#1 Record/Radio City

Big Star

SACD ~~$18.98~~ $13.98

RELEASE DATE: 30 Jul 1991

SXSA-60025-6

LABEL: STAX

Big Star: American band that during its brief existence in the early 1970s helped define power pop, a style in which bright melodies and tunefully boyish vocals are propelled by urgent rhythms (Encylopedia Britannica).
Brief existence is right. The band was together from 1971( #1 Record ) to 1974 ( Radio City ). There was a later album called Third or Sister Lovers, but it wasn’t released until more than three years after the group broke up, and it sounded like a nervous collapse in progress. So Big Star ends up in the encyclopedia as a footnote to what might have been a brilliant future. Well, no. It ends up in the Stax catalog as a reminder that although Big Star never sold its way onto the charts, the band’s influence continues and Alex Chilton is regarded as, in the words of the critic Mark Miester, “the patron saint of power pop.” Chilton and Jody Stephens, the Lennon and McCartney of the genre, gave their music a socking energy that they absorbed growing up in Memphis. That power and purity have never been heard with more impact than in this Super Audio Compact Disc (SA-CD) issue of an American pop classic. Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Andy Hummel, Jody Stephens

Recorded summer and fall 1972 and fall 1973.