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For Carolyn

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In October 1972 the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen number-one singles achieved by acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade. Iggy Pop was holed up in a studio recording Raw Power and David Bowie had just given birth to Ziggy Stardust, but the album charts were dominated by heavy rock (Black Sabbath’s Vol 4), progressive rock (Yes’s Close To The Edge) and inane pop (David Cassidy’s Cherish). Since the Beatles had disbanded two years earlier, the short, catchy guitar-pop song had all but disappeared from vogue. But there was a quartet trying to keep that musical torch burning. Big Star, a Memphis band that took the best elements of the Beach Boys, the Beatles and the Byrds, was ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and lengthy, self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening they were playing a show to less than a hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.

Like most of the shows that the band had already played, they got only an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never heard a Big Star record but they did know who the lead singer was: Alex Chilton had sung a handful of hit singles with the Box Tops a few years before. For the show, Chilton, like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel, was wearing a casual shirt and jeans, had shoulder-length hair and was constantly fiddling around with his amplifier.