Top 100 ALbums of the 1970s - #66 - Big Star - Third/Sister Lovers (1978)

I sometimes think of post-punk as the third stage in the classic "5 Stages of Grieving" paradigm. Punk is anger. Kids with guitars were lashing out at the system, making a lot of noise and having no small amount of fun while they did it. It didn't matter if they couldn't play. It didn't matter if their recordings were coated in a layer of distortion or white noise. That was all part of the honesty of it all.

But as the 70s progressed, that level of anger simply wasn't sustainable, and so punk rockers began to burn out, slipping into the third stage, depression. The aesthetics were still there. The amateur singing/playing, the lo-fi recordings, the simple song structures, but gloom and melancholy were now inescapable. The fact that this album is called "Third" ties into this theory a little bit. What doesn't help is that fact that Third was actually recorded in 1974, before punk proper even had a chance to get going. Like so many of the albums on this list, I guess it was ahead of its time.

Third/Sister Lovers marks the final album from Alex Chilton's Big Star, as well as his own personal breakdown. The recordings were such a mess that they didn't find an official release until years later, and even then no one couldn't agree on an "official" track listing. 

There's a lot of tragedy here, which is an odd juxtaposition with the music itself. On song after song, Chilton manages to conjure up lovely, sweet melodies, arranged simply for maximum pop appeal. But there's something wrong. Most bands would be thrilled to come up with songs like "Thank You, Friends", "O, Dana", and "Jesus Christ" but Chilton sounds downright miserable as he sighs and grumbles his way through the lyrics.

Perhaps the inclusion of a Velvet Underground cover, "Femme Fatale", is a clue to how the band was really feeling at the time. The Velvets were always the best at barely cloaking disfunction behind well-crafted, but inexpertly performed pop gems. It seems like Big Star owes a debt to them in more ways than one.

One of the things I like about this, and other albums on the list by Nick Drake and the Modern Lovers, is how raw, honest, and personal the music is. Hemingway once said that, to be a writer, all you had to do was sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. I feel like these albums are embracing that sentiment in musical form.

There were a lot of leftover outtakes from these sessions that didn't make the original release, although subsequent reissues have restored most or all of them. Most fun are covers of "Nature Boy" and the Kinks' "Till the End of the Day." The truth is, little details like the inclusion of extra songs, or even the track order, make little difference. It's a solid album, no matter how you listen to it.