Where the Downtown skyline overlooks the Wolf River harbor and the Mississippi River, cosmic sounds will soon reverberate from the Maria Montessori School Amphitheater, where local musicians will come together to perform the songs of the late Chris Bell at the school’s ongoing River Series. Bell, the mastermind behind Big Star and his posthumous solo record, I Am the Cosmos, was born and raised in Memphis. While he saw little commercial success in his lifetime, neither his still-growing international cult fanbase nor his family have forgotten about his acclaimed body of work.
One of those carrying the torch for Bell is Brittain Wells, whose mother, Cindy Bell Coleman, is Bell’s younger sister. Wells now helps manage the school’s River Series concerts and wanted to honor the 50th anniversary of Bell recording the song “I Am the Cosmos,” the title track of Bell’s lone solo album. “Maria Montessori School is where our 3-year-old son attends,” Wells says. “How sweet that we can celebrate 50 years of this magical music as a family, a school family, and a Memphis community, while also raising money for Chris’ great-nephew’s school.”
The concert, set for Saturday, June 8th, at 5 p.m., will feature Big Star drummer Jody Stephens, Van Duren, Greg Cartwright, Adam Hill, Alex Greene, Krista Wroten, and more. The Turnstyles open the show.
Wells, 38, was born years after Bell was tragically killed at age 27 following a 1978 car wreck on Poplar Avenue. “It’s amazing. I never knew him, but I feel him all the time through his music and his fans,” Wells says. “Seeing how many people are devoted to his legacy and music makes me happy. I’m thrilled he can live on in so many ways.”
Along with “I Am the Cosmos,” Bell will also forever be entwined with the brick hallways of Ardent Studios in Memphis. That’s where the guitarist/vocalist spent countless nights co-engineering his band’s now-classic 1972 debut, Big Star’s #1 Record (Ardent/Stax Records). On that disc, the original Big Star lineup, which comprised Jody Stephens and the late Alex Chilton and Andy Hummel, crafted pristine power-pop standards like “In the Street,” “Feel,” and “Thirteen.”
After the LP failed commercially, a distraught Bell tumultuously exited the band and even quit music for a year. But from that dark period came inspiration, and a born-again Bell ultimately landed on his feet inside Shoe Productions, where he tracked “Cosmos,” his melancholy magnum opus. It all started at Huey’s on Madison Avenue, where Bell happened to sit next to sound engineer Warren Wagner, who’d just co-founded Shoe.
“We were sitting at the bar talking, and Chris said he liked what I put together over at Shoe,” Wagner told me while I was researching my book, There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star. “Within the next day or two, Chris calls, and we end up in the studio one night with just him and me. … He made some acoustic recordings, and then we got a band over there with him. We ended up doing ‘I Am the Cosmos’ in one night. We probably didn’t do more than two takes.”
For the “Cosmos” session, Bell enlisted drummer Richard Rosebrough and bassist/keyboardist Ken Woodley of the band Alamo. Though both have since passed away, they were interviewed for There Was a Light and shared vivid memories of recording “I Am the Cosmos.”
“Chris was fun to work with at Shoe,” the late Rosebrough recalled in 2013, two years before his death. “He always had a smile on his face, a kind of evil grin. The ‘cat that just ate the canary’ expression, but he wouldn’t talk a lot. He was this shining star over in the corner of the room. He was excited to be in a different studio with different people, playing his own songs.”
Woodley, who died last year at 74, also recalled an eccentric, witty Bell. “He was quiet and could sometimes look a bit stern. He could also be a perfectionist,” Woodley said in 2017. “He’d say, ‘I know you can do better than that.’ I’d be like, ‘Chris, I just learned it!’ But we always got along great. I wasn’t a part of the Big Star clique, the people he’d grown up with, so we were friends on a different level.”
Though often described as introverted in daily life, he was anything but quiet in the studio, especially while tracking “I Am the Cosmos.” “Chris would turn it up just as loud as he could,” Rosebrough recalled. “He’d get this piercingly bright, brilliant sound. It’s all distorting and melting down, but it’s just a dynamite sound.”
The song still powerfully resonates for many, including Jody Stephens, who will play drums on “I Got Kinda Lost” and “Get Away” at the River Series concert. “It just comes in so heavy. Not as people define ‘heavy’ these days, but emotionally heavy — and instrumentally, too.”