. Both Back of A Car and September Gurls have a candid sexual tension in the lyrics and some of the most perfect melodies and hooks committed to rock n'roll. The very moment when Chilton sings "OOOh when she makes love to me!", on September Gurls and launches into an orgasmic jangling guitar run is pop perfection. These two records combined for an affordable must buy for anyone with a rudimentary understanding of popular music. With virtually no distribution by their original label Ardent, many who own this treasure may have otherwise never heard it. Now it's your chance to do the right thing when you go to the record store to buy Hoobastank, the Calling or Ashlee Simpson; get this record instead and while you're at it, buy those other acts a copy. Chances are the ones responsible for grooming these acts may have been trying to replicate Big Star's craft ever since. Oh that's right, Big Star didn't have a stylist. But they had a need to paint their hearts on anyone's ear who heard them instead of their nails by someone making 6 figures to do it. They didn't really need it, they were Big Star!
#1 Record/Radio City Poster
There's a lot of truth to the statement that the art lives on, long after the artist has gone or changed directions. This is certainly the case with Big Star, a Memphis band forged out of a willful vision, whose brief existence profoundly affected scores of artists spearheading the post-punk/alternative power pop schools of music throughout the eighties and nineties. R.E.M., The Replacements, The Posies, Teenage Fan Club, Wilco, and The Bangles, are just a few of the artists who have acknowledged a huge debt to Big Star. This newly remastered version of #1 Record / Radio City features enhanced packaging and two unreleased bonus tracks!A two-for-one combo of the first two Big Star albums (they only recorded three). Heard side by side, #1 Record and Radio City only add further testament to Big Star's seminal greatness. On the first album, Chris Bell and Alex Chilton share songwriting credit, though each brings a remarkably different sensibility to the band: Bell creates pure pop nuggets ("Feel") while Chilton swaggers with reckless melancholy ("Ballad of El Goodo," "Thirteen."). After Bell's departure, Chilton took control of the helm for Radio City, and what a ride it is. While not abandoning Bell's penchant for pop, Radio City careens wildly through some of the most exhilarating music ever created, from the rave-up opener, "O My Soul," to the pure pop masterpiece "September Girls" to the whimsical ditty "I'm in Love with a Girl." It's too bad that Big Star didn't create more albums, but thank God they made the ones they did. --Tod Nelson
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