Welcome to the latest newsletter where we delve back into our powerpop heritage and rediscover Big Star!
Last week we looked back at how Squire decided on the band name name, and how it was as much a product of local connections, named after the shop 'Squires', that Squire rehearsed above, before discovering the name had serious historic connections to modernism!
Similarly, Big Star's name is as much a product of their Memphis roots, and was also named after a shop, over the road from where they recorded!
The band was formed in the early 1970s by Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, and Andy Hummel. After spending countless hours recording at Ardent Studios in Memphis, the group would often take breaks and walk across the street to the Big Star supermarket—a Southern chain of grocery stores with a glowing neon star in its logo.
The band members, especially Chris Bell, were enamoured with the idea of juxtaposing the name of this humble, everyday store with the larger-than-life aspirations of rock stardom. The name "Big Star" was a tongue-in-cheek reference, simultaneously ordinary and extraordinary, reflecting the band's desire to craft timeless, unpretentious music with universal appeal.
The name also had a visual component. For the cover of their debut album #1 Record, they worked with a friend who created a neon sign based on the store’s logo, which became an iconic image in its own right. The decision to name the band Big Star was serendipitous, yet it captured the essence of the band’s ethos—combining Southern charm with a reverence for the pop craft of the British Invasion.
Interestingly, the bands second option was to borrow the name of the restaurant next door to Big Star, called Sweden Kream! You can see Ardent Studios over the road from the sign!
The Big Star supermarket eventually closed and became a car repair shop,
2024 marks not only the remarkable 40th anniversary of the Squire September Gurls album, but also the 50th anniversary of the Big Star ‘Radio City’ album, which included the song ‘September Gurls’!.
It’s incredible that when we chose the song as the lead off cover on our follow up to Get Smart, (which celebrated its own 40th anniversary last year with the UK tour), the Big Star album was a mere 10 years old.
Its sometimes hard to image what it was like to discover music in pre internet days, but back then when the Big Star LP was released, it hardly sold in the UK, perhaps a mere 500 copies, so if you didn’t own it you were unlikely to ever hear it. It wasn’t until The Bangles covered the song in 1986 that the homage to the song gained traction, and as later bands mined the 1970s power pop heritage, so slowly Big Star became a hip influence to cite, with bands such as The Replacements, Teenage Fanclub, and The Posies referencing the band, in recordings, interviews and with The Posies joining with original members Alex Chilton and Jody Stevens in 1993 for the reunion and later release a live album.
However, although The Bangles covered September Gurls, and later used it as the title of a compilation CD, they weren’t the first to cover the song, but neither, it turns out, were Squire!
In fact it was The Searchers, who first covered the song! Recorded and mixed at Rockfield Studios, between August-October 1980, and released on the 1981 LP 'Loves Melodies’ (titled Play For Today in UK),with a great version, but with a clear Searchers take on it, combining their signature ‘Needles and Pins’ sound with a rock arrangement. What's fascinating about their LP is that they had signed to Seymour Stein’s New York Sire Records (who were also The Ramones label) and they were produced by Ed Stadium who had recorded all those classic Ramones albums in New York, so lending a new wave approach to the Searchers, updating their sound.
Interestingly, the second artist who covered the song was an American regional artist Gary Charlson based in Kansas City, Missouri. His version, was part of a live in the studio recording, captured on July 30 1981, and released as an EP on local label Titan Records called ‘Real Live Gary!’ It remained, like the Big Star record, an undiscovered powerpop cult classic. It is an EP of cover versions, presumably the bands live repertoire, given the bands proficiency in the studio performance, and the track list includes Badfinger ‘No Matter What’, The Byrds version of Dylan’s ‘My Back Pages’, Hey Deanie by Shawn Cassidy, (but actually written by Eric Carmen of The Rasperries!) Gary’s powerpop credentials were clearly intact, his voice is spot on, and the live approach brings out a great version of all the songs. He’s still performing and playing as Honeywagen and releasing CDs via Kool Kat Records.
The Titan label compilation is also a fascinating snapshot of the sound of powerpop/new wave regional recordings from Kansas, in the centre of USA, around the same time as The Plimsouls and Paul Collins Beat were making their first records on the West Coast in Los Angeles and The Smithereens were forming on the East Coast in New Jersey. Apparently, the Gary Charlson EP was also due to have been re-released by Bomp! Records in LA, titled Undercovers, but never got past the white label stage. Nevertheless, it shows that Greg Shaw was aware of a wider powerpop scene during that period.
Of course this detail was invisible to us at the time of choosing to record September Gurls in 1984, and it’s fascinating to look back and connect all the different versions of the iconic song and hear how each band has interpreted the song.
We still think that it was Squire’s version that ‘nailed it’! We have heard many times that it was the Squire version that first brought Big Star to the attention of fans who were into Squire, and how they went on to discover a treasure trove of music through the gateway of the Squire September Gurls album and investigate the broader catalogue of Big Star, uncovering a hidden gem in the world of power pop and influencing a new generation of listeners and musicians alike.
Finally, there is also a great acoustic version on this super rare Anthony Meynell - Live In Tokyo CD!
See you next week!