Radio City, the second album from Memphis legends and “power pop” godfathers Big Star is among the latest subjects in Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series — a popular collection of pamphlet-style treatments on individual albums.
The Radio City volume is written by Bruce Eaton, a Buffalo, New York-based jazz concert producer who is an acquaintance of Big Star singer Alex Chilton. In the preface, Eaton recounts first buying Radio City at a used bin of a Buffalo record store in 1976 and three years later finding himself on stage with Chilton playing the Big Star classic “September Gurls.”
In all honesty, the Radio City book can be rough going at first: Eaton’s repeated faux-self-deprecating descriptions of himself as a “vinyl junkie” and recovering “rock snob” become annoying. (Typical example: “For rock snobs, the more obscure your favorite band, the better.”) And his fandom sometimes results in overwritten overstatement, as when Eaton connects his post-college love of Radio City to the Sixties pop he listened to on the radio as a teenager: “It’s as if all the music coming out of all the little transistor radio speakers … had somehow been beamed into outer space to some distant planet and then transformed by a band of musical alchemists into something both fresh and yet familiar and sent back to Earth in a stream of glowing super-charged electrical particles by a wizard of sound.” Um, yeah dude. And the book is hampered by frequent copy-editing oversights.
But what Eaton’s book has going for it is a personal connection to Chilton that provides him with rare access to the somewhat reclusive icon and an insistence on focusing more on the music itself and the circumstances of its recording rather than the more familiar personality-based story of the band’s brief initial life.
