Deep South Radio

“Years ago, I used to loiter around in a Memphis record store staring at a double LP by the band Big Star that was hanging on the wall. It cost $75. Thanks to my meager summer lifeguard salary, I certainly couldn’t afford it, but I came in to the store so often, pretending to look at the other records while clearly mooning over that Big Star one, that the clerk cut me a deal one day and let me have it for half-price, although it was surely worth more. I took the record home and played it on my dad’s old Bang and Olufsen stereo over and over again.

Months later, that same clerk, in a fit of beneficence so grand it is still unmatched in my life, sent me a copy of the band’s second album, which he’d found at a garage sale in North Carolina. It still ranks as one of the best gifts I’ve ever received.

In the intervening years those albums, “#1 Record” (1972) and “Radio City” (1974) served as the food of love: They were the soundtrack to first kisses (I’d put it on deliberately), to road trips, to debilitating post-breakup sadnesses.

So when Alex Chilton, Big Star’s lead singer, died last week at the age of 59, I felt sad. But that sad feeling was overtaken by a stronger, stranger one, a feeling of time passing.

I never thought about how old Chilton was — his best music was young. His songs, in their small way, could express the youthful anguish of being stuck in a small town, of having a crush so powerful that you thought it might kill you, of having so much fun at a party that you found yourself walking home from it humming aloud. The songs rocked when you needed them to.

But for all of his records’ beauty, Chilton’s only major commercial success came from the single “The Letter,” which he recorded well before his Big Star days, with a band called the Box Tops in 1967. Big Star’s own albums were plagued for years by label troubles, and Chilton’s subsequent solo releases were much more experimental and generally misunderstood.

But in the 40-odd years that followed his initial forays into recording, Chilton’s records became a secret handshake for pop artists such as R.E.M., the Replacements and the Posies. Elliott Smith and Wilco are just two of a number of bands who have covered Chilton’s songs, almost but never quite matching the delicacy of the original versions.

Now, with Chilton’s passing, I hope new legions of fans will moon over his music at record stores, even long after the news of his death has passed. How grand must it have felt to create music so timeless that it outlasts the body of its author?”