Big Star News

Clockwise: Big Star's al pastor; Pinkberry; Belly Shack's belly dog with kimchi salsa; Sprinkles cupcakes Photo: ehfisher /Flickr; herkie /Flickr; Belly Shack; Sprinkles We can't deny that we've noticed a Los Angeles influence on Chicago's restaurant scene of late, whether it's Bill Kim putting L.A. furniture and playing L.A. music in Belly Shack ...

The economy may have been in its worst recession since the Great Depression, but that didn't stop record companies from putting out a bumper crop of box sets.

Like most Big Star fans, author Robert Gordon overheats a little in the biographical essay that accompanies this handsome four-disc box set.

The holiday season is upon us once again, and music is always a welcome gift. Here are reviews of some of the latest, greatest hits and multi-CD box sets that are now on store shelves.

While there are many positive things to be said about digital distribution, now the primary means for buying new music and quickly driving the CD to extinction, one thing you can't do with an MP3 file is wrap it up and put it under the Christmas tree.

Once, when speaking of The Velvet Underground , Brian Eno said, "Only 5,000 people ever bought a Velvet Underground album, but every single one of them started a band." The same thing can probably be said of Tennessee power-pop forebears Big Star.

Good luck finding a record store to buy them, but there is no shortage of new musical boxed sets available this season.

Some 42 years ago, a Memphis bar band happened upon a young white kid who, somehow, sang like an old blues singer.

Where was Alex Chilton on Wednesday night? At the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, he was onstage, more or less, standing at the far right, sometimes even near his microphone .

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers, "Live Anthology'' Some bands are studio titans while others are kings of the road.

Anyone who picked up this past week's dead-tree edition knows that it was our annual holiday guide --our all-encompassing reference book for what to get those omnipresent jerks in your life known as friends and family.

This show seems half-assed in a way that everyone is frankly really pleased with, most of all Alex Chilton, of course, a blithely nonchalant power-pop deity loping amiably through a clutch of '70s hits with the aid of a couple '90s alt-rockish power-pop dudes who deified him at a late 2009 show at a Masonic Temple in Brooklyn, ostensibly to promote ...

The mighty Big Star in their original early 1970s incarnation. L-R: Jody Stephens, Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel.

Chilton, to the letter "A song like 'Soul Deep' is obvious enough, a patented commercial sound, yet within these strictures it communicates with a depth and sincerity of feeling that holds the attention and brings you back often." That's the late, great rock critic Lester Bangs, waxing enthusiastic - and surprisingly lucid - regarding the ...

Hovering on the verge of their 20th anniversary, The Mother Hips have just released their seventh studio effort, Pacific Dust , and, to the surprise of no one who's spent a little time with their work, it's another end-to-end pop-rock jewel.

We all know how daunting - nay, obnoxious - it can be to find holiday gifts for the listener who has nearly everything.

In Space , these Memphis power-pop legends' overdue studio follow-up to 1978's revered Third/Sister Lovers , didn't exactly convince anyone that the Big Star magic was still alive.

The term, "Memphis Curse," was bantered around quite a bit amongst musician friends when I resided there for three years in the 1990s.

You've heard the Big Star commotion. The boys are at it again, this time with a honky-tonk taqueria in the old Pontiac space opening Monday.

Memphis' Ardent Records has resurfaced with a little buzz lately after releasing a Big Star box set and reissuing Chris Bell 's I Am the Cosmos .