Pitchfork

[Posted Thursday, September 18th, 2003 04:00:00 Pitchfork Central Time]

Jeremy C. Baron and Will Bryant report:
Big Star-- now there's a name from the past. For all you kids too young to know 'em for anything other than the theme to That '70s Show, here's a history lesson: Big Star was one of the more influential (but least successful) power-pop outfits of the '70s. Alex Chilton fronted the band, with Jody Stephens, Chris Bell and Andy Hummel on drums, guitar and bass, respectively. Big Star's first album, imaginatively titled #1 Record, which was met with critical acclaim, but box office on par with this year's Gigli: basically, no one bought it. The album was released on the Ardent label, a subsidiary of the legendary Memphis label Stax. Call it bad timing, but distribution, budgetary, and promotional lapses conspired to all but bury the album. The band broke up, only to reform sans Bell two years later for Radio City. But, a similar fate befell this record: think Glitter, only with good reviews. They tried their hand at a third, but quit in the midst of recording. This time, the split was for good.

Or was it? In 1993, Chilton and Stephens joined up with Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of the Posies for a live show at the University of Missouri; this line-up has reconvened for occasional tours and one-off shows ever since. A 1993 live album, Columbia, documents this incarnation of Big Star, who performed Chilton's would-be hits as though they were beloved generational anthems. Even after that, Big Star's music still lives on, through covers by the likes of Wilco, Elliott Smith and Beck, who did an acoustic version of "Kangaroo" nearly every night of last year's tour, instead of playing "Where It's At."

Yet the Big Star curse has even followed the band into its afterlife. A planned 1998 tribute album, which included input from Wilco, Whiskeytown, Juliana Hatfield, Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, The Posies and the Afghan Whigs, was also mired in legal troubles and never actually released. The album included a sole new offering from the Chilton-Stephens-Auer-Stringfellow lineup called "Hot Thing" which was only issued officially on an Ignition Records promo CD touting the ill-fated release.

Now, a decade after the '93 performance, Big Star is set to release a greatest hits CD, The Big Star Story, through Rykodisc on September 23rd. Ryko promised the disc "covers the depth and the breadth of the Big Star experience from the soaring power-pop of 'September Gurls' to the experimental melancholy of 'Holocaust.'" "Hot Thing," touted here as a "new and previously unreleased Big Star track," makes its official debut on the CD. And yes, the best-of also contains "In The Street," the song that's the basis for the theme to That 70's Show. Sure, the song isn't quite the same without Donna gripping the dashboard for dear life or Fez singing along in his Balki, Jr. accent, but I'm sure we can all rock out to it anyway. Tracklist:

01 September Gurls
02 Thank You Friends
03 Don't Lie To Me
03 Ballad Of El Goodo
03 Holocaust
03 I Am The Cosmos
07 In The Street
08 You Get What You Deserve
09 Thirteen
10 You and Your Sister
11 Back Of A Car
12 Jesus Christ
13 Mod Lang
14 Baby Strange
15 O Dana
16 Motel Blues
17 Nighttime
18 Hot Thing [previously unreleased]