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another man's done gone
Cut for a longish Alex-Chilton-y ramble.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember when John Lennon was killed. I am, barely, and I know many of the people on my friendslist are younger than I am. So maybe you don't remember, maybe you do. But anyway, I do. I remember my mother, who never seemed like such a huge music fan, crying over him. I remember that we decorated the Christmas tree that year to a weekend-long radio tribute, and I can't remember whether it was her idea or mine, or maybe it was both, but it was the strangest Christmas decorating session, everything differently weighted and off-kilter. I remember that the candlelight vigils outside the Dakota were news that year. And really, John Lennon hadn't exactly changed the world, had he? Not really. It just seemed that way. He just changed the face of rock and roll, is all. Along with a few other people, he changed the way the western world thought about music, and we mourned him for a long time on the strength of that. Still mourn him, I think, in some ways.
He changed me, too. That weekend, I think, early December 1980, was when I started to take music seriously. It started with a Beatles obsession -- it so often does, doesn't it? -- that spiraled into a genre-bending magpie bedazzlement with music that has changed quite a bit over the last thirty years or so, but hasn't ever really died away.
Other performers have died since then, obviously. Rock and Roll, it has a high body count, a low life-expectancy. And there are some people I miss on a personal level (Elliot Smith) and others who I missed because they also changed the music scene and I respected them for it (Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson). But until this morning, I had never heard about the death of a musician and cried over him. It took Alex Chilton for that.
A friend of mine said this morning, when I wrote her about it while I was still feeling electrocuted and speechless, that this is only the beginning. That Alex Chilton may be the first of our pantheon of true musical idols to die (who wasn't, as in the case of John Lennon, already dead when I found him), but there's a long line still to come. And it's true, damn it, it's true, it's true. There are many, many to come, and they'll come faster as we grow older. But I can't imagine very many hitting quite this hard. Alex Chilton never faded away for me, he was a musical constant for me in a way that few people are. (On some levels, that's sort of a criticism of both of us, isn't it? That he wasn't a risk-taking performer after his Big Star days, that he stuck to what he did well, and did it well, or at least, with reasonable consistency, for decades. That he never outgrew himself, and I never outgrew him. But still.)
Alex Chilton might never have have achieved the success or name recognition levels that John Lennon or Michael Jackson or even Kurt Cobain did, but in a lot of ways, he did exactly the same thing that they did. Brian Eno (I think it was him) once said that the Velvet Underground, back in the day, only sold about six albums, but every one of the six people who bought them went out and formed a band; Alex Chilton had a similar influence over the indie bands of the Eighties and Nineties, and I honestly don't think that the music I listened to and loved best would have existed in its same form if it hadn't been for him. The Replacements wrote a song about this very phenomenon, actually. That's one of my favorites, too.
That sounds so clinical, though. What I'm feeling right now is anything but clinical, I promise. I love Alex Chilton, from start to finish, the way I'd love the music of a friend, personally connected and unflinchingly loyal. Even when his songs aren't, er, up to any sort of professional standard -- oh, man, the disastrous guilty pleasures of Bach's Bottom! -- I still love them. I can't think of a time when I haven't heard his voice and it hasn't instantly brought me to a very particular place, goofy and cocky and awkwardly adolescent and touching for all that. Can't think of a time when it hasn't made me smile. Can't remember a time when a Big Star song played that I didn't stop everything so I could listen and sing along.
I met him a couple of times, did you know that? He lived in New Orleans for a while in the Nineties, and our social circles overlapped very tangentially, so it wasn't unheard-of to accidentally come face to face with him at a party or a concert. But that's not really why I'm mourning him now. I'm mourning him because I hadn't given it much thought before, but a world without Alex Chilton in it, playing semi-seedy bars with varying degrees of enthusiasm and drawling his way through life, seems almost unbearably dim to me, today. It makes me want to go home and light candles, in vigil, and because I feel as though I need the light.
I don't know if you're old enough to remember when John Lennon was killed. I am, barely, and I know many of the people on my friendslist are younger than I am. So maybe you don't remember, maybe you do. But anyway, I do. I remember my mother, who never seemed like such a huge music fan, crying over him. I remember that we decorated the Christmas tree that year to a weekend-long radio tribute, and I can't remember whether it was her idea or mine, or maybe it was both, but it was the strangest Christmas decorating session, everything differently weighted and off-kilter. I remember that the candlelight vigils outside the Dakota were news that year. And really, John Lennon hadn't exactly changed the world, had he? Not really. It just seemed that way. He just changed the face of rock and roll, is all. Along with a few other people, he changed the way the western world thought about music, and we mourned him for a long time on the strength of that. Still mourn him, I think, in some ways.
He changed me, too. That weekend, I think, early December 1980, was when I started to take music seriously. It started with a Beatles obsession -- it so often does, doesn't it? -- that spiraled into a genre-bending magpie bedazzlement with music that has changed quite a bit over the last thirty years or so, but hasn't ever really died away.
Other performers have died since then, obviously. Rock and Roll, it has a high body count, a low life-expectancy. And there are some people I miss on a personal level (Elliot Smith) and others who I missed because they also changed the music scene and I respected them for it (Kurt Cobain, Michael Jackson). But until this morning, I had never heard about the death of a musician and cried over him. It took Alex Chilton for that.
A friend of mine said this morning, when I wrote her about it while I was still feeling electrocuted and speechless, that this is only the beginning. That Alex Chilton may be the first of our pantheon of true musical idols to die (who wasn't, as in the case of John Lennon, already dead when I found him), but there's a long line still to come. And it's true, damn it, it's true, it's true. There are many, many to come, and they'll come faster as we grow older. But I can't imagine very many hitting quite this hard. Alex Chilton never faded away for me, he was a musical constant for me in a way that few people are. (On some levels, that's sort of a criticism of both of us, isn't it? That he wasn't a risk-taking performer after his Big Star days, that he stuck to what he did well, and did it well, or at least, with reasonable consistency, for decades. That he never outgrew himself, and I never outgrew him. But still.)
Alex Chilton might never have have achieved the success or name recognition levels that John Lennon or Michael Jackson or even Kurt Cobain did, but in a lot of ways, he did exactly the same thing that they did. Brian Eno (I think it was him) once said that the Velvet Underground, back in the day, only sold about six albums, but every one of the six people who bought them went out and formed a band; Alex Chilton had a similar influence over the indie bands of the Eighties and Nineties, and I honestly don't think that the music I listened to and loved best would have existed in its same form if it hadn't been for him. The Replacements wrote a song about this very phenomenon, actually. That's one of my favorites, too.
That sounds so clinical, though. What I'm feeling right now is anything but clinical, I promise. I love Alex Chilton, from start to finish, the way I'd love the music of a friend, personally connected and unflinchingly loyal. Even when his songs aren't, er, up to any sort of professional standard -- oh, man, the disastrous guilty pleasures of Bach's Bottom! -- I still love them. I can't think of a time when I haven't heard his voice and it hasn't instantly brought me to a very particular place, goofy and cocky and awkwardly adolescent and touching for all that. Can't think of a time when it hasn't made me smile. Can't remember a time when a Big Star song played that I didn't stop everything so I could listen and sing along.
I met him a couple of times, did you know that? He lived in New Orleans for a while in the Nineties, and our social circles overlapped very tangentially, so it wasn't unheard-of to accidentally come face to face with him at a party or a concert. But that's not really why I'm mourning him now. I'm mourning him because I hadn't given it much thought before, but a world without Alex Chilton in it, playing semi-seedy bars with varying degrees of enthusiasm and drawling his way through life, seems almost unbearably dim to me, today. It makes me want to go home and light candles, in vigil, and because I feel as though I need the light.