The first two Big Star albums have rightly become the stuff of legend. From day one, when the group decided to call themselves Big Star after the grocery chain across the street from Ardent Studios on National, the group was a self-contained unit of Alex Chilton, Christopher Bell, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens. Bell's heroes were the Beatles, so in his mind, to be a really great group, you had to do everything as near as possible to the way the Beatles did it. Hence all the songs were credited jointly to Bell/Chilton, and any outside players on their first album, the critically beloved #1 Record were not listed. When Bell left the band just after sessions had begun for a second album (released a year later as Radio City), Bell and Chilton split up the songs they'd written together for that album. Bell died in a car crash in December, 1978. Over thirty years after the fact, it's difficult to really separate the Bell/Chilton songs, and determine exactly who wrote what, especially on some of the tracks on Chris Bell's posthumous Rykodisc album. No one ever asked Chris Bell about it when he was alive (indeed, only a couple of dozen people had heard those songs during his life), and Alex Chilton's usually a tad vague on the subject. This, then, will be the first piece published that really gets into the details of the recording of those two legendary albums, and the brilliant Bell/Chilton catalog of songs.

There's been a lot of activity on the Big Star front circa 2003-2004. A Rykodisc 'best of,' the previously unreleased Rock City band album on Lucky Seven Records, the highest profile performance the band's made (except perhaps for their Tonight show appearance some years back), the Big Star panel at SXSW in Austin, March 18, 2004 (with Stephens, Hummel, Manning, Stringfellow, Auer, and this author), and now an album of new material was finished in April, 2004. Additionally, in late April, Stax Records released a new SACD hybrid CD of #1 Record/Radio City that is playable on both regular CD players and on SACD decks. This marks the first time the two albums have been available in America using modern remastering techniques, which makes it an essential purchase.

Rob Jovanovic's forthcoming Big Star book (Big Star: The Story of Rock's Forgotten Band, to be published Nov. 2004 in the UK only) does a wonderful job of laying out all the configurations that the many players in the Big Star story were involved in between 1965-1970. There was an ever-revolving cast of friends and players who hung out at the Bell family's huge mansion in far east Memphis. Back then, it was literally in the country, and the original house that had been on the land when they bought it had been moved to the back of the lot; hence its being dubbed by the local musicians who hung out and rehearsed there 'The Back House.' The Bell kids and their friends had devoted the Back House to the arts, making one room a music room and one room a darkroom (Bell, Hummel, Terry Manning, and several of the others were photography nuts).

In the meantime, here's a handy little summary of what we know -- the facts are as nearly as the principals can recall them about the recording of the first two Big Star albums. This comes from conversations with Alex Chilton (an old friend from my Memphis years back then), Terry Manning (Ardent Studios engineer/producer, and co-owner of the Ardent Records label that released the Big Star albums), Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel, Van Duren (Duren's albums are being reissued by Manning, and are essential to Big Star fans), and Rob Jovanovic, and also incorporates some discussions from the March 2004 Big Star panel at SXSW. By writing this piece, I hope to bring some clarity to those murky years without taking away from Rob's book, (which you'll dig when it comes out).

(Andy, Terry, Rob, and Van've all read over this before we put it online. Andy in particular was very generous and helpful with helping figure all this out, even while continuing to express amazement that anyone would actually care to read about it after all this time. If you're not already a fan, go away, this isn't written for you at all.)

The only early bands we need to be concerned with here are Rock City and Icewater, because those are the only two configurations of the Back House boys that actually recorded. Terry Manning recorded a solo album at Ardent Studio on National St. in 1969 that featured Christopher Bell (lead guitar), Richard Rosebrough (drums), and Stephen Rhea (drums). The album was released in 1970 by Enterprise (a subsidiary of Stax Records) under the title Home Sweet Home, and has become a collector's item among the few who know it; it features Bell's first released studio work. Around the same time, while Alex Chilton was still under contract to the Box Tops (1969), Manning helped Chilton record his first solo album, not released until 1996 under the title 1970 on Ardent Records (since technically speaking, Chilton was still contracted to the Box Tops in 1969). Rosebrough again played drums, this time on all the songs, but most instruments were divided among Chilton and Manning, who wrote almost all of the songs.

Rock City were a loose group that formed around a Tom Eubanks solo album in 1969. Eubanks had been playing in a band with Jody and his brother Jimmy Stephens, and his debut was going to be Chris Bell's first shot as a record producer. As the project got going, Jody Stephens signed on as the drummer, and Terry Manning joined on keyboards, backing vocals, and engineering. It soon became apparent that it could be a real group record, with Bell and Manning adding a couple of tunes to the substantial number Eubanks had ready. The group named themselves after the tourist attraction atop Lookout Mountain near Chattanooga, Tennessee (www.seerockcity.com) -- at the time, all over the main highways and interstates in the Midsouth were HUGE signs that read "See Rock City," "Visit Rock City," and "See Seven States From Rock City," often painted on the roofs of barns visible from the highway. The album title was to have been See Seven States. The album was recorded and pretty much forgotten about -- no labels expressed any interest whatsoever in putting it out at the time. The group never played live, and really existed for only as long as the album took to record. Around late 2002, though, Manning discovered the tapes in a box labeled "Tom & the Turtles," and in July, 2003, released it under the title Rock City on his own Lucky Seven Records imprint (distributed by Rounder Records). The album was released "as is," with no modern mixing, overdubbing, or post-production whatsoever, exactly as it was finished and compiled in late '69/early '70. After Rock City, Eubanks vanished from the Big Star story, although he's still playing music today.

The Rock City CD also includes the single recorded work of the next important group down the line, Icewater. This band included Bell, Stephens, Manning, and a friend of Stephens' who was about to become a very close friend of Chris Bell's from 1969-1972, bassist/piano player Andy Hummel. Icewater did play some gigs, but only recorded one song (Manning dates it to 1969, but I think early 1970 may be more accurate), "Feel," a track which would three years later open Big Star's #1 Record. It's important to note that these bands all kind of overlapped somewhat, and more nearly reflected a group of friends (including Rhea, Rosebrough, Jody's brother Jimmy, Van Duren, Bill Cunningham [also a founding member of the Box Tops and in the 1965 group The Jynx, named after the Kinks, with Chris Bell, a band with whom Chilton also sang with] and others, all of whom knew each other and played in varying configurations). As Hummel put it last week: "Remember, don't ever get too wrapped around the axle trying to fit some incarnation of Big Star into some rigid set of names or time frames. That's just not how it was. It was a 'stream of consciousness' kind of thing. We could have called ourselves Ulysses."

Alex Chilton had left the Box Tops, spending time in 1969 in Los Angeles, where he lived with Dennis Wilson, moving back home when Manson and the girls moved into Dennis' house. After that, he spent time in New York City, meeting Bud Scoppa, and learning guitar from Roger McGuinn (this meeting may also have happened in LA, depending on whose story you believe). While in New York, he practiced guitar constantly, developing his famous and distinctive guitar style, and began to write a very serious set of songs, inspired by the Greenwich Village folk scene, and artists like Loudon Wainwright. When Icewater made an aborted trip to NYC trying to score a record deal, Bell visited his childhood friend Chilton, and made him promise to come see his new band when he got home. After seeing the band once at a VFW gig in Memphis, Chilton decided to drop folk music and become a member of Chris Bell's band, Icewater. From this point on, there was a real, cohesive group, and everyone involved and around them recognized it as such.

This band was always the four-piece that fans know and love: Christopher Bell, Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, and Andy Hummel. Terry Manning was already out of the picture, as his producing/engineering career was really taking off, especially when Jimmy Page brought Led Zeppelin to Ardent to record what became Led Zeppelin III and requested that Manning (an old friend) engineer the album. Manning and John Fry, the owner/producer/engineer of Ardent Studios/Records, while at no point actually members of Big Star, were in fact tremendously supportive of the group. Bell had already taken Fry's engineering class, and become certified (i.e., trusted) to run the equipment and do sessions on his own after hours when no one was using the studio (he had a key). By the time Ardent moved from National to their current location on Madison Avenue in late 1971, Hummel had also taken the course, and Bell had taken it a second time. As Stephens remembered it at the SXSW panel: "it was pretty amazing when you think about it that they were entrusting us kids with keys to the studio -- I was only 17 at the time. Bands nowadays would just never have that freedom in a state-of-the-art studio."

As Hummel remembers: "When Chris and I returned from [attending college in] Knoxville in the spring on 1970, the separate overlapping groups thing [wa]s very true. As we approached the advent of Big Star, Icewater or whatever you call it, as a performing group was just Chris, Jody, and me with Richard filling in a time or two. Eubanks and Manning had mostly, if not entirely, faded from the picture by this point except when we were recording, and that was dictated by whoever just happened to be in the studio on any given night. I mean, you played with whoever was there based on the studio pecking order if you wanted studio time and experience. And by the time Alex joined up, Chris Jody, and I had completely evolved into a tight, distinct musical entity. When Alex joined up there was no fuzz on who was the band. It was the three of us with Alex joining to make it four."