Every tape collector has one crown jewel—a recording of a night where a favorite artist was totally on—and Alex Chilton really needed a tape like that in his discography. Chilton's three albums with Big Star are stone classics; his subsequent recording career was spotty, and after 1987's High Priest he never made a particularly worthwhile studio album. The last 20 years of his life yielded a few sterile-to-perverse records, the cash-in of the Box Tops and Big Star reunions, and not much else besides live shows that the faithful swore were sometimes really good, if Alex was in the mood.
What was going to be Chilton's second set at the Knitting Factory in New York City on a February night in 1997 was cancelled when the power went out. But somebody happened to have an acoustic guitar on hand, and there were some candles, and so Chilton decided to play a few songs for those audience members who were still hanging around. That turned into an impromptu 17-song set of covers that one Jeff Vargon happened to catch on tape.
It's wonderful—a mess, but a marvelous mess. Chilton opens with a pair of far-out-of-the-way country readymades, "Last Bouquet" (a 1959 Clyde Owens B-side) and "Step Right This Way" (from a 1971 album that songwriter Glen Sherley recorded while in prison); one of Chilton's odder gifts was the ability to tell when some utterly forgotten song would sound great with his cracking, tremulous voice. After that, he mostly shifts to standards--"Lovesick Blues", "I Walk the Line", "The Girl from Ipanema"—occasionally with the audience joining in, campfire-style.
The crowd shouts requests for his old favorites, which he shoots down, although he revives a couple of jazz tunes from his 1993 album Clichés. The only song from Big Star's repertoire that turns up is a cover: Loudon Wainwright III's groupie-schtupping ballad "Motel Blues". This CD gilds the lily by ending with a studio recording of another country cover, Johnny Lee's "You Can Bet Your Heart on Me", which is admittedly a little more dignified than the set's actual closer, an "If I Had a Hammer" that disintegrates into ridiculousness. ("If I had a potato...")
Electricity by Candlelight shows off Chilton's instrumental virtuosity and his impressive memory for songs. Show me someone who knows all the chords to "Wouldn't It Be Nice" offhand and I'll show you a Beach Boy, but Chilton knocks it out with no problem, then follows it with "Surfer Girl" and "Solar System." (He bluffs his way through a single verse of Joni Mitchell's "A Case of You," but come on.) The real joy of this set, though, is that it gives us what Chilton's later career promised but rarely delivered. He's not trying to flip anyone off, or working out torment, or phoning in the oldies with former bandmates and acolytes. He's just a great busker, having a really good time with his tiny audience.
