“If demons come while you’re under, I’ll be a blue moon in the sky.”
Big Star’s third album is kind of a mess, but it’s still very good. Many people acknowledge either one or the other—they either give it bonus points because it is a musical document of a rapidly splintering band (that was never that tightly held together to begin with) and Alex Chilton’s mental decline; or they ignore the album glaring faults and say it is a classic on par with #1 Record. By my estimation, it’s somewhere in between those two extremes.
Chilton was always a great hook-writer, and he comes up with a handful of them on Third that will lodge themselves in your brain for days. But they’re different than before; moody and depressing instead of upbeat and poppy. Since the band’s first two albums sold like six copies each, Chilton essentially decided there was no sense in making something with the intention of commercial appeal. What was the point anymore? One apocryphal story suggests that Chilton deliberately sabotaged ‘Downs’ (a bonus track on the reissue) with percussive bounces of a basketball when he was told the demo had radio potential. The band was basically dissolved at the time these songs were recorded, so Chilton felt free to follow his depressive muse. In fact, even when the album, sans a sequenced tracklist, was pulled off the shelf and released several years later, Chilton and drummer/collaborator Jody Stephens still didn’t really consider it a Big Star album.
The story of Big Star will always be a sad one, and Chilton conveys that general mood with his lyrics and instrumentation. Occasionally, beautiful moments emerge, like the harrowing ‘Holocaust’, in which Chilton delves to a depth of human destruction that rivals similar explorations from Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, etc. He saves the lyric actually containing the word ‘holocaust’ until the last line: “You’re a wasted face, you’re a sad-eyed lie, you’re a holocaust.” The plodding piano drives the song, but a mournful slide guitar and a heart-wrenching cello raise the song to classic status. I don’t know enough about Chilton to know if this is artistic posturing or if the commercial failure of the first two Big Star albums actually left him in this state of anguish. I find that I don’t actually care though, because it’s effective either way. Carl Marsch, who plays the cello on ‘Holocaust’, also provides synths, woodwinds, and stringed instruments on a number of songs. His contributions are a constant highlight and give the album a richness that rewards headphones listening.
Elsewhere things get a little bit weird. ‘Jesus Christ’ is a straight-faced Christmas tune, performed without a hint of tongue-in-cheek sarcasm that makes other oddities like ‘Thank You Friends’ slightly enjoyable. Before, we heard Chilton earnestly belting out benign lyrics about cars and girls, but here he was clearly intent on making things tough to stomach, if not outright peculiar. Consider the track ‘Big Black Car’ which combines sparse instrumentation with weirdly upbeat lyrics about a car.
Although the album feels very rough-hewn and ramshackle, there is plenty to love mixed in with the purposefully unappealing stuff. And even though I feel it doesn’t increase the album’s merit per se, there is a certain appeal to listening to the songs produced during the era of Chilton’s intense personal turmoil; it’s probably an unhealthy voyeuristic appeal, but it exists. Chilton never reached heights of mental illness that completely wrecked his life like contemporary tragic figures—Syd Barrett, Nick Drake, Brian Wilson, etc. He recorded music as a solo artist regularly through the 1990s when Big Star reunited—but his state of mind was certainly a furtive ground for the creation of some good music. Like the albums of the other sad figures—Drake’s Pink Moon and Barrett’s The Madcap Laughs—Third/Sister Lovers slots in as a cult classic, an unpalatable album that has nevertheless found a home amongst misfits and outsiders who identify with Chilton’s state of mind even though the final product is lacking in several key areas.
Favorite Tracks: Big Black Car; Holocaust; Stroke It Noel; Nightime; Blue Moon.