Big Star's Again: A book, a record, and misery

This isn’t Big Star. Not by any stretch of the imagination. Big Star, at least as they existed during the wholly productive and prolific years 1972-75, was never capable of the sort of indifference and languor that In Space (pathetically hyped by Rykodisc as the "first Big Star record in 30 years!") vomits up. But hey, cult bands have cult followings and cult followings tend to fall for the endless mercenary money-grabbing tendencies of those they worship so why not Big Star’s Alex Chilton? Hell, he’s built a goddamn career out of such games. After all this is the same cat who spent much of the past thirty years tying to disguise his genuine rock and roll apathy as a kind of quaint and disheveled eccentricity when, truth be told, it was quite simply Mr. Chilton issuing absolute shit - fractured tidbits and ideas of songs and attempting to pass it off as "art" (yeah sure, there were the occasional three minutes of intrigue, though very few and awfully far between and buried beneath so much musical excrement that they weren’t worth the insufferable time it took to discover).

So why not sully the good name Big Star? It’s been thirty long years! And the cult is out there waiting with fattened wallets! Big Star is back! And Alex Chilton could care fucking less. That is quite painfully obvious from the uninspired start ("Dony" is raffish enough to suggest a true Big Star lineage, but ultimately comes off as another grand con) of In Space to its tedious finish. Chilton sounds as though he’s sleepwalking through the entire affair and could care less that it comes off that way (although he does at times, as on the forced finale "Makeover", try like hell to sound as though he’s excited – that should be good enough, right?). And while Posies Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow do a damn fine job doing their part while serving up some sweet Big Star-inspired music, In Space sounds, at best, like a better Posies record than the one the Posies themselves released earlier this year or, at worst, like a reasonably tolerable solo Chilton effort.

Thirty years and this is what we get? You betcha!

But why all the fuss? What could possibly lead anyone to believe that there was a decent Big Star record yet to be made three decades later? And, above all, who really cares?

Maybe Rob Jovanovic does.

In the postscript to his rock-bio book Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop Jovanovic explains that it took eight years for him to find someone willing to publish the Big Star story he so hoped to write. And when he finally did, Alex Chilton would have nothing to do with the telling of it. It’s obviously a huge hole in any bio-type book to not have the main player onboard and involved, but it’s an even costlier omission when the book is of a genre (rock-biography) that tends toward the eternally dull and often painful adulation that comes with rock and roll veneration. It’s rarely very interesting to read the biography of an artist who is evidently held in such high regard by the story’s author that the scribe felt compelled to pen the tale. Eight years certainly qualifies as a compulsion for Jovanovic, and his book is fairly typical rock-bio stuff.

While Jovanovic does well in steering clear of blatant adoration, his book sinks into a rather monotonous storytelling that sheds no light on the mysteries that defined Big Star’s legend: three irrationally brilliant records and the fact that virtually nobody heard them in their day. Instead if insight Jovanovic delivers a rather shallow and linear retelling of the who’s, what’s, where’s and when’s during the thirty some odd years that have led us up to the present Chilton/Big Star swindle titled In Space. There is no exploration of the most pertinent question in the Big Star story: why?

So in the end, after thirty long years, this is all we get – two fairly weak, passionless, incomplete and uninteresting pieces of mere product that shamefully do absolutely nothing to explain or enhance the Big Star legend.

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