THE LAST EVER BIG STAR

El Camino IV

This isn’t the last Big Star ever. I’m just being dramatic!! There’s at least five left in Mississippi and Alabama, even though the one in Aberdeen burned down before I could ever make a photo. I remember when I finally swung by a few years ago, standing in the parking lot listening to the birds chirp in the charred remains of the roof. I found part of the star in the parking lot, melted and distorted, so far gone it wasn’t even worth trying to take it with me.

This old friend is in the Arkansas Delta, and it’s been closed for over ten years. I’ve been trying to make a good photo of the sign for a while but it’s one of the giant ones, one letter per segment, and you have to spend a little time there to try to squeeze it all in. It faces East towards the River and normally when I’m wandering by it’s late in the day and the sign(s) are backlit, mostly beyond the reach of my trusty Polaroids.

When I see these synthetic hieroglyphs the Replacements begin to ring in my ears, how it’s late and the station started to fade. Even though “Alex Chilton” is their overt manifesto to the band, to me it’s “Left of the Dial” which truly conjures the luminous specter of Big Star, with its chiming crescendos of full on seventies rock guitar spilling over almost delicate feedback, just as much a teenage symphony to God as “Heroes and Villains,” only Paul Westerberg believed in a different deity than Brian Wilson.

So every time I make a photo of an abandoned grocery store I’m crafting a tribute, a paen to three albums which entranced me when I was a teenager, which have shaped my whole life, just three dozen songs plus let’s never forget “I Am the Cosmos.”

But isn’t that what a lot of the greatest photos are, anyway? Just ways to say thank you, to say I will remember this moment, I will try to save it, and

I know where I bought your first album on CD, I know when I got the 45 from Shangri-La Records, I remember you, you mattered, the art you created endures.

If you like Big Star and Chris Bell, then read my love letter to them from 2020, complete with a (bad!) Polaroid of Jody Stephens’ drumkit and a (good!) photo of the boys by Maude Schuyler Clay and a (wonderfully mournful!) cover of “You and Your Sister” by Justin Peter Kinkel-Schuster. Plus sweet potato waffle fries!!

GORJUS is a dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, held fast with instant film. For the foreseeable future, it will be devoted to EL CAMINO, a mostly black-and-white travelogue through New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas.

If you ever made a mixtape for someone and put “Thirteen” as the ballad on the first side (say, in the fourth or fifth song slot), then I hope you got a kick out of this, and I reckon we would be friends. Consider forwarding this letter to a pal who is like us. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see an archive of Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.