smartgrrrl's guide to stuff

This is not going to be a tribute to Alex Chilton (R.I.P.) because honestly I don’t know enough about Big Star or the Box Tops, aside from the more well-known and deservedly much-loved tracks. And I can’t even tell you that my introduction to Alex Chilton was via The Replacements, as it was for so many people who, coincidentally or not, are around my age. I certainly heard “Alex Chilton” before I heard Alex Chilton, but “The Letter” notwithstanding my real introduction came in the form of The Bangles’ covering “September Gurls” on Different Light. I was 14/15, and I played the hell out of this album, until eventually I was more taken with this song (and “If She Knew What She Wants,” by Jules Shear) than with the radio-friendly singles like “Walk Like an Egyptian” and “Manic Monday.” It’s not surprising to me now — “September Gurls” has that jangly guitar sound that gets me youknowwhere, it’s lush and plaintive and gorgeous. Take a listen:

It would be another year, maybe two, until I “discovered” The Replacements (and that happened via R.E.M., and one of these days I think it would be fun to sit down and create a flow chart of my history with music)

(also it’s a little embarrassing now to admit that I lived in the Twin Cities during the 80s and only really started listening to The Replacements at the tail end of it, but, you know, I’m going to chalk that up to being juuuuuuuuust young enough that I couldn’t be a part of that scene, you know?)

and then maybe a year after that that I first heard “Alex Chilton,” and even then, like Matthew Gallaway says in his post which you all should just go over and read right now, seriously, why are you still here?, for whatever reason I didn’t race to find out more. And then I was in college and went to see Robyn Hitchcock play a show with Matthew Sweet opening, and in thanking Matthew Sweet for opening for him Robyn Hitchcock said, “He’s great, he should be opening for Alex Chilton.” And it occurs to me now that he’s always had this sort of aura around him because of The Replacements song, and because of what Robyn Hitchcock said, and so I’ve subconsciously always thought of him as an impenetrable wall of coolness that I wasn’t worthy enough to scale. I know that’s dumb. And it occurs to me now that this is ironically hilarious. I don’t think I consciously listened to anything Alex Chilton sang himself until I was well into graduate school, close to the end of the 90s, when I didn’t care anymore about being cool. So this is not going to be one of those “this is what Alex Chilton means to me” posts.

But I’ve spent the better part of the last 24 hours reading all sorts of those kinds of posts written by people who can remember exactly where they were and how they felt the first time they heard song X, how Alex Chilton influenced their own creative pursuits, how Alex Chilton’s music got them through that rough patch. These personal histories make up a spectacularly rich mosaic, a living testimonial to the immeasurable significance that one person can have.

Basically it just feels as though someone who wasn’t ever supposed to die just did.

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