Alex Chilton, leader of the influential and edgy power pop group, Big Star, and the ’60s pop-soul band The Boxtops, has died.
Chilton’s music is an underrated, but important piece of rock history, an influence on bands ranging from the Replacements to R.E.M.
While Big Star’s best years were in the past, the music will live on.
I have to correct myself. Somehow, I misnamed a Springsteen album — me! — calling it by the first single released in today’s year-end music post. The disc in question should have been Tunnel of Love. What exactly happened?
Once again, I offer my review of the year in music, alphabetically:
There was always something regal and elegant about Jim Carroll, something that belied his drug-addicted youth, that seemed to set him apart from his time.
Carroll died Friday — a shock, really, given that he was just 60 and had produced some great recent writing.
I met him once, briefly, after a poetry reading he gave at Rutgers. I got there at the end and he signed the flier — a slip of paper I still have tucked away in a photo album with the other autographs I’d collected during my younger days.
I first read Carroll’s work in 1980, when I was at Penn. State. I was at sea, so to speak, lacking real direction but developing what might be described as a bohemian bent. I was into rock — mostly punk and what is now called classic rock — and was just discovering that literature, and poetry in particular, was something worth reading outside of class.
I gobbled up books — Kerouac and Ginsberg, Hemingway, a collection of postmodern Americans and Jim Carroll’s Basketball Diaries. The Diaries were an accidental find, a small pocket-sized book discovered in a bookstore as I rummaged the shelves. I’d been listening to Catholic Boy, Carroll’s first album almost continuously after first hearing its single (if you can call it that), “People Who Died,” on Vin Scelsa’s show on WNEW. The album was a revelation for me — poetic lyrics set atop those driving punk guitars — that led me toward Television, Patti Smith and many of the other New York bands of the 1970s (I’ve always been more of a New York punk than a London banger).
The book was raw and yet also art, a contrivance in the best sort of way. It was a young teen describing the darker side of New York City in the 1960s in a stylized voice that helped define a particular strain of writing that would follow.
I was taken by the book, as I said, and have been reading his poetry since then. I remainin awe of a poetic sensibility that was so fully developed at such a young age and that managed to grow and the spread into other art forms (I mentioned rock, but there also were the spoken word discs, the prose explorations and the diaries).
In the end, it is that divine scream of an album — Catholic Boy — that stands as his best work, and as the piece of his muse that helped ingite my own poetic explorations.
Thanks, Jim. Rest in Peace.
So, about three weeks ago (July 22), I decided to buy a compilation disk — The Best of Mink DeVille — because I’d missed the band’s mix of blue-eyed soul and punk-rock attitude.
Maybe I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know — Willy DeVille, the band’s artistic leader, its chief songwriter and singer, died this week after a battle with pancreatic cancer. The news, which I heard Friday, saddened me more than I would have thought — DeVille, as I said, had ceased to be a central player in my personal soundtrack. And yet, he was important to me as a roots-rocker with attitude.
In songs like “Cadillac Walk,” “Spanish Stroll” and “Let Me Dream If I Want To,” he created a geography of sound, a sense of place — a mythic Brooklyn of the past and present — that made him stand out from the rest of the punk scene.
DeVille for me combined what I liked best about Southside Johnny and early groups like the Drifters with that in-your-face sense that I got from the rest of his compadres.
Listening today, it might be easy to forget that DeVille was a central player among the New York punkers — mostly because we’ve narrowed our sense of what punk is. But DeVille and the rest of the New York scene (Television, Patti Smith, the Contortions, James Black and the Whites, The Shirts, The Ramones, etc.) were always about more than volume and speed. They were about experimentation and a deconstructed nostalgia that remade music at a time when it was dominated by flaccid arena rockers like Styx and REO Speedwagon.
I’ve probably listened to DeVille’s album on my iPod a dozen times since I bought it, not including the songs I’ve added to various playlists. I’m glad I rediscovered DeVille before he died and know his legacy will live on.
Hank Kalet 