Jake Rabinbach on Alex Chilton

“Do it baby! We ain’t got much tape left, c’mon! And if you people wanna hear what’s going on, put on your headphones. They’re right here on the couch”–Alex Chilton “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It”

When I was 17 years old, the summer before my senior year in High School, I would sit in my parents’ house smoking pot and recording cassette 4-track demos with an egg shaker, a Kay acoustic guitar and my Mother’s upright piano. I was in love for the first time and writing intensely personal material for the first time in my life. My Mother’s best friend from highschool had a son who was quite a few years older than me and sang in a relatively successful band. I played him a cassette of one of my recordings and he asked me if I was influenced by Lou Reed. I told him definitely and he said I should check out the “Third” record by this band called Big Star.

It took me over a year to find a copy of ‘Third.’ I remember putting it on in my college dorm room and feeling like there was a ghost singing to me from another world and I wasn’t even sure if I liked it as much as it made me uncomfortable. I got that feeling in my stomach which can only be described as the early stages of obsession. I started reading on the internet about a musicians from Memphis named Alex Chilton who somehow managed to be a teenage blue eyed soul singer with the Box Tops, a pioneer of power pop with Big star, and late 70s deconstructionist punk rocker in his solo career. As someone obsessed with Otis Redding, The Beach Boys, and the Velvet underground, I could not have imagined that anyone person could have better encapsulated everything I loved about Rock and Roll music.

Alex Chilton was an uncompromising artist and famously infuriated collaborators and fans by making decisions like throwing his technical prowess on guitar overboard to pursue playing like a 13 year-old who just picked up the instrument on his solo record ‘Like Flies on Sherbert,’ or using a basketball for a kick drum on ‘Downs’ from the ‘Third’ record. And he did it all with a snarl as if to say “I make beautiful music despite all of you.” As a young Rock and Roll musician who still aspires to things like relative success or a fan base, this total disregard for his audience still shakes me to my core and inspires me to no end.

As exciting as it seems, this disposition has its costs, which are ever present in the song “Nighttime.” This song perfectly expresses the struggle of being a bohemian artist in a constricting environment. But the beauty and innovation of the music and production also suggests the glory of triumphing over the oppression of a small city and a world not yet ready for this music. Fortunately, the word caught up and people like me could discover the music he made with Big Star 25 years later.

The fact that someone heard my fumbling teenage lovesick demos and equated them to “Third” speaks more to the feelings of isolation, longing and musical searching Alex Chilton conveys in his music than it relates to anything specific I was doing. Now it is quite possible to say that no other record has affected my music more. Neither my Mother’s friend’s son or I could have known then that I’d be recording my own records in the same rooms and hallways where Big Star recorded “Third.”

The last time Jump back Jake were in the studio together this passed October, Jake Vest and I spent the first hour sitting at the piano in studio A singing as much of “Third” as we could get through while we waited for the rest of the band to show. What followed were the most fun and satisfying sessions of my life and singing Alex’s songs in the room where he recorded them was a good warm up. Like that night Alex’s music has been present for me in all of the most important moments of my adult life. It has been the soundtrack to long journeys between Memphis and New York, not to mention countless romances, and few nights pass when I don’t put on “Nighttime” to fall asleep. I never met Alex Chilton, but I imagine if I did I would not have said any of this to him, though I might have said thank you.

“Jump Back” Jake Rabinbach
Manhattan 3-18-2010

Permalink | March 19th, 2010