Big Star never completed their third album. In fact, it’s likely that the music collected on Omnivore’s triple-disc box set Complete Third was never intended to be a Big Star album. Alex Chilton maintained as late as 2007 that he and drummer Jody Stephens never considered these 1974 sessions a Big Star project, a testament supported by the fact that none of the tapes in Ardent Studios were labeled with name “Big Star.” Instead, they were credited to Alex Chilton alone, Alex & Jody, and Sister Lovers, a punning reference to the fact the pair were dating sisters at the time.
Sister Lovers also provided Rykodisc with a subtitle for these recordings when they issued Third/Sister Lovers on CD in 1992, marking the first time a label attempted to seriously piece the puzzle of Big Star Third together. Prior to that, the album came out under a variety of titles—3rd, The Third Album, Big Star’s 3rd: Sister Lovers, Sister Lovers (The Third Album), with the alleged provisional title Beale Street Green remaining the province of bootlegs—all bearing a different track listing, none of which mirrored the test pressing that was unsuccessfully shopped around to labels in 1975.
Reissue producer Cheryl Pawelski uses that test pressing as her lodestar on Complete Third, letting it form the foundation of the third disc of final mixes, serving as a culmination to the discs of demos and rough mixes that precede it. A good chunk of these tracks previously appeared on archival releases from Rhino, Big Beat/Ace and Omnivore, but 28 debut here. None of these unheard cuts would make much sense on their own release, but they provide crucial pieces of the narrative on a box set that attempts to make sense of sessions that the creators themselves don't quite understand.
One thing all participants—Chilton and Stephens, producer Jim Dickinson, Ardent owner/producer/engineer John Fry—can agree upon is that no official version of Third exists. Dickinson attempted to piece it together for Rykodisc in 1992 but he freely admits that his vision differed from Chilton’s and once this period passed into history Chilton showed no interest in revisiting it. In the liner notes to Complete Third, Ken Stringfellow—the Posies guitarist who was instrumental in ushering the reunited Big Star into the ’90s and 2000s—recalls a time when he and his partner Jon Auer cajoled Chilton to attempt “Kizza Me” at a latter-day reunion show. Once the band kicked off the song at sound check, Alex stood still as a statue, refusing to lay hands on his guitar or sing. By that point Chilton was finished with Third. But as Chris Stamey— a co-leader of the dB’s who helped maintained the Big Star legend in the ’70s as Stringfellow did in the ’90s—notes elsewhere in the liners, there was a time when these were among his “newest and dearest” tunes.
Those early demos on the first disc do indeed carry traces of sweetness, particularly in the delicate readings of “Lovely Day,” “Thank You Friends,” “Take Care,” “Jesus Christ,” and “Blue Moon,” all sounding like natural extensions of the folk tunes scattered through the first two Big Star albums, not to mention some of the material Chilton attempted just after leaving the Box Tops. Even the album’s towering triptych of gloom—“Holocaust,” “Nightime,” and “Kanga Roo” (entitled “Like St. Joan” in its first incarnation)—feel brokenhearted rather than desolate. So what happened between these initial readings and the final mixes, which often feel like a fever dream from a man embracing madness?
Again, nobody knows for sure, but everybody orbiting Ardent in the mid-’70s agree Chilton was hell bent on self-immolation, bitter at the industry, angry at himself, and involved in a destructive relationship with Lesa Aldridge, his girlfriend and muse who co-wrote “Downs,” an improbably chipper valentine to quaaludes. Jim Dickinson could always spin a yarn, and he invented a tale for Third, determining that the album was all about decomposition—a decay that began with the unraveling of Big Star, spread through the dissolution of the golden age of Memphis music, then taking root at the breakdown of Chilton himself. It’s a good story, one that’s likely true on some level, but it’s also a bit pat, the kind of thing that a producer invents: he’s cobbling together a narrative out of what seems to be a mess.
Complete Third presents that purported mess as a whole, offering every known existing recording from the sessions, and, in doing so, it suggests the sessions weren’t quite as chaotic as lore suggests. Certainly, the demos show that Chilton’s songs were fully formed at the start, so it was a deliberate decision on his part to record the songs just as Jody Stephens was learning them. Ardent producer/engineer Adam Hill supports this theory: “While the lack of pre-production contributed to the loose feel of the songs, there’s no doubt that Alex was chasing sounds he heard in his head, and he knew when had captured them on tape.” If Chilton was deadset in chasing chaos, Dickinson was his ideal partner. Where John Fry favored precision—fitting for an engineer who ran a studio—Dickinson preferred to let things careen out of control, either because he knew magic came with mistakes or because he couldn't resist mischief.
Once Dickinson enters the picture, somewhere around the tail end of the first disc after the initial demos were completed, things start to get weird and heavy. The pivot is a pair of duets between Alex Chilton and Lesa Aldridge, where the pair turn the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired” into a narcotic crawl and pretend to be Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris on “That’s All It Took.” From there, the madness has settled in, so it's no surprise that they stumble through T. Rex’s “Baby Strange” or spend five minutes dicking around on guitar and steel drums dubbed “Pre-Downs”—an indication that the innocence of the initial demos had now curdled.
The second disc documents how the sessions started to congeal, the beauty and the bleakness sometimes existing on the same plane, sometimes separating into their own spheres. If there are no great revelations here—the closest is a version of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours” sung by Lesa, one of many Lou Reed allusions here (another is Alex quoting “Perfect Day” at the start of “I’m So Tired”)—it nevertheless gives an idea of the vibe of the recordings, how it was pitched halfway between madness and intention. Comparing the first disc of Complete Third to the second, and it’s clear that Chilton wanted to create the illusion that everything was spinning out of control.
Perhaps Chilton succeeded too well, muddying the barrier between the act and the art. After a while, John Fry pulled the plug. He reached his breaking point when Alex pulled in a drunk off the street to sing on a soused version of Jerry Lee Lewis’ “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” Fry claimed later that the sessions turned “perverted,” which might be a reference to run-of-the-mill late-night seediness but might have a deeper meaning: Third perverted the ideals Fry held for Ardent. When he opened the studio, he allowed the British Invasion mavens of Memphis to hone their craft after hours at a cut rate. It’s how Chilton and collaborator Chris Bell developed the crystalline power pop of #1 Record and Radio City—these largely were songs invented in the studio and executed by Fry—and such late night sessions are also how Third came to be, except they came out curdled instead of clear.
Fry shopped the album to labels in 1975 in the hopes of recouping some of the money poured into the project. Nobody bit. Lenny Waronker at Warner asked, “I don’t have to listen to that again, do I?” Over at Atlantic, Jerry Wexler claimed “This record makes me feel very uncomfortable.”
Wexler was onto something. The bleakest moments of Third remain unsettling, capable of causing existential shivers on a bright, sunny day. Creeping along with no seeming sense of momentum, “Holocaust” and “Kanga Roo” have an inexorable pull—listening to them is like being pulled out to sea on an inescapable undercurrent, utterly impossible to navigate your way back to shore. When paired with the carnivalesque flourish of “Jesus Christ,” the homespun baroque pop of “Stroke It Noel,” the explosive carnality of “Kizza Me” and the woozy sway of “O, Dana,” Third can’t help but suggest that Alex Chilton was losing his grip. The primary gift of Complete Third is to reveal that this was a deliberate performance, not audio verite. Perhaps Third was, as Jim Dickinson claimed, the sound of decomposition. But by presenting the demos, working sessions and final mixes in order, Complete Third makes plain that far from being an unwieldy jumble, Alex Chilton meant to have Third sound as tortured, haunting and beautiful as the darkest moments of the soul.
