After several years of touring in support of Radio City, and an
abortive attempt at a third album (patched together and released
in 1992 as Sister Lovers/ Third), Big Star broke up. Chilton and
Bell began solo careers, but both remained obscure throughout the
remainder of the 1970s.
Chilton
eventually garnered a cult following and found sustenance in his
Box Tops legacy. Bell quit music, took a job in his father’s
restaurant, and died in a car crash near Memphis in 1979. His one
attempt at a solo album, I Am the Cosmos, was released posthumously.
Big Star’s story didn’t end there, however. In the eighties
and nineties interest in the band resurfaced, as grunge pioneers
like the Replacements and Teenage Fanclub touted Big Star as pioneers
of a ramshackle authenticity, akin to what later became “alternative
rock” (the Replacements released a song called “Alex
Chilton”; Fanclub titled one of its albums Thirteen after
the Big Star track from #1 Record).
Other Southern U.S. bands like R.E.M. and Wilco were decidedly “Big
Star-ish” in their approach to songwriting and production,
and a sound that had seemed quirky and outdated in the early seventies
suddenly became trendy.
A Big Star reunion followed in the nineties, as did reissues of
the original studio albums and a pair of so-so live recordings.
For a year or two a Big Star revival seemed afoot. But like everything
else in Big Star’s troubled career that, too, proved illusory.
Amazingly, Big Star lives on, still touring occasionally in the
U.S. and holding tenaciously to a small-but-loyal following of fans
for whom “stardom” never really meant that much.
~Peter
Webb is a singer-songwriter of several recordings. He is currently
working on his PhD in Canadian War Literature at University of Ottawa.
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