Alex Chilton, Musician.
Posted: Thursday, March 18th, 2010 1:36 pmDecember 28, 1950-March 17, 2010
The urgent, jangling power-pop that Alex Chilton made with his band Big Star turned him into a cult icon and inspired the sound of a raft of bands that followed, from REM to Teenage Fanclub.
Like the Velvet Underground, for reasons of bad timing and rank bad luck, Big Star’s influence on popular music was not matched by commercial success during the group’s lifetime. Although the first two Big Star releases, No 1 Record and Radio City, subsequently found a prominent position on lists of the greatest albums of all time, they were virtually ignored by the record-buying public on their release in the early 1970s.
By then Chilton had already tasted the biggest commercial success of his career with his first band, the Box Tops, with whom he enjoyed a No 1 hit with The Letter, when he was 16.
Yet it was his work with Big Star that eventually made him a legendary figure in rock music, a status that was reinforced when the Replacements wrote a song named after him. When the group came together in 1971, rock music was at its most pompous and self-indulgent. Read Full Obituary
