This week I’m sharing a piece I’m submitting to the fine folks at Stinkweeds for a forthcoming zine. Stinkweeds is a record store institution here in Phoenix, Arizona, and I’m so pleased to share something with them. I’ll post updates about the physical editions of the zine here on the blog when they are ready to share. In the meantime, we’ve got a timely entry:
It’s late in the day as I type, but it’s still January 12, Chris Bell’s birthday. The Southern-raised Bell, tangled up in various configurations with his musical partner Alex Chilton, is part of my personal cult-rock canon. Together and individually, the duo crafted a remarkable streak of post-Beatles rock music that has captivated me since my early record store days.
Big Star’s proper albums, #1 Record and Radio City, the latter minus Bell, are clever, elegant gems, full of energy and youthful flourish. But what happens next is where it gets really interesting: a set of essentially unfinished records that double as masterpieces.
Crafted with maverick producer Jim Dickinson and released in 1978, years after Big Star had wiped out in the wake of Chilton’s mania the ragged art-pop of Big Star’s third album, Third, or Sister/Lovers, would serve as a foundational document for the burgeoning alternative scene with artists like R.E.M., This Mortal Coil, and Jeff Buckley picking up on its deconstructed brilliance.
Though maybe a little less heralded, it’s the same deal with the masterful I Am The Cosmos. Released on Rykodisc in 1992, I Am The Cosmos picks up where Bell-era Big Star left off in a lot of ways, pairing hard rock grooves with chiming power-pop. But along the way, there are Moog synths layered over gentle, almost Windham Hill ready 12-strings and hand percussion, ragged proto alt-rock, and the standout metaphysical dream pop of the title track, a song the reformed Big Star made a staple throughout its tenure as a performing act in the ‘90s and 2000s.
Collecting material recorded in various locales and time periods prior to Bell’s death in 1978, I Am The Cosmos is also a stealth Christian rock album. To be clear, it’s not a praise and worship record, but it finds Bell bringing his music into alignment with his charismatic Christianity in ways Big Star only hinted at. Bell credited his faith with pulling him out of a terrible depression following his exit from Big Star, but he could be intense about it, occasionally creeping his friends out. As new songs came together, his religious dedication poured into the music.
Bell’s Christian expression could venture toward the tough-edged and stern, and I hear in it sometimes a disheartened struggle: “You’re sitting on your ass, trying to find some grace,” he chides in the bleak “Better Save Yourself.” But Bell hits beatific notes, too, on songs like “Look Up” and “There Was a Light,” where he sounds like he’s been heavy on his Ecclesiastes: “Spending all my time/Waiting to die/What's the use” before evoking a restoring celestial light that rekindles his desire to live. It’s not all homilies—“Get Away” is a power-pop charger and “Got Kinda Lost” is a troublemaking raver you could imagine Axel Chitlin commandeering for his demento classic Like Flies on Sherbert. But when you factor in the album’s opener, “I Am the Cosmos” the scale tilts toward the sacred.
In it, the distinction between heartache and dark night of the soul collapses under the weight of a shambolic drum kit and swelling orch-rock balladry. “Every night I tell myself I am the cosmos,” Bell sings, indulging in what sounds a lot like new age esoterics or some non-dualistic thinking to me. Then the all-too-earthbound response: “But that don’t get you back again.” It’s a gut wrencher, and that’s even before, to paraphrase the Apostle Paul, “the Holy Spirit intercedes through wordless expression” via the guitar solo.
Alex might have sung about Jesus Christ with a defiant over-sexed glee—its own form of sacred expression to be sure—but Bell meant it, articulating a universal and holy ache that lingers in the song: “I never wanna be alone.”
Notices: Did the world end in 2017? On the latest episode of Click Vortex, Sam Means and I ponder occult mysteries, Red Hot Chili papas, the jazz flutes of Jack Kevorkian, the pioneering public access show TV Party, Alan Moore, Damon Albarn, John Dee, 30 years of Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock and more. Listen at WASTOIDS.
Also: JPW plays Crescent Ballroom Saturday night, January 14. It’s a free show with Dad Weed. I’m told kids can attend. They’ve got good burritos there. We’ll have you home at a reasonable hour.
We’re covering Sinéad O'Connor’s “John, I Love You” and taking it in a Marquee Moon direction at the end. Talk about a sacred song: