Big Star’s Radio City is Classic Rock Nirvana

Every once in a while one of rock’s many mutations comes with a development I can’t track from its origin point at all.

I do not know how my beloved Sunny Day Real Estate, redolent of heady, amorphously spiritual art-rock jangle à la U2 or Warners R.E.M. or early Radiohead, became the early flagships for emo. And to this day, when I throw on Big Star’s epochal record-geek cult opus Radio City, I hear immense craft, expansive structures, inventive fretwork, dorkily sung classic-rock nirvana. Beyond its most effervescent and well-known “hit,” “September Gurls,” and the celebrated, lovely solo-acoustic denouement “I’m in Love With a Girl,” I do not hear, and I quote, “power pop,” the underrespected genre it allegedly brought into the world.

If we’re talking about the fact it’s expertly harmonized, sure. Exceptionally melodic? Yes, but in no way immediate, except on “September Gurls” and maybe if you’re feeling charitable, “O My Soul,” which kind of proves how not tight this is, how far from new wave and Ramones and everything I group with power-pop’s short-fast ethos. These songs took me, and the rest of the rock establishment years to absorb. Is it the introduction of jangling guitars into the power-rock structures? The call-response between the two triumphant Who chords-with-drumboasts that take “Daisy Glaze” out between those sweet little guitar lines? I can maybe get with that, though maybe I’ve been looking at it upside-down: the Monkees and the Byrds and “Ticket to Ride” brought the jangling Rickenbacker arpeggios into the form, and nerdy little Alex Chilton imparted the…power?

Jody Stephens is no John Bonham, but he does make these sneakily pretty compositions swagger and tumble with a heft that I can confidently say the Byrds’ Michael Clarke did not. To me that feels like a development that would’ve happened anyway as rhythm took over the top of the tops by the end of the ‘70s and never really stopped until the Auto-Tune and trap era. But I’ll give credit where it’s due and Stephens roars in his fills, dips, and dives. He adds all the palpitations that Chilton’s teen-yelp yearning requires to tug on a normie’s collar if not quite their heartstrings.

Here’s what I do hear: serious fans of the Stones on “Mod Lang” just as much as any Beatles here. And when I do hear Beatles, it’s the dissonant “Taxman” groove of “She’s a Mover,” not “She Loves You,” yeah yeah yeah. I hear the sly, sinister chord that climaxes each line in the chorus of “You Get What You Deserve” to counterweight Chilton’s ascending vocal path. I hear jangling guitars of course, set to neither power nor pop over the sad-sounding plea that turns out to be hilariously deadpan in the written fact: “Why don’t you come on back from way out west / Love me and we can work out the rest.”

VIDEO: Big Star “September Gurls”

The youthful vulnerability in Chilton’s quaver, I suspect, plays a big part in why the term “pop” is always mentioned in the same sentence as this band. They’re definitely not macho even if 50 years on they sound indistinguishable from any other exuberant ‘70s axe-wielders who wanted to inject their love of soul, British Invasion, and even blues — which at the time still towered over any rock development — into their own heroically personal art that nonetheless connects to other tune-besotted loners. It’s funny to cross those wires, speaking of emo, and to zero in on sadness as the throughline in now more than a century of pop as we know it. But from Frank Sinatra all the way down to Drake, you could be way more off the mark.

Today, Radio City just sounds like classic rock of uncommon craft and sensitivity that never once, not even on the one entitled “I’m in Love With a Girl,” ventures within miles of sap. It was eventually followed by one of the all-time cult albums, Third/Sister Lovers, three years after Big Star disbanded, and even the cult doesn’t ascribe the power-pop tag to that one.

Weirdness embedded in impressive beauty and form was their gift to us, and while you don’t have to be pop or rock at all to encompass that tall order, Big Star definitely rocked and sometimes even could make you think they’d be big stars. Just not selling out Radio City.

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Ted Miller

Ted Miller is trying to collect the head of every Guns ‘n Roses’ guitarist for his rec room. He currently has three.

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