The death of Big Star and Box Tops frontman Alex Chilton — who passed away yesterday at a hospital in New Orleans, where he’d lived for the past couple of decades — is the latest in a stretch of recent losses for the Memphis music scene, most notably Jim Dickinson, Willie Mitchell, and Jay “Reatard” Lindsey.
Chilton, of course, had worked with Dickinson, most notably on the final Big Star album, Third/Sister Lovers, and on his notorious solo album Like Flies on Sherbert, and the two were always linked, with Dickinson also presiding over the recording of the Replacements’ tribute song “Alex Chilton” in 1987.
Chilton’s death happens on the eve of what was meant to be a busy period for the modern incarnation of Big Star, a group that included Chilton and original drummer Jody Stephens alongside new hands Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow. With the Big Star legacy back in the news thanks to a high-profile reissue campaign last year, the band was set to perform this Saturday night at the South By Southwest Music Festival in Austin, Texas, a performance preceded by a panel on the band. That panel was to include Stephens and original bass player Andy Hummel, but not, notably, a publicity-shy Chilton. The band was also slated to make a rare hometown appearance with a May concert at the Levitt Shell. As of now, it remains to be seen whether those concert appearances will be canceled or reconfigured, but the early word out of Austin was that the panel was likely to still be held, but now as a tribute to Chilton.
