A half-century after Memphis power-pop band Big Star released their first three studio albums, their music has entered the rock canon through a kind of trapdoor that connects classic rock with indie rock. Singer, songwriter and producer Chris Stamey is playing Sunday at The Basement East with the Big Star Quintet — a group that includes Big Star drummer Jody Stephens along with a lineup of musicians who have been influenced by the sound of Big Star’s 1974 album Radio City — performing that album as well as selections from 1972’s #1 Record and 1978’s Third. For Stamey, this is a way to connect to the audience that was there all along.
“A lot of people discovered listening to the Big Star records late at night on their own, and have a personal relationship with those records,” Stamey tells the Scene from his home in Chapel Hill, N.C. “But there’s a difference that comes about when you hear them in a hall with hundreds of people who have also felt that same way.”
Stamey, who grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C., tells me he and his future bandmates in power-pop band The dB’s heard the #1 Record track “When My Baby’s Beside Me” on local radio in 1972. You hear the spirit of Big Star’s Southern-fried Anglophile rock on The dB’s 1981 albums Stands for Decibels and Repercussion. Stamey played and recorded with Big Star singer, songwriter and guitarist Alex Chilton in 1977, during a year when Chilton decamped from Memphis to New York to play shows in the city.
Big Star famously played few shows and sold few albums in the ’70s. Still, for many post-punk bands, the skewed bite of Chilton and Big Star-cofounder Chris Bell’s guitar playing, which harked back to the British Invasion, provided a template for their style. Along with Stamey and Stephens, R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills, Wilco singer and multi-instrumentalist Pat Sansone and guitarist Jon Auer — who has played with The Posies and the re-formed version of Big Star that began performing in 1993 — bring the Big Star repertoire to life as Big Star Quintet.
On his own, Stamey cut Chilton and Tommy Hoehn’s song “She Might Look My Way” on his 2023 album …The Great Escape. Back in 1977, Stamey recorded a version of the song with Chilton (who died in New Orleans in 2010) on a demo for Elektra Records. Stamey’s version includes work by producer and musician Terry Manning, who worked with Big Star on #1 Record. Manning played all the instruments on Escape except drums and rhythm guitar, while Stamey’s vocals are suitably Chilton-esque.
Meanwhile, the harmonic palette of Stamey’s new album Anything Is Possible serves as a reminder that one of the great contributions Big Star, The Beach Boys and The Beatles have made to pop is via harmonic innovation. Anything Is Possible features vocal harmonies from New York neo-power pop band The Lemon Twigs on three tracks, including “I’d Be Lost Without You.” As he says, “I sent them a few harmony ideas remotely, because they couldn’t come down here, and they sent me back the most glorious harmonies.” “I’d Be Lost Without You” updates the kind of American art song favored by Brian Wilson, Van Dyke Parks and, occasionally, Chilton himself. Stamey will play songs from Anything on Monday at the original Basement with bassist Byron House and keyboardist Jen Gunderman.
For a Big Star fan like me, who has tried for years to fathom the mystery of what might be Big Star’s best album, Radio City remains allusive, enigmatic and endlessly replayable. No other classic rock album refuses to boogie so firmly, and Chilton, Stephens and bassist Andy Hummel never play in anything like a fast tempo. In that, Radio City reflects the tempo and groove of Memphis music itself.
“The idea was, they’re Southerners,” Stamey says about discovering Big Star in the long-ago ’70s. “And they’re doing this in a time when the Allman Brothers were the be-all and end-all. We just felt like we were less alone.”
