There were meteor showers all week – slow burning blue flames in between flashes of heat lightning in the sky above highway 61 between Clarksdale and Memphis.  Robert ‘Wolfman” Belfour was playing at Red’s on the corner of Sunflower and MLK.  It was a a Wednesday night house party and it was like 2009 and 1959 were the same year.

Then it was a new year and I stayed up late in a guest house on Belvedere writing a new song called ‘King of Romance.’  Now it is our new single.  It’s free.  Share it with each other.  XOXO JBJ

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

My name is Jake Vest. I live two blocks from Ardent Studios, and Alex Chilton is one of my two biggest influences. Jim Dickinson is the other. And last night, when I put my copy of Big Star’s “Third” on the turntable, that statement really hit me hard. That album is by far one of the scariest, weirdest, and most gut-wrenching albums of all time. Of course, It’s also joyous, sarcastic, tender, and (in the case of “Nature Boy” from the Rhino reissue) very funny. I feel so much pride that this brilliant record (along with a giant truckload of others) was recorded two blocks down Madison by people who lived only a short drive away.

Since the day Dirk Kitterlin handed me the CD version of “Third” with its awful artwork (ugliest artwork I’d ever seen, aside from the #1 Record/Radio City 2fer), I’ve been obsessed with it. So obsessed that I dug even further (with the help of my personal bible: “It Came From Memphis” by Robert Gordon) into territory that freaked me out even more.

“Like Flies On Sherbert” shook me to my core. I had trouble finding it, just like I did the Moloch record. But eventually I got it (with ugly 2fer artwork again…), and it took a long time before I listened to anything else. The fuck-it-who-cares guitar tones, the pounding drums on “Hey, Little Child,” Chilton’s madman yelp on the title track, Lee Baker tearing it up on “My Rival” and pretty much everything else (and I mean TEARING IT UP), Dickinson’s effortless piano parts and his vocals (and guitar?) on “I’ve Had It,” the weird synthesizers, the bad timing, the popping of microphones, the laughing, the Carter Family… And to add to the overall greatness is the fact that no one could tell me who really played what on the album. Jim Dickinson himself once said to me, “Shit, come to think of it that might’ve been Baker on the drums…” I was in love. The absolute everything-that-came-before-
this-doesnt-matter-anymore kind of love.

I dedicated tons of time to finding everything he recorded during the mid to late 70′s. Lucky for me the internet was ripe. Thanks to Japanese mail order sites and illegal downloading (sorry, Ardent), I was able to hear what I favor as his best work. Singles like “Bangkok” the “Singer Not The song” EP along with bootlegs like “Dusted In Memphis” and “One Day In New York” offered a glimpse into an otherwise unreleased, invisible world. A definite highlight is a live show at CBGB’s in 1977 by Alex Chilton & The Cossacks. This may be my favorite recording of his. The versions of “Take Me Home And Make Me Like It” and “Little Fishy” are unparalleled by him or anyone else. It’s pure rock n roll madness. And it is exactly the kind of music I want to make, through and through. If you havent heard it, e-mail me and I’ll get you a copy.

I tried to put a band together to cover “Sherbert” (enlisting the Hi-Tone’s Dan Holloway in the process!), and eventually that idea turned into The Bulletproof Vests (sorry, Dan). For anyone who’s seen us play, you know the highlight of our set is always Chilton’s “Take Me Home And Make Me Like It.” Always. I mean it NEVER FAILS. And I’m in no way surprised.

Wednesday night was shocking. I’m uncomfortable discussing my personal emotions as a result of his passing, because I am not an Alex Chilton friend or an Alex Chilton family member. I am simply an Alex Chilton fan. And I will continue to keep his music (along with other Memphis music) alive by performing and recording it for anyone who will listen.

“Play it for me, guitarist.”

Here is a list of things that have happened on the JBJ/BPV tour dates so far:

Everyone but Jake R. ate tacos in Knoxville

Jake R. yelled at the band for being late for load out and then apologized

Jake R drove everyone back to Memphis after the Nashville show and then pulled over 15 minutes outside Memphis so Greg could piss

We decided never to play “I Can’t Stand the Rain” ever again

The band left Jake R. for dead in a sleeping bag on the floor of an empty apartment in Jackson Mississippi on Saturday morning

Our tell-all book will sell so many more copies than Motley Crue’s  “The Dirt”

xoxo – JBJ