It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong — but it takes a much, much smaller man to take nearly 40 years to ‘fess up to his mistakes. And that’s just the kind of man I am. So here I am, stripped naked of shame and regret, chained to the Orockle doors, megaphone in hand, ready to scream into the howling wind: I WAS WRONG ABOUT ALEX CHILTON’S 1980s OUTPUT!

Like everybody else who came into rock maturity in the 1980s (other than E. Pluribus Gergeley), I fell deeply in love with Big Star upon hearing them as a pimply-faced college puke. Big Star had everything I needed as a budding music nerd, in overwhelming abundance: Impeccable song craft! Soaring harmonies! Clanging guitars! Doomed-to-fail braininess! I-know-more-than-you-do exclusivity!

I rhapsodized over the pop perfection of their first two albums, and made excuses for the shambolic weirdness of the third. I agonized over the band’s collapse, and cursed the world for not appreciating their greatness, even as I enjoyed being one of the select few who actually owned a copy of “Radio City” on the original Ardent label. I decided Alex Chilton was a genius.

Of course, I wasn’t the only music nerd in the 1980s to discover Chilton and Big Star, so a few indie labels decided it would make good business sense to green-light various Chilton “comeback” projects, which were targeted fairly specifically at people like me. And here is where I started to go very, very wrong — because, like almost everybody else at the time, I thought these albums and EPs sucked.

The critical take on Chilton’s first “comeback” album, “High Priest,” was basically:  “huh?” Everybody, including (probably especially) me, just could not understand why the man we perceived as the creative genius behind the dense, powerful, proto-power pop of Big Star would debase himself with such a lazy throwaway album of obscure ’60s AM/soul radio material. The arrangements were sloppy — not insane, or non-existent, as on “Like Flies On Sherbert,” but stripped down, basic, elemental… yeah, “lazy.” Basically, if Alex had wanted to piss off all the people looking for a return to Big Star’s style and substance, he couldn’t have done a better job.

But — even as some critics twisted themselves into pretzels trying to convince us this was all part of a Chilton master plan to fool the world by deliberately making music that was beneath him — the truth is that this album, and most of the other stuff he released as an indie elder statesman, was great. Not Great with a capital “G,” but impeccably curated, played with honesty, clarity, and nuance, and generally pleasing to the earbulbs. I’ve grown into a place where I absolutely adore these records, and I listen to them far more often than the Big Star material (which I still marvel at, but find to be very much “of an era.”)

I should point out that I also love the original artists’ versions of the covers within this catalog. But Chilton’s soulful interpretations are unique, and meaningful. Like a bop jazz trio doing a set of Broadway show tunes, they’re measurably different from the originals, but respectful of the source material.

All this to say: go check out “High Priest,” or “Set,” and listen with an open mind. I think you’ll like what you hear.

HVB

Does it get more gentle than this?

Not sure where or how to start this rant, but — well, let me just call all of RTH out (yes, including me) for being a bunch of bullshit rockist pansies. How is it possible that in the 15 years or so that we’ve been bloviating about music we’ve never stopped to acknowledge how truly amazing the Bee Gees were?

And look — before any of you start yammering about their output in the ’60s, or their silly-psych concept albums, or any other rockist justification for liking the band — let’s just call a spade a spade: during the second half of the 1970s, the Bee Gees’ batting average for crafting powerful, moving, era-defining, ethnic ghetto-busting pop music was literally close to 1.000.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lbFycezCo8

My wife and I had to spend a lot of time on the highway over the last few days for work reasons that are too boring to get into here. Because my shoulder is still pretty jacked up, my wife had to do all of the driving — and that meant she got to choose what we listened to as we trundled down the highway. For a while, I was able to sneak shit that I wanted to hear on the rental car stereo, but it didn’t take long for her to start making specific demands — and the last one, made in the interest of staying awake and alert, was “play something you can dance and sing along to.” Enter the Bee Gees. I found a pretty generic greatest hits package on Amazon Music, and pressed play. A full hour later, I was shocked by the fact that we hadn’t exited the 1970s yet, and each and every tune we’d heard was aces.  

And let me be clear:  sure, these tunes are danceable. Yes, they’re catchy. They do make you feel happy. But they’re stealth vehicles for some of the densest Kentonism in pop music. I’m not smart enough to describe the music theory going on behind “Nights On Broadway,” or “How Deep Is Your Love,” or about a dozen other songs that owned the charts 45 years ago, but their music was some seriously brainy shit.

So let’s give it up for the Bee Gees, shall we? And please do so without referencing their 1960s output. That stuff is occasionally excellent, but we need to face the truth here: the Bee Gees made pop music great in the late 1970s.

I look forward to your responses.

HVB