Author Archives: Jude Warne

Last year the “alternative newsweekly” The Memphis Flyer published a brief piece titled “Local Man Loves Big Star,” a parody report of a gent who couldn’t stop raving about Big Star and their work, even when the conversations at hand didn’t call for it. This would’ve been pretty funny! IF… the whole thing had not seemed so truthful. The discovery of ’70s band Big Star, at whatever point it might occur for any given individual, has a sort of obsessive-compulsive effect on the discoverer. How are these records so good, so… perfect? How have I not heard them until now? There is an immediate air of mystery that begs further investigation—who were these guys? In her biography of Big Star-man Alex Chilton, Holly George-Warren sets out to explain this, in part, who was Alex Chilton exactly? 

Chilton’s musical success came early—he was sixteen years old when he recorded his first single, performing vocals with The Box Tops on soon-to-be number-one hit “The Letter.” This band disassembled in 1970, and soon after, Chilton joined fellow Memphis musician Chris Bell’s group, renaming it Big Star. The band went on to make three albums (only the first, #1 Record with the original line-up; Bell split pretty early on), all three of which made it onto Rolling Stone’s “Top 500 Albums” list (do with this information what you will! It is at least worth noting.)

And yet in spite of the band’s critical acclaim and longevity of musical influence on bands like R.E.M and The Replacements, Big Star never quite made it to the big leagues. A mixture of bad decisions and bad luck with record labels (a la Graham Parker), messy distribution, not to mention raging egos and drugs (sound familiar?) led to Big Star’s legacy being maintained by a contingent of rock critics and rock nerds.

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“In 1964, long-playing vinyl records sounded great. It was the age of high fidelity, and even your parents were likely to have a good-sounding console or tube components and a nice set of speakers, A&R, KLH, and so on.”

Ah, the good old days! Before eight-tracks, before cassette tapes, before CDs, before Mp3 players, when vinyl was where it was at! We’re obviously all about that here—and apparently Donald Fagen, co-founder and frontman of legendary jazztastic pop-rock group Steely Dan is as well. Some readers might conclude from his new autobiographical book Eminent Hipsters that DF is some kind of cranky old man—or as he puts it, an “Old Uncle Fuckwad.” Rest assured, he is. But he’s great at it.

If you’re familiar with the musical character of Steely Dan and Donald Fagen, you’ll know that there is an intense voice of jazz music that runs throughout their body of work. And if you’re familiar with Fagen’s debut solo effort The Nightfly, you’ll also know how in touch Fagen is with the nostalgia and romance that accompanies the years spanning his teens (cue Mad Men—so does everyone else apparently!)

Eminent Hipsters traces the development and evolution of Fagen’s musical beliefs and persona by uncovering his earliest influences and the artistic experiences that helped to define who he became. Through this, we get an excellent portrait of what life must have been like for a kid in suburban New Jersey during the Cold War era that escorted us into the golden age of rock-pop in the 1960s.

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