Alex Chilton, PDBD*

Work to do, but nothing will happen until a few inchoate Big Star/Alex Chilton thoughts spill out.

-Many, many people more knowledgeable and talented than I will be making their tributes, but all I can really say is that there have been times in my life when Big Star's music basically functioned as my epidermis. 

-I have said it elsewhere, but "Jesus Christ"'s failure to get traction as a Christmas staple continues to baffle me.

-Looking over the internets since then, it's been touching to see that not only the Mauras and Balks of the world are undone, but various folks I follow/read for reasons having nothing to do with music, but who turn out to share my sense of how important Alex Chilton was -- Dr. Saturday and Sam Sifton and Maud Newton come to mind.

-That said, that football and food and book people are taking this hard suggests a scary dimension of this story. Alex Chilton, for the aforementioned folks and many others, was the voice of at least a subset of a generation. Call it the "spent a chunk of the 80s/90s rewinding the cassette of Radio City and waiting for that boy/girl to call generation." Most of the folks above, I would guess, are older than 35 and younger than Chilton himself. But not that much younger. Chilton was born in 1950, and he was 59 when he died. With better living/luck/genes, he might have seen his threescore and ten, but he was not, by any means, a talent cut down in the flower of youth. If you are a member of the generation I mention above,  the people in the bands you like are starting to die not because of heroic abuse of drugs/alcohol, but because they are getting old. Unfortunately, that means that any one of us could be next. That's the scary part.

-On a brighter note, an anecdote lifted from the Awl via Our Band Could Be Your Life:

Moments later a man entered the dressing room and asked if he could borrow a guitar. “BORROW A GUITAR??!!! WELL, WHO THE FUCK ARE YOU???!!! [Gibby Haynes of the Butthole Surfers] screamed, eyes flashing in delirious anticpation of forthcoming violence. But the man was totally unfazed.

“I’m Alex Chilton,” the man answered calmly.

Haynes was flabbergasted. After a long pause, he methodically opened the remaining guitar cases one by one and gestured at them as if to say, “Take anything you want.”

-I heard, I think, pretty early on that he had died, and when I went to the internet for details, someone had already updated his Wikipedia page to reflect his death. Who does that? Is it like some morbid version of first tracks? 

-I am sure there will be no shortage of streams and videos. But treat yourself and buy this, at least. 

*Having had my hands full of bereavement in recent years, I've become increasingly uneasy w/ R.I.P. as a thing we say. The resting in peace would seem to come with the being dead territory, for the vast majority of faiths/non-faiths. I propose PDBD as an alternative. It stands for Please Don't Be Dead.

Comments

[New Orleans Survivor]

Once you go through a huge apocalyptic catastrophe and its aftermath, the fact that "you can be next" moves from the back to the front of your mind.

I remember sitting eating free oysters in Le Bon Temps Roule with you and the Cinetrix listening to the man whom Steve Zahn will play and I look at you and say, "Guess who the bass player is?" You didn't know, but I'll never forget the look on your face when I said, "Alex Chilton." When you were done choking on bivalves and Abita in flabbergastedness, I shrugged and continued, "He probably needs the bread."

[Cookie]

PDBD works for me. I shun RIP as well; it's Charles Addams territory.

[Clr]

Thank you for capturing part of why this just hit me SO HARD.

As soon as I saw that the wikipedia page had been updated, all I could think was, "really? who does that? who rushes to be the first person to update someone's wikipedia page when they DIED? why is this something you want to do?"

I loved that my baseball twitter was just as full of Alex as the music/writing one.

[Cookie]

I think the scary part is getting old without them.

[Davisrogan@yahoo.com]

Alex did not need the money. I was terrified of playing alone.

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