Category: RIP


RIP: Alex Chilton, 1950 - 2010

March 17th, 2010 — 10:04 pm

The New York Times has confirmed that Alex Chilton, lead singer of Big Star and the Box Tops, passed on today of a suspected heart attack.

Chilton’s music was potent, and his influence immense; I still find new meaning in those simple lyrics, and nuance in those deceptively plain chords and melodies, each time I listen to them anew.

And tonight, I’m listening to them again, over and over.

In memory of the man who crafted some of the finest, most direct songs I know - the master of our adolescent hearts, still beating unbidden in our chests even as his own has stilled - today, we revisit one of my favorite features from last year.

Covered in Folk: Big Star
(Kathryn Williams, Son Volt, Evan Dando, Kelly Willis +10 more!)





Bloggers love Big Star. So much so, in fact, that mere mention of their names to a certain sort of audiophile is like a secret handshake, a wink and a nod that marks the listener as a well-informed, well-cultured aesthete of a particular underground substream which defined the modern musical map.

And deservedly so. Led by highly conflicted and conflicting personalities Alex Chilton & Chris Bell in the early seventies, the original incarnation of Big Star never had much mainstream success, perhaps because they were way ahead of their time, though label mismanagement and inter-band tensions certainly took their toll. Lineup changes had an effect, too: Bell left the band before Chilton and remaining band member Jody Stephens came back to record Third/Sister Lovers, a third and final masterpiece, and after that, the project pretty much petered out.

But thanks to mid-eighties back-catalog attention from both labels and the rising alt-rock movement, the post-British invasion proto alt-rock which Big Star produced during their short-lived first-wave career would go on to become a strong and heady influence for musicians and fans searching for a pound of powerpop truth in the lean rock decades which followed.


Singer-songwriters prone to pensive coverage love Big Star’s songbook, too. Short enough to fit in a thin box set, it is nonetheless chock full of easily learned, easily covered odes to timeless angst and adolescence, ranging from brooding acoustic ballads to powerful rockers.

The band’s underground cachet allows coverage to serve as a nod to smart listeners looking for an acknowledgement of the history of music which creates the time/space of performance and its corresponding experience. The songs themselves remain powerful enough to speak raw emotion in oft-hushed tones to anyone who might care to hear, regardless of familiarity with the original. It’s the ideal situation for covers, allowing the recreation of songs to serve as a community grounding for those that need it, while simultaneously providing a stage for just plumb good performance.

Which is not to say that it’s impossible to mess up a Big Star song. Only that there’s more than enough gems out there, and that we have the whole process — from the songwriters and original performances to the interconnected history which brings forth our experience of interpretation — to thank for it. We’ve posted a few of these before, and I’m certainly not the first to share most of ‘em, but for completeness’ sake, here’s the breathtaking best of a surprisingly large collection, from grungy electric folkrock to hard-edged alt-country to sparse and sultry singer-songwriter.

*You and Your Sister was a Chris Bell solo track, released as a b-side just a few months before Bell passed in a car crash at the age of 27 in December, 1978. It also featured Alex Chilton on backing vocals.


What with multiple Big Star reissues and compilations coming at us this year — most notably upcoming four-disk Rhino demos-and-all retrospective Keep The Eye On The Sky, which drops September 15 — I’m not the only one to pick up on the buzz. For more relatively recent blogger paeans, including links to a few more great Big Star covers, check out August tributes from Mainstream Isn’t So Bad and Aquarium Drunkard. And don’t forget to pick up 2006 tribute album Big Star, Small World if you’re up for some additional coverage of the late nineties post-grunge and Americana type.


Cover Lay Down posts new coverfolk features and sets Wednesdays, Sundays, and the very occasional otherday.

11 comments » | Big Star, RIP

RIP Davy Graham, 1940 - 2008

December 16th, 2008 — 09:46 pm





It’s hard to overstate the influence of multiracial and multitalented guitarist Davy Graham on modern folk music. A seminal figure in the 1960s British folk revolution, Graham’s broad interest in pushing the boundaries of folk music to include jazz, blues, middle eastern, and other global musical forms opened up the genre to a world of new possibility, enriching the very foundation of folk while making it accessible to a much wider folk audience. And his distinctive use of D modal or “Celtic” tuning, which allowed artists to easily maintain an open-string harmony while noodling around in the treble strings, became a “second standard” for picked and acoustic guitarists throughout the genre spectrum, making possible the very conceit of the “folk instrumental”.

As separate elements, Graham’s genre-play and his popular transformation of technical possibility each revolutionized what folk could be; taken together, the two make a case for Graham’s fifty-year body of work as definitive in driving both the body and soul of what we now consider the essence of folk. Certainly, by their own admission, his impact on peers and subsequent folk luminaries such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Fairport Convention, and Martin Carthy was unparalleled; farther from the center of the British folk scene, Paul Simon and Jimmy Page, among others, cite him as a major source of inspiration.

Like many folk fans, while I recognize the Graham’s influence on song and structure when I hear it, I don’t know enough of his original work as I’d like to, though I plan to rectify this post-haste. But oh, how fitting to celebrate his life’s work in covers, given his history. In a wordless tribute to a man who brought such breadth and potential to a fledgling form, then, here’s a few versions of the work which made him most famous…followed by a pair of great and traditional jazz covers, and two vocalized songs of upbeat albeit bluesy comfort, from the man himself.

Rest in peace, Davy. Long may your songs and sound reside in our strings and our voices, our ears and our hearts.

1 comment » | RIP