Big Star weren't perfect. The word gets thrown around a lot, especially regarding to their debut, #1 Record, as if perfection were their triumph. They were a band of few, if any triumphs; theirs was a losers' history upgraded by the passage of time and the success of those they influenced. Big Star were marked by their lack of triumph. Big Star were roiling and volatile, a freak collision between a couple of college kids and an idle teen idol, who in every regard but artistic, failed their way through a career that barely qualified as such. How far Big Star fell into that wide chasm between what they wanted to be and what they were, that is what made them great.
Nothing Can Hurt Me is the soundtrack for the new Big Star documentary of the same name. It contains unheard, alternate mixes from #1 Record, rough mixes from Sister Lovers, and other special mixes created for the movie, all bracketed by studio banter. They don't shine like the original album versions, but still, "When My Baby's Beside Me" is just as compelling even if this mix has more pish in the cymbals. You would have to be at least a six-out-of-10 on the Big Star nerd scale to hear specific differences without cuing up a Big Star album proper to check.
During the time of these recordings, Alex Chilton was only a few years past "The Letter", the single that made him a teenage star with the Box Tops. The single had sold four million copies and nabbed them a Grammy nomination alongside the Beatles. (That they both lost to 5th Dimension explains the dimensions of entire pop cosmos at the time). Over the next few years he saw enough of success to know he didn't want it on its terms; he dropped from the limelight, bailed on his life in Memphis with his teenage bride and newborn son, hung heavy with the Beach Boys in L.A. before he expatriated to the Village at 19 to fashion himself into a folkie. Embarrassed by the Box Tops, he was aiming to do something earnest. Two years later he returned to Memphis with a couple of songs and essentially stumbled into Chris Bell's laborious studio project with bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens. With the addition of Chilton, they became Big Star.
If nothing else, Nothing Can Hurt Me functions as a will-do-in-a-pinch Big Star Best Of. You get a sort of thumbnail genesis, but without the movie to provide context, it's jarring to go from Chilton's ode to the purity of the teenage love, "Thirteen", with its fragile harmonies and "tickets for the dance," to a markedly less lucid Chilton droning, "Nothing can hurt me... I can't feel a thing" five songs later. On "Thirteen", and the songs that precede it, they sounded like what they were: American kids who grew up on the Beatles. Once you get to the brittle distance of "Kanga Roo" and its peals of feedback, there is a sad, reedy quality to Chilton's voice. It's clearly the same repentant boy of "Give Me Another Chance", but on "Kangaroo", his wavering, narcotized tone makes it seem like he's melting; his promise that "I'm gonna be alright now," ringing hollow as he sounds anything but.
Chris Bell, as the saying goes, was perhaps just not made for his times. Born into affluence, he was private and volatile--during Big Star's era he secluded himself in the back house behind his parents home, where he immersed himself in making art and music and taking drugs in an attempt to salve his depression and blunt his sexuality (in the film, his brother says Bell confessed as much-- in the American South in the early 70s, even amid the youth culture fringe, being queer was not really spoken of. Even in the documentary, some of Bell's friends speak of it euphemistically as "experimentation". Many of the doc's tearjerking moments are for Bell). You can hear Bell's Beatlesmania in his voice here on "My Life Is Right", in his crisply un-American o's of the "lonely road" he sings of. There's a quiver in his voice on "Feel", a squeaky stretch as he forces his high notes; along with the surly bravado he summons on "Don't Lie to Me,"--"I told my dad/ And now I'm telling you/ Don't push me 'round," he yalps--you hear the proximity to boyhood. That for all their finesse, for all of these gorgeously arranged songs and year of Bell-helmed sessions at Ardent-- they were still amateurs getting it right; kids in a good time band.
What the sad documentary and its accompanying soundtrack of barely alternate-mixes reinforce is that there is no justice in pop music; the ones that "deserve" to make it rarely do, dreams die on the vine. Big Star's fame, during their initial three-album run, was directly inverse to their talent. Rock'n'roll is cruel like that; it's all winners histories and idiot luck. Music might have been a different place if #1 Record had been just that and bumped Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick off the charts in June of 1972, but maybe not. There are plenty of bands that mapped inspired paths to greatness, but Big Star's story, as seen on film and heard on these songs, is a potent reminder of just how beautiful failure can be.
