#1 Record

Album review

In the mid-1970s, while most of the music world was focused on stadium concerts, the excesses of hard and glam rock and inevitable indulgences like half-hour drum solos, one unknown Memphis quartet was quietly predicting the future. Fronted by Alex Chilton who'd been the teenaged singer on the Box Tops 1967 hit, "The Letter," and including songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell, bassist Andy Hummel, and drummer Jody Stephens, Big Star (named for a local supermarket chain), was steeped in the Beatles and contemporaries of Badfinger and The Raspberries. During its short life, the band recorded three ahead-of-their-time albums in the early 70s that are now worshipped as THE unassailable grails of power pop. Even more far-reaching, the band's three albums are also the place where R.E.M., The dBs, The Posies, Matthew Sweet, Teenage Fanclub, and many others first got the idea for the jangly, tuneful, proudly Anglophilic guitar pop that eventually became a large part of Alternative Rock.

Opening with Chris Bell's unexpectedly Robert Plant-esque vocal on the opening track, "Feel," this collection of Bell/Chilton originals progresses through sparkling tracks like the hilariously-titled, Byrdsian romp, "The Ballad of El Goodo," rockers like "Don't Lie To Me," the anthemic "When My Baby's Beside Me," and the joyous, bouncy single "In The Street," sung by Bell and later re-recorded by Cheap Trick as the theme song of television's That 70's Show. All are lean, clean, joyous blasts of melody built on tight ensemble playing rather than vocalist melodrama or solo instrumental glory. What gives #1 Record a never to be repeated edge in the slim Big Star catalog, is the presence of two strong vocalists in Chilton and Bell, who trade leads and harmonize together. The gossamer, beseeching "Give Me Another Chance" rises on their ravishing, John and Paul-like entwining. The defining twist in the Big Star fable is that because the distribution was fumbled, #1 Record barely made it into the stores, a lost cult record from the day it was released. Given an appropriately shimmering, tingle-inducing production thanks to the recording and mixing expertise of both Bell, but in particular Ardent Studio owner John Fry (most apparent in the crystalline acoustic guitar tones in "Watch The Sunrise"), these 12 miraculous confections are given added detail and punch in the sparkling new all-analog remastering. Guitar pop music has rarely if ever been this consequential. The still-radiant, all-consuming pop genius here remains sublime. © Robert Baird/Qobuz