Big Star

Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train.
Lonely days are gone,
I'm a-goin' home,
'Cause my baby just a-wrote me a letter.

I never got one of those letters, but I always wished that I could have. I was five years old when that song was a hit, and Alex Chilton was only sixteen when he sang it, but it stayed with me. Maybe it was the "air-o-plane" or the vision of a "fast train" that appealed to my childhood fantasies about travel. More likely it was the essential desperation found in those lyrics and in their soulful delivery. It would be another decade before I could truly identify with the longing found in "The Letter," but I could still identify strong emotion when I heard it.
Twenty-some years after I heard that song, I was reintroduced to Alex Chilton. The Replacements had a song about him. The sang about how "children sang by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes around." Little did I know just how influential this one guy's voice could be. Rolling Stone thought enough of his work to put all three of his Big Star albums on their list of the five hundred greatest. He never wanted to be Bruce Springsteen. "What would be ideal would be to make a ton of money and have nobody know about you," he said. "Fame has a lot of baggage to carry around."
And so Alex Chilton continued to travel light. Right up to the very end. He was scheduled to play at the South By Southwest Festival in Austin this weekend. Alas, he won't make that gig. For the rest of us, we'll have to be content to follow the urging of the Replacements: "I never travel far, without a little Big Star."