#1
Record featured well-crafted songs, soaring vocals, and crisp production.
But it also clearly displayed a band with a split personality, owing
to the differing sensibilities of its two front men, Bell and Chilton.
Chris Bell was gritty-voiced belter whose forte was power-soaked
anthems like “Feel” and “Don’t Lie to Me,”
sonically akin to such hard-rocking contemporaries as Grand Funk
Railroad or April Wine. The other microphone featured Alex Chilton,
whose introspective lyrics and vulnerable singing on songs like
“Thirteen” and “The Ballad of El Goodo”
brought Big Star more in key with alt-country crooners like Gram
Parsons.
On the one hand, this contrast gave #1 Record a sonic versatility
more akin to the Beatles Revolver than to Grand Funk’s latest
boogie fest. On the other hand—and this was disastrous in
the corporate seventies—the album’s shape-shifting tendencies
made it impervious to niche-marketing.
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