Remembering Alex Chilton
Scott already covered the awful news, but if anyone is worth a follow-up post, it’s Alex Chilton. Like most of my contemporaries, I came to admire Alex Chilton through his professional admirers; and like everyone who came of age before the Internet, what I knew about him consisted of a host of believable rumors. I’ve never tried to verify those rumors, though, because it was their believability that mattered more than their truth. For example, Alex Chilton indirectly named one of the most important albums of the 1990s via the resilience of a particular lyrical gesture: the sincerely feigned grand statement. On “September Gurls,” he sings:
I loved you, well, never mind.
I’ve been crying, all the time.
That “never mind” alerts us to the fact that the narrator is a liar, albeit a sympathetic one, because if he were actually that nonchalant he wouldn’t be “crying all the time.” Paul Westerberg picks up on the gesture on the aptly titled “Never mind,” in which he sings:
It makes no sense, to apologize.
The words, I thought, I brought, I left behind,
So, never mind.
All over but the shouting, just a waste of time.
Never mind.
Westerberg’s delivery on the second line is ambiguously clipped: he sounds like someone on the verge of tears, but the reason for them could be that he has no idea what to say; that he knows that no matter what he says, it won’t be enough; that he knew what to say, that he had the right words, but that he’s forgotten them; or many an other et cetera. More important for our purposes is what Westerberg learned from Chilton, i.e. how to turn an explicit denial of any significance into an implicit statement of maximal importance.
What looks like boilerplate passive-aggression on paper is, in “Never mind,” nothing of the sort: Westerberg shouts “never mind” like an interrupted stutterer, out of sheer frustration over his inability to articulate what he means. The result is that, as in “September Gurls,” the words intended to divest a situation of emotional import acquire the very significance their existence is intended to diminish. Which, of course, is why Kurt Cobain named Nirvana’s second album after that Mats track and penned this:
I found it hard, it’s hard to find.
Oh well, whatever, never mind.
That lyric reads like a canned slacker response to adversity, and maybe it is; but in “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the phrase appears a powerful song, so even absent any solid evidence that Cobain’s citing Westerberg citing Chilton, I could believe he was.
Such was the legend of Alex Chilton in 1991—a full year before Fantasy Records reissued #1 Record and Radio City, meaning that this is what I thought on the strength of the lyrics on the Bangles’ cover of “September Gurls” and his work with the Box Tops. I had absolutely no idea what Big Star would sound like, only that Chilton was a force worth reckoning with.
And so he was.
I’d link to some of his catalog, but I’m still having problems listening to Big Star because of the accident, and anyway, every other blog you read is linking to one of the four Big Star videos on Youtube. Which, when you think about it, is fairly incredible: when I was in high school, I was one of five people I knew who were into Big Star. There must be some powerful process of self-selection at work here, is all I can say.
I do like Chilton, but it’s not like that’s a unique lyrical gesture, I think. Although I guess it’s possible that a country songwriter like Harlan Howard was also influenced by Chilton when he wrote “Never Mind” which was beautifully sung by Nanci Griffith.
You say you’re heading out to California
You’ve heard the grapes are falling from the vines
I was hoping you might have the urge to write me
But, I don’t believe you will so . . . never mind
I was talking to a man down at Genesco
He said they might be hiring anytime
I’m so tired of going anyway the wind blows
And I though that me and you . . . but never mind
. . .
I first saw you picking oranges in Orlando
All day you kept your ladder close to mine
We froze in Georgia burned up in Chicago
And I always thought that we . . . but never mind
I do like Chilton, but it’s not like that’s a unique lyrical gesture, I think.
That’s sort of what I was getting at: Chilton was such an iconic figure that history was revised to flow through him. His influence on Westerberg is obviously indisputable, and while I do remember reading an interview in which Cobain talked about the Mats and “Never mind,” I can’t vouch for accuracy of memory, because I probably made it up in sixth grade and repeated the lie so many times it sounds like truth. (Better to do that about music than, say, death panels.)
God I feel old. I saw Chilton with the Box Tops in 1970, when I was 13.
Hey SEK, long time lurker, first time poster, blah blah blah. Anyway, I just wanted to say that this was the most interesting, thought provoking piece on Alex Chilton that I’ve read today. My first experience with Alex Chilton was, like many, the Replacements. But my real first experience was hearing a reformed Big Star in 1993 at the University of Missouri show, where I was going to school. Hearing the Posies (who I was a huge fan of) and Big Star (who Paul Westerberg told me I should be a huge fan of) was just amazing. It was only after that show that I started to appreciate his music on its own terms, and I’m glad I did.
PS – Appropo of nothing SEK, I thought you would find this amusing. I am a new teacher at an alternative school, and when I was hired they told me I need to teach an elective. After shooting down all my ideas (media literacy – they would have loved it), they suggested a class on graphic novels. Never having read a single one, I said sure. Needless to say, it’s been quite a few months. I got copies of Understanding Comics, which has been. . .interesting, considering I am teaching 5 kids with Asperger’s and Autism. 90% of that book is over their heads, but a lot of the stuff you have written at your web site has been extremely helpful, so I just wanted to say thanks.
They were all channelling Gilda Radner.
i was travelling and didn’t get to comment on alex chilton in real time, but being one of the old-timers here, i can speak to being one of the people who actually bought big star records when they were new! the amazing thing at the time, carrying on the point randy paul made, is that chilton’s voice as a teenager with the box tops was deeper and huskier than it was as a 20-something member of big star.
i saw chilton perform as a solo artist maybe 10 – 12 times (he’s in a rough tie with sonny rollins and betty carter at 4th in the “bands and/or musicians i’ve seen the most live” chart), and he was never less than compelling, and sometimes downright brilliant.
my favorite of all memories was the night in the late ’80s at TT the Bear’s in cambridge, when the warmup act was a very fine maine-based country-rock type ensemble, knots and crosses, who were so good that when chilton and his band came out, in their honor, he played the dovells’ “bristol stomp,” a genius cover that i never again heard him perform (as opposed, for example, to “volare,” which i heard him perform the first time that night, but many times after)….
That “never mind” alerts us to the fact that the narrator is a liar,
Oh no. “Never mind” there does not mean he’s nonchalant, it means “but I’m aware you don’t want to hear me go into that.”