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Aug 10, 2015 Web Exclusive By Frank Valish

The late ‘70s were an interesting time for Alex Chilton. While achieving great success a decade earlier fronting The Box Tops with hits like “The Letter” and “Neon Rainbow,” among others, Chilton had been long since removed from mainstream musical relevance. His most recent band, Big Star, while going on to see critical and cult approval as well as widespread indie-rock influence, had dissolved in the wake of middling success and popular disinterest.

Chilton, a Memphis native, had moved to New York City. He was beginning to embark on a solo career that would include the strange initial forays of Bach’s Bottom and Like Flies on Sherbert, albums that mixed cover songs with bizarre experimental pop. He was also spending his time playing with rockabilly/punk collective Tav Falco’s Panther Burns, an outlet far different from any of his previous musical endeavors.

The year 1977 saw Chilton in the middle of these dissimilar worlds, seemingly all at once. He released an EP, Singer Not the Song, with Terry Ork’s Ork Records, the title of which was taken from the EP’s cover of the Jagger/Richards composition “The Singer Not the Song.” Chilton had also begun associating with Chris Stamey, later of The dB’s, who became part of a band that Chilton played with around town, which he dubbed Alex Chilton and the Cossacks.

Ocean Club ‘77, credited only to Alex Chilton, is a perfect document of Chilton’s disjoined late-‘70s period. Across 16 songs and 50 minutes, Chilton is in beautiful voice (and the sound on this reissue is stellar). Beginning with Bach’s Bottom‘s jaunty “All of the Time,” the set list is everything any Chilton fan could want, a mix of Box Tops, early- and Third-era Big Star, cover songs, and cuts that would feature prominently on Chilton’s first two solo albums. Segueing into a faithful yet blissfully irreverent version of “September Gurls” and then to a version of Chuck Berry’s “Memphis, Tennessee,” the often inscrutable Chilton seems above all to be having fun. “Windows Hotel,” introduced as a new song (and previously only available in demo form on the Beale Street Green bootleg) is decidedly New Wave, and even a bit reggae, in its angular, jumpy delivery. Chilton covers The Seeds’ “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” He introduces his Box Tops hit, “The Letter,” by saying, “Please Mr. Postman.” “Nighttime,” from Big Star’s Third follows, along with the cheeky “My Rival,” which would later anchor Like Flies on Sherbert. Chilton covers The Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” introducing it as “a song by Charlie Manson.” And the set ends with two Big Star classics, “Way Out West” and “O My Soul,” followed by “She Might Look My Way,” which he co-wrote with lost Memphis power pop legend Tommy Hoehn, and a cover of Nelson Slater’s “Dominating Force.”

Ocean Club ‘77 is the perfect mix of all things Chilton, performed at a time when he was distinctly between musical worlds. To find a gem like this amid a period which can easily be seen as Chilton’s lost period is, for Chilton cultists, the equivalent of finding a lost recording of Brian Wilson performing Smile in 1968. It’s a true revelation. (www.nortonrecords.com)