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Courtesy of Omnivore Recordings
It was a Soulard Culture Squad open mic at Soulard Preservation Hall, circa 1989. A young, thin, white man, casually dressed, approached the open mic wearing a baby blue shower cap. The crowd was tuned in and silent, so he could start saying his piece on his way to the mic and everybody could still hear him. “I love her,” the young man said, walking slowly, “and I hoped that getting to know her better would bring us closer together.” Now he had reached the microphone. “Sometimes,” he said into the mic, and then started backing away again, back toward the seat he came from, where a young woman seemed to be waiting for him, “it works the other way.”
Big Star’s Complete Third is being presented by Omnivore Recordings in a 3-disc edition released on October 14. Every extant demo, alternate take and rough mix for Third is presented on discs 1 and 2, with a new presentation of a final order for the final masters on disc 3. You would have to love Third (which probably you once called by its alternate title, Sister Lovers) to even consider listening to a package that collects every scrap of what could have been or almost was or gradually became Third. But will getting to know her better bring you closer together? This has to be a major concern with a record like Big Star’s Third that so many people have loved so dearly for so long. After all, sometimes, it works the other way. And why would anyone pay good money to fall out of love with one of their favorite records?
The demos released on Complete Third are intimate performances, Alex Chilton on vocal and acoustic, with live room sounds. We’ve never been brought this close to these songs before. The lyrics no longer disappear under echoey piano strikes or electric guitar slides. We get to see lyrics change. “Big Black Car”—the funeral dirge for the hot rod song that Ike Turner and Chuck Berry created right here in St. Louis—is a revelation in its demo forms. The final take, known from various releases of Third, has Chilton singing, “Maybe I’ll sleep in a Holiday Inn,” which always made you wonder: Why can’t a rock star insulated in his limousine afford a better hotel? How did a day drive turn into an overnight stay? It’s depressing, weird, beautiful and exciting, all at the same time, and that’s the Big Star’s Third that we’ve come to love and fear. The demos complicate that even more. “Maybe we’ll f--- in a Holiday Inn,” Chilton sang, when the song was new. He wasn’t alone in the big, black car, and they were doing more than sleeping in the hotel. How did this funeral dirge for the open road song go from “we” to “I,” from sex together to sleeping alone? That drift helps to explain why the same record was titled both Sister Lovers, which suggests a singer and drummer tangled up in two sisters, and Third, which only shows that Alex Chilton can count the number of Big Star records. (Holliday Aldridge was the sister whom drummer Jody Stephens loved; she might be in that evolving “Holiday Inn” lyric somewhere.)
Lesa Aldridge was the sister Alex loved, and she comes alive on Complete. The song that best places us in their social reality as musicians and lovers (in Memphis, in 1974) is their cover of “Afterhours,” the Velvet Underground (VU) song. Maureen Tucker sang it on the original, in a simple schoolgirl voice. Big Star recorded a cover with Lesa singing in that same child’s voice, mixed with the same slip-slides on vocal reverb. It’s like hearing the demo of a cover, because they would work their way to greater things playing Lou Reed songs. On Big Star’s cover of VU’s “Femme Fatale” on Third, Lesa adds a counterpoint vocal, lushly singing the hook—“She’s a femme fatale”—in French. It doesn’t matter how many times you have heard how many VU covers, that reverb-drenched backing vocal, where Lesa coaxes a little more of the lyrics of “Femme Fatale” into the French it borrows from, endures as one of the greatest interpretations of the Velvets. “Afterhours” is nothing like that. It’s two lovers playing a song they both love the way the band they love played it.
There are revelations in Complete—Alex’s rugged lead vocal out-take on “For You,” which Jody Stephens sings like an angel in the final take we all know; rough mixes of “Kangaroo” without the signature cowbell, which provokes the weird feeling of not hearing a cowbell; a guitar-driven demo of “Downs,” a song only known before now as a deconstruction of steel drums on downers—but the overall pattern of the collection is ultimately even more powerful than all of the “Oh, wow!” moments along the way. Complete both confirms and destroys major 20th century rock & roll myths. It confirms that Big Star’s Third is a record for all time that will be cherished as long as rock music is cherished. And Complete Third completely destroys the myth that when Third was recorded, Big Star was a disintegrating band led by a self-destructing songwriter, who therefore left only fragments of songs he just quit tinkering with for later producers to fake and fudge into “final” mixes and sequences that will only ever be provisional.
Agreed, the sequence of the final takes of Third will always be a passionate controversy that Complete does not settle, but hearing Big Star work towards the versions and mixes of the songs we know best from these sessions leaves you feeling that Third was neither aimless nor unfinished. The earliest demos have the character of the final songs, and Chilton carries a great many vocal phrasings and inflections from demo to final vocal. The finished songs are better than the demos and reflect deliberate work at making them better. The final mixes are better than the rough mixes.
The final mixes are better than the rough mixes. The songs and performances you already knew are better than the ones you have never heard before that didn’t make the previous “final” cuts. And hearing so many of these songs without the strings and woodwinds that Chilton and producer Jim Dickinson added for final colors—with gorgeous arrangements by Carl Marsh, still alive and arranging in Nashville—reminds you that Big Star’s Third is one of rock’s greatest chamber music records.
Getting to know Third better through Complete Third brings us closer together.
Omnivore Recordings releases Big Star's Complete Third today, Friday, October 14. For more information, go to omnivorerecordings.com/artist/big-star.
