Big Star’s second album doesn’t so much arrive as it careens into the room.
Radio City is the sound of brilliance, half-drunk and half-desperate, with Alex Chilton steering the whole thing like he knows the car’s alignment is shot but he can’t help gunning it anyway. Chris Bell had walked away after #1 Record, leaving Chilton with freedom, instability, and a studio full of ghosts. What followed wasn’t polish or perfection, but something far more enduring: a flawed, flickering masterpiece that became the DNA of alternative rock.
“You get what you deserve.”
To understand the tension inside Radio City, you must rewind to Chilton’s teenage years. At 16, he was already famous — fronting the Box Tops, belting out “The Letter” with a voice far older than his years. He knew what pop success felt like, and maybe that’s why he distrusted it so deeply.
By the time he walked into Ardent Studios with Big Star, he wasn’t chasing another hit single. He was dismantling the very machinery he’d already seen from the inside, writing songs that clung to pop melody while muttering under their breath about the futility of the chase.
Ardent itself shaped the sound of the band. Tucked away in Memphis, the studio was the rare place where kids obsessed with the Beatles could lay their ideas down with the same sonic care given to Otis Redding or Isaac Hayes across town at Stax. The walls practically sweated Southern soul, but inside Ardent’s rooms, Big Star learned to bend that lineage toward chiming guitars, fractured harmonies, and the strange middle ground between garage mess and radio polish.
On paper, they should have soared. Their first album, cockily titled #1 Record, had glowing reviews and songs that could have lit up FM playlists (its opener would later echo through a sitcom’s ’70s nostalgia haze). But the business failed them: Stax’s distribution (which handled Ardent’s releases) faltered, leaving the record barely in stores; by the time Radio City arrived, promotion was still a mess. They weren’t Laurel Canyon mellow enough for California, not heavy enough for arenas, not rootsy enough for Nashville. Instead, they fell through the cracks, a great American band with no country to claim them.
Which is exactly what Radio City sounds like: a secret work of genius, half-hidden, muttering to whoever’s patient enough to listen.
The record opens with “O My Soul,” a ragged funk-rock charge, Chilton spitting defiance over a groove that threatens to fall apart but never quite does — his way of saying Big Star wouldn’t play it clean just to fit in.
Bassist Andy Hummel gets his turn at the mic with “Way Out West,” a looser jangle, like the Byrds brought down to the cracked Memphis pavement. “What’s Going Ahn” follows, fragile and shimmering, Chilton half-believing in beauty as Teenage Fanclub’s whole future waits in its glow.
“You Get What You Deserve” is a would-be hit, half pep talk and half sneer, the band mocking the industry’s empty promises. Then comes “Back of a Car,” restless guitars chasing freedom that feels like futility, a road song with no destination — the teenage dream already curdling.
Midway through, “September Gurls” shines like the crown jewel: pure jangle-pop perfection, cracked just enough to remind you it’s human. “She’s a Mover” turns up the Stones’ swagger, blustering and stumbling in equal measure, a parody of arena rock posturing. The record closes on “I’m in Love with a Girl,” just Chilton and a guitar — unmarketable intimacy, a refusal to end on anything but honesty.
Radio City is messy, and that’s the point. The harmonies don’t always land; the production veers between polished and thin. But that imperfection is precisely what makes the record endure. Big Star were rebelling against the smooth surfaces of commercial rock, showing that you could find more truth in the cracks than in the polish. Real life doesn’t sound like Abbey Road — it sounds like this.
And the bands that mattered heard them. R.E.M. built their entire early vocabulary on Big Star’s jangle — Peter Buck practically lifted his guitar tone from Chilton’s 12-string shimmer, and Michael Stipe turned Chilton’s mix of opacity and ache into its lyrical twin. The Replacements idolized Chilton so much they wrote a song bearing his name and had him guest on another (“Can’t Hardly Wait”), turning ragged imperfection into something sacred. The dB’s carried Big Star’s blueprint straight into the college rock ’80s, Southern kids again marrying British Invasion melody to American grit.
By the early ’90s, the Posies and Matthew Sweet made their devotion explicit — Frosting on the Beater and Girlfriend are practically love letters to Chilton and Bell, drenched in Big Star’s melancholy hooks. Elliott Smith took it even further inward: you can hear Radio City in his hushed acoustics and fractured whispers, especially on Either/Or. What Chilton muttered in Ardent Studios became the inner soundtrack for a generation that didn’t believe rock had to shout to matter.
The irony is that Big Star’s cult grew because of failure. With so few records in circulation, each copy became a kind of hallowed text, passed hand to hand, whispered in college dorms and record shops. Critics kept the flame alive, and by the time reissues hit the ’80s, a new generation was ready to call them prophets.
Even the album cover art weighs in: a blurry photo of a bare light bulb hanging from Ardent’s ceiling — not iconic, not staged, just half-lit brilliance caught before it burns out.
That’s the paradox of Radio City: a commercial failure that became scripture. The industry ignored it, but anyone who would build the next chapter of American rock studied it like gospel. It proved that songs don’t need mass approval to last. They just need honesty, ache, and the courage to stumble toward transcendence. Somewhere between the jangle and the static, they found what they once said about “Paint It, Black”: that beauty and despair were always humming the same note.
You are likely to hear a Big Star song in the wild while waiting for a touring indie act with power pop leanings to take the stage at Star Community Bar. Snuggle up close to the venue’s Elvis shrine for the full-on Memphis experience.
Megan’s favorite song on the album is “What’s Going Ahn”. This track continues to weave Chilton’s cool nonchalance over pungent lyrics that admit love is a mystery he’s still trying to solve. Alongside hauntingly beautiful stacked harmonies of Chilton’s voice, he admits “I like love, but I don’t know” and “I resigned from everyone ever since I was young”, as if to say nothing can help or hurt me now.
It sounds like the studio manager left hours ago, but Chilton has finished a bottle or two and is spewing his guts into the microphone — and just short of blacking out — he manages to press record. The former teenage blue-eyed pop sensation no longer has crowds of screaming fans surrounding him.
Things are quieter now due to his own battles with addiction, which leave him trying to keep his footing amidst the rubble left over from failed relationships.
Wendell’s favorite song on the album is “Back of a Car,” as it absolutely bangs right from the start. It is teenage restlessness dressed up like liberation, only to later reveal itself as something closer to paralysis. The guitars churn forward like they’re chasing the horizon, but Chilton’s voice knows the horizon isn’t moving — freedom’s a mirage, love’s a trap, and every late-night drive loops back to the same fluorescent parking lot.
What keeps it from stalling are Jody Stephens’ wicked drum fills, exploding like fireworks in the rearview mirror, turning dead-end longing into a pulse that still feels alive. It’s the sound of wanting everything and knowing you’ll settle for nothing, a joyride where the radio blares too loud to cover the silence.
Big Star can be found on Bandcamp, all streaming platforms, and wherever records are sold. You are likely to find their songs played on SiriusXM stations Deep Tracks, Underground Garage, and The Spectrum. Also, if you ever have a chance to catch one of their occasional reunion shows with The Big Star Quintet, you should definitely do that.
The band’s lone surviving member, Jody Stephens, is still on the skins, and he’s assembled an all-star cast of Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Pat Sansone (Wilco), John Auer (The Posies), and Chris Stamey (The dB’s). Wendell caught this act in Nashville a few months back and was absolutely blown away.
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