Notes

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Big Star aren't just rock's greatest cult band; they were arguably rock's first cult band. Like Magellan, they discovered a new route to iconic status, but theirs was more circuitous and didn't involve such niceties as sales, audience, tours, or really anything resembling actual success. Instead, they maintained a slow, dim burn throughout the 1970s and 80s, their memory kept alive by critics, collectors, record store clerks, and younger generations of musicians such as R.E.M. and the Replacements. It's easy to read that history in the band name and album titles, which today play like ironic gestures toward out-of-reach celebrity. But Big Star were sincere about being big stars and having #1 records. They didn't set out to be cult: Striving for celebrity and confirmation, they wrote what they thought should be hit records, and they played to please. Their appeal should and could have been broad. By comparison, their loyal audience nearly forty years later is a fluke.

Despite their unprecedented longevity and surprising durability, Big Star have been under-anthologized, with a strange string of lackluster releases. Alex Chilton's pre-band solo debut, 1970, took more than 15 years to make its way to record store shelves, and the band's first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City, have been joined at the hip now for decades, starting with the British combo release in 1978 throughout Fantasy/Concord's recent remaster. Big Star's final album, Third/Sisters Lovers, gathered dust for nearly five years before finally getting a small release, and even that tribute album was delayed for nearly a decade. During that time, The Best of Big Star and Big Star Story tried foolishly to whittle the band's short career down to one negligible disc.

Combining studio tracks, live cuts, demos, and unreleased recordings to reveal new sides of the band, Rhino' 4xCD Keep an Eye on the Sky sounds like the one reissue that finally gets Big Star right. It picks up right before the band formed, with solo tracks from both Chris Bell and Chilton as well as songs from previous bands Rock City and Icewater (the Box Tops are missing, and certainly not necessary to the story). Each iteration of the line-up is represented here, although there's nothing from 1993's comeback Columbia: Live at Missouri University or from 2005's already forgotten In Space. This set wisely keeps its eye on the 70s.

These four discs ultimately do what any good box set should do: In tracing the band's trajectory from power-pop progenitors to post-pop tinkerers, Keep an Eye on the Sky presents a history of the band that could not be gleaned from the albums themselves, using finished studio tracks along with demos and rarities to give a fuller picture of the musicians, their dynamic, and their songs. This type of repetition can be fatal in some reissues, either offering distinctions only a true diehard could love or valiantly covering up a deficit of unreleased material. But here, the approach goes a long way toward humanizing a band that has been largely mythologized even into the Internet age. You can listen in on band practice or late-night jam sessions at Ardent, or just wander across happenstance pairings, such as Chilton singing "Nature Boy" while William Eggleston-- yes, that William Eggleston-- plays piano. That these new versions of familiar songs feed the cult rather than expunge the mystery is perhaps due to Ardent founder and engineer John Fry, whose studio work brings out the subtle flourishes in these different takes: the handclaps on the sped-up version of "O My Soul", the rich strums that underline the chorus of "The Ballad of El Goodo", the crisp guitar sound that gives "You Get What You Deserve" its bite. He's the fifth Big Star, as crucial to these early recordings as George Martin was to the Beatles or Martin Hannett was to Joy Division.

Big Star developed its particular sound in a very short time. The first notes of "Feel", the #1 Record opener, still sound like a clarion call, a signal that something exciting is about to go down. They live up to that promise through their first two albums, but on their third, with Bell and bass player Andy Hummel gone, Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens gradually disassemble that power-pop sound, seemingly indulging every oddball impulse: jive-talking through "You Can't Have Me" and "Kizza Me", adding French-language backing vocals to the Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale", writing a paean to Jesus Christ. Third and its outtakes show Big Star in its death throes, giving up on the idea of power pop to the people and just making strange, sad, beautiful songs for themselves. "Holocaust" in particular, especially the haunting piano demo here, is devastating in its damaged beauty.

Keep an Eye on the Sky ends with a cuts from three concerts recorded at a small Memphis club in 1973, featuring the original line-up minus Bell. They run through songs from the first two albums, including jammy performances of "She's a Mover" and "Don't Lie to Me" as well as covers of T. Rex, the Kinks, the Flying Burrito Brothers, and Todd Rundgren. It's a strong show, a better glimpse at Big Star the live band than any of their actual live albums, but what stands out is the relative lack of audience response. Big Star were opening for Archie Bell & the Drells, and it's clear that the crowd was already impatient with the first act. As a result, it sounds like Big Star are playing to an empty room, which feels thematically appropriate. People wouldn't start clapping until many years later.