The New Yorker:

The album is fifty years old, but it remains a blueprint for how to sever rock and roll from nostalgia.

By Mitch Therieau

In the early months of 1973, the band that dared to call itself Big Star was anything but. The album of glittering, tightly orchestrated guitar rock they had released the previous year—titled “#1 Record,” both as a gag and an earnest wish—received favorable reviews from the critics who heard it. But the distributor bungled its job, and most people who read Rolling Stone’s declaration that “#1 Record” was “one of the sleepers of 1972” had no way to go out and actually buy the album. A tour of the South’s small-town halls and empty auditoriums—even a dingy movie theatre—did little to get the word out. Back in their home town of Memphis, the band half-heartedly worked up a few new songs and fought among themselves with increasing ferocity. When the singer-guitarist Chris Bell, in the grips of addiction and paranoia, walked into Ardent Studios and destroyed the multi-track masters for the record he had spent more than a year obsessively writing and recording, it seemed as clear a sign as any that the group was finished.

If they had left it there, Big Star would perhaps go down in rock history as a piece of trivia, a band whose consuming misfortune somehow yielded a single, impossibly beautiful record. Among other things, “#1 Record” is a time capsule, a shiny container for memories of idle youth: “Hanging out, down the street / The same old thing we did last week,” Bell brays over a snaking chromatic guitar riff on “In the Street”; “Won’t you let me walk you home from school,” Alex Chilton, the band’s other frontman, pleads on the fragile “Thirteen.” This is rock and roll as pastoral. The songs conjure an enchanted land of perpetual adolescence, full of self-renewing wonder. Bad vibes sometimes darken the horizon, usually in the form of heartbreak. But they are typically either sublimated, as on the obliquely anti-draft anthem “The Ballad of El Goodo,” or exorcised through sheer volume, as in the Memphis-soul horn blasts that puncture the otherwise turgid opener “Feel.”

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