BIG STAR
Radio City (1973)
Stax/Ardent
Produced by JOHN FRY

Where do you begin talking about an album stacked with one undeniable genre classic after another? Everything that's ever been called "power pop" leads back to this, and pretty much all of it is inferior.

Alex Chilton was clearly a talent in the Box Tops, clearly a maverick by the time of #1 RECORD, and clearly a genius once RADIO CITY rolls around. His innovative pop-song forms are so perfect they seem almost manipulative. He is in a league with almost no others, and the songs on this record are as close as anyone's come to that sudden rush of "I Get Around" or "I Want to Hold Your Hand" since the '60s.

It's helpful to Chilton's quirky focus that the late, great Chris Bell left the band before this album was recorded (though he does show up on a couple of tracks). Without Bell, there is nothing holding Chilton back; he dives full force in both of his natural directions -- the rock & roll purist with every second engineered for life-shaking effect, and the emotionally exhausting avant-pop mastermind. #1 RECORD was the pop record, THIRD/SISTER LOVERS would be the shattering, dissonant masterpiece, but RADIO CITY is the perfect fusion.

Chilton is a genius. The songs here that foreshadow THIRD would sound perfectly at home on that record, so delicate they threaten to fall to pieces, almost unearthly in a way sensed only in the paranoid drama of Chilton's voice. "O My Soul" is his "Good Vibrations," the most unconventional and jarring of the lot, with its schizophrenic musical narrative and a shreiking, hanging-from-the-rafters band performance. "Morpha Too," near the end of side two, provides the payoff, Chilton alone on piano sounding devastated. His fragmented, hellish rock move "Life is White" (a rejection of the first album's love song "My Life is Right"?) turns evil harmonicas into a wall of fire, with Alex crushing everything under his brilliant teenage lyrics: "I know what you're like / And I can't go back to that" turns to "I know what you lack..." Again, he has the most important skill for a true rock & roller, and the one most of them after the mid-'60s blatantly lack: he is blind to banality, and he understands that rock & roll is a different world in which literary standards do not apply. He intends to speak to an audience that does not like flowery poetry any more than they like being looked upon as dimwitted tickets to wealth. His sincerity and lack of pandering make his work that much more moving... and disturbing. He is so much like Brian Wilson in this sense that it's hard to contemplate.

A set of three other songs predict the shuddering, mad intensity of THIRD: "What's Going Ahn," a psychological trauma set to music that means to rivet us in its slow pace, and does. Chilton is a genius. "Well, I like love, but I don't know / All these girls, they come and go." The almost voyeuristic breakup ballad "Daisy Glaze" reads like someone's diary in the midst of a breakdown -- "And I'm thinking, Christ / Gotta find my life, gotta find my life" -- that ends in the ultimate kissoff: "You're gonna die, yes, you're gonna die." Even the rollicking "She's a Mover" has tones of violence and cinematic revenge: "She's so wild / Drag, fast we go / Ooh I dig speed so good / Destroy her in the cruiser / And destroy her."

We also reach back to #1 RECORD for the more commercial material, and it's excellent, though I don't think the three obvious throwbacks stand up to the best moments of the previous album. "Way Out West," written by bassist Andy Hummel, is wonderfully unpretentious, a worthy sequel to "The India Song." The breathless, Beatlesque "You Get What You Deserve" is another powerful angry-male diatribe, with such familiar speeches as "Try to understand what I'm going through" and "You've gotta have a lot of nerve." The album closer, "I'm in Love with a Girl," is sweet and pretty but seems almost anachronistic given what precedes it; it certainly would have been more at home on #1 RECORD.

But goddamn, Chilton is a genius. In ascending order, "Mod Lang," "Back of a Car," and "September Gurls" are just about the three most perfect pop songs ever written, and the last one is hands down the best track of the '70s. "Mod Lang," dating from some of the earliest Big Star performances, is a blues imitation (its words built largely from the clichés of that genre) that endlessly exhilirates in its simplistic chorus: "How long can this go on?" Similarly unforgettable: "Back of a Car," which comes close to the power of "September Gurls." With Chilton's best chorus -- "I'll go on and on with you / Like to fall and lie with you" -- it evokes youth with a feverish, fast-paced beauty that defies the walls of trends. The Cars spent ten years trying to manage that song, but as good as they were, they couldn't get a glimmer of the magic in Chilton's guitar, and certainly none of them had a voice like his. These are short, sweet, loud pop songs, their insane perfection and appeal infinite.

"September Gurls" dispels everything that you ever loved about rock & roll into three minutes of something like bliss. It encapsulates all elements of Big Star's seductive urgency, with the desperation in Chilton's voice, the tower of glory in the guitar solo, and the stinging energy of the lyrics: "I loved you... well, never mind." It is not only a wonder that this wasn't a huge hit, it's completely mystifying that it didn't overcome the odds to make this band a household name. I've never heard anything like it.

But the album went nowhere, and cult status or not, we will always be missing the impact it could have had on the world at the time. Instead, we get to experience it for ourselves, which may be even better. The important thing is... Chilton is a genius.