ALEX CHILTON- LIKE FLIES ON SHERBERT

Alex Chilton is awesome. If you enjoy plain old rock music or some really amazing songwriting then you owe it to yourself to get into this man and his odd body of work. The back story that everyone is maybe familiar with goes something like this:

A teenage Chilton somehow lands himself a job as the guitar player in the 60's one-hit-wonders The Box Tops and ends up singing on their biggest hit, that band splits and Chilton befriends fellow songwriter Chris Bell. After awhile they gather two other musicians and form the now legendary Big Star. They write and record two of the greatest and most influential power-pop albums of all time but no one hears them and no one who does seems to care enough. The band splits sometime in the early 70's, Chris Bell becomes a junkie and ends up killing himself while Chilton spends the rest of the decade in a permanent state of depression and intoxication. He regroups with a former Big Star bandmate to record some songs for a new album as The Sister Lovers (the two of them were dating a set of sisters) but it ends up being released as a Big Star album entitled Third, which the label thinks will yield more interest for the album. It doesn't and the album flops, which is no surprise to Chilton at this point. It would go on to be the most lauded and influential of The Big Star LP's but at the time it was just another failure in an ever-expanding list. Shortly after that, Chilton went back to getting fucked up on a permanent basis and somewhere in the haze decided to do his first solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert. A few years later, Chilton became an in-demand producer for new-wave and punk bands and finally earned the long-overdue praise for the material he penned with Big Star. An untouchable cult-figure from the mid 80's on, Chilton enjoyed critical success and unwavering support from the independent music community until his death a few years ago...

But this album... oh boy. One critic said it was the worst album ever made. People hated it's amateurish production and incredibly sloppy playing but listening to it now, you get to hear a power-pop album that predates lo-fi, indie-rock and alt-country by about twelve years. I think it's great and so did Chilton. He said it was made during the worst period of his life but it somehow managed to be a fun reminder of that time instead of the drug-addled mess everyone made it out to be. Decide for yourself I guess.

HERE