Music So Loud, Can’t Tell a Thing: Big Star’s 'Radio City' at 50

Radio City begins with a guitar revving its engines, a slide that starts things up and never stops. Big Star’s 1974 sophomore album, which turned 50 this month, clears its throat with “O, My Soul,” a surfy, funky jaunt that’s the rock and roll equivalent of all of the lights flickering on at an arcade. “Go ahead and shake if you wanna,” sang Alex Chilton, then 23-years-old, having already learned how to shake, rattle and roll as the teenybopper frontman of The Box Tops. With that whirling organ part and Jody Stephens’ raucous, choppy drumming, the album’s opener finds Chilton trying to strut his stuff, projecting confidence to mixed success. “When we’re together, I feel like a boss,” he admits. “O, My Soul” chronicles a search for the transformative properties of pop—a lover, a hit song or a car—because Chilton was always in search of music’s catharsis.

In 1970, Chilton returned to Memphis, recently having left the Box Tops, best known for the late ‘60s hit “The Letter.” Local vocalist/guitarist Chris Bell invited Chilton to join, alongside drummer Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel, and form Big Star. The group toiled over their debut, #1 Record, sweating out 12-string acoustic guitar melodies and crisp harmonies at Ardent Studios. Chilton and Bell fancied themselves as a Lennon–McCartney-esque duo, producing meticulous pairings of T. Rex-like swagger and strict, Beatles-y arrangements. #1 Record was distributed and promoted poorly by Stax Records, leading Bell to quit the band after copious infighting—and Big Star eventually disbanded for a few months, only to reform and eventually get back to work at Ardent on Radio City, an album that became one of power pop’s ur-texts.

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Just before Bell began work on the aching, heartbroken “I Am The Cosmos” and similar solo material, Chilton took the reins of the band. But the influence of Bell, “[Chilton’s] folkie counterpart” as Robert Christgau described him, still rears its head here. Bell wrote much of Radio City’s “Back of a Car,” a teenage fantasy about driving around, listening to music and not knowing how to say you love someone. Along with “I’m in Love with a Girl,” a rare, earnest tangent from Chilton, “Back of a Car” remains one of Radio City’s most hopeful songs. The band choreographs the track wondrously, centering the verses around Chilton’s struggle to admit his feelings. A soaring harmony and accented drums force him to spit out the sentiment, with the line “I love you, too” simply concluding the chorus.

Without Bell’s contrasting, direct sensitivity, Chilton’s songwriting reoriented towards confusion. He began writing harsher, more vicious sentiments while largely retaining the ringing guitars and Hummel’s hooky basslines of their debut. The production, covered primarily by the band, themselves, provides a throughline between Radio City and Big Star’s debut. But songs like “What’s Going Ahn,” most memorable for its moody Wurlitzer chords and airy, haunting “ooh’s,” pinpoint Chilton’s new indifference and uncertainty. “I like love but I don’t know / All these girls, they come and go,” he sings, offering a broad overview of Radio City’s diminished spirits.

Naturally, Chilton wasn’t content. He was forced to grow up quickly while on tour with the Box Tops, which came after having a #1 hit with them at just 16 years old. What remained was the acute resentment that fuels a song like “Life is White,” full of petty, selfish squabbles and chunking guitars that sync up with a wailing harmonica. “I know what you lack / And I can’t go back to that,” sings Chilton, before the band wanders towards a honky-tonk piano break. The result is blistering bubblegum, a precursor to the meanness of Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind” if it were made up of oversimplified feelings and Byrds guitar tones. While Chilton’s childishness isn’t always the easiest pill to swallow, “Life is White” understands the corrosive nature of apathy in a relationship.

Stephens’ drumming throughout Radio City surprises for how choppy or ambling it can be, a welcome disruption to pop rock’s normally perfunctory drummers. After three strikes of a snare drum on “Daisy Glaze,” the simmering resentment of “Life is White” erupts into an undercurrent of violence. The song begins woozy and dejected, Chilton’s discombobulating delivery staggers along with Stephens’ cymbal crashes, but suddenly the tempo shifts and the guitar leads are harmonized and bending. Everything ends in a frenzy, with Chilton singing arriving at a bar, looking to score, and getting ready to fight on the dance floor. In the album’s most crass, sexist moment, Chilton belts “Who is this whore?,” chastising his company before growing existential. As guitars ricochet higher and higher up the scale, “Daisy Glaze” is Chilton lashing out, tossing blame around for his lasting emptiness that informs Radio City.

Luckily, Radio City has a few antidotes to Chilton’s songs of loathing and lovesickness. On “Way Out West,” the album’s only song exclusively accredited to Hummel, Stephens sings a jovial, mid-tempo recollection of yearning. While the opening line “She’s a schemer and she makes me mad” leaves Stephens sounding like he’s huffing and puffing, Hummel’s lyricism can’t diminish the song’s melancholic shine. “Love me, we can work out the rest,” sings Stephens, pleading while still bolstering the song’s hooky bonafides. Chilton’s chorus harmony gives “Way Out West” both levity and wistfulness, allowing the hook to ascend beautifully. Later, his harmonies begin to feel Todd Rundgren-esque on “Morpha Too,” a sweet detour that sounds like a lost demo by The Left Banke.

It was never hard to place the influences of Big Star, but they rarely sounded more like the Who than on “She’s a Mover.” Between the drums that sound sampled from My Generation and the Townshend clang of the guitar, “She’s a Mover” pairs a recognizable structure with some of Radio City’s strangest lyrics. “When she smile like crocodile,” Chilton sings, before trailing off into an instrument build up. “Mod Lang” vibrates on a similar, nearly proto-glam frequency, with the line “I can’t be satisfied” tossed around like a bad-vibes mantra. These songs, along with “What’s Going Ahn,” were recorded with Danny Jones on bass and Richard Rosebrough on drums—an explanation for why these tunes seem slightly out of step with Radio City’s tight, locked-in songcraft.

“September Gurls” remains Radio City’s biggest song, born out of the way Chilton’s difficulties with relationships began to rhyme with each other. Built upon his jangling, shaggy guitar chords, the second single off of Radio City takes the template of the Beach Boys’ “California Girls” and personalizes it, toying with astrology and heartbreak along the way. Even on Chilton’s most exuberant songs, he seems acutely aware of what he’s missing, often shrugging it off with a line like “I loved you, well, nevermind.” Described by novelist Michael Chabon as “the greatest number-one song that never charted,” the song remains a shimmering feat, the clear first entry in Big Star 101.

Chabon’s comment gets to the heart of Big Star’s legacy, a band remembered as perpetual underdogs, kneecapped by the unfair forces of the pop chart and, even, their own record label. Around the release of Radio City, Columbia Records and Stax Records entered a spat around their distribution deal, leaving Big Star’s catalog in flux. The album got raves but wasn’t accessible in record stores. After another disappointing record release, Hummel decided to finish college, and left Big Star in the hands of Chilton and Stephens. They began work on Third/Sister Lovers, a misshapen flash of depressed brilliance which remained the band’s final work until they reformed fifteen years later.

With the help of pop rock dorks the Posies, Chilton and Stephens reunited in 1991 while Big Star was having somewhat of a resurgence. After Third/Sister Lovers, Chilton went off to New York, releasing lo-fi disasterpieces and producing CBGBs bands like the Cramps, and Stephens stayed working at Ardent. In the meantime, legends like R.E.M and the Replacements worshiped at Big Star’s altar, eventually leading to a power pop resurgence in the 1990s with acts like Teenage Fanclub and Matthew Sweet. The Replacements’ Paul Westerberg famously penned the song “Alex Chilton,” an imagined happy ending for Big Star: “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes round / They sing, ‘I’m in love, what’s that song?’’ Chilton would even provide production on the Replacements’ Tim and lend vocals to their track “Left of the Dial.”

But “Alex Chilton” remains one of the greatest songs about how an extraordinary melody or hook can transform you or bring you somewhere you’ve never been before. More specifically, “Alex Chilton” is about how Big Star will do this to you. Westerberg proposes that Radio City can define what you’re feeling even when you can’t, that Big Star’s music can fill in your blanks. On “Back of a Car,” Chilton sings about having music so loud that you “can’t tell a thing” or “can’t find the lines.” Big Star’s songwriting always centered around these young, big emotions and the way they intersected with the joy of music. After Radio City, those feelings have been rarely articulated so perfectly since.

Ethan Beck is a writer from Pittsburgh who lives in Brooklyn. His work can be found at Bandcamp Daily, Paste Magazine, Washington Square News and others.

Music So Loud, Can’t Tell a Thing: Big Star’s Radio City at 50

A half-century later, the Memphis band's sophomore album remains a bright, beautiful portrait of young, big emotions and the way they intersected with the joy of music.