Some Girls

Few would deny that New York City in the Seventies was an epicenter of popular and art culture. In an age newly broken in to postmodernity, there was a good degree of overlap between the two. With thirty to forty years of hindsight, it might be interesting to ask what New York City in the Seventies signified; what its values were, why it gave rise to the kind of culture it did, and what of lasting significance was created in rock music out of these values. To adumbrate: the Seventies are associated culturally with a kind of decadence- promiscuous sex and drugs not complicated by the idealistic goals of the Sixties. In the States, it was a time of economic hardship and political crisis. Andy Warhol, a conduit for all kinds of New York energy for his entire life, remarked that the Sixties were about clutter while the Seventies were very empty. The rock music which came out of Seventies NYC largely emanated from a single venue (CBGBs) on the Bowery; Talking Heads, Blondie, Television, Patti Smith, the Ramones, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and others. Mick Jagger and the Stones had their own version of being decadent in the Seventies; after their most distinguished musical winning streak ended (with the release of Exile on Main Street in '72), the Stones put out a handful of dull, rote, mechanical albums which weren't conceived or executed with much sharpness. By '78, many rock fans had ceased to expect anything from them. But something clicked with Mick and Keith in New York; Mick, who had started to build a reputation as a "beau monde" socialite, was seen out and about at haunts like Studio 54, and Keith and Mick both visited CBGBs. CBGBs music was by no means all punk (though lots of punks, including the Clash, played there), but the atmosphere of the place was punk, and Mick and Keith picked it up. By '78, they were both motivated to rebel against their own decadence and respond to the ethos of both CBGBs and punk.

Importantly, Mick Jagger had also discovered Lou Reed. Having internalized Reed's willingness to go out on a limb and write about degeneracy, deviance, and transgression, he began writing lyrics which mirrored these concerns. The Rolling Stones '78 album Some Girls took these elements and made of them a solidly conceived and built Stones album. The three tracks which explicitly concern New York ("Miss You," "When the Whip Comes Down," and "Shattered,") each address a different form of degeneracy. With the monster hit single "Miss You," it is the degeneracy of loveless marriages winding downwards into realms of emotional entropy and promiscuous rebellion. Because "Miss You" employs the four-on-the-floor rhythms and walking bass lines of the then au current disco craze, and because Jagger half-sings and half-speaks a set of lyrics nuanced far beyond what was on rock radio in '78, "Miss You" was one of the Stones most electrifying moments. As had happened with "Satisfaction," they took something floating in the air, something attendant upon the Zeitgeist of '78, and nailed it down in a way which crossed all kinds of lines and united the rock world. The protagonist in the song could be taken as a double for Jagger himself; a world-weary rogue who goes for night walks in Central Park, is trying to give up an orgiastic, drunken lifestyle, all in the context of trying to save the aforementioned loveless marriage. Mick Jagger had pressures to respond to which Lou Reed and Ray Davies did not; he was a news item, someone mentioned in gossip columns, so that the lyrics of "Miss You" demonstrate him taking public mythologies about himself and turning them into art.

"When the Whip Comes Down," which clearly shows Reed's influence, is even more drastic; it's narrated by a homosexual prostitute who hangs out in Hell's Kitchen looking for customers. Jagger's lyrics slyly and coarsely relate to this scenario: "when the shit hits the fan/ I'll be sittin on the can." The whip has a double meaning; this protagonist is into S & M, but the whip can also be taken to signify poverty, homelessness, misery, and certain death. The song, musically, is as punk as the Stones ever got; pure, simple, brutish raunch. If it's done with less feeling and tenderness than Reed's street portraits, its unsparing grimness has its own cool allure. "Shattered" prefers to take the decadence of New York culture as symptomatic of the whole of American culture in decay. Jagger sings, "Pride and joy and loneliness/ and that's what makes that town the best/ Pride and joy and dirty dreams/ and still survivin on the streets and/ look at me, I'm in tatters/ shattered." The song, which concludes the album, is musically "up" and very spry; it's a strange misfit between the lyrics and the music. If the lyrics point a finger, it's at America as a realm of excess; where everyone wants everything all the time. The title track takes Jagger's rock-star stance as a sex-God and ridiculously inflates it. Jagger gets outre in an equal opportunity way; English girls "are so prissy/ I can't stand them on the telephone," white girls "they're pretty funny/ sometimes they drive me mad" while "black girls just want to get fucked all night/ I just don't have that much jam." The whole thing, potentially offensive as it is, is played for laughs and as an archly provocative farce.

"Beast of Burden" is just the opposite; a mature take on lust and desire which, like "Let's Spend the Night Together," wants to make a bargain, rather than bludgeon or "come on." If the Stones, with Some Girls, were able to end the "sucking" Seventies on a note of triumph, it's because they saw how empty the state of things was without letting the emptiness permanently take over the band. There's something cleansing about representing decadence honestly; from '65 onwards, this has always been a subtext of Mick Jagger's lyrics and the Stones music. If anything does redeem them, it's honesty. And because Some Girls sounds like the most listenable record produced by a major rock band in the late Seventies in 2012, we can be thankful that Mick Jagger let himself be influenced by Lou Reed, CBGBs, Andy Warhol, Studio 54, Bianca, Jerry Hall, cocaine, Keith, and the sense that the whole thing could come undone at any instant.

Muswell Hillbillies

 It was 1971; singer-songwriters were making big commercial waves, and "confession" was in the air. If, for once, Ray Davies of the Kinks was going to join the party and confess, it would have to be with more wit, irony, and sophistication than the James Taylors and Carole Kings of the world. Why Davies did decide to join the party is anyone's guess; but, for once, Davies turned his rapier wit inward, and produced a set of songs (Muswell Hillbillies) which lingered on the author himself as a figure of fun. This being Ray Davies, much of the self-analysis is deceptively simple; the first track on the album, "20th Century Man," begins, "This is the age of machinery/ A mechanical nightmare/ The wonderful world of technology/ Napalm hydrogen bombs biological warfare," and comes to the conclusion "I'm a twentieth century man/ but I don't want to be here." It's an extension of the sentiments expressed in "Victoria" from Arthur: "Long ago, life was clean/ sex was bad and obscene/ and the rich were so mean/ stately homes for the Lords/ croquet lawns, village greens/ Victoria was my queen." What made the singer-songwriters so cloying is the narrowness of their approach; as if their self-absorbed sorrows were really that compelling to a seasoned intelligence (which they weren't). Ray Davies big singer-songwriter confession is that what he longs for is not for his baby to love him again, not for his friends to save themselves and give up drugs, not for the counterculture to reform, but to migrate back to Victorian England, which represents to him (though he is coy about saying this outright) a kind of elegant simplicity which is also safe, comforting, and lazily reliable. Rock music was perceived in those days as ultra-nouveau, to the extent that high-culture stalwarts like Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem paid it lip service; with all the new sexual, political, and cultural freedoms won in the Sixties, what could goad Ray Davies into such nostalgic reverie? Because the question is both pertinent and difficult to answer, Davies opts to make fun of himself, turning his neurosis into theatrical comedy, and outdoing, on every possible "meta" level, the crass confessionalism which was selling in '71.

The other big confessional moments on Muswell Hillbillies ("Acute Schizophrenia Paranoid Blues," "Holiday," "Complicated Life") notably employ the language of psychiatrists (what could be called "psycho-babble") to make their points; Davies, as first-person protagonist, is "leaving insecurity behind me/ environmental pressures got me down," and is "too terrified to walk out of my own front door/ they're demonstrating outside, I think they're gonna start the Third World War," but he "don't need no sedatives to pull me round/ I don't need no sleeping pill to help me sleep sound." Engaged rock fans could be encouraged by the bathos of James Taylor to laugh at him; they could laugh along with Ray Davies. Davies bag of tricks did also take Muswell Hillbillies in some surprising directions, away from mere confessionalism. "Skin & Bone" is a song about young women and eating disorders; not only ahead of its time, but one of the few instances in which eating disorders have been addressed as an issue in the rock canon. Davies is sympathetic and humane but still plays the situation for laughs: "Fat Flabby Annie was incredibly big/ She weighed just about sixteen stone/ And then a fake dietician went and put her on a diet/ Now she looks like skin and bone." The chorus runs, "She don't eat no mashed potatoes/ She don't eat no buttered scones/ Stay away from carbohydrates/ You're gonna look like skin and bone." What's interesting to note is that this kind of obsession, with a woman's body needing to be ideally thin, is a twentieth century contrivance; women in Victorian society ("angels in the house") did not have the history of starving themselves half to death. If you were fat, you were fat; so what? Davies encourages us to believe that Annie was happier and more lovable when she was plump, and before the decadence of twentieth century mores destroyed her peace of mind. "Skin & Bone" is essentially a sympathetic piece of portraiture, and uses comedy to make a moral point. Put it next to "Sweet Baby James" and Davies' true status next to the singer-songwriters of '71 is easy to infer.

By '71, sympathetic portraiture wasn't particularly new to Davies (or to his American counterpart of the time, Lou Reed), but one task of Muswell Hillbillies was to address "America," a loaded subject for the all-too-English Kinks. The subject was loaded because America had never particularly warmed to the Kinks, and they were banned from spending much time there. But Davies' imagination was rich, and in producing a song like "Oklahoma U.S.A.," he cut as deeply into the heart of the American psyche as any rock songwriter (even including Bruce Springsteen) ever has. "Oklahoma U.S.A." is equally funny and sad; the female protagonist of the song is an average working-class worker (possibly in a factory or an office, and certainly the American counterpart of the characters in "Dead End Street") who feeds herself on her resemblance to movie stars. The way her daily life works, "She walks to work but she's still in a daze/ She's Rita Hayworth or Doris Day/ And Errol Flynn's gonna take her away/ To Oklahoma U.S.A." And the crux of the song, which is repeated more than once, follows from this: "All life we work but work is a bore/ If life's for living then what's living for?" The implicit message is that Davies has a vision of human essence which transcends the simply English or simply American; everywhere in the world, people try to get through their days as best they can, dealing with deprivations, disappointments, and despair. "Oklahoma U.S.A." is the most earnest sounding piece on Muswell Hillbillies; the music reinforces the pathos of the lyrics, and the honky-tonk ambience which makes the other songs so funny is in abeyance here.

Oddly, for an album which bears the weight of so much thematic richness, Muswell Hillbillies sounds relatively light and breezy. What's conspicuously absent are the sort of "daffodil" stylings which made the Sixties "London" Kinks so distinctive but also insured that they could be called an acquired taste. The music on Muswell Hillbillies includes a good amount of straightforward rock, some blues and the aforementioned "honky-tonk" stylings (consolidating that Davies wanted to tackle American music and Americana here), so that Muswell Hillbillies sounds more conventional than the Kinks other major albums. All of which could've added up to a major commercial success for them; after all, in '70 the hit single "Lola" (also pretty straightforward rock) put them back on the commercial map. Alas; it didn't happen that way, and Muswell Hillbillies became another rock cult classic. What made the Kinks so famously commercially unlucky: bad timing, lack of singles, a desultory approach to live performances, or just bad luck? It's still difficult to answer. By the late 70s, the Kinks did manage to go through a few commercial roofs, and sold out Madison Square Garden at least once. What needs to happen in 2012 is that what got buried for no good reason should come to the surface. Muswell Hillbillies and Sister Lovers both found ways to trump the singer-songwriters popular in those days; in terms of "artful confession," Davies deserves to be not only put on the map but be granted some sovereignty.

The '66 Explosion: Face to Face

If the year '67 in serious rock music had to do with direct confrontations with a nascent counterculture, the year '66 was more involved with writerly innovations. Suddenly, young artists writing rock songs could write about just about anything. What was stunning is that most of the major ones (Lennon, McCartney, Davies, Townshend, Dylan, Jagger) chose to employ this new freedom to address issues which would've been unthinkable to address in '64 or '65. The Beatles had a #1 hit single with "Paperback Writer," a song narrated from the point of view of a literary hack looking for an in to sell and publish cheap books. Revolver, the Beatles major '66 achievement, took the Beatles down some dark paths; "Eleanor Rigby" (also a #1 hit in the UK), a song about an aging spinster, "Tomorrow Never Knows," one of the first rock treatises on metaphysics (which used the Tibetan Book of the Dead as a reference point), and "Doctor Robert," a song about a New York physician who gave paying patients amphetamine injections. The Stones '66 opus, Aftermath, was equally dark; "Under My Thumb" assayed sexual politics in a ruthlessly disciplined way, "Mother's Little Helper" poked fun at pill-popping housewives, and "Lady Jane" used medieval royal courts as a metaphor for the courting techniques of a modern gigolo. Dylan's Blonde on Blonde hid behind an inscrutable wall of innuendos, Surrealistic imagery, and swirling carnivalesque music; and the Who were involved in upping the ante, where auto-destructive performances were concerned. It was a year of excitement and ferment, when (providentially) the mainstream media did not yet quite realize what was happening, so that the major rock songwriters were free to work unimpeded by circumstances which would later chain them to a sense of writing "for a generation." The Beatles, especially, became "spokesmen for a generation" after Sgt. Pepper, once the ferment was over and entropy sank in. If Dylan was already there, '66 marked the end of his forward momentum forever, and the inscrutability of Blonde on Blonde sank in as his last statement while on the crest of a media wave.

Into this mix came the Kinks' Face to Face. The Kinks, because they had been banned from the United States and had ceased to have hit records there, were even more free than the Beatles and Stones to do artistically as they pleased. In England, at least, they were still competitive; and Ray Davies clearly had competition in mind when he composed the best Face to Face tracks. What's worth noting instantly about Face to Face is that not all of the tracks fall into the trough of what I call the Kinks' "daffodil" style; lazy, rolling tempos, gentle marches (which even hint at oompah-band corniness), and a certain dandified decadence of which Oscar Wilde himself might've approved. Because Face to Face is musically varied, and because Ray Davies dares to tackle more serious issues than any of his contemporaries, I rate the Kinks' Face to Face as the most major rock achievement of '66. Interestingly, Face to Face went out of print in the US a long time ago. If you want to obtain a copy, you have to hustle. This gives Face to Face the aura of a hidden gem, which it very much deserves. It is the single strongest collection of Davies material. A song like "A House in the Country" brings many worlds together; musically, it's straightforward, pounding rock. What the lyrics satire is a British businessman of some kind, whose ferocious approach to his workaday life is rationalized because he has "a house in the country and a big sports car." Davies sings, "why should he care if he is hated in his home?" It's not just that this subject matter is outre for popular music; the absolute mundanity of the situation makes it unlikely that the song could even work. The song does work because the psychology of the businessman is nuanced, and bizarre. Why does having a house in the country make up for being hated? Why is it so necessary to construct a ferocious exterior?

To extrapolate something larger from this, Ray Davies was the first British songwriter to write extensively about class. This businessman's ferocity is middle-class, materialistic ferocity. It could even be upper-middle class ferocity. Oddly enough, between "A House in the Country," "Most Exclusive Residence for Sale," and the hit single "Sunny Afternoon," the theme of "houses" and class recurs on Face to Face. Houses are a representation of class status; in "Most Exclusive.." and "Sunny Afternoon," two aristocrats lose their houses and thus their status. Interestingly, "Sunny Afternoon" knocked the Beatles' "Paperback Writer" off the top of the charts. It was a shining moment for Ray Davies and the Kinks, because the Beatles in Sixties pop were hegemonic. "Sunny Afternoon" is performed in full "daffodil" grandeur, and if it works better than the Kinks' other daffodil pieces it's because when it was released it was a new musical style for them, and has a freshness to it which "Dead End Street," from later that year, does not. Crucially, the ruined aristocrat in "Sunny Afternoon" is "lazing," rather than working, the protagonist of "A House in the Country" robbed of his ferocity and put out to pasture. He has, in fact, been taxed to death. He's a misogynistic abuser of women divested of sexiness (Mick Jagger's protagonists manage to make sexual politics sound sexy), and a drunkard. Davies' big Face to Face mode is, in fact, satire, and the sense that he's "taking the piss" of British societal mores in what for '66 was a surprisingly sophisticated way.

Other Face to Face satires are gentler. "Dandy" works to spoof Swinging London bachelors, who "swing" from woman to woman without settling anywhere. Davies, as always, thinks about the aging process, and the fact that these hapless rogues will be left with nothing in the end. "Session Man" is a dig at musicians who don't express anything but what they're told to play, and play for money alone. It is widely thought that the song refers to Nicky Hopkins, a keyboardist who was ubiquitously present on rock sessions in England in the Sixties. "Little Miss Queen of Darkness" is the creepiest, and walks a fine line between being satire and sympathetic portraiture. The young woman in the song hangs around clubs, gets fixated on a single man who spurns her and never recovers. Because the protagonist of the song also spurns her, we learn that she's unpleasant to deal with socially; is, in fact, repellant. But "Swinging" culture meant that figures like this, "lurkers," were commonplace, and if no one noticed them it wasn't particularly unusual. Davies' artist's eyes saw that a figure like this was the dark side of Sixties London personified, and so he painted her portrait faithfully. "Holiday in Waikiki," on the other hand, is a jovial study of consumer culture taken to the nth; a tropical paradise become a commercial hell, with everything priced above its proper value. Since the dominant note of Face to Face is satire, and because the satirical value of each track is unique, there's no other album in the rock canon quite like Face to Face. Aging had not yet become a central Davies preoccupation; nor had the "daffodil" style become predominent. What converges is the feel and sharpness of a rock masterpiece. For the songs' poignance, you could even reasonably say that Face to Face is Sister Lovers-as-satire. The '66 explosion included one comet which has been partly lost; when it returns, it should return at the top.

Post-Avant Rock: The Other Alex Chilton (and Chris Bell!)

In 2009, I put up a blog post on my blog Stoning the Devil about a strain of poetry which went under the name "post-avant." Before then, no one had particularly defined what "post-avant" poetry was. I gave post-avant two definitions; one was meant specifically for post-avant as a form of poetry, one could be used as a catch-all phrase for any kind of art which could be deemed post-avant. That definition was "anything with an edge." If you want to apply a dictum to Alex Chilton's m.o. in everything musically significant he did other than (and including) Third/Sister Lovers, "anything with an edge" fits like a glove. Several works need specifically to be considered: Big Star's Radio City and parts of #1 Record, the Alex Chilton solo record (Jim Dickinson produced) Like Flies on Sherbert, and some of the material Chilton recorded in NYC in the Swinging Seventies. The Chris Bell solo album I Am the Cosmos, released fourteen years after Bell's death in '78, also counts, and fits under the "anything with an edge" rubric. Much of what came out of Memphis in the Seventies does fit under the post-avant rubric, and Jim Dickinson's whole fethishistic approach to making records was a post-avant approach. The Memphis crew which sustained these guys was edgy. Of all the accomplishments just mentioned, Big Star's Radio City is the most vaunted and, in fact, often goes higher on some rock critics' lists than Third/Sister Lovers does, so we'll deal with Radio City first.

Radio City is a collection of twisted power-pop songs which were recorded after Chris Bell left Big Star. Several key components of the songs distinguish the album. First and foremost is Alex Chilton's guitar-playing. He uses complicated arpeggios extensively and uniquely, so that Radio City is hardcore as a rock guitar player's wet dream; an album of indie guitar heroics. Chilton's playing isn't grandiose the way you'd expect to hear from Hendrix, Clapton, Beck, and Page, but it's phenomenally tasteful and expressive just the same. The way the guitars are mixed is dense, and the tone of the Radio City guitars is trebly in the extreme. Some musicians hear Byrds-like "jangle" in Radio City, but there's also a certain amount of Keith Richards "crunch." That's one of Radio City's big musical equations: the Byrds magically melded with the Stones, McGuinn with Keef. What makes the album so edgy is that the song structures and the lyrics are unconventional, and oddly formed. Though the melodies are catchy and solid, Big Star sound, always, on the edge of a nervous breakdown, with cacophony and chaos right around the corner. The songs have awkward breaks and pauses, Jody Stephens' punctuations on drums are abrupt and emphasize how combustible the musical approach is, and there's always a hinge to disarray. Lyrically, there's plenty of mischievous sex, in the Chilton tradition, but there's also a sense that Chilton is playing edgy games to thwart the inclusion of cliches: he sings "you're gonna get your place in the scene/ all God's orphans get fates in the dream/ now, you get what you deserve" in "You Get What You Deserve," or "She tells the men Go to Hell/ and where that's at is where I'm comin from" in "She's a Mover." The album has a number of centerpieces: "September Gurls" is a straightforward slice of hard rock candy, with a memorably trebly guitar break, and "Daisy Glaze" is a tempo-changing, warped bit of inchoate angst which includes some of the most intricate arpeggiated guitar work in the rock canon. Those who prefer Radio City to Third/Sister Lovers like the twisted approach and that many of the songs are uptempo; the edginess of the approach is that all the power-pop elements are inverted away from standard usage. Radio City influenced the approach of 80s bands like the Replacements and 90s power-popsters the Gin Blossoms, and for AmerIndie and college radio remains a reference point.

Like Flies on Sherbert, Alex Chilton's late 70s classic, is more an exploration of kitsch, a swan-dive into total cheese that listens like an attractive junk-heap. The cover photo, by Memphis native William Eggleston, has the same aesthetic; if the picture (affixed to this post) seems to veer towards misogyny, it's with a twist towards lightness and satire rather than serious intentions. The title of the album can also be taken as a kind of metaphor; Chilton, Jim Dickinson and their cohorts were themselves like flies on the great big "sherbert" of kitshcy Americana, where pop music was concerned. This album is about "roots" retooled, and mixes covers like "Girl After Girl," "Alligator Man," and even K.C. and the Sunshine Band's "Boogie Shoes," with unsettling, drunken Chilton originals like "Hook of Crook" and "My Rival." Chilton's songs have an undertone of violence here which is lacking on the Big Star albums for the most part: he sings "I would kill to pursue my will," or "my rival/ I'm gonna stab him on arrival/ shoot him dead with my rifle." Still, the feel of the album is jovial, and Chilton sounds (somewhat unlike on the Big Star albums) like he's thoroughly enjoying himself. Chilton mixed the album himself, and in true, edgy "junk-heap" fashion, stray "white noise" and detuned instruments are let in to enhance the ambience of intoxication and the outre. The major piece Chilton recorded himself in NYC, "Bangkok," fits neatly into this vein; it's an exploration of sleazy, deviant sex done up in rockabilly finery. It also functions as an embrace of kitsch (which could be taken as a rejection of the Big Star ethos): "Margaret Trudeau, Jackie O/ Madame Nu and Brigitte Bardot/ Bangkok!" Chilton was clearly frustrated by the inability of "serious" material to sell (Sister Lovers wasn't even released until '78), so that diving into the frivolous was a kind of escapism for him and his Memphis cohorts.

The music Chris Bell was recording all through the Seventies in Memphis was much more earnest and less demented than Chilton's. Bell stayed in confessional mode after he left Big Star. He also converted hardcore to Christianity. A song like "Better Save Yourself" is dark to the point of bleakness, also uses arpeggiated guitars placed up in the mix, and represents a state of torment which gives a clue as to why Bell died at a young age (27) in 1978. Bell's recordings have an interesting ambience, as he was dedicated to studiocraft as well as songcraft, and the airiness he built into Big Star's #1 Record is present on I Am the Cosmos, too. But he doesn't twist things the way Chilton does, and his edge has to do with psychological collapse and ambivalence: "I really want to see you again/ I never want to see you again" he sings on the title track. "Speed of Sound" manages to sound lush in spite of Bell's torment, and the acoustic guitars are miked in such a way that they define a large amount of auditary space. Clearly, Bell was attracted to how Big Star's #1 Record, the one on which he played the largest role, sounded, and his solo recordings are a natural companion to #1 Record.

In terms of "post-avant" rock music, others in the Seventies, from Fripp, Bowie, Eno, and Byrne on one side to punk and New Wave on the other, were attracted by a post-avant approach. David Bowie, in particular, made a conscious attempt not to put out anything that didn't demonstrate some kind of edge, and for Bowie (whose intentions were at least partly commercial) this was a risky move. Chilton and Bell didn't not bear the weight of holding up a commercial edifice the way Bowie did; they were safely tucked away in the margins. They worked without being "welcomed to the machine." As such, they had almost complete artistic freedom. What they chose to do with that freedom carried with it the extremity of their personalities, and the extremity of the Memphis subculture which gave birth to those personalities. Mid-Town Memphis, in the Seventies, was its own nexus and its own center of gravity. If it remains worth looking into, it's because it had its' own way of nurturing talent, and the musicians drawn like flies to both the auto-destruct and the twisted ambience of the place produced works of popular musical art rich enough to be called sherbert. William Eggleston's "Dolls '70" proves conclusively that this ambience was felt by other artists in other disciplines as well; whatever it is, it's something about America, freedom, sex, despair, and good times which won't quit.

Narrative Development: Third/Sister Lovers

I have already put into print the notion that, for me, Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers is the greatest rock album of all time. The caveat enjoined has to do with sequencing- that Sister Lovers takes its position at the top of the hierarchy only when put together in a certain way. Tracks like "Downs," "For You," and covers of the Kinks and Jerry Lee Lewis need to be dropped, "Nature Boy" slotted between "Holocaust" and "Kangaroo," the album end with "Take Care," etc. The miracle of I-Tunes is that anyone can accomplish this for themselves in 2012. What I want to offer here are some further notes as to what I have noticed about Sister Lovers as I continue to listen to it closely. What I've previously surmised is that the narrative of Sister Lovers involves a love triangle between the unnamed protagonist (Alex Chilton) and two female characters, Lesa and Dana. It now seems signifcant to me that "O, Dana" follows "Femme Fatale"; Dana's position vis a vis Alex Chilton is that of an unattainable femme fatale. The protagonist/ Chilton character is more richly drawn than at first appears; he sings to Dana in "O, Dana," "you seldom know what things are/ do illusions go very far?" He's spiritually and emotionally wise; thus, the logic behind the inclusion of "Nature Boy." One of the mysteries of Sister Lovers thus becomes, why does a protagonist this sensitive, this wise, and who is already involved with the Lesa character, fall for someone as hard and clannish as Dana? The simple answer is that this character has an Achilles' heel: he's a masochist. He likes to be abused.

One pursuant thing which emerges from "Holocaust" is that this protagonist has a tendency to wallow in negative emotions, which Dana and her friends reinforce. He sees through Dana (whose eyes "couldn't hide anything" in "Kangaroo" and who "seldom knows what things are"), but likes to be hurt by her anyway, and ignore Lesa into the bargain, thus incurring Lesa's wrath. The album is resolutely first-person and personal; we never really hear Lesa and Dana's thoughts. Only one song features a significant reversal and recognition at once: "Nighttime." What the lyrics hint at obliquely is that Alex attempts to introduce Lesa to Dana and her clan, and Lesa rejects them out of hand: "get me out of here/ get me out of here/ I hate it here/ get me out of here." The song concludes on a note of devotion to Lesa, and the way the album ends ("Blue Moon" into "Take Care") reinforces this. The album begins and ends with Lesa, and is occupied with Dana and her posse in the middle; that's the structure. If Dana and Lesa are both rejected by the end, it's because the protagonist is too sensitive to extend himself anymore. The aimless drift of "Big Black Car" returns at the end, with more focus and pathos. If the album has one central lyrical message, it's this: to be touched is to be hurt. The resolution isn't particularly comforting, and is manifestly uncompromising. The staunch avant-gardism of the music makes Sister Lovers a package girded against crass commercial success. The irony is that Sister Lovers, musically, is not only melodically rich but melodically stunning. "Holocaust," in particular, would not be so haunting if the melody and chord changes weren't as instantly memorable as anything Paul McCartney or Brian Wilson ever wrote.

Owing to John Fry's engineering, Alex Chilton's voice is high in the mix, and the production values around Sister Lovers are quirky but immaculate nonetheless. There are even a few virtuosic touches like the "walking" bass on "Femme Fatale." Between the density of the lyrics and the richness of the music, there would seem to be few rock albums which Sister Lovers does not dethrone. Recent attempts to do something similar, like the Decemberists' The Hazards of Love, falter around unattractive, melodically unmemorable music, and overblown lyrical conceits. The albums I have recently spoken of as cohesive (Strange Days, Satanic Majesties, Sgt. Pepper, Velvet Underground and Nico) are only semi-cohesive in comparison with Sister Lovers, even if they reflect upon broader, more political themes. Other rock "relationship albums," like Blue, Rumours, and Layla, don't sustain any narrative intensity, or any narrative at all, for that matter; each song is its own entity, even if all the songs are thematically similar. What's interesting about Sister Lovers, other than the fact that the songs "talk back" to each other, is that though it's a cult favorite, not many people have noticed that much to distinguish it. Works of art which grow slowly and quietly often start that way. Sister Lovers does in fact have the rare potential, for a rock album, to keep generating surprises after a hundred listens. It offers a protagonist as Southern, and Gothic, as any created by Faulkner or Carson McCullers. "Holocaust" sounds so claustrophobic partly because it's meant to represent Southern heat- a swampy, sultry, sick, drunken Southern night. Of such nights is Sister Lovers hewn.