What strikes me about your comments is the lack of perspective you seemed to have had about music itself as you heard the Big Star records. I fell victim to this myself as the ’80s progressed and, for a while, I fell for the big con that the Talking Heads, R.E.M., Husker Du, the various attempts to combine “roots” and “punk” that would result in the inanities of “No Depression” music, and other things of that ilk (back when people took Elvis Costello seriously) had somehow superseded the entire history of pop music and specifically rock and roll that had come before it. You know, like the idea that non-rock had somehow become rock, as in the “lounge music” movement and all that stuff. None of which is to say that the music of the ’80s was necessarily bad–I myself don’t ever return to most of it, but I do like the G0-Betweens and Prefab Sprout and hip-hop and so forth, there’s always good music.

What I think the original critics of Big Star perceived was the links to the music of about 5 years previously. The Zombies, the Byrds, the Beatles circa ‘66, Moby Grape, Buffalo Springfield, the Beach Boys…the high end of late-’60s pop music. All the original reviews caught this flavor. Later on, by the time I heard Big Star, we also realized this. I was born in 1958 and was 19 when I heard the three Big Star albums.

This puts me, generationally, in the camp with Chilton and Chris Bell, more or less. I’m also from Tennessee and realized a long time ago that Memphis was, despite its faults, the most un-doctinaire and fuck-it-all city in American musical culture. The Big Star records could have never been made in a company town like Nashville.

To my ears in ‘78 the Big Star albums seemed like some of the only un-dated ’70s music. I had been discovering all the early-’70s music that my generation’s fucked-up obsession with “progress” a la prog-rock and all that other bad, post-Beatles ’70s shlock had obscured: Funkadelic, Eno, James Brown at his peak, classic ’70s soul, late Stax music, and on and on. The other ’70s. This is what Big Star is a part of; plus, the production of the Big Star records is relatively austere, purist, classic, and the playing in the Memphis style of spare rock ‘n’ roll. In other words, this was a band with a link to a tradition that the rock fans of the ’80s could only dream of. As people get further away from what rock ‘n’ roll sort of was in the ’50s and ’60s, they become more convinced of their strange ideas of progress. I see this every day with people under 35–they think Can is a great band but regard James Brown as a joke, or dismiss the great Miles Davis electric music of the era as a relic of a jazz sensibility they only dimly perceive.

This is because they spent too much time worrying about fuckin’ David Byrne or somebody, or Jack White, or whoever–latecomers to rock. Chilton was to some degree a precursor to these performers and fans, but Alex liked r&b and understood its impulses. Who among the younger generation can say the same? We’ve had plenty of worship of Lou Reed, but I don’t see anyone giving Ernie K-Doe or Chris Kenner their props, as Chilton always did.

I suppose condescension toward the past is somewhat inevitable, given the nature of rock and music history in general. I certainly used to think Sinatra was a joke, and spent hours listening to shit like Jethro Tull in 1974 when I could’ve been listening to Howard Tate or the JB’s. As for Westerberg and “Alex Chilton” the song, I never thought much of the song or of the Replacements. They’re OK–to me they were about as significant as John Fred and His Playboy Band or any number of other post-punk groups I’ve forgotten the names of. The skill, verve and artistry of Big Star isn’t there on their records, as far as I can hear, just sounds like more of the same old calculated outrage and studied incompetence to me. Some good songs. But I feel sorry for a generation who has to derive inspiration from stuff like this, such a late moment in what was already a specimen of Junk Culture.

It sounds like you got the picture, and good for you.