The second disc is where the barrel scraping begins, but to the set's credit, much of what's included- 15 tracks, all but two previously unreleased- actually helps expand the history of Bell and Big Star. "Speed of Sound", "Get Away", "I Got Kinda Lost", and "Make a Scene" surely could have found a place in Big Star's oeuvre, too, given their due in the studio. Here, "Better Save Yourself" hangs heavy and haggard, and Bell's vocals on "Look Up" are downright heartbreaking, giving songs such as it, "Though I Know She Lies" and "There Was a Light" the same sense of shaky, tragic inevitability that pervades Third/Sister Lovers. To call most of these songs "down" would be as unjustly reductive as calling Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers "depressing." It may be true on one level, but it fails to get at the soulful essence that makes Bell so special.īack in Big Star, Chilton and Bell shared a "Chilton/Bell" writing credit, but that was as illusory as "Lennon/McCartney." Away from Big Star, Bell's solo work proves him Chilton's equal, or at least equally inclined toward a sort of melancholy but melodic proto power-pop (the "pop" part echoing the Beatles, of course, but with the emphasis on "power," at least in terms of the emotions it contains and evokes). In some ways it's almost fitting that, finally given his moment in the spotlight, he's stationed just left of the bright beam, still illuminated but not totally out of the shadows, either.īut seeing as the original CD issue of I Am the Cosmos was, by necessity, cobbled together from Bell's remains, what, exactly, was left in the vaults? The new reissue features the original album (as such) on the first disc, 12 songs presented in a slightly re-sequenced order.
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It's there for people to buy it, but only if they know where to look first. Case in point: while Big Star gets its own four-disc Rhino boxed set, an expanded reissue of Bell's I Am the Cosmos gets relegated to Rhino's Handmade imprint. Granted, Bell never got his Volkswagen moment, and admittedly he remains on the cultier end of the cult act spectrum. It turned out that Bell, between demo sessions, working in his parents' restaurant, gigging around Europe with various pick-up bands, and dealing with his ongoing depression, had amassed more than enough strong material to make him a cult hero, almost akin to an American analog of Nick Drake, another struggling songwriter lost too soon but unearthed and embraced later (thanks, in no small part, to his own reissues). That's all most heard of Bell's solo work until 1992, when Rykodisc compiled his extant studio material on I Am the Cosmos, which fittingly showed up alongside a spiffy definitive reissue of the scattershot Third/Sister Lovers and followed some renewed interest in Bell's writing (This Mortal Coil covered both "I Am the Cosmos" and "You and Your Sister" on 1991's Blood, the latter song sung by then-Breeders Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly). In fact, it wasn't until Big Star's Third/Sister Lovers showed up on shelves (however haphazardly) that Bell made his solo bow: the single "I Am the Cosmos" backed with "You and Your Sister", songs coincidentally (or not) steeped in the same sense of sadness and loss that marked Big Star's swan song.
![made in the am album deluxe edition made in the am album deluxe edition](https://di2ponv0v5otw.cloudfront.net/posts/2020/12/20/5fdfeb14463d4fffa6997535/s_5fdfeb27275e55ff7e38101f.jpg)
Prone to serious depression and chemical indulgence, he began fitfully working on solo material as soon as he exited Big Star (though he reportedly participated in at least some of the Radio City sessions), and if there was every reason to expect good things from him, Big Star's own bad luck was indication enough he'd have just as much trouble getting people to hear it. Alex Chilton's writing partner Chris Bell was gone by the time the band released its second album, 1974's Radio City, and by the next year Chilton had essentially pulled the plug on the group, leaving behind a few loose ends later collected as the once-abandoned, later-resuscitated masterpiece Third/Sister Lovers.īell died in a car accident not long after that album's eventual 1978 release. Certainly Big Star itself (current iteration aside) didn't really last long enough to bask in any belated good will. History is written by the winners, but in the case of Big Star it's the losers- the quiet obsessives, the hopeless romantics "in love with that song" (to quote Paul Westerberg)- who kept the band's legacy alive under the threat of perpetual obscurity.