#1 Record:

By early 1971, the band formerly known as Icewater and now a quartet with Chilton had begun to record in earnest, pooling the songs Bell and Chilton already had, and writing new ones. To all intents and purposes, Chris Bell actually produced the album -- certainly it was all his creative vision, and his drive that made it happen, a point on which everyone agrees; it has to be noted that Big Star throughout its career was always a true band, not a singer or singers with backing musicians. John Fry helped them record the basic tracks at National and served as engineer early on. But by the time Ardent moved its current location on Madison Avenue in 1971, Chris Bell was producing and engineering most of the overdub sessions, and did a good portion of the overall arrangements (although Hummel emphasizes that all four members typically wrote their own parts). John Fry, who was the primary engineer for the recording of the basic backing tracks, got an 'executive producer' label because Bell wanted it listed that way, over Fry's objections; Fry felt that the band was solely responsible for the production of the album. Manning probably did a bit of engineering on overdubs, mostly while still at National. Hummel engineered some overdubs as well (not to mention engineering the basic acoustic guitar track by Bell and Chilton for "Try Again"), as well as playing occasional keyboards. Lead and rhythm guitars were by Bell and Chilton. Drums were by Stephens, bass and piano were by Hummel. Ardent had bought America's first Mellotron, and various songs feature Mellotron parts played by almost everyone at times (except Stephens). Hummel sings "The India Song" (which he wrote, and originally recorded all by himself late one night in Studio B with guitar and vocals only), with a strong double track of Alex imitating Andy laid on top; the finished track featured Hummel on Mellotron and Chilton on guitar. Hummel and Stephens confirmed at the panel that they really didn't sing on #1 Record much at all. All vocals (lead, harmony, & backing vocals) are by Bell and Chilton with Manning adding harmonies, mostly likely on "In the Street," "Don't Lie To Me," "Thirteen," "Give Me Another Chance," and "The Ballad of El Goodo." On "When My Baby's Beside Me" Manning doubled the lead vocal on the choruses. Ardent had one of the first Moog synthesizers in the States (in fact the one they had included the actual keyboard used in the Beatles by George Harrison), and Manning played it on "Give Me Another Chance."

Hummel continues: "By the time we got to Madison the band was self-contained. John's big contribution, and the one thing none of us could do, but which he is the world's expert at, was the final mixdown, which was always a grueling process, but responsible for much of the 'Ardent' sound."

At Bell's suggestion, all songs were split down the middle credit-wise as Bell/Chilton songs (in imitation of Lennon/McCartney, Chris Bell's heroes and main inspirations), regardless of who actually wrote the song. However, only "Don't Lie To Me," "Give Me Another Chance," and "ST 100-6" seem to have been written after Chilton joined. "When My Baby's Beside Me" was most likely composed solely by Chilton, according to Manning. It's likely these were all written at least partially as true collaborations. Stephens, Hummel, and Manning don't necessarily know more than we do about who wrote exactly what on #1 Record, because the songs tended to be presented to the group by the guy who wrote them. Then all the arrangements were pretty well figured out in the studio by Bell and Chilton with help from Hummel and Stephens. The band would do take after take until they got a perfect backing track, then overdub on the songs, sometimes for months, until they (well, Bell, really) felt it was perfect.

It's more likely than not that Bell and Chilton co-wrote songs more or less exactly like Lennon/McCartney and Marriott/Lane, which is to say that one of them brought in a nearly finished song, and the other embellished it a bit with help from the rest of the band, maybe adding a line here or there, or making some significant arrangement suggestions. Unlike Lennon and McCartney, tho, no one ever got the pair to go over song for song who wrote what. Here's what we DO know for sure (thanks in part to Rob's extensive research): "My Life Is Right" (written by Bell/Eubanks) is the same basic track recorded for the Rock City album with new parts added. "Try Again" is a completely new recording of a Bell track from the Rock City album (Chilton had, incidentally, played acoustic guitar and doubled the vocal on the Rock City recording of that song). "Feel" is the same basic track recorded by Icewater, with new bass, lead guitar, and vocal parts replacing parts of the original. Chilton certainly didn't co-write this one, and may not even play on the finished song (Manning, Stephens, and Hummel, however, do play on it, as do the Memphis Horns -- Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love -- the horn parts all were done for the original Rock City version).

Chilton brought four of his new songs into the sessions, all of them written during a stay in NYC in 1970: "In the Street," "The Ballad of El Goodo," "Thirteen," and "Watch the Sunrise." "Give Me Another Chance" was written by Chilton after the recording sessions had begun.

"In the Street" was most certainly finished off by Bell (who sang lead on the record), but the riff (derived from a Blind Willie McTell blues song Chilton had learned from Keith Sykes, another Memphis songwriter) and lyrics were primarily Chilton's, although I think it was an acoustic song before Bell transformed it. At the panel, Ken Stringfellow expressed surprise at the song's authorship, since like many fans, he'd assumed Bell wrote it since he sang it, but unlike Lennon and McCartney, some Bell/Chilton songs were sung by the guy who didn't write it; that's just how much confusion there is about who did what in Big Star -- Stringfellow's now been in the band for 11 years, longer than Bell was by a long shot.

Bell certainly helped finish the other songs, too. Manning, Stephens and Hummel all describe "Watch the Sunrise" as a Chilton track. Which makes Chris Bell's "Country Morn" (released on a flexidisc many years ago by the Back of a Car fanzine) a big mystery -- it appears to predate #1 Record, and yet is exactly the same melody and possibly the same backing track, with completely different (obviously Bell-composed?) lyrics. Bell's lyrics are suicidal; Chilton's are hopeful and uplifting. I specifically asked all three men at the SXSW panel if they knew who really wrote what and what came first, and they simply don't know. We can't ask Bell, and Chilton may never help clarify this mystery. Is it a Chilton song grafted onto an existing Bell studio backing track?

As a final note, before leaving the rest of the album's story to Jovanovic's book: Manning and his (at the time) wife, Carol, designed, contracted a local neon artist to make, and photographed the iconic front album cover (under the name Cenotaph), and the photo on the back is from the Chilton family's music room on Montgomery.

Christopher Bell was by all reports just completely devastated over the lack of success of #1 Album. Stax did in fact promote the album, far more so than previous stories about Big Star may have led you to believe. It's always been repeated that Stax were a soul music label who simply didn't know what to do with a white Anglophile rock band, and didn't care. And that Stax's bankruptcy around the time killed the album. All partly true. But if as Jim Dickinson has famously repeated time and again: "…the Big Star albums only sold 500 copies and every single one seems to have wound up in the hands of musicians or music writers who were influenced by it…," then I'd submit for your consideration that Ardent's publicist (John King) did in fact manage to both create the legend and myth about Big Star, and those alleged 500 copies are mostly all promotional copies, not stock (i.e, sold in stores) copies. For the record, the 'official' Ardent figure appears to be 4000 of each album sold. Slightly higher, but only slighter. But as for Bell, he'd been working up to this album since he was 13. He'd finally gotten THE dream band. He'd poured his heart and soul into it, driving the band to achieve a final product that unquestionably was vastly better than they'd have achieved without his drive. And the fact that the record was not only not a hit, but not really even available in stores anywhere due to Stax's massive distribution legal troubles at the time, effectively led Bell to a complete breakdown, the downward spiral of drugs, etc. In much the same way as the death of Smile crippled Brian Wilson, the commercial failure of #1 Record crippled Bell. He'd never live long enough to recover. An unfortunate single-car crash ended his life, just after Chilton's birthday twp days after Christmas in 1978.

As a little sidebar to the drama of Big Star's debut, at the Big Star panel at SXSW, a lady in the audience asked if the story was true about Chris Bell destroying the master tapes for #1 Record. Terry Manning replied that it did happen. Apparently one day Manning 'got wind' that Bell was on his way to Ardent to destroy the master tapes, so Manning hurriedly hid the master tape, and took it home later. He put a scrap tape in the box where the master mix-down tape had been. So when Bell came in, the box he took out and destroyed didn't have a Big Star tape in it at all. Manning told me last week that the first time the master tapes have been out of the box since then was in March, 2004. R.E.M. were in Manning's Compass Point Studio in Nassau, Bahamas (which Manning manages and has co-owned with Chris Blackwell since 1993 -- visit his website at www.compasspointstudios.com) and he let Peter Buck and Mike Mills hold the actual tape in their hands. Manning reported that they were thrilled!

For the record, Manning and especially Bell were the big Beatles nuts, although everyone involved saw the Beatles in Memphis in 1966 (except Stephens, who got caught trying to sneak in). All the people whose names you've read before all played in garage bands in the '60s, most starting to perform in public at about age 13, and all played in bands focusing more nearly on British Invasion music (Beatles, Kinks, Yardbirds, Pretty Things, Who, Moody Blues, etc.) instead of the locally popular R&B music that everyone else in Memphis played and liked to hear (stuff like "In the Midnight Hour," "Knock on Wood," and all the Stax hits). While everyone liked every one else's favorite bands, Chilton's faves were most certainly The Who, The Zombies, the Kinks, and especially The Beach Boys. To this day people writing about Big Star insist on describing Chilton as being a big Beatles nut, but it just really isn't true. The Byrds weren't really the influence you might think, either, but Chilton learned a lot about guitar playing directly from Roger McGuinn (in '69 or '70 depending on whose story you believe), so that's certainly a huge influence on Chilton's Big Star era guitar style, although not really on Bell's -- he was a George Harrison/Jimmy Page fan, and let's not forget that Terry Manning engineered Led Zeppelin III at Ardent immediately before the sessions for #1 Record began, and that was most certainly influential on Big Star's sound, too, although that fact is almost universally overlooked.

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