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Big Star Quintet

Sep 03, 2024 By Matthew Berlyant Photography by Matthew Berlyant Web Exclusive

It’s easy to look somewhat cynically at these types of anniversary tribute shows, perhaps even calling them cash-ins or the like, but that would be greatly missing the mark were it to be applied unfairly to this, a 50th-anniversary celebration of Big Star’s 1974 magnum opus Radio City, the second album released under the Big Star name and the last to feature contributions from founding member and singer/songwriter/guitarist Chris Bell. By the time of the album’s release, Bell had left, thus ceding dominance of the band’s sound and ethos to fellow singer/songwriter/guitarist Alex Chilton.

As such, the sound became less audibly Beatles and Led Zeppelin-influenced, but more audibly in thrall to The Byrds, The Beach Boys, and other key Chilton influences. It also turned darker and more introspective, perhaps inadvertently leading the way to the recordings that would later first be released in 1978 as Sister Lovers. That said, it wasn’t fully dominated by Chilton, as evidenced by the Andy Hummel-penned “Way Out West.”

All of that aside, Big Star Quintet are an all-star tribute featuring sole surviving member Jody Stephens on drums and vocals joined by multi-instrumentalists Pat Sansone (Wilco), Jon Auer (The Posies), Chris Stamey (dB’s), and Mike Mills (R.E.M.) all known for participating in previous Big Star tributes playing #1 Record and Sister Lovers in full. In other words, you couldn’t pick a better set of musicians to do this, and boy did it show.

The first set consisted of Radio City in full, but after the short break, the irony is that it was during the second set that the real fireworks began. All five members of the quintet sang beautifully, really capturing the vulnerability, yearning, and teenage/twenty-something longing inherent in compositions such as “Watch the Sunrise,” “Thirteen” (which a particularly drunk audience member kept yelling for all night, finally getting it at the end of the second set; hope he was happy), “Night Time,” and many others.

Perhaps the highlight of the entire evening, even after all that, was the Sansone-sung Chris Bell tune “You and Your Sister,” originally the B-side to his only solo single (and also memorably covered by This Mortal Coil later on), the immortal “I Am the Cosmos” (also played on this evening during the second set and sung, appropriately, by Auer, who always sung Bell’s songs when Big Star was active again from 1993 to Chilton’s death in 2010), the second-to-last song played on this evening. What a revelation this was!

Simply put, this is great, timeless, God-tier power pop/classic rock played and sung by those who knew it best, two members who played in Big Star at various points either during both or one of its incarnations, and members of Big Star-inspired bands like the dB’s and R.E.M. that knows this music forwards and backwards. What more can one ask for?