Every Night I Tell Myself

The enduring myth of Big Star.

I’M STANDING IN THE PARKING LOT of a closed down fast food joint in Tennessee.  There’s a fellow in a camp chair in the shade, and I’m asking him when it closed.  “Not too long ago,” he smiles.  His name is Freddy.  From the sign, you would think the place was still open, right by a busy grocery store in Germantown. 

“I heard it’s going to be a Zaxby’s,” he says.  Freddy had been selling the Sunday edition of the Commercial Appeal.  He was all out. “Why are you taking a picture of this place, anyway?” he asks me.  

I don’t tell Freddy the whole story. I don’t tell him that I’m trying to fit fifty years of musical history into a Polaroid, that I’m standing in a parking lot in Germantown because some of the most beautiful music of the last century was made by a twentysomething who used to manage the fast food place. I don’t tell him I wish the sign said CLOSE with the D fallen off or THANKS FOR ALL THE MEMORIES or something which marked it as a memorial, which it was, to me. I wish it said anything other than NOW SERVING SWEET POTATO WAFFLE FRIES.

But I don’t tell him all that.

Germantown, Tennessee, 2020 (Polaroid SX-70)

IT’S 1994 IN COLUMBUS, Mississippi, and I’m at a close-out place called Wall’s with my two best pals. It’s not that a Tower Records burned down somewhere, but maybe like five of them burned down; there’s not just a few racks of cds and cassettes for sale, there’s dozens of tables filled to the brim with every album you’ve never heard of, at crazy cheap prices.

Lucas is clamoring that I buy a cd with one of the worst covers I’ve ever seen; it looks like a cheap bootleg, promising 2 COMPLETE ALBUMS ON 1 CD. “I swear,” he promises. “I swear you’re going to love Big Star. They’re just great.”

I trusted him, with good reason—he knew more about music than anyone I’d ever met, with special emphasis on the Cure and R.E.M. While I'd been driving around in high school in a Camaro listening to Stevie Wonder and the Beatles, Lucas had been playing drums in a Dinosaur Jr. cover band in Auburn. They were called Dinosaur Jr. Junior.

He was right. Big Star was great. And not long afterwards, I finally saw the full-sized cover for their second album, and something rattled loose inside of me.

A QUARTER CENTURY LATER I’m at Ardent studios, on my knees and grunting, trying my best to take a picture of Jody Stephens’ drumkit. I’m on a tour with the Due South Co-op, and we’re working on a show that’s going to hang in the Cotton Museum in downtown Memphis.

Correction: I’m trying and completely failing to make a picture of the drumkit. Here, here’s one of them:

Memphis, Tennessee, 2018 (Polaroid 600, shot at an angle)

Looking in the rearviewmirror, I know what my problem is now—know how I could have made a killer photo. But I was in awe, in a temple of sound, and trying to make a memorial—trying to sum it all up in one photo, fifty years of beauty and grief. Just because “Stroke It Noel” was played here doesn’t mean you can echo that particular piece of art. I’ve made some of the best Polaroids of my life hunched over Faulkner’s grave at dawn, but that doesn’t mean they’re As I Lay Dying or even The Reivers.

It’s just a bad picture of a drumkit. But it was a riot to try.

INTERLUDE ONE: How in the world do I not have a photo of the Overton Shell?

INTERLUDE TWO: I loved to hear the cynical yet kind stories of the Jackson photographer James Patterson, now passed. James had a wonderfully dry sense of humor and could see connections between two widely different things.

I remember talking about Big Star with him once; let’s say we were holding up the bar at Hal & Mal’s, but I think it was probably more like Martin’s or W.C. Don’s. We were talking about great lost Mississippi bands—namely, the mighty Gants, of Greenwood. James liked to think that when Alex Chilton warbled the lyrics of one of the most beautiful songs of all time, “Thirteen,” that he was really singing about them. The timeline fit—the Gants’ first record came out two years before “The Letter,” Alex’s big hit with his teenage band, the Box Tops.

Won't you let me meet you at the pool?
Maybe Friday I can
Get tickets for the Gants
And I'll take you, oo-oo-ooh.

I like to think he was right, and sometimes when I play that song in the car, that’s how I sing it.

INTERLUDE THREE: Here’s the Radio City incarnation of Big Star (Stephens, Chilton, and Andy Hummel). The boys are on top of Gray Gardens South in Tallahatchie County, circa 1974, in a photograph by Maude Schuyler Clay.

Wait, where is Chris Bell in that photo?
Oh, he was out of the band by then.

Why?
I don’t really know. I’ve got that Rob Jovanovic book around here, but—I don’t know, who can really know why someone quits a band? I mean really know. There’s so much emotion when you create art with other people, so much tension that can come from that.

Well, what happened to him?
He wrote two of the most beautiful songs of all time, and then he died.

What was the whole thing about the fast food place before, the one that closed down?
Oh, the Danvers? Yeah, after he quit Big Star he was managing the Danvers in Germantown. His family owned it. Or, I guess, all of them, back then.

Did he sing about the Danvers, or—
No, it’s not—the picture’s not literal, he didn’t sing about it, the songs aren’t about that place, or at least I don’t think they are. It’s just—he was there. He was there once, when he was alive. It’s just a place he was.

I see.
There’s no memorial, or anything. There should be, but there’s not. There’s just the songs. But he was there.

What are the songs?
“I Am the Cosmos,” which I first heard on a Rhino power pop compilation I also got at Wall’s, and then “You and Your Sister,” which I got on his posthumous solo record. I bought it in ‘96 at the Starkville BeBop.

Why do you think it so important for you to know when or where you found this music?
I actually have no earthly idea. Although I’m increasingly wondering if it’s because this music is part of the . . . like, computer code making up the person I am today. The information which composes me in part. And as the seasons pass I have been trying to figure out the code. Even though I know that’s probably not a thing you can actually do.

Here, here is a code:

“Life Is White,” by Big Star, from a promotional copy of their 1974 LP Radio City, as viewed through the microscope of the lathe on which the record was cut, April 22, 2018

I NEVER SAW BIG STAR play live, in either of their seventies or nineties incarnations. At the turn of the century I did see a revival of the Box Tops at a Jubilee Jam in Jackson. The stage was set up in the intersection of Capitol and West, by the governor’s mansion. Alex was growling his way through “A Whiter Shade of Pale.” It was raining. I wandered off, went back to the place I was crashing.

I wish now I had stayed. I was in my twenties and it wasn’t Big Star and it didn’t feel legendary and I was a brat. They were just people playing music.

Perhaps that’s why this music means so much to me now. Big Star wasn’t Elvis or the Beatles, Chris Bell wasn’t John Lennon. They weren’t gods:  they were just people. Maybe their music is more special because they were real, because they tried so hard, and because it really worked.

Even if just a few times, for just a few minutes.

That’s worth a memorial to me.

AS ALWAYS I am gorjusjxn on Instagram and you can see more of my photography at McCartyPolaroids. The music made by Big Star and its members continues to inspire artists decades later. Two of my favorite recent covers have been just this year.

First, Bedouine, Hurray for the Riff Raff, and Waxahatchee perform an incredibly beautiful “Thirteen.”

Second, Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster (of the Water Liars) did a wonderful “You and Your Sister” during quaratine.

Have a safe and peaceful Thanksgiving.