Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Rob Jovanovic
I want to make an album of real genius, to sit alongside the Stones' 'Exile On Main Street', and Big Star's 'Third' (Peter Buck, R.E.M. 1991)The definitive biography of Big Star, the most influential band of the last 30 years.Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three albums – #1 Record, Radio City and Third – are still felt today. Big Star bucked the musical trend of the Seventies. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio friendly Power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists such as Primal Scream, R.E.M., the Bangles, the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, Garbage, St. Etienne, Pavement and Travis regularly speak of the Big Star legacy.After singing in 1960s boy-band The Box Tops, Alex Chilton joined up with Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens and Chris Bell to form Big Star in late 1970. Chilton and Bell quickly formed a Lennon-McCartney type partnership at the heart of band and began turning out tunes laced with the best pop sensibilities of the Beatles and Badfinger, the guitars of the Byrds and the harmonies of the Beach Boys. But creative tensions, haphazard distribution, and marketplace indifference sent the band into a series of splits, solo-projects and short-lived reunions that left them on the brink of oblivion. Thirty years later though, and most guitar bands in the world will admit a debt to Big Star and their three albums remain unqualified successes.Drawing on interviews from surviving band members (including Andy Hummel's first interview for 30 years) and the major players at the Memphis based record label Ardent, Rob Jovanovic has written the definitive history of Big Star, the forgotten band.
Big Star
The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Rob Jovanovic
For Carolyn
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2e1a47f6-b682-5f19-b144-9a4e5c6a37b1)
Title Page (#u9e31adcc-4ab1-55b9-9b34-2257b0ff8c83)
Prologue (#ucfbfb397-2d43-5b63-ba93-359f6d1a892e)
1 ‘Why do you come so far?’ (#u53f9e743-9610-5de6-8324-f3f5f3dc8102)
2 ‘They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles’ (#ub0a588fa-c251-5ef3-997f-8c41e8bd36cb)
3 ‘He wore a black T-shirt, nobody wore those, and torn jeans’ (#ucd2a4d99-f2f9-5c10-a99a-cc42975d3a92)
4 ‘All the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand’ (#ua12378a8-6477-519f-a36d-279d7891f6bc)
5 ‘We just figured we’d all be killed anyway’ (#u501ff4e8-a5a1-5d35-8dc2-f57606ec9897)
6 ‘Bob Dylan never had anything on John Harold and he knew it’ (#u17f7e3b3-4ca7-5021-9569-ba8917f37e05)
7 ‘It really does sound like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing’ (#uc5b1d014-531e-5190-b71d-4828e5a7ccb8)
8 ‘Mississippi didn’t like guys with long hair’ (#u38485a2c-a435-510f-adaf-1e4f276b6efc)
9 ‘The beer bottles were dancing across the tables’ (#u5f6509a3-a173-550c-9e44-3f43ce2ecebf)
10 ‘We got fired after the first show in Michigan’ (#uc47c64da-c74d-5eb3-91af-2c99d7383732)
11 ‘He turned to me and shot Demerol down his throat with a syringe’ (#u78e4576d-4b0f-5a94-ac6c-304f65c0680e)
12 ‘The singularly most heavy moment of my life’ (#u1850fd52-efdc-52f3-ad61-bda7b414c817)
13 ‘Look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers!’ (#ua562f79b-fdf6-588f-952e-fad8b5d90337)
14 ‘Another stray American in London’ (#u2d1fddbb-8446-52b8-8297-4fb253b58867)
15 ‘Alex Chilton, Rock Legend, Back’ (#ua6f339cc-4840-5d57-8a94-ef93529a7bb6)
16 ‘He was rather nonplussed to be sought out while wearing a paper hat’ (#ufeb16c7e-93e6-54a6-92af-0b0167bc103a)
17 ‘It sounds like gun shots’ (#u292accba-ed03-58c5-98e6-e466f5346cf3)
18 ‘We toasted his health with cheap beer and snacks from Taco Bell’ (#u806edca6-a963-5d41-8ab1-4306fb99e86c)
19 ‘We had to have girls because we were entertaining the troops’ (#u02518e11-da9d-5b4c-87c6-e2c90cc412f3)
20 ‘Without being overly threatening, I pushed him into a corner’ (#u7f3adcfb-3405-52f7-b7ee-76ff8b6233df)
Postscript (#ub6a3b8ca-d00d-57de-a500-f1e0fbcee154)
Timeline (#u7907b625-358a-5048-94d3-25d17a9c350c)
Discography (#ue69046f6-8dde-524c-9f6c-38a8ae3d4b22)
BIG STAR: ALBUMS (#u183fb7ed-fcc3-56e5-9c64-93ddfc0987c0)
Concert List (#ufbadfe95-6720-5098-9f8d-eebadbacaa1a)
Cover Versions (#u8adc5839-5a47-5871-b294-7b78f25b94a0)
Bibliography (#u526a81b0-2a44-527e-aa30-a75850c08245)
Notes (#ub814438e-ea05-56bc-9ed3-a3631bdf9bd6)
Thanks and Acknowledgements (#uc747c60c-a627-562c-9351-35bbee70419d)
Index (#uc9968975-f915-538a-88cc-b85f17f479b8)
About the Author (#u47630fc8-2f26-587b-aedf-196a6ea33bf2)
Praise (#ue18a93a8-0530-51ea-b52e-f478253f99d3)
Copyright (#ue634d800-c36b-5ded-a527-797006217c6c)
About the Publisher (#u1ad86f17-9828-5746-a922-3f76d6f6617d)
Prologue (#ulink_d62c79e4-b22b-539f-9770-008c883b2deb)
In October 1972 the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen number-one singles achieved by acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade. Iggy Pop was holed up in a studio recording Raw Power and David Bowie had just given birth to Ziggy Stardust, but the album charts were dominated by heavy rock (Black Sabbath’s Vol 4), progressive rock (Yes’s Close To The Edge) and inane pop (David Cassidy’s Cherish). Since the Beatles had disbanded two years earlier, the short, catchy guitar-pop song had all but disappeared from vogue. But there was a quartet trying to keep that musical torch burning. Big Star, a Memphis band that took the best elements of the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Byrds, was ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and lengthy, self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening they were playing a show to less than a hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.
Like most of the shows that the band had already played, they got only an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never heard a Big Star record but they did know who the lead singer was: Alex Chilton had sung a handful of hit singles with the Box Tops a few years before. For the show, Chilton, like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel, was wearing a casual shirt and jeans, had shoulder-length hair and was constantly fiddling around with his amplifier. This casual attire was at odds with the glammed-up sartorial excesses and lavish stage productions that the superstars of the day were blasting their audiences with. Tonight the three-pronged guitar attack drowned out Stephens’s melodic drumming and almost all of the vocals. It was the usual problem they faced having played so few shows together. On #1 Record, their recently released debut album, the balance was perfect. On vinyl the guitars chimed and the vocals soared. Here it was a battle that the vocals lost. And this was not helped by the obvious discomfort of the other vocalist, Chris Bell. At this point in his career he still hadn’t conquered his stage fright and his hands kept shaking violently.
During the quieter moments, such as when Chilton stepped forward to sing an acoustic version of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’, the crowd talked over the top and downed beers. For the rest of the set they were happy to stomp along with the instantly catchy, rousing choruses of ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ and ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, even if they’d never heard them before. Lead vocal duties were shared between Chilton and Bell but all four band members sang back-up. Chilton’s vocals recalled the deadpan delivery of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn while Bell’s were more like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
Big Star ran through all twelve songs from their only album, a couple of new songs called ‘Got Kinda Lost’ and ‘Back of a Car’ and added covers by T-Rex, the Kinks and Neil Young. At the end of the show, as the crowd filtered out, the band packed up their own equipment. Although this was only the band’s seventh live show, it would be the last with this line-up. Bell would quit before the end of the year; another album (Radio City) would be recorded by the remaining trio in 1973 before Hummel quit and then just Chilton and Stephens would be left of the original line-up to record the band’s third and final album of the 1970s.
Everyone who heard #1 Record agreed that it was a masterpiece, but a combination of bad luck and record-label mismanagement meant it was almost impossible for any fans reading the great reviews to actually buy a copy. Similar problems affected Radio City and by the third album things had untangled to such a degree that no one really cared any more and it would take four years for it to get any kind of release.
After the final break-up, the band’s music somehow managed to transcend their misfortune and in the late 1970s and 1980s Big Star began to take on cult status. Writers and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic began talking about this great band that most people had never even heard of and which they could only listen to on bootlegged cassettes. By 1992 the clamour had grown so great that their albums were issued on CD and the band finally received long overdue recognition, and sales, in the 1990s.
Now, thirty years after its demise, Big Star is hailed as a great band that just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given a little luck, their story might have been very different. Over time they have proved to be the missing link between the power-pop bands of the 1960s and the alternative rockers of the 1980s and 1990s. But back in 1972 no one was playing catchy three-minute guitar songs any more, especially back home in Memphis, where soul was king.
1 ‘Why do you come so far?’ (#ulink_dbdc73a4-913b-57f9-a4e6-771a990b7a5a)
Memphis, TN. Pre-1960
Unlike many US cities, Memphis has a rich and varied history.
Wounded by civil war, it has survived widespread yellow-fever epidemics
and been forced through the reconstruction and reform movements. But Memphis is best known for its music. The city is considered as the ‘Birthplace of the Blues’; it was a major player in the evolution of rock’n’roll and it has long been a hotbed of soul music. Many factors have contributed to the musical history of the city, with its geographical position
and racial mix being two of major ingredients.
At the head of the Mississippi delta, as the river runs north to south – from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico – the city of Memphis spreads east from the river’s banks. Its position meant that it picked up a large amount of passing trade from migrating workers and entertainers travelling between Chicago and New Orleans.
With drugs and drink easy to acquire and Beale Street’s thriving back-room gambling culture, the extra ingredient for patrons wanting a little excitement in their lives was sex. Memphis’s burgeoning whorehouse district was one of the only places where black men could sleep with white women. These establishments operated a white man’s curfew. At around two in the morning the whites went home and blacks were allowed in for the rest of the night.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Memphis had become the murder capital of the United States, even though its population barely exceeded 150,000. The drinking culture of the downtown area coupled with hundreds of gambling rooms created this chilling statistic. At this time the music there was mainly of the rowdy alehouse variety but that soon changed, thanks in large part to a man by the name of W.C. Handy.
W.C. Handy moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, just south of Memphis on Highway 61, in 1903. Around Clarksdale were thousands of blacks working the cotton fields in the stifling heat. Their ‘hollers’ in the day and their singing on shantytown porches at night caught the ear of the twenty-year-old who was an accomplished cornet player. Legend has it that while waiting for a train he was transfixed by a young man plucking away at a battered guitar and singing the blues. Two years later he moved to Memphis and was soon a regular player on Beale Street, helping to bring the blues to a wider audience. In 1909 his ‘The Memphis Blues’ became a massive hit: it is credited as being the first blues song actually committed to paper. Handy’s dragging of the blues away from the cotton fields and into places where a white audience could hear them was a major step, changing Beale Street and Memphis forever.
While liquor and drugs formed an underground economy for much of Memphis’s local government, Beale Street was the only place in the south that allowed the black population to be actively involved in any business ventures, even if most of them were illegal.
For black businessmen the Beale Street region was the financial and social epicentre of the south if not the whole country. Cocaine had spread through western Tennessee when the Coca-Cola company set up a bottling plant nearby and, though cocaine was removed as an active ingredient in 1905, the local dealers had already set up direct links with South America for their supplies.
The collision (and collusion) of black and white cultures spilled over into music. The 1920s saw a second wave of blues men. Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis (who in 1975 would open for the Rolling Stones in front of fifty thousand people) and ‘Sleepy’ John Estes further entrenched the city as ‘Home of the Blues’ while just down the road Robert Johnson was supposedly making his pact with the devil. The Great Depression was fast approaching but the effects of the still-thriving cotton trade helped to soften the economic burden on Memphis. Prohibition was introduced but the drinking didn’t slow down, it just became less visible.
Outside the Beale Street area, Memphis was still cut in half by colour restrictions. Most hotels, restaurants, public toilets and cinemas were white only. This was manageable while the blacks were in the minority but a great flood in 1937 meant many thousands of black farm workers lost their homes and moved into the city. World War II boosted the Memphis economy with the building of the Millington Naval Air Station, an Army depot and the Mallory Air Force Depot. The fact that cotton prices rose steeply during wartime also helped the local economy.
The mayor eventually clamped down on the Beale Street vices, which put many black businessmen out of business or forced them just across the river into West Memphis, which was actually over the state line with Arkansas and out of his jurisdiction. Anyone wanting a night out with an edge to it now had to cross the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge that was built in 1949.
Much of the music that the night-clubbers crossing the bridge were going to listen to was a new mix of Memphis jazz and blues played on the newly electrified guitars that were becoming more popular. The resultant sounds were christened ‘rhythm and blues’. At the time record labels were still somewhat mystified by the new forms of music and used terms such as ‘race music’, ‘ebony music’ or ‘sepia music’ to define and catalogue the rapidly growing market. Despite the politically incorrect naming of the product, rhythm and blues and its offspring – rock’n’roll – would cross all racial boundaries and sweep young America off its feet.
This was never more apparent than on Memphis radio. The white owners of the WDIA station, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, made the earth-shattering decision to change to an all-black play format. It was the first black station in America and ensured that Memphis had a dedicated blues station. Soon after the broadcasts started, a young man by the name of Riley King walked in off the street and asked for a job, which he got, later changing his name to ‘Blues Boy King’ or ‘B.B. King’. He went on to become a blues legend in his own right, with his first chart-topping single, ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, coming along in 1952. WDIA proved one of the Black America’s biggest cultural breakthroughs, especially in the South, where racism was rampant.
Including the rural areas surrounding Memphis, the potential listenership was almost half a million black Americans. With cross-town competitor WHBQ also spreading the word of black music and a new type of popular music by the name of ‘rock’n’roll’, Memphis soon had twin points of attack on the record buyers of America.
With Beale Street fast fading into musical folklore, a new up-and-coming recording studio shook the world. While the first half of the century had seen the city gaining a reputation as a hotbed of blues and jazz excellence, the second half belonged to rock’n’roll. But then, as now, a high proportion of Memphians either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on on their own doorstep while the sounds of Memphis were being lauded around the world and especially in the UK, as the Beatles and Rolling Stones would later prove. The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ was just one example of their love of Memphis music, while the Stones’ championing of the blues was legendary.
It was in 1953 that this musical revolution unwittingly began. Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service to make his first single. The owner of the studio was thirty-one-year-old Sam Phillips. He’d opened the studio at 706 Union Avenue in January 1952, catering to people who were willing to pay to record their own piece of vinyl. Presley paid his money, cut his songs and left. It would be another two years before he returned to record a single for Phillips’s own Sun label.
The early 1950s record-buying public was eating up the easy listening sounds of Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby but that was all about to change. Phillips with his Sun label was now recording B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf while his friend the local DJ Dewey Phillips would play them on his WHBQ radio show, ‘Red Hot & Blue’. It was Dewey Phillips who got hold of a test pressing of the first Presley single for Sun, ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, and proceeded to play it over and over on his show. The response was phenomenal; the post-war boredom vanished for the nation’s teenagers and a new mix of music and sex flooded into every American living room.
Suddenly parents and children were not listening to the same music any more. James Dean became a new kind of screen idol and rock’n’roll provided the rebellious soundtrack. Record stores and music shops seemed to spring up on every street. In Memphis the success of Presley helped open the door for the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Presley was basically a white man singing black music. Sun Records made the most of the opening as young men from around the South travelled to Memphis to try their hand at being a rock’n’roll star: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash were just some of the ones that became superstars.
While the 1920s were the golden age of Memphis Blues and the 1950s were the glory years of rock’n’roll, the 1960s saw Memphis emerge as the bona fide centre of soul. The prime mover behind the new direction of Memphis’s music was Stax Studios.
Banker Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Stax (and gave it its name from the first two letters of their surnames, St-Ax) after Stewart had begun recording country acts in 1957. His studio had had its first hit with the Mar Keys’ instrumental jam ‘Last Night’ in 1961. The Mar Keys were the first white band in Memphis with horn players, a black band trademark. Booker-T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ in 1962 was another nationwide success for the studio. The next decade saw Stax have over 150 Top 100 singles. The ‘Stax sound’ came from bands that were used to playing to both black and white audiences, and then synthesizing this mix to a precise degree. Otis Redding, Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave became international stars on the back of it. Stax would later become embroiled in the Big Star story.
The future members of Big Star arrived just before rock’n’roll took off. Chris Bell was born in Memphis on 12 January 1951, the second youngest of six children: Virginia, David, Vicky, Sara, Chris and Cindy. Bell’s mother, Joan Branford, was English. She met US B-17 bomber crew member and Memphis native Captain Vernon Bell in Norwich during the Second World War. The pair married in England, moving back to the United States at the end of the war.
Once back home, Vernon was discharged from his military duties and set up what was the first of a string of cafés and restaurants. The Little Tea Shop opened its doors for business in January 1946, the Knickerbocker restaurant on Poplar Avenue followed, as later did a series of Bonanza Steak Houses and Danvers Fast Food outlets.
The Bell family expanded as fast as their restaurant business and with the family home fast becoming too small for six children the Bells moved out to East Memphis in 1956. Chris and younger sister Sara were closest in age and were often mistaken for twins, not just because of their similar looks and age, but because they went everywhere and did everything together. All of the Bell children attended White Station Elementary School at the corner of Poplar and Perkins and went on to White Station High School, although Chris changed schools later on. The Bells were a typical well-off middle-class family who attended the local Episcopal church on Sundays.
Chris wasn’t a big music fan – an early favourite was Brenda Lee – but he was an avid comic book collector. ‘I remember Chris being curious about many things as a young child,’ says David Bell. ‘He had a sort of scientific bent along with an aptitude for mathematics. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be.’ This precocious will to learn would later be borne out in his approach to studio work.
On 26 January 1951, exactly two weeks after Chris, Andrew Hummel was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where his father, John Hummel, was serving in the Navy. After Andy’s younger brother, Robert, was born in 1952 the family moved back to Elkwood Drive in Memphis and when a third child, Sally, came along they moved to Worthington Circle in midtown Memphis. John Hummel was a doctor who had been put through medical school by the Navy so he was required to serve a certain amount of time afterwards. When his service ended he moved to Memphis to set up his own practice as a gynaecologist.
Their first move to Elkwood Drive was actually covered in some detail in the local press. Andy’s mother, Barbara Jo Walker Hummel, a native of Murray, Kentucky, had been crowned both Miss Memphis and Miss America in 1947 and the local press followed her every move. For example, a full page in the Memphis Press-Scimitar was given over to her brief visit to Memphis in 1947 to look at engagement rings during a stop-off at the airport between promotional duties. ‘Thousands Brave Electrical Storm To Greet Miss America at Airport’ the headline proudly states, covering the meeting of Barbara Jo, her father and John Hummel to look at prospective rings for thirty minutes before flying on. In Memphis she presented a daily TV programme for WHBQ from 1955, called Lady of the House, in which she hosted guests and gave tips to housewives from three till four in the afternoon. Meal planning and food preparation was the main thrust of the show, which was aired just in time for wives to prepare the evening meal for husbands coming home from a hard day at the office. Andy often made a guest appearance on the show before he started at school. Barbara could often be found in the local papers during the 1950s even if it was just a photograph of her dressing her children or teaching them how to read. As well as bringing up three children she found the time to perform in musical comedy stage shows (she was an excellent singer by all accounts), model clothes and later (unsuccessfully) run for political office in the state legislature.
At the same time that Chris Bell was starting at White Station, Andy began at the all-male Presbyterian Day School. ‘Elementary school was kind of a big mystery to me,’ recalls Hummel. ‘I never quite got it and never really fitted in very well. I was very bored and became rather lazy around the third grade. My parents never seemed to take much of an interest in my schooling other than just sending me off, and then screaming at me when my grades were bad. One thing they did do was make me take piano. Starting in the third grade I had a lesson every week and had to participate in recitals, which I hated of course.’
Jody Stephens was born in Memphis on 4 October 1952, the middle of three brothers – Jimmy was two years older and David five years younger. Stephens’s father, James, from Virginia, and mother, Rose, from Massachusetts, met in Washington at a roller skating rink. When they started talking, it turned out that they both were working at the same hospital, the former in the X-Ray department and the latter as a secretary. Jody was enrolled at the Colonial Elementary School before moving on to Willow Oaks Elementary, a middle-class but less exclusive school than either Bell or Hummel’s.
Jody’s father would occasionally sing and play guitar for his boys, usually in a country style, though most music around the house in Jody’s formative years was described by his brother Jimmy as ‘easy listening’. The brothers usually got their ‘pop fix’ by listening to the Top Forty radio shows. Apart from short stints of piano lessons, none of the Stephens boys played an instrument in their early days. ‘Jimmy and I were on the Willow Oaks [Swim] Club which was very middle class,’ says Jody. ‘He was a great diver so he was on the dive team as well. Now that I think of it, I may have been on the dive team but [was] not nearly the diver Jimmy was. I don’t think I ever won a race but did finish second and third occasionally. They used to give us spoonfuls of honey to rev up the energy level and I think they even put ice in the water for faster swim times.’
‘My parents tried to get me to take classroom-style piano lessons,’ explains Jimmy. ‘My first teacher had a nervous break-down; the second was killed in a car wreck; and the third attempt coincided with basketball. And basketball won. My dad had tried to teach me some things by ear on piano but a friend of mine was taking guitar lessons and I wanted to take [them]. But my parents were concerned that my interest in the guitar would go the same way as the piano, so I never took any guitar lessons.’
This was a temporary setback, though, because soon almost every boy in the country wanted to be in a rock band and play guitar. The number of guitar players in America increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Beatles’ prime-time television appearances. In Memphis literally hundreds of bands sprang up from nowhere, playing both the local R&B dance hits and the brand new sounds of the British Invasion. Hummel, Bell and Stephens would be among these teenage rock-star wannabes and, despite living in different parts of town, their love of music would soon cause their paths to cross.
2 ‘They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles’ (#ulink_04f81e50-4253-54be-85e6-429de358f30c)
Memphis, TN. 1960 to 1966
The date was 9 February 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS broke all previous audience figures as a staggering 73,000,000 viewers tuned in to see the Beatles’ US television première. By 1964 traditional rock’n’roll was starting to be seen as somewhat passé, and with this TV appearance the Beatles completely blew it away.
The show itself, ‘In association with Anacin and Pillsbury Biscuits’, was a curious mix of musical numbers, novelty acts and the Beatles, the biggest band in the world.
In his introduction, Sullivan revealed that the Beatles had just received a telegram from Elvis Presley wishing them luck in the US. He then introduced the Fab Four to a torrent of screams; the studio audience was predominantly female. The band took the stage in matching black suits with their trademark boots and haircuts, opening with ‘All My Loving’. During the second number, ‘Till There Was You’, the camera focused on each of the band in turn and a primitive graphic introduced them individually as ‘Paul’, ‘Ringo’, ‘George’ and ‘John – Sorry, girls, he’s married’.
Almost everyone interviewed for this book mentioned this event, and without it there may well have been no Big Star. The number of guitar players in the United States rose by a factor of four to over ten million by 1966.
The abundance of teen bands in Memphis was catered for in a number of interesting ways. George Klein had been a classmate of Elvis Presley and hosted shows on both WHBQ radio and TV. On a Saturday morning his radio show was broadcast live from Goldsmith’s department store in downtown Memphis while other stores had band showcases during shopping hours or to promote fashion parades in the evening. Saturday afternoons saw Klein’s TV show Talent Party. Local and national bands would lip-synch in the studio to their backing tracks while a chorus of dancing girls, the WHBQ-ties, would go-go along to the latest cool sounds in their mini-skirts and bouffant hair styles.
On weekend evenings local clubs also helped out underage partygoers with dedicated teen-nights which gave ample opportunity for Memphis bands to play and build up localised fan bases. The Roaring 60s Club, the Tonga Club and the Clearpool Beverly Room were just three of many, while church halls and YMCAs also had plenty of bands to choose from. Styles ranged widely from band to band. The locals mainly soaked up country, blues, rock’n’roll and soul, while a growing number of others kept on the cutting edge with the British rock invasion filtering through.
Racial segregation in reality still held sway in much of the South. Despite the strides made by WHBQ and WDIA, stations were still mainly all black or all white. Occasionally a song would cross over but this was rare. At least the population of Memphis had the choice and the chance to listen to both strands. Some of the poorer black neighbourhoods and richer white ones were only a few streets apart after all. The result was that white bands were influenced by black music, whether they wanted to be or not, and black ones were influenced by white music. Hummel, Stephens and Bell all heard everything that was on offer.
It wasn’t until the Beatles really reached America in 1964 that Chris Bell took a real interest, as he confirmed in a 1975 interview: ‘I started playing [guitar] in high school when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and really got motivated to start playing when the Beatles records first came out. Before that, music was a side thing, something that went on in the background.’ Chris attended one year at White Station Junior High before his parents transferred him to the Memphis University School (MUS). MUS was an all-male school that prepared its privileged white students for a university education. It was not the best choice of school for someone as nebulous as Chris. Starting at MUS coincided with the Bell family moving to Germantown, an affluent suburb in East Memphis.
The family had purchased around twenty acres of land and had a big house purpose-built on the property. The house that had originally been standing on the plot was moved to the back of the estate and nicknamed the ‘back house’.
‘They had a huge house, a pool, the whole nine yards,’ enthuses Andy Hummel. ‘The driveway must have been a mile long!’
At thirteen Chris started having guitar lessons and the back house proved an ideal spot to practise in. It was set far enough away from the main house that he could play as loud as he wanted without offending anyone. The building was a singlestorey affair, with several rooms. Sara, David and the other children would often hang out there listening to Chris, and later his friends, practise for hours on end.
Meanwhile Jody Stephens was attending Overton High. ‘Nowadays Overton is a performing arts school,’ he explains, ‘but when I went to Overton it was anything but. It was pretty stifling and I didn’t have a great time.’ Jimmy and Jody were getting into music. ‘Stax records was a big influence on me as well as Jody,’ says Jimmy Stephens. ‘“Knock on Wood”, “In The Midnight Hour”, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, the Isley Brothers, then the Who, early Kinks, Hollies and limited Beach Boys, to mention a few, all stood out. But the Beatles were the major influence – times ten over anything else. The first record I actually bought, that I know I bought without parental participation, was the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.’ Jimmy also caught the guitar-playing bug but the problem was that everyone was already playing guitar. He started delivering the morning paper so that he could save up to buy a bass guitar and thus find a way into a local band. ‘I don’t remember how it happened,’ says Jimmy Stephens, ‘but someone either gave or loaned me an acoustic guitar that I took the first two strings off so I would have to play it as a bass instead of a guitar and I learned to play by listening to McCartney’s bass lines over and over.’ Jody started playing drums and the two brothers started practising together at home.
On 19 August 1966 the Beatles played two shows at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, one at 4pm and one at 8.30pm. This was the Beatles third stateside visit and the band was mired in the controversy over John Lennon’s (mis-quoted) ‘bigger than Jesus’ scandal. The tour was under tight security, which was made even tighter when, in Memphis, the band received a death threat. Jimmy and Jody had tickets for the early show but wanted to exchange them for the evening one. They went to the venue in the morning but were told that it was not possible to change the tickets. Then they just decided to hang around outside for a while. Jimmy Stephens takes up the story: ‘We decided to go and hide outside the rear stage doors. We hid beside a dumpster that was inside a fenced area long before they actually closed the gate. We waited and eventually the doors opened and I slipped inside the backstage area unnoticed and found a place to hide in some folded-up bleacher seats and stayed there for a while. I could see police walking around but just after I slipped in, they closed the door, leaving Jody outside. Eventually I turned myself in because I was getting worried about Jody. I think they were really upset about it because these two young kids had breached their security. They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles.’
By this time, Jody and Jimmy had begun trying to get a band together. ‘We were really lucky,’ says Jody. ‘Our parents were tolerant of our pursuit of music and they would let us practice in the house, and it was a small house. The den was very “live”. It had panelling on the walls and it had broken tile flooring. I’m sure it was impossible for them to really escape the noise.’
There were lots of kids in the Stephens’ neighbourhood that wanted to be in a band and it didn’t take long to get one together. They found a couple of guys with guitars, one of whom could sing. Jody and Jimmy went through many different names, but two were The Sands and Spot. Their early bands of 1964-5 included Tom Eubanks as the singer and another school friend, Wendell Wheat.
Eubanks was another big Beatles fan. ‘I didn’t ever listen to music until the British invasion, it was horribly boring,’ he admits. ‘When the Beatles came out it was this breath of fresh air and with the rawer kinds of sounds like the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” it was just electrifying. It was something that made me want to do it. I wanted to play guitar but there weren’t the learning aids back then that there are today. I used to muck through it and figure out how to do it.’ Eubanks and Jimmy Stephens were in the same year at high school and started practising at the Stephens house. ‘We never really got anywhere,’ laughs Eubanks. ‘If Jody did something that Jimmy didn’t like, Jimmy’d threaten to beat his ass. I’d say, “Jimmy, you can’t really have a band where you’re threatening to beat up the drummer!”’
‘I think I probably used to ride him,’ admits Jimmy, ‘about his needing to practise more or listen more to what the drummer was actually playing on cover versions – especially with regard to bass and drum lines.’ While Jimmy was brushing up on his bass playing he also sang backing vocals in his friend Mike Fleming’s band, the Chessmen. ‘I had done a couple of parties with them,’ he says. ‘I was doing back-up vocals because they had a bass player who was much more advanced than I was at the time, his name was Andy Hummel.’ The Chessmen consisted of Fleming, Hummel, drummer Scotty Bringhurst and guitarist Dick Wills and provided the link as to how Jody and Andy eventually met.
After several months Eubanks moved on to a new band and Wendell Wheat took his place as the singer in the Stephens brother’s trio. ‘There were different line-ups at various times,’ says Jody. ‘It was the usual core of my brother and Wendell Wheat. We played shows at little dances here and there, parties and stuff. It was all covers.’ At one point the trio actually played at their first recording session. ‘We met a guitar player who was with a black vocalist named Calvin Simms,’ recalls Jimmy Stephens. ‘This was our first recording session at a little studio named Sonic Recording with Roland Janes as engineer.’ That was the closest that the trio came to actually gaining any kind of local recognition because when the principal found out that their band had a black singer he stopped them from playing at their school. ‘Our high school was all white at the time and Calvin was from a different area,’ recalls Jimmy Stephens. ‘As far as I recall, Memphis musicians just played music and didn’t get caught up in the black-white thing. We just wanted to play music and what did skin colour have to do with that, or anything else, for that matter? My parents may have received some stares from the neighbours but we were all doing something positive and fun and they were supportive. Wendell’s mom went to the high school and raised hell with them when she found out they weren’t going to let us play. I think they gave some lame excuse but we knew what was going on.’ The Sonic demo tape would never be used. It had been earmarked for George Klein’s Talent Party but they couldn’t be entered for the show because Simms moved away to Los Angeles, leaving them without a singer.
Andy Hummel had started the 1960s with another house move, this time to Belleair Drive by the side of Overton Park. He was becoming a fan of surf music and bought all the latest singles by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. Then, like everyone else, he was hit by the Beatles. ‘I can still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard them,’ he says. ‘They totally blew me and everyone else away. It’s sad that so many of the younger folks interested in music these days missed that experience. The Beatles were all anyone talked about. I mean everyone, old and young, the news media; they were just the main thing happening in the world at the time. After that it was the British Invasion and I loved all those bands, bought their records and just listened to rock’n’roll as much as I could. I had a little record player and lots of singles.’
Hummel also changed schools in the seventh grade, aged twelve. His new school was Snowden High, a regular public school where for the first time Hummel was attending classes with members of the opposite sex. ‘Were my eyes ever opened up!’ he laughs. ‘I had spent seven years in a very exclusive, protected environment and all of a sudden I was thrown into the gaping maw of the real world. I mean we had a guy who was seventeen years old still in seventh grade. The place was full of thugs. And girls, girls, girls! I loved it.’
Hummel pushed all the boundaries that he could: rock’n’roll, girls and, in his own words, ‘hanging around in the park all the time smoking cigarettes and stuff’. Overton Park was, and still is, home to the Memphis Zoo. It also has a large wooded area, a nine-hole golf course, some college buildings (including an art school) and is the site of the Overton Park Shell, an amphitheatre where Elvis Presley sang in 1954. Hummel and his friends would sneak up to the art school buildings in the park and try to sneak a peek at the life models that were posing nude for the painting students. They also found an underground system of cemented tunnels that were used for drainage from the park. ‘We lived down there,’ says Hummel. ‘Some of the students from the art academy had once gone down into one of the tunnels and covered the walls with tempera paintings. And it was like our own private art gallery no one else knew about.’
At Snowden, Hummel fell in with a crowd wanting to start a band. The Chessmen, based around Mike Fleming, who was in Hummel’s class, were formed in 1965. ‘I got my parents to buy me a bass that year. I began playing in a basement band with some guys. My musical life just sort of took off from there. My first Precision Bass Sunburst with a rosewood fretboard was about 250 dollars. I took about ten lessons at a local music store and, having played the piano for so long, once I knew which finger to put where to get the notes, the rest was easy. Meanwhile I bought a cheapo Sears Silvertone acoustic six-string. I just played it and played it. I picked out all the songs on all the records I could get. I really began to love Simon and Garfunkel a lot, then Joni Mitchell, and the other folkies because the guitar parts were so much fun to play. Finger picking six-string folk and bluegrass style is still my favourite kind of music.’
Once Jimmy Stephens was occasionally singing with the Chessmen, Hummel soon met Jody. ‘They [Jimmy and Jody] went to the same church,’ explains Hummel. ‘The First Baptist Church was near my house although they lived out in East Memphis. I hung around there because Mike Fleming went to church there and lived close by. Jody was very quiet back in those days so I didn’t really know him all that well. I hung around with Jimmy more. It was later on that I discovered what an extremely nice, considerate guy Jody is, and he has remained so through all we’ve been through, which will always be something of a mystery.’
The Chessmen began with a show at a Catholic or Episcopal church in East Memphis and lasted for about a dozen shows over a period of eighteen months. When that band split, and Jimmy left to play with Jody [who had also occasionally played with the Chessmen] and Wendell Wheat, Hummel and Mike Fleming added Richard Ennis on drums, Jimmy Turnage on guitar and named themselves the Swinging Sensations. A little older and more experienced, they managed to double their profits to around 300 dollars per show. Their line-up changed from time to time with a singer named ‘Yogi’ and a new bass player called ‘Nollie’. Hummel ended up playing keyboards for the last line-up. With Ennis’s dad as manager, the gigs came thick and fast and they moved from youth clubs and church halls to more adult venues, including Air Force bases.
The Swinging Sensations wore matching light blue, short-sleeved Banlon shirts and played an array of R&B and soul covers. Fleming switched to trumpet and a saxophone player was added to give them a mini horn section and enable the Stax sound to be replicated. The summer after the ninth grade the band set off in a van down to Florida, playing shows all the way there and back for their one and only ‘tour’.
The following autumn Hummel changed schools yet again, this time to MUS, which Chris Bell was also attending. Bell had already met fourteen-year-old drummer Dewitt Shy. The two hit it off and immediately began talking about getting a band together. Bell was becoming quite proficient on the guitar and word was put out that they needed a bass player. Bill Cunningham auditioned and was accepted. He brought along two schoolmates from Elizabeth Messick Junior High School – David Hoback to play guitar and Mike Harris to share vocal duties.
‘Chris and I began talking about starting a band,’ says Shy. ‘We hadn’t seen each other play but had heard about each other’s interest in music. We practiced among ourselves until we knew we were compatible in our musical interests, then we went looking for other prospective members.’ In early 1965 the line-up was complete and Dewitt Shy came up with a band name.
‘The band called itself the Jynx,’ he says. ‘I pushed the name, being enamoured with, and basically cannibalising, the Kinks’ name. We practised regularly in the living room of my house at 4272 Chanwil. My mother knew with the band practices occurring at my house she could keep an eye on things. She always loved music, although before we started playing, her tastes were in the realm of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. She did like the Beatles, though, and welcomed our band’s “new” music at the house. She bought me my first drum set, a Ludwig oyster marine pearl set with Zildjians and after each practice she had to walk around the house rearranging pictures and paintings hanging on the walls, which were askew as a result of the loud music.
‘Girls would show up for the practices which pleased us no end and we played covers of the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Moody Blues, Them, the Zombies, the Animals and the like. Chris was heavily influenced by the Beatles and was an excellent guitarist. We tried to get him to concentrate on playing just the lead guitar, but he liked to play both rhythm and lead and consequently was kept quite busy during our gigs.’
Chris’s love of all things English was enhanced by David Bell’s frequent trips to Europe, from which he’d return with the very latest singles that had yet to reach Memphis. ‘Of all of Chris’s bands, the Jynx are the group that I remember chauffeuring around to band practices and garage parties,’ says David Bell. ‘They were quite popular and rather competent. I think that a lot of their popularity had to do with their courage to be performing at such a young age.’
The summer of 1965 was a good time to be in a band in Memphis. Local act Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs had a worldwide smash with ‘Woolly Bully’ and bands like the Jokers, Ronnie and the Devilles and the Gentrys were pulling in crowds around town. ‘Our name got around the junior-high and high-school party scenes in Memphis,’ says Shy. ‘We played at private parties, at school venues and we competed in and did well in a number of local “battle of the bands” competitions. We played in some local Memphis teen clubs that were hot at the time, like the Tonga Club and the Go Go Club.’
By December 1965 the Jynx were being considered for a spot on Talent Party but they needed a demo tape to audition for a spot, which would let them appear on the show early the next year. ‘We bought some recording time at Sonic Studio,’ says Shy. ‘We recorded at least four songs and I remember that Alex Chilton was supposed to show up for the session to sing with Mike Harris but Alex did not show, so the original band did the session. We were nervous, or at least I was, but we got into it and it went smoothly. We liked to play loud, but we had to back the volume down for the session. Talent Party liked it and we went on that TV show in Memphis as a result. My recollection is a little fuzzy on this but I think Alex became involved because we wanted to experiment with having two lead singers sometimes singing together and sometimes one backing up the other. It proved not to work so well and Mike ultimately left the band.’
The four songs from the session were the Moody Blues’ ‘And My Baby’s Gone’, ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ by James Brown (which the Moody Blues had also covered), ‘Little Girl’ by Them and Paul Revere and the Raiders’ ‘Just Like Me’. ‘Little Girl’ is a confident-sounding take, with a tight rhythm section; ‘Just Like Me’ shows the band rocking out a little with some nice backing vocals and prominent guitar work from Bell. ‘And My Baby’s Gone’ could be an early Doors demo while ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ shows a different, soulful, side to the band.
The December 1965 session was the only one ever recorded by the Jynx and after Harris left the band tried out three different vocalists. Chilton, Ames Yates and Vance Alexander all filled in briefly and Jerry Powers had a short stint as keyboard player but the band disintegrated in 1966 when none of the stand-in vocalists would commit permanently. ‘Alex was very talented but was not always consistent in showing up on time for practices and some gigs,’ recalls Shy. ‘We were playing some original songs but also covers of well-known songs. I can remember telling my mother during the heyday of the band that “music is my life” but she poured cold water on any thoughts I had of not continuing my education. In the long run she was right.’
Chilton would soon go on to national fame with another band and Bill Cunningham would later link up with Chilton once again. On leaving the Jynx, Cunningham immediately hooked up with a band called the Jokers who had a limited edition album released. The line-up included a drummer by the name of Richard Rosebrough.
Rosebrough, born in Memphis on 16 September 1949, initially had different musical influences to his future band mates. ‘When I was three my mother bought us a seventy-eight rpm copy of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”,’ he recalls. ‘It was on yellow vinyl and very scratchy. I was just fascinated with the melodies, counter melodies, mode changes and the imagery of all the different instruments and sounds. Then Elvis was on The Ed Sullivan Show. We watched it as a family event on a Sunday night. We had no idea that he would become the entertainer of the century. To us he was a local boy made good and we were proud. I somehow knew that things had changed that night but I was still too young to grasp it.
‘As a child I beat on pots and pans and had nervous legs [they bounced up and down a lot]. Both of my sisters got piano lessons because they were girls, but not me. I just banged aimlessly on the piano and worked out ‘Chopsticks’ until I was told to stop. It was considered proper for the young daughters to play the piano and to be cultured. They care little about music now, but it has always been my life.’ Rosebrough got his first drum in the seventh grade but, as his mother couldn’t afford a stand for it, he used two stacks of a classics book collection to set it on. ‘Tore ‘em up, sadly,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t that much fun playing just a marching drum, but learning the twenty-six rudiments proved to be the best training for the future.’
Rosebrough had originally started out in the Mariners, a group he put together with some high-school friends. ‘We formed in 1964 after the Beatles had been realized,’ he says. ‘We actually had success with parties, clubs, and “battle of the bands”. We even got paid. Then I got a call from the Jokers and I quit the Mariners.’ When Bill Cunningham also joined the band, the line-up of Rosebrough (drums), Cunningham (vocals and organ), Mark Cowan (vocals), Allan Stewart (guitar) and Dudley Brewer (bass) hit the Memphis live circuit for a couple of years between early 1966 and late 1967, covering everything from the Beatles to the Four Tops and most things in-between. During this time Cunningham brought Chris Bell to a practice and introduced him to Rosebrough for the first time.
It was a meeting that Rosebrough remembers well to this day. ‘Christopher came over to band practice in my mother’s living room one Saturday,’ he says. ‘He was dressed differently, perhaps more loudly, like purple patterned bell-bottom pants that were too short. He had bushy, curly reddish blonde hair that he cut himself or maybe his brother David cut it. He was shy and didn’t say a lot. He had a sheepish, devilish grin on his face, but gave little to go on. I sensed a far-away kid who was really into rock’n’roll, Beatles, Kinks and the Who. He had conflicts with his dad and Vernon Bell wanted to sell the guitar.’ Chris won the day and kept the guitar. Slowly, through this loose series of cover bands, a hard core of anglophilic rock fans was gravitating together. Little did they know it when they all finally met, but they were destined for greater things.
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Rob Jovanovic
I want to make an album of real genius, to sit alongside the Stones' 'Exile On Main Street', and Big Star's 'Third' (Peter Buck, R.E.M. 1991)The definitive biography of Big Star, the most influential band of the last 30 years.Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three albums – #1 Record, Radio City and Third – are still felt today. Big Star bucked the musical trend of the Seventies. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio friendly Power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists such as Primal Scream, R.E.M., the Bangles, the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, Garbage, St. Etienne, Pavement and Travis regularly speak of the Big Star legacy.After singing in 1960s boy-band The Box Tops, Alex Chilton joined up with Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens and Chris Bell to form Big Star in late 1970. Chilton and Bell quickly formed a Lennon-McCartney type partnership at the heart of band and began turning out tunes laced with the best pop sensibilities of the Beatles and Badfinger, the guitars of the Byrds and the harmonies of the Beach Boys. But creative tensions, haphazard distribution, and marketplace indifference sent the band into a series of splits, solo-projects and short-lived reunions that left them on the brink of oblivion. Thirty years later though, and most guitar bands in the world will admit a debt to Big Star and their three albums remain unqualified successes.Drawing on interviews from surviving band members (including Andy Hummel's first interview for 30 years) and the major players at the Memphis based record label Ardent, Rob Jovanovic has written the definitive history of Big Star, the forgotten band.
Big Star
The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band
Rob Jovanovic
For Carolyn
Table of Contents
Cover Page (#u2e1a47f6-b682-5f19-b144-9a4e5c6a37b1)
Title Page (#u9e31adcc-4ab1-55b9-9b34-2257b0ff8c83)
Prologue (#ucfbfb397-2d43-5b63-ba93-359f6d1a892e)
1 ‘Why do you come so far?’ (#u53f9e743-9610-5de6-8324-f3f5f3dc8102)
2 ‘They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles’ (#ub0a588fa-c251-5ef3-997f-8c41e8bd36cb)
3 ‘He wore a black T-shirt, nobody wore those, and torn jeans’ (#ucd2a4d99-f2f9-5c10-a99a-cc42975d3a92)
4 ‘All the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand’ (#ua12378a8-6477-519f-a36d-279d7891f6bc)
5 ‘We just figured we’d all be killed anyway’ (#u501ff4e8-a5a1-5d35-8dc2-f57606ec9897)
6 ‘Bob Dylan never had anything on John Harold and he knew it’ (#u17f7e3b3-4ca7-5021-9569-ba8917f37e05)
7 ‘It really does sound like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing’ (#uc5b1d014-531e-5190-b71d-4828e5a7ccb8)
8 ‘Mississippi didn’t like guys with long hair’ (#u38485a2c-a435-510f-adaf-1e4f276b6efc)
9 ‘The beer bottles were dancing across the tables’ (#u5f6509a3-a173-550c-9e44-3f43ce2ecebf)
10 ‘We got fired after the first show in Michigan’ (#uc47c64da-c74d-5eb3-91af-2c99d7383732)
11 ‘He turned to me and shot Demerol down his throat with a syringe’ (#u78e4576d-4b0f-5a94-ac6c-304f65c0680e)
12 ‘The singularly most heavy moment of my life’ (#u1850fd52-efdc-52f3-ad61-bda7b414c817)
13 ‘Look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers!’ (#ua562f79b-fdf6-588f-952e-fad8b5d90337)
14 ‘Another stray American in London’ (#u2d1fddbb-8446-52b8-8297-4fb253b58867)
15 ‘Alex Chilton, Rock Legend, Back’ (#ua6f339cc-4840-5d57-8a94-ef93529a7bb6)
16 ‘He was rather nonplussed to be sought out while wearing a paper hat’ (#ufeb16c7e-93e6-54a6-92af-0b0167bc103a)
17 ‘It sounds like gun shots’ (#u292accba-ed03-58c5-98e6-e466f5346cf3)
18 ‘We toasted his health with cheap beer and snacks from Taco Bell’ (#u806edca6-a963-5d41-8ab1-4306fb99e86c)
19 ‘We had to have girls because we were entertaining the troops’ (#u02518e11-da9d-5b4c-87c6-e2c90cc412f3)
20 ‘Without being overly threatening, I pushed him into a corner’ (#u7f3adcfb-3405-52f7-b7ee-76ff8b6233df)
Postscript (#ub6a3b8ca-d00d-57de-a500-f1e0fbcee154)
Timeline (#u7907b625-358a-5048-94d3-25d17a9c350c)
Discography (#ue69046f6-8dde-524c-9f6c-38a8ae3d4b22)
BIG STAR: ALBUMS (#u183fb7ed-fcc3-56e5-9c64-93ddfc0987c0)
Concert List (#ufbadfe95-6720-5098-9f8d-eebadbacaa1a)
Cover Versions (#u8adc5839-5a47-5871-b294-7b78f25b94a0)
Bibliography (#u526a81b0-2a44-527e-aa30-a75850c08245)
Notes (#ub814438e-ea05-56bc-9ed3-a3631bdf9bd6)
Thanks and Acknowledgements (#uc747c60c-a627-562c-9351-35bbee70419d)
Index (#uc9968975-f915-538a-88cc-b85f17f479b8)
About the Author (#u47630fc8-2f26-587b-aedf-196a6ea33bf2)
Praise (#ue18a93a8-0530-51ea-b52e-f478253f99d3)
Copyright (#ue634d800-c36b-5ded-a527-797006217c6c)
About the Publisher (#u1ad86f17-9828-5746-a922-3f76d6f6617d)
Prologue (#ulink_d62c79e4-b22b-539f-9770-008c883b2deb)
In October 1972 the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen number-one singles achieved by acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade. Iggy Pop was holed up in a studio recording Raw Power and David Bowie had just given birth to Ziggy Stardust, but the album charts were dominated by heavy rock (Black Sabbath’s Vol 4), progressive rock (Yes’s Close To The Edge) and inane pop (David Cassidy’s Cherish). Since the Beatles had disbanded two years earlier, the short, catchy guitar-pop song had all but disappeared from vogue. But there was a quartet trying to keep that musical torch burning. Big Star, a Memphis band that took the best elements of the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Byrds, was ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and lengthy, self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening they were playing a show to less than a hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.
Like most of the shows that the band had already played, they got only an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never heard a Big Star record but they did know who the lead singer was: Alex Chilton had sung a handful of hit singles with the Box Tops a few years before. For the show, Chilton, like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel, was wearing a casual shirt and jeans, had shoulder-length hair and was constantly fiddling around with his amplifier. This casual attire was at odds with the glammed-up sartorial excesses and lavish stage productions that the superstars of the day were blasting their audiences with. Tonight the three-pronged guitar attack drowned out Stephens’s melodic drumming and almost all of the vocals. It was the usual problem they faced having played so few shows together. On #1 Record, their recently released debut album, the balance was perfect. On vinyl the guitars chimed and the vocals soared. Here it was a battle that the vocals lost. And this was not helped by the obvious discomfort of the other vocalist, Chris Bell. At this point in his career he still hadn’t conquered his stage fright and his hands kept shaking violently.
During the quieter moments, such as when Chilton stepped forward to sing an acoustic version of ‘The Ballad of El Goodo’, the crowd talked over the top and downed beers. For the rest of the set they were happy to stomp along with the instantly catchy, rousing choruses of ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ and ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, even if they’d never heard them before. Lead vocal duties were shared between Chilton and Bell but all four band members sang back-up. Chilton’s vocals recalled the deadpan delivery of the Byrds’ Roger McGuinn while Bell’s were more like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.
Big Star ran through all twelve songs from their only album, a couple of new songs called ‘Got Kinda Lost’ and ‘Back of a Car’ and added covers by T-Rex, the Kinks and Neil Young. At the end of the show, as the crowd filtered out, the band packed up their own equipment. Although this was only the band’s seventh live show, it would be the last with this line-up. Bell would quit before the end of the year; another album (Radio City) would be recorded by the remaining trio in 1973 before Hummel quit and then just Chilton and Stephens would be left of the original line-up to record the band’s third and final album of the 1970s.
Everyone who heard #1 Record agreed that it was a masterpiece, but a combination of bad luck and record-label mismanagement meant it was almost impossible for any fans reading the great reviews to actually buy a copy. Similar problems affected Radio City and by the third album things had untangled to such a degree that no one really cared any more and it would take four years for it to get any kind of release.
After the final break-up, the band’s music somehow managed to transcend their misfortune and in the late 1970s and 1980s Big Star began to take on cult status. Writers and musicians on both sides of the Atlantic began talking about this great band that most people had never even heard of and which they could only listen to on bootlegged cassettes. By 1992 the clamour had grown so great that their albums were issued on CD and the band finally received long overdue recognition, and sales, in the 1990s.
Now, thirty years after its demise, Big Star is hailed as a great band that just happened to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given a little luck, their story might have been very different. Over time they have proved to be the missing link between the power-pop bands of the 1960s and the alternative rockers of the 1980s and 1990s. But back in 1972 no one was playing catchy three-minute guitar songs any more, especially back home in Memphis, where soul was king.
1 ‘Why do you come so far?’ (#ulink_dbdc73a4-913b-57f9-a4e6-771a990b7a5a)
Memphis, TN. Pre-1960
Unlike many US cities, Memphis has a rich and varied history.
Wounded by civil war, it has survived widespread yellow-fever epidemics
and been forced through the reconstruction and reform movements. But Memphis is best known for its music. The city is considered as the ‘Birthplace of the Blues’; it was a major player in the evolution of rock’n’roll and it has long been a hotbed of soul music. Many factors have contributed to the musical history of the city, with its geographical position
and racial mix being two of major ingredients.
At the head of the Mississippi delta, as the river runs north to south – from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico – the city of Memphis spreads east from the river’s banks. Its position meant that it picked up a large amount of passing trade from migrating workers and entertainers travelling between Chicago and New Orleans.
With drugs and drink easy to acquire and Beale Street’s thriving back-room gambling culture, the extra ingredient for patrons wanting a little excitement in their lives was sex. Memphis’s burgeoning whorehouse district was one of the only places where black men could sleep with white women. These establishments operated a white man’s curfew. At around two in the morning the whites went home and blacks were allowed in for the rest of the night.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Memphis had become the murder capital of the United States, even though its population barely exceeded 150,000. The drinking culture of the downtown area coupled with hundreds of gambling rooms created this chilling statistic. At this time the music there was mainly of the rowdy alehouse variety but that soon changed, thanks in large part to a man by the name of W.C. Handy.
W.C. Handy moved to Clarksdale, Mississippi, just south of Memphis on Highway 61, in 1903. Around Clarksdale were thousands of blacks working the cotton fields in the stifling heat. Their ‘hollers’ in the day and their singing on shantytown porches at night caught the ear of the twenty-year-old who was an accomplished cornet player. Legend has it that while waiting for a train he was transfixed by a young man plucking away at a battered guitar and singing the blues. Two years later he moved to Memphis and was soon a regular player on Beale Street, helping to bring the blues to a wider audience. In 1909 his ‘The Memphis Blues’ became a massive hit: it is credited as being the first blues song actually committed to paper. Handy’s dragging of the blues away from the cotton fields and into places where a white audience could hear them was a major step, changing Beale Street and Memphis forever.
While liquor and drugs formed an underground economy for much of Memphis’s local government, Beale Street was the only place in the south that allowed the black population to be actively involved in any business ventures, even if most of them were illegal.
For black businessmen the Beale Street region was the financial and social epicentre of the south if not the whole country. Cocaine had spread through western Tennessee when the Coca-Cola company set up a bottling plant nearby and, though cocaine was removed as an active ingredient in 1905, the local dealers had already set up direct links with South America for their supplies.
The collision (and collusion) of black and white cultures spilled over into music. The 1920s saw a second wave of blues men. Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis (who in 1975 would open for the Rolling Stones in front of fifty thousand people) and ‘Sleepy’ John Estes further entrenched the city as ‘Home of the Blues’ while just down the road Robert Johnson was supposedly making his pact with the devil. The Great Depression was fast approaching but the effects of the still-thriving cotton trade helped to soften the economic burden on Memphis. Prohibition was introduced but the drinking didn’t slow down, it just became less visible.
Outside the Beale Street area, Memphis was still cut in half by colour restrictions. Most hotels, restaurants, public toilets and cinemas were white only. This was manageable while the blacks were in the minority but a great flood in 1937 meant many thousands of black farm workers lost their homes and moved into the city. World War II boosted the Memphis economy with the building of the Millington Naval Air Station, an Army depot and the Mallory Air Force Depot. The fact that cotton prices rose steeply during wartime also helped the local economy.
The mayor eventually clamped down on the Beale Street vices, which put many black businessmen out of business or forced them just across the river into West Memphis, which was actually over the state line with Arkansas and out of his jurisdiction. Anyone wanting a night out with an edge to it now had to cross the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge that was built in 1949.
Much of the music that the night-clubbers crossing the bridge were going to listen to was a new mix of Memphis jazz and blues played on the newly electrified guitars that were becoming more popular. The resultant sounds were christened ‘rhythm and blues’. At the time record labels were still somewhat mystified by the new forms of music and used terms such as ‘race music’, ‘ebony music’ or ‘sepia music’ to define and catalogue the rapidly growing market. Despite the politically incorrect naming of the product, rhythm and blues and its offspring – rock’n’roll – would cross all racial boundaries and sweep young America off its feet.
This was never more apparent than on Memphis radio. The white owners of the WDIA station, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, made the earth-shattering decision to change to an all-black play format. It was the first black station in America and ensured that Memphis had a dedicated blues station. Soon after the broadcasts started, a young man by the name of Riley King walked in off the street and asked for a job, which he got, later changing his name to ‘Blues Boy King’ or ‘B.B. King’. He went on to become a blues legend in his own right, with his first chart-topping single, ‘Three O’ Clock Blues’, coming along in 1952. WDIA proved one of the Black America’s biggest cultural breakthroughs, especially in the South, where racism was rampant.
Including the rural areas surrounding Memphis, the potential listenership was almost half a million black Americans. With cross-town competitor WHBQ also spreading the word of black music and a new type of popular music by the name of ‘rock’n’roll’, Memphis soon had twin points of attack on the record buyers of America.
With Beale Street fast fading into musical folklore, a new up-and-coming recording studio shook the world. While the first half of the century had seen the city gaining a reputation as a hotbed of blues and jazz excellence, the second half belonged to rock’n’roll. But then, as now, a high proportion of Memphians either didn’t know or didn’t care what was going on on their own doorstep while the sounds of Memphis were being lauded around the world and especially in the UK, as the Beatles and Rolling Stones would later prove. The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ was just one example of their love of Memphis music, while the Stones’ championing of the blues was legendary.
It was in 1953 that this musical revolution unwittingly began. Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service to make his first single. The owner of the studio was thirty-one-year-old Sam Phillips. He’d opened the studio at 706 Union Avenue in January 1952, catering to people who were willing to pay to record their own piece of vinyl. Presley paid his money, cut his songs and left. It would be another two years before he returned to record a single for Phillips’s own Sun label.
The early 1950s record-buying public was eating up the easy listening sounds of Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney and Bing Crosby but that was all about to change. Phillips with his Sun label was now recording B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf while his friend the local DJ Dewey Phillips would play them on his WHBQ radio show, ‘Red Hot & Blue’. It was Dewey Phillips who got hold of a test pressing of the first Presley single for Sun, ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, and proceeded to play it over and over on his show. The response was phenomenal; the post-war boredom vanished for the nation’s teenagers and a new mix of music and sex flooded into every American living room.
Suddenly parents and children were not listening to the same music any more. James Dean became a new kind of screen idol and rock’n’roll provided the rebellious soundtrack. Record stores and music shops seemed to spring up on every street. In Memphis the success of Presley helped open the door for the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Presley was basically a white man singing black music. Sun Records made the most of the opening as young men from around the South travelled to Memphis to try their hand at being a rock’n’roll star: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash were just some of the ones that became superstars.
While the 1920s were the golden age of Memphis Blues and the 1950s were the glory years of rock’n’roll, the 1960s saw Memphis emerge as the bona fide centre of soul. The prime mover behind the new direction of Memphis’s music was Stax Studios.
Banker Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Stax (and gave it its name from the first two letters of their surnames, St-Ax) after Stewart had begun recording country acts in 1957. His studio had had its first hit with the Mar Keys’ instrumental jam ‘Last Night’ in 1961. The Mar Keys were the first white band in Memphis with horn players, a black band trademark. Booker-T and the MGs’ ‘Green Onions’ in 1962 was another nationwide success for the studio. The next decade saw Stax have over 150 Top 100 singles. The ‘Stax sound’ came from bands that were used to playing to both black and white audiences, and then synthesizing this mix to a precise degree. Otis Redding, Carla Thomas and Sam & Dave became international stars on the back of it. Stax would later become embroiled in the Big Star story.
The future members of Big Star arrived just before rock’n’roll took off. Chris Bell was born in Memphis on 12 January 1951, the second youngest of six children: Virginia, David, Vicky, Sara, Chris and Cindy. Bell’s mother, Joan Branford, was English. She met US B-17 bomber crew member and Memphis native Captain Vernon Bell in Norwich during the Second World War. The pair married in England, moving back to the United States at the end of the war.
Once back home, Vernon was discharged from his military duties and set up what was the first of a string of cafés and restaurants. The Little Tea Shop opened its doors for business in January 1946, the Knickerbocker restaurant on Poplar Avenue followed, as later did a series of Bonanza Steak Houses and Danvers Fast Food outlets.
The Bell family expanded as fast as their restaurant business and with the family home fast becoming too small for six children the Bells moved out to East Memphis in 1956. Chris and younger sister Sara were closest in age and were often mistaken for twins, not just because of their similar looks and age, but because they went everywhere and did everything together. All of the Bell children attended White Station Elementary School at the corner of Poplar and Perkins and went on to White Station High School, although Chris changed schools later on. The Bells were a typical well-off middle-class family who attended the local Episcopal church on Sundays.
Chris wasn’t a big music fan – an early favourite was Brenda Lee – but he was an avid comic book collector. ‘I remember Chris being curious about many things as a young child,’ says David Bell. ‘He had a sort of scientific bent along with an aptitude for mathematics. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be.’ This precocious will to learn would later be borne out in his approach to studio work.
On 26 January 1951, exactly two weeks after Chris, Andrew Hummel was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where his father, John Hummel, was serving in the Navy. After Andy’s younger brother, Robert, was born in 1952 the family moved back to Elkwood Drive in Memphis and when a third child, Sally, came along they moved to Worthington Circle in midtown Memphis. John Hummel was a doctor who had been put through medical school by the Navy so he was required to serve a certain amount of time afterwards. When his service ended he moved to Memphis to set up his own practice as a gynaecologist.
Their first move to Elkwood Drive was actually covered in some detail in the local press. Andy’s mother, Barbara Jo Walker Hummel, a native of Murray, Kentucky, had been crowned both Miss Memphis and Miss America in 1947 and the local press followed her every move. For example, a full page in the Memphis Press-Scimitar was given over to her brief visit to Memphis in 1947 to look at engagement rings during a stop-off at the airport between promotional duties. ‘Thousands Brave Electrical Storm To Greet Miss America at Airport’ the headline proudly states, covering the meeting of Barbara Jo, her father and John Hummel to look at prospective rings for thirty minutes before flying on. In Memphis she presented a daily TV programme for WHBQ from 1955, called Lady of the House, in which she hosted guests and gave tips to housewives from three till four in the afternoon. Meal planning and food preparation was the main thrust of the show, which was aired just in time for wives to prepare the evening meal for husbands coming home from a hard day at the office. Andy often made a guest appearance on the show before he started at school. Barbara could often be found in the local papers during the 1950s even if it was just a photograph of her dressing her children or teaching them how to read. As well as bringing up three children she found the time to perform in musical comedy stage shows (she was an excellent singer by all accounts), model clothes and later (unsuccessfully) run for political office in the state legislature.
At the same time that Chris Bell was starting at White Station, Andy began at the all-male Presbyterian Day School. ‘Elementary school was kind of a big mystery to me,’ recalls Hummel. ‘I never quite got it and never really fitted in very well. I was very bored and became rather lazy around the third grade. My parents never seemed to take much of an interest in my schooling other than just sending me off, and then screaming at me when my grades were bad. One thing they did do was make me take piano. Starting in the third grade I had a lesson every week and had to participate in recitals, which I hated of course.’
Jody Stephens was born in Memphis on 4 October 1952, the middle of three brothers – Jimmy was two years older and David five years younger. Stephens’s father, James, from Virginia, and mother, Rose, from Massachusetts, met in Washington at a roller skating rink. When they started talking, it turned out that they both were working at the same hospital, the former in the X-Ray department and the latter as a secretary. Jody was enrolled at the Colonial Elementary School before moving on to Willow Oaks Elementary, a middle-class but less exclusive school than either Bell or Hummel’s.
Jody’s father would occasionally sing and play guitar for his boys, usually in a country style, though most music around the house in Jody’s formative years was described by his brother Jimmy as ‘easy listening’. The brothers usually got their ‘pop fix’ by listening to the Top Forty radio shows. Apart from short stints of piano lessons, none of the Stephens boys played an instrument in their early days. ‘Jimmy and I were on the Willow Oaks [Swim] Club which was very middle class,’ says Jody. ‘He was a great diver so he was on the dive team as well. Now that I think of it, I may have been on the dive team but [was] not nearly the diver Jimmy was. I don’t think I ever won a race but did finish second and third occasionally. They used to give us spoonfuls of honey to rev up the energy level and I think they even put ice in the water for faster swim times.’
‘My parents tried to get me to take classroom-style piano lessons,’ explains Jimmy. ‘My first teacher had a nervous break-down; the second was killed in a car wreck; and the third attempt coincided with basketball. And basketball won. My dad had tried to teach me some things by ear on piano but a friend of mine was taking guitar lessons and I wanted to take [them]. But my parents were concerned that my interest in the guitar would go the same way as the piano, so I never took any guitar lessons.’
This was a temporary setback, though, because soon almost every boy in the country wanted to be in a rock band and play guitar. The number of guitar players in America increased dramatically in the aftermath of the Beatles’ prime-time television appearances. In Memphis literally hundreds of bands sprang up from nowhere, playing both the local R&B dance hits and the brand new sounds of the British Invasion. Hummel, Bell and Stephens would be among these teenage rock-star wannabes and, despite living in different parts of town, their love of music would soon cause their paths to cross.
2 ‘They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles’ (#ulink_04f81e50-4253-54be-85e6-429de358f30c)
Memphis, TN. 1960 to 1966
The date was 9 February 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS broke all previous audience figures as a staggering 73,000,000 viewers tuned in to see the Beatles’ US television première. By 1964 traditional rock’n’roll was starting to be seen as somewhat passé, and with this TV appearance the Beatles completely blew it away.
The show itself, ‘In association with Anacin and Pillsbury Biscuits’, was a curious mix of musical numbers, novelty acts and the Beatles, the biggest band in the world.
In his introduction, Sullivan revealed that the Beatles had just received a telegram from Elvis Presley wishing them luck in the US. He then introduced the Fab Four to a torrent of screams; the studio audience was predominantly female. The band took the stage in matching black suits with their trademark boots and haircuts, opening with ‘All My Loving’. During the second number, ‘Till There Was You’, the camera focused on each of the band in turn and a primitive graphic introduced them individually as ‘Paul’, ‘Ringo’, ‘George’ and ‘John – Sorry, girls, he’s married’.
Almost everyone interviewed for this book mentioned this event, and without it there may well have been no Big Star. The number of guitar players in the United States rose by a factor of four to over ten million by 1966.
The abundance of teen bands in Memphis was catered for in a number of interesting ways. George Klein had been a classmate of Elvis Presley and hosted shows on both WHBQ radio and TV. On a Saturday morning his radio show was broadcast live from Goldsmith’s department store in downtown Memphis while other stores had band showcases during shopping hours or to promote fashion parades in the evening. Saturday afternoons saw Klein’s TV show Talent Party. Local and national bands would lip-synch in the studio to their backing tracks while a chorus of dancing girls, the WHBQ-ties, would go-go along to the latest cool sounds in their mini-skirts and bouffant hair styles.
On weekend evenings local clubs also helped out underage partygoers with dedicated teen-nights which gave ample opportunity for Memphis bands to play and build up localised fan bases. The Roaring 60s Club, the Tonga Club and the Clearpool Beverly Room were just three of many, while church halls and YMCAs also had plenty of bands to choose from. Styles ranged widely from band to band. The locals mainly soaked up country, blues, rock’n’roll and soul, while a growing number of others kept on the cutting edge with the British rock invasion filtering through.
Racial segregation in reality still held sway in much of the South. Despite the strides made by WHBQ and WDIA, stations were still mainly all black or all white. Occasionally a song would cross over but this was rare. At least the population of Memphis had the choice and the chance to listen to both strands. Some of the poorer black neighbourhoods and richer white ones were only a few streets apart after all. The result was that white bands were influenced by black music, whether they wanted to be or not, and black ones were influenced by white music. Hummel, Stephens and Bell all heard everything that was on offer.
It wasn’t until the Beatles really reached America in 1964 that Chris Bell took a real interest, as he confirmed in a 1975 interview: ‘I started playing [guitar] in high school when I was twelve or thirteen years old, and really got motivated to start playing when the Beatles records first came out. Before that, music was a side thing, something that went on in the background.’ Chris attended one year at White Station Junior High before his parents transferred him to the Memphis University School (MUS). MUS was an all-male school that prepared its privileged white students for a university education. It was not the best choice of school for someone as nebulous as Chris. Starting at MUS coincided with the Bell family moving to Germantown, an affluent suburb in East Memphis.
The family had purchased around twenty acres of land and had a big house purpose-built on the property. The house that had originally been standing on the plot was moved to the back of the estate and nicknamed the ‘back house’.
‘They had a huge house, a pool, the whole nine yards,’ enthuses Andy Hummel. ‘The driveway must have been a mile long!’
At thirteen Chris started having guitar lessons and the back house proved an ideal spot to practise in. It was set far enough away from the main house that he could play as loud as he wanted without offending anyone. The building was a singlestorey affair, with several rooms. Sara, David and the other children would often hang out there listening to Chris, and later his friends, practise for hours on end.
Meanwhile Jody Stephens was attending Overton High. ‘Nowadays Overton is a performing arts school,’ he explains, ‘but when I went to Overton it was anything but. It was pretty stifling and I didn’t have a great time.’ Jimmy and Jody were getting into music. ‘Stax records was a big influence on me as well as Jody,’ says Jimmy Stephens. ‘“Knock on Wood”, “In The Midnight Hour”, Sam and Dave, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, the Isley Brothers, then the Who, early Kinks, Hollies and limited Beach Boys, to mention a few, all stood out. But the Beatles were the major influence – times ten over anything else. The first record I actually bought, that I know I bought without parental participation, was the Beatles’ “I Want To Hold Your Hand”.’ Jimmy also caught the guitar-playing bug but the problem was that everyone was already playing guitar. He started delivering the morning paper so that he could save up to buy a bass guitar and thus find a way into a local band. ‘I don’t remember how it happened,’ says Jimmy Stephens, ‘but someone either gave or loaned me an acoustic guitar that I took the first two strings off so I would have to play it as a bass instead of a guitar and I learned to play by listening to McCartney’s bass lines over and over.’ Jody started playing drums and the two brothers started practising together at home.
On 19 August 1966 the Beatles played two shows at the Mid-South Coliseum in Memphis, one at 4pm and one at 8.30pm. This was the Beatles third stateside visit and the band was mired in the controversy over John Lennon’s (mis-quoted) ‘bigger than Jesus’ scandal. The tour was under tight security, which was made even tighter when, in Memphis, the band received a death threat. Jimmy and Jody had tickets for the early show but wanted to exchange them for the evening one. They went to the venue in the morning but were told that it was not possible to change the tickets. Then they just decided to hang around outside for a while. Jimmy Stephens takes up the story: ‘We decided to go and hide outside the rear stage doors. We hid beside a dumpster that was inside a fenced area long before they actually closed the gate. We waited and eventually the doors opened and I slipped inside the backstage area unnoticed and found a place to hide in some folded-up bleacher seats and stayed there for a while. I could see police walking around but just after I slipped in, they closed the door, leaving Jody outside. Eventually I turned myself in because I was getting worried about Jody. I think they were really upset about it because these two young kids had breached their security. They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see the Beatles.’
By this time, Jody and Jimmy had begun trying to get a band together. ‘We were really lucky,’ says Jody. ‘Our parents were tolerant of our pursuit of music and they would let us practice in the house, and it was a small house. The den was very “live”. It had panelling on the walls and it had broken tile flooring. I’m sure it was impossible for them to really escape the noise.’
There were lots of kids in the Stephens’ neighbourhood that wanted to be in a band and it didn’t take long to get one together. They found a couple of guys with guitars, one of whom could sing. Jody and Jimmy went through many different names, but two were The Sands and Spot. Their early bands of 1964-5 included Tom Eubanks as the singer and another school friend, Wendell Wheat.
Eubanks was another big Beatles fan. ‘I didn’t ever listen to music until the British invasion, it was horribly boring,’ he admits. ‘When the Beatles came out it was this breath of fresh air and with the rawer kinds of sounds like the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” it was just electrifying. It was something that made me want to do it. I wanted to play guitar but there weren’t the learning aids back then that there are today. I used to muck through it and figure out how to do it.’ Eubanks and Jimmy Stephens were in the same year at high school and started practising at the Stephens house. ‘We never really got anywhere,’ laughs Eubanks. ‘If Jody did something that Jimmy didn’t like, Jimmy’d threaten to beat his ass. I’d say, “Jimmy, you can’t really have a band where you’re threatening to beat up the drummer!”’
‘I think I probably used to ride him,’ admits Jimmy, ‘about his needing to practise more or listen more to what the drummer was actually playing on cover versions – especially with regard to bass and drum lines.’ While Jimmy was brushing up on his bass playing he also sang backing vocals in his friend Mike Fleming’s band, the Chessmen. ‘I had done a couple of parties with them,’ he says. ‘I was doing back-up vocals because they had a bass player who was much more advanced than I was at the time, his name was Andy Hummel.’ The Chessmen consisted of Fleming, Hummel, drummer Scotty Bringhurst and guitarist Dick Wills and provided the link as to how Jody and Andy eventually met.
After several months Eubanks moved on to a new band and Wendell Wheat took his place as the singer in the Stephens brother’s trio. ‘There were different line-ups at various times,’ says Jody. ‘It was the usual core of my brother and Wendell Wheat. We played shows at little dances here and there, parties and stuff. It was all covers.’ At one point the trio actually played at their first recording session. ‘We met a guitar player who was with a black vocalist named Calvin Simms,’ recalls Jimmy Stephens. ‘This was our first recording session at a little studio named Sonic Recording with Roland Janes as engineer.’ That was the closest that the trio came to actually gaining any kind of local recognition because when the principal found out that their band had a black singer he stopped them from playing at their school. ‘Our high school was all white at the time and Calvin was from a different area,’ recalls Jimmy Stephens. ‘As far as I recall, Memphis musicians just played music and didn’t get caught up in the black-white thing. We just wanted to play music and what did skin colour have to do with that, or anything else, for that matter? My parents may have received some stares from the neighbours but we were all doing something positive and fun and they were supportive. Wendell’s mom went to the high school and raised hell with them when she found out they weren’t going to let us play. I think they gave some lame excuse but we knew what was going on.’ The Sonic demo tape would never be used. It had been earmarked for George Klein’s Talent Party but they couldn’t be entered for the show because Simms moved away to Los Angeles, leaving them without a singer.
Andy Hummel had started the 1960s with another house move, this time to Belleair Drive by the side of Overton Park. He was becoming a fan of surf music and bought all the latest singles by the Beach Boys and Jan and Dean. Then, like everyone else, he was hit by the Beatles. ‘I can still remember exactly where I was and what I was doing when I first heard them,’ he says. ‘They totally blew me and everyone else away. It’s sad that so many of the younger folks interested in music these days missed that experience. The Beatles were all anyone talked about. I mean everyone, old and young, the news media; they were just the main thing happening in the world at the time. After that it was the British Invasion and I loved all those bands, bought their records and just listened to rock’n’roll as much as I could. I had a little record player and lots of singles.’
Hummel also changed schools in the seventh grade, aged twelve. His new school was Snowden High, a regular public school where for the first time Hummel was attending classes with members of the opposite sex. ‘Were my eyes ever opened up!’ he laughs. ‘I had spent seven years in a very exclusive, protected environment and all of a sudden I was thrown into the gaping maw of the real world. I mean we had a guy who was seventeen years old still in seventh grade. The place was full of thugs. And girls, girls, girls! I loved it.’
Hummel pushed all the boundaries that he could: rock’n’roll, girls and, in his own words, ‘hanging around in the park all the time smoking cigarettes and stuff’. Overton Park was, and still is, home to the Memphis Zoo. It also has a large wooded area, a nine-hole golf course, some college buildings (including an art school) and is the site of the Overton Park Shell, an amphitheatre where Elvis Presley sang in 1954. Hummel and his friends would sneak up to the art school buildings in the park and try to sneak a peek at the life models that were posing nude for the painting students. They also found an underground system of cemented tunnels that were used for drainage from the park. ‘We lived down there,’ says Hummel. ‘Some of the students from the art academy had once gone down into one of the tunnels and covered the walls with tempera paintings. And it was like our own private art gallery no one else knew about.’
At Snowden, Hummel fell in with a crowd wanting to start a band. The Chessmen, based around Mike Fleming, who was in Hummel’s class, were formed in 1965. ‘I got my parents to buy me a bass that year. I began playing in a basement band with some guys. My musical life just sort of took off from there. My first Precision Bass Sunburst with a rosewood fretboard was about 250 dollars. I took about ten lessons at a local music store and, having played the piano for so long, once I knew which finger to put where to get the notes, the rest was easy. Meanwhile I bought a cheapo Sears Silvertone acoustic six-string. I just played it and played it. I picked out all the songs on all the records I could get. I really began to love Simon and Garfunkel a lot, then Joni Mitchell, and the other folkies because the guitar parts were so much fun to play. Finger picking six-string folk and bluegrass style is still my favourite kind of music.’
Once Jimmy Stephens was occasionally singing with the Chessmen, Hummel soon met Jody. ‘They [Jimmy and Jody] went to the same church,’ explains Hummel. ‘The First Baptist Church was near my house although they lived out in East Memphis. I hung around there because Mike Fleming went to church there and lived close by. Jody was very quiet back in those days so I didn’t really know him all that well. I hung around with Jimmy more. It was later on that I discovered what an extremely nice, considerate guy Jody is, and he has remained so through all we’ve been through, which will always be something of a mystery.’
The Chessmen began with a show at a Catholic or Episcopal church in East Memphis and lasted for about a dozen shows over a period of eighteen months. When that band split, and Jimmy left to play with Jody [who had also occasionally played with the Chessmen] and Wendell Wheat, Hummel and Mike Fleming added Richard Ennis on drums, Jimmy Turnage on guitar and named themselves the Swinging Sensations. A little older and more experienced, they managed to double their profits to around 300 dollars per show. Their line-up changed from time to time with a singer named ‘Yogi’ and a new bass player called ‘Nollie’. Hummel ended up playing keyboards for the last line-up. With Ennis’s dad as manager, the gigs came thick and fast and they moved from youth clubs and church halls to more adult venues, including Air Force bases.
The Swinging Sensations wore matching light blue, short-sleeved Banlon shirts and played an array of R&B and soul covers. Fleming switched to trumpet and a saxophone player was added to give them a mini horn section and enable the Stax sound to be replicated. The summer after the ninth grade the band set off in a van down to Florida, playing shows all the way there and back for their one and only ‘tour’.
The following autumn Hummel changed schools yet again, this time to MUS, which Chris Bell was also attending. Bell had already met fourteen-year-old drummer Dewitt Shy. The two hit it off and immediately began talking about getting a band together. Bell was becoming quite proficient on the guitar and word was put out that they needed a bass player. Bill Cunningham auditioned and was accepted. He brought along two schoolmates from Elizabeth Messick Junior High School – David Hoback to play guitar and Mike Harris to share vocal duties.
‘Chris and I began talking about starting a band,’ says Shy. ‘We hadn’t seen each other play but had heard about each other’s interest in music. We practiced among ourselves until we knew we were compatible in our musical interests, then we went looking for other prospective members.’ In early 1965 the line-up was complete and Dewitt Shy came up with a band name.
‘The band called itself the Jynx,’ he says. ‘I pushed the name, being enamoured with, and basically cannibalising, the Kinks’ name. We practised regularly in the living room of my house at 4272 Chanwil. My mother knew with the band practices occurring at my house she could keep an eye on things. She always loved music, although before we started playing, her tastes were in the realm of Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. She did like the Beatles, though, and welcomed our band’s “new” music at the house. She bought me my first drum set, a Ludwig oyster marine pearl set with Zildjians and after each practice she had to walk around the house rearranging pictures and paintings hanging on the walls, which were askew as a result of the loud music.
‘Girls would show up for the practices which pleased us no end and we played covers of the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Moody Blues, Them, the Zombies, the Animals and the like. Chris was heavily influenced by the Beatles and was an excellent guitarist. We tried to get him to concentrate on playing just the lead guitar, but he liked to play both rhythm and lead and consequently was kept quite busy during our gigs.’
Chris’s love of all things English was enhanced by David Bell’s frequent trips to Europe, from which he’d return with the very latest singles that had yet to reach Memphis. ‘Of all of Chris’s bands, the Jynx are the group that I remember chauffeuring around to band practices and garage parties,’ says David Bell. ‘They were quite popular and rather competent. I think that a lot of their popularity had to do with their courage to be performing at such a young age.’
The summer of 1965 was a good time to be in a band in Memphis. Local act Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs had a worldwide smash with ‘Woolly Bully’ and bands like the Jokers, Ronnie and the Devilles and the Gentrys were pulling in crowds around town. ‘Our name got around the junior-high and high-school party scenes in Memphis,’ says Shy. ‘We played at private parties, at school venues and we competed in and did well in a number of local “battle of the bands” competitions. We played in some local Memphis teen clubs that were hot at the time, like the Tonga Club and the Go Go Club.’
By December 1965 the Jynx were being considered for a spot on Talent Party but they needed a demo tape to audition for a spot, which would let them appear on the show early the next year. ‘We bought some recording time at Sonic Studio,’ says Shy. ‘We recorded at least four songs and I remember that Alex Chilton was supposed to show up for the session to sing with Mike Harris but Alex did not show, so the original band did the session. We were nervous, or at least I was, but we got into it and it went smoothly. We liked to play loud, but we had to back the volume down for the session. Talent Party liked it and we went on that TV show in Memphis as a result. My recollection is a little fuzzy on this but I think Alex became involved because we wanted to experiment with having two lead singers sometimes singing together and sometimes one backing up the other. It proved not to work so well and Mike ultimately left the band.’
The four songs from the session were the Moody Blues’ ‘And My Baby’s Gone’, ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ by James Brown (which the Moody Blues had also covered), ‘Little Girl’ by Them and Paul Revere and the Raiders’ ‘Just Like Me’. ‘Little Girl’ is a confident-sounding take, with a tight rhythm section; ‘Just Like Me’ shows the band rocking out a little with some nice backing vocals and prominent guitar work from Bell. ‘And My Baby’s Gone’ could be an early Doors demo while ‘I’ll Go Crazy’ shows a different, soulful, side to the band.
The December 1965 session was the only one ever recorded by the Jynx and after Harris left the band tried out three different vocalists. Chilton, Ames Yates and Vance Alexander all filled in briefly and Jerry Powers had a short stint as keyboard player but the band disintegrated in 1966 when none of the stand-in vocalists would commit permanently. ‘Alex was very talented but was not always consistent in showing up on time for practices and some gigs,’ recalls Shy. ‘We were playing some original songs but also covers of well-known songs. I can remember telling my mother during the heyday of the band that “music is my life” but she poured cold water on any thoughts I had of not continuing my education. In the long run she was right.’
Chilton would soon go on to national fame with another band and Bill Cunningham would later link up with Chilton once again. On leaving the Jynx, Cunningham immediately hooked up with a band called the Jokers who had a limited edition album released. The line-up included a drummer by the name of Richard Rosebrough.
Rosebrough, born in Memphis on 16 September 1949, initially had different musical influences to his future band mates. ‘When I was three my mother bought us a seventy-eight rpm copy of “The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”,’ he recalls. ‘It was on yellow vinyl and very scratchy. I was just fascinated with the melodies, counter melodies, mode changes and the imagery of all the different instruments and sounds. Then Elvis was on The Ed Sullivan Show. We watched it as a family event on a Sunday night. We had no idea that he would become the entertainer of the century. To us he was a local boy made good and we were proud. I somehow knew that things had changed that night but I was still too young to grasp it.
‘As a child I beat on pots and pans and had nervous legs [they bounced up and down a lot]. Both of my sisters got piano lessons because they were girls, but not me. I just banged aimlessly on the piano and worked out ‘Chopsticks’ until I was told to stop. It was considered proper for the young daughters to play the piano and to be cultured. They care little about music now, but it has always been my life.’ Rosebrough got his first drum in the seventh grade but, as his mother couldn’t afford a stand for it, he used two stacks of a classics book collection to set it on. ‘Tore ‘em up, sadly,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t that much fun playing just a marching drum, but learning the twenty-six rudiments proved to be the best training for the future.’
Rosebrough had originally started out in the Mariners, a group he put together with some high-school friends. ‘We formed in 1964 after the Beatles had been realized,’ he says. ‘We actually had success with parties, clubs, and “battle of the bands”. We even got paid. Then I got a call from the Jokers and I quit the Mariners.’ When Bill Cunningham also joined the band, the line-up of Rosebrough (drums), Cunningham (vocals and organ), Mark Cowan (vocals), Allan Stewart (guitar) and Dudley Brewer (bass) hit the Memphis live circuit for a couple of years between early 1966 and late 1967, covering everything from the Beatles to the Four Tops and most things in-between. During this time Cunningham brought Chris Bell to a practice and introduced him to Rosebrough for the first time.
It was a meeting that Rosebrough remembers well to this day. ‘Christopher came over to band practice in my mother’s living room one Saturday,’ he says. ‘He was dressed differently, perhaps more loudly, like purple patterned bell-bottom pants that were too short. He had bushy, curly reddish blonde hair that he cut himself or maybe his brother David cut it. He was shy and didn’t say a lot. He had a sheepish, devilish grin on his face, but gave little to go on. I sensed a far-away kid who was really into rock’n’roll, Beatles, Kinks and the Who. He had conflicts with his dad and Vernon Bell wanted to sell the guitar.’ Chris won the day and kept the guitar. Slowly, through this loose series of cover bands, a hard core of anglophilic rock fans was gravitating together. Little did they know it when they all finally met, but they were destined for greater things.
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Rob Jovanovic
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Биографии и мемуары
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 25.04.2024
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О книге: I want to make an album of real genius, to sit alongside the Stones′ ′Exile On Main Street′, and Big Star′s ′Third′ (Peter Buck, R.E.M. 1991)The definitive biography of Big Star, the most influential band of the last 30 years.Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three albums – #1 Record, Radio City and Third – are still felt today. Big Star bucked the musical trend of the Seventies. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio friendly Power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists such as Primal Scream, R.E.M., the Bangles, the Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, Garbage, St. Etienne, Pavement and Travis regularly speak of the Big Star legacy.After singing in 1960s boy-band The Box Tops, Alex Chilton joined up with Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens and Chris Bell to form Big Star in late 1970. Chilton and Bell quickly formed a Lennon-McCartney type partnership at the heart of band and began turning out tunes laced with the best pop sensibilities of the Beatles and Badfinger, the guitars of the Byrds and the harmonies of the Beach Boys. But creative tensions, haphazard distribution, and marketplace indifference sent the band into a series of splits, solo-projects and short-lived reunions that left them on the brink of oblivion. Thirty years later though, and most guitar bands in the world will admit a debt to Big Star and their three albums remain unqualified successes.Drawing on interviews from surviving band members (including Andy Hummel′s first interview for 30 years) and the major players at the Memphis based record label Ardent, Rob Jovanovic has written the definitive history of Big Star, the forgotten band.