Big Star – Third / Sister Lovers (1992, US)
[As randomly chosen via Fedi survey,[1] our next spotlight is on number 897 on The List. This guest post was written by @arratoon, and the album was also submitted by @arratoon.]
This record does not exist. By that I mean it wasn’t ever supposed to be the third record by Memphis band Big Star; the master tapes have it as an Alex Chilton release. In 1974 he and drummer Jody Stephens, and a cast of Memphis musicians, went into the studio with producer Jim Dickinson to record some music. The results were released in 1978, and since then various releases have come out, with differing running orders and covers. Nobody is entirely sure which is the ‘correct’ version, if such a thing even exists.
The 1992 Rykodisc offering was aided by a renewed interest in the band, thanks in no small part to 1984’s It’ll End in Tears, the first album from Ivo Watts-Russell’s This Mortal Coil project, which featured covers of “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo”. Teenage Fanclub’s 1991 album Bandwagonesque rings with chiming echoes of Big Star too. Interest in the band started to pick up.
But what of the music itself? It’s such a strange mix. At turns power pop, at others dark and haunted, then with covers of The Kinks’ “Til the End of the Day”, “Nature Boy”, and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On”, and also their now Christmas standard “Jesus Christ”, it’s clearly a collection of songs rather than a coherent planned album.
But what incredible songs they are. Punchy Rykodisc opener “Kizza Me” is rousing. “Thank You Friends” rings with spiky guitars. “Stroke it Noel” is one of the tracks that is augmented by baroque strings, and is a gateway to the more melancholy standout pieces such as “Nightime” and “Blue Moon”, both achingly beautiful and sad love songs, two of the greatest Big Star ever released.
Then there’s “Holocaust”, with its icy “You’re a waste of space/You’re a dead-eyed lie” refrain, and “Kanga Roo”, a song that falls apart and pulls itself together all through its running time. “Take Care”, the final track on the album proper, before the bonus tracks on the Rykodisc edition, is a plaintive hug: “This sounds a bit like goodbye/In a way it is, I guess.”
Normally, compilations of outtakes and studio experiments are extremely offputting, with their worse versions, badly thought-out initial attempts, and plain bad songs, but for fans of the Rykodisc release, the Complete Third, an Ardent 69-track compilation of everything that went in to the making of the album, the album that never really was, is essential listening. You can hear songs come to life, ideas flourish, and beauty unfold.
It’s heartening that a record that even the artists who created it thought might just fade away and never be released to a wider public has been taken to the hearts of music lovers around the world. Give it a listen, you’ll understand why.
– Adrian Arratoon (@arratoon)
The survey choices that led to this spotlight were: “Starfish and coffee”, “Maple syrup and jam”, “Butterscotch clouds, a tangerine”, and “And a side order of ham”. The first option was the winning selection, so the survey result was translated as picking an album in The List that contained a (part of a) word in the phrase – in this case, “star(fish)”. ↩︎
#1970s #AlexChilton #altRock #BigStar #garagePop #garageRock #powerPop
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