I’ve always had an arms-length relationship with Alex Chilton. Sure, I heard “The Letter” a million times, and the first time I heard “September Gurls” as a kid, I was all, hey, that’s alright, though i was just a kid and didn’t have access to a lot more, especially since there wasn’t a radio station that reliably played them in Toronto in the late 1970’s. I remember there being a bit of a to-do when Big Star broke up, but while the deejays on my favorite stations mentioned how great they were, they never actually played them, and at that point I was still too young to do anything other than hunt down the occasional album with my paper route money when I had the chance, and the Sam The Record Man outlet in Fairview Mall didn’t have any Big Star anyways.
Then punk entered my life, and I finally had some music of my own. The eighties were a flood of Jam and Clash songs, punctuated with the occasional Black Flag & Bad Brains thing and whatever pop or reggae tracks I managed to get out of the Island or Stiff catalog. I discovered Elvis Costello & Nick Lowe, and from there found jazz, and it wasn’t until the release of Tim that I really had ever even properly heard of the Replacements.
Which opened the hell out of my eyes. Listening to Paul Westerberg scream and stumble his way through the crazed fraught masterpieces he’d wrote, well, I finally, thought, that. That’s the kind of song I want to listen to forever.
I listened to Tim and Let It Be for the next year without interruption, learning every melody line, every missed bass fill, every spliced guitar solo, every broken note Paul sang, every fumbled outro, despite the obvious and inescapable fact that the whole band was a bunch of fuckups, they could still make perfect pop, still pull the emotions they wanted out of you whenever they wanted, still make art, in the widest and truest and most personal sense of the word. When Paul starts into “We are the sons of no one” on Bastards Of Young, he means it with every molecule of air in his lungs. At the end of Let It Be, the line “How do you say I miss you/to an answering machine?” still makes me stop and take a deep breath even now, twenty-some years and hundreds of listens after the first time I heard it. It was — it is — beauty, honesty, shit, perfection. They’re letting their nerve endings hang out and daring us to watch the light show. It’s remarkable, and it makes me look at wastes of time like the whole emo movement like it’s some kind of extended comedy act. I can’t take anyone in that scene seriously after listening to Paul Westerberg be realer in his sleep than System Of A Down will ever be in a quadrillion years. And I like System Of A Down.
Which brings us to Alex Chilton, and “Alex Chilton.” Again, my only exposure to him until well into my adulthood was through the Replacements, and maybe that was for the best. You can never make your own case the way another great artist and fan can make it on your behalf. It almost didn’t matter how great you actually are, as long as someone thinks enough of you to write a chorus as beautiful as
Children by the million scream for Alex Chilton when he comes around
They sing, “I’m in love. What’s that song?
I’m in love with that song.”
I remember the first time I heard that song. I was working as a dishwasher in a restaurant across from Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, living on leftovers from the kitchen, and sleeping in a flop house. It was about 1987 or 1988, and I was homeless and destitute. But when we would clean up at the end of the night, one of the cooks would let me put on my cassettes while we finished our chores (I was in no hurry to leave, even at 4:00 in the morning), and I would often bring in Tim to play. The other guys didn’t mind, it was upbeat and they thought I was crazy, so they indulged me. When Pleased To Meet Me came out, I stole the cassette from a record store; at that point, that band was by far the best thing in my life, and I wasn’t going to have the money to buy it, like, ever.
The first time I played the new tape in the kitchen, the cooks didn’t like it as much. They wanted a routine, and I was fucking with it. But that shitball boombox on top of the salad table was the only tape player I had access to, and I’d be damned if i was going to let anyone take that away from me. And that was when I first heard “Alex Chilton,” and it made me cry a little, and I thought, you know, I’ve been hearing about this guy my whole goddamned life. Maybe I should hunt him down and see what the hell the big deal is.
So I found a tape called Bach’s Bottom, essentially an outtakes and seconds collection, not a great place to start. I had no one who knew about him to help me, I just had my instincts, and the tape was cheap, so I figured it was as good a place as any. I had never heard of Big Star. Fuck, I was homeless, every minute spent indoors anywhere was a little victory. It was just too sloppy and repetitive for me to get (it seemed there were about 93 versions of “Take Me Home And Make Me Like It,” and “Bangkok” just seemed kind of racist), so I figured either Westerberg was having us on about him or he heard something in him that maybe wasn’t there, and so that was it for me & Alex Chilton for another few years, until I was actually in a band of my own, and the chorus of people around me were all shocked that I wasn’t into him yet.
So I managed to buy (I was employed and homed by this point) #1 Record and Radio City, and it was another one of those moments when you realize you’ve been holding your breath for a really long time, and you open your lungs and breathe deeply for a minute or two, and you realize the air smells like flowers and you’re awake for the first time in months. So many more things made sense after that. That happens every once in a while.
There’s a reason this piece isn’t about Alex Chilton as much as it is about my favorite of his fans, and that’s because as much as I now love Big Star, I never really got into Alex Chilton’s solo stuff. Maybe at some point I will. I see why people love it, and it’s great for all the reasons the Replacements are great. But when I want to hear Alex Chilton, I still go to Paul Westerberg.
It’s true that without Chilton, there is no Westerberg, at least not in the way that I grew to love and require in my life in the way I required food and shelter, and for that, I will honor his life and art in as much detail as I have in me. Hey, I’ll listen to “Thirteen” forever. Even though Westerberg may touch me more, and I may feel closer to him through his recorded and live work than I did to Chilton, who I always only ever knew as a bit of a hot mess whose best work happened before I knew who he was, I’ve spent enough time with both of them now that I really feel like I lost a good friend yesterday, one that I didn’t get to know nearly as well as I wanted to before he died.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go put on a record.
