Chris Bell – I Am The Cosmos

I played this collection the other day having not heard it for some time, and was blown away. For many years the title track has been a staple of compilation CDs I’ve made for people, but I’d forgotten how good many of the other tracks are. In particular, “Look Up” is a beautiful melody, while “You and Your Sister” is, to quote American writer Scott E Miller, simply one of the best pop songs ever.

Listening to the first Big Star album, #1 Record, it’s hard to hear where Alex Chilton started and Chris Bell began. Both have a clear love of the Beatles, jangly guitars, but with a dark melancholy that sounds all the sadder in the light of the personal traumas not unrelated to Big Star’s commercial failure.

It’s also hard to distinguish Bell’s solo songs collected on I Am The Cosmos from his Big Star material, especially since Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens play on some of the songs on I Am The Cosmos. They were recorded between his departure from Big Star - in 1973 after #1 Record flopped - and Bell’s premature death in a car crash in 1978. They were recorded sporadically, his career hampered by abuse of booze and drugs.

These songs never saw a commercial release until Rykodisc issued this CD in 1992. It was the first CD I ever bought. I’d held out against getting a CD player but when this was released (not on vinyl) I knew my luddite days were over.

The roots of power pop

Further to my post on the Everlys' Two Yanks In England, an album that I confess I'd not heard of until picking it up earlier this year, I've just read an enlightening review by Edd Hurt for Nashville Scene of the new Big Star biography and album. Hurt cites Two Yanks In England as the missing link between the British guitar pop of the Beatles and the Who and the power pop of Big Star:

"To say ... that all power pop derives from The Who is to ignore what may be the Ur-power-pop statement, the Everly Brothers’ 1966 Two Yanks in England, a brilliant, neglected (and recently reissued) record featuring songs by the Hollies, and a work that one-ups the Beatles by putting a peculiarly Southern American spin—lost, melancholy, subtly tortured—on the basic formula.

"Big Star, the Memphis band led by Chris Bell and Alex Chilton, are the group whose early ’70s albums go a step further and define power pop as a synthesis of British pop music and the West Coast post-folk-rock of the Buffalo Springfield, Gene Clark and Moby Grape, with an admixture of the spare, oblique style of Stax Records. And like the Everlys’ Two Yanks in England, Big Star’s albums give the Beatles back to Americans."

I can hear what he means; it's what's wrong with the Everlys' record in the sense that they don't sound as Swinging London as they'd hoped; but it's also what's great about the album in that they bring something to the table that the Beatles, Who and Hollies themselves aspired to: authentic southern soul.