[2003-10-01] A good argument could be made that both BMG Music Club and Columbia House Music Club are, like remaindered books ¹, little more than extravagantly easy ways to beef up your personal record collection without having to do the vicious legwork involved with finding new music. I don't know how either of the two MCs are run, or if at all anymore or if they've been Napsterized or what, but when I was a lying, multiple-membership 16 year old, I'd get a little sheeny catalog once a month, send a card back, and either get CDs or not. Rare was the time when a CD was in the catalog that was really new or exciting or big, which from this vantage makes sense but at that point I just figured the MCs were just really really out of touch.

We'd get the catalogs (we being most of my friends, all of us ran this scam of having multiple memberships, usually under our real names, then the names of our dogs, then under our Golden Smog/porn names (middle name+street you grew up on, giving us things like Daniel Veronica, Lewis Brighton, Mark Stryker, you get the idea)) and of course there wasn't anything we were really looking for: those catalogs worked the magic they did by just offering so much, at prices that made you feel literally stupider if you didn't buy at least one CD ($10 for the first, $3 for each after!). So you'd swallow hard and say "Yes, fine: I need a copy of Prince's Purple Rain" or something like that. And not that there was anything wrong with any of the CDs we ordered: they just weren't what we were exactly hankering for. I was 16 in 1995, which pretty much meant if it wasn't DMB, Soul Coughing, Ben Folds Five, G. Love, Ben Harper or Wilco, I didn't much care.

So our mailboxes got stuffed with like old midyears Miles Davis, or George Clinton, or the Cars, or the Police, or Curtis Mayfield -- the sort of discs we intuited needing but not really knowing for sure why. Like that Spearhead song where the guy's gotta buy a spool of thread but can't remember why, we were buying those discs because we needed them but wouldn't remember/realize why for a few more years (those years, of course, giving us enough clarity to listen to no more DMB and pretty much all the M.Davis we can get). And it was almost completely (this isn't an advertisement, I swear) risk free: it was cheap (there was no file swapping at the time: we had FTP if we wanted to share something big, and when I say we I don't mean me: I hadn't a fucking clue about that stuff) to get the discs, we were teenagers so had vast liquid assets (comparatively), so the transaction was simple on just about every possible level.

And then there were the esoteric moments. There was the interview or article where someone we loved, say Ben Folds, saying he loved Fleetwood Mac's Rumours and so, a check in the box and a month later, we got that. It was this fortification, I guess you could call it: we were building libraries of music but we didn't actively like or even know enough music, at that age, for all-out libraries, so secondhand info was great, the best secondhand info coming from the people we loved most. Nick Drake got rereleased sometime right around then, 94 I believe, and Westerberg said at some point that he loved Drake so check, month, boom.

Of course the early- and mid-1990's were anachronistically rife: no no no, Nirvana was not first, there was the Pixies, no Pearl Jam wasn't first, there was the Who, no Wilco was not first, there was Son Volt and the Flying Burrito Brothers. We chased all these threads, my friends and I, chased back through the 80's and 70's and 60's if necessary. We Found, over and over, ever vigilant for whatever chalice some musician we were blasting at all hours had sipped from back in halcyon days.

The kick, for me, the First There Was that's pretty much spelled out my musical tastes for all foreseeable future, was when Big Star got back together for a reunion show in 1994 in Columbia, Missouri. Big Star was everywhere on the musical family tree, was someone REM and the Posies and the Replacements crowned: pretty much the whole Royal Guard of Good Music that I was listening to was in some way or another genuflecting, nodding back to Big Star. Who the fuck was this Big Star shit? It didn't sell in the stores, of course (Big Star never sold, even when they were together as a band), and so it was simple: check the box, wait a month, put it in the player.

The disc that'd been released was of a concert in which Jody Stephens and Alex Chilton, two of the four founding members, were joined by two of the Posies (Frosting on the Beater was their big like 1994 or something album, with "Dream All Day" being their one video-backed single), Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer. That's, to be more clear: two like 40something musicians joined with two 20something ones, and the young guys had way more chops: they were doing the Grind, musically, with the Posies, but Chilton released albums only sporadically (as is infamous for his live shows) and Stephens was a session guy and label man at Ardent records.

The concert album is rough and jagged and weird. There are undeniably beautiful moments on it, but just as prevalent are the really bizarre, What The Fuck Is This type noise that, at age 15 or so, didn't know how to handle, literally. The last song on the album is called "Slut" and the chorus shouts "S-L-U-T, she may be a slut but she looks good to me", which may have worked in the 70's, but in the 90's a headbob around that catchy as hell chorus was a little...icky.

Big Star came out, technically, with three CDs while they were a band, though the third album is still a hotly contested issue with fans. The two for sure, legit Big Star releases are #1 Record and Radio City, 1972 and 73 respectively, and they're astounding in more ways than I'm gonna bother with here (the loose platitudes regarding this band are anywhere you want to look).

The concert album, titled Columbia I believe, was mostly old Big Star tracks, with an Andy Hummel (the former bassist for the band, not even in music anymore) track and a Chris Bell track. Chris Bell was the other singer/songwriter/guitarist when the group started in '71, the co-writer of the first album and pretty much absent from the second. Chris Bell played on that one disc, he and Alex Chilton (find the Replacements song of the same name for an amazing time) had a falling out, and that was, for Chris Bell's place in Big Star, that.

The Chris Bell track on Columbia that the revamped Big Star plays is the title track of the CD, released thirteen years posthumously, of Chris Bell songs, "I Am The Cosmos." It's... my nature is to aggrandize things, load and thicken what I love and claim it's actually, more than just me loving something, the best __________ ever made. So when I say Chris Bell's "I Am The Cosmos" is the best song ever made, I fully submit that that's a weakness of mine, that hyper-overstatement. However (you saw the caveat a mile away, didn't you?), this song is, for me, cupped along with a handful of other songs that are simply It, the Best, Ever, All Bets Completely Off.

There's not enough to read about Chris Bell out there, as far as my money goes, but I don't know if this is the essay to correct that. Yes, he was an incredible musician, yes depressed, yes into drugs at different times, yes a questionable death, yes yes yes, all of it. His lone album, I Am The Cosmos, came out from Ryko in 1992 and collects, sadly, everything he ever did -- a total of 15 tracks, though a few of them are remixes. What you'll read everywhere about Big Star is that they were, are, pure pop classicists, and that they cut a mold that literally hundreds of other bands have taken and run with (the Replacements are typically considered their, alternately, most egregious or most respectful heirs). For a long time Chris Bell's donation to that sound was not really considered -- Alex Chilton was, even when he was fighting the reputation tooth and nail, a perfect songsmith, one of those guys who just pisses gold records. And Bell died so young, with so little proved, that he was sort of easy to leave unconsidered. ²

That's, thankfully, changed, and a single listen to I Am The Cosmos will disabuse anyone of the notion that Big Star was Chilton's vehicle. Chris Bell could fucking write, and the album, unintended by its author for release but thank god for concerned brothers (David Bell, Chris' brother, got it out with Ryko's help), is a testament to that.

But there's only one song you need to hear. Just one track, track #1. Describe a kick to your guts. Go ahead. Is it something like this (I was only going to quote the first part, but it's too perfect, cohesively, to orphan off and offer separately:

Every night I tell myself
I am the cosmos
I am the wind
But that don't get you back again

Just when I was starting to feel okay
You're on the phone
I never want to be alone

Never want to be alone
Hate to have to take you home
Want you too much to say no, no
yeah yeah yeah
yeah yeah yeah

My feelings always have been something
I couldn't hide
I can't confide
Don't know what's going on inside

So every night I tell myself
I am the cosmos
I am the wind
But that don't get you back again.
I'd really like to see you again
I really wanna see you again...(repeat till end) ³

Okay, I don't know how you like your eggs, how you like your autumn days, how you like your revenge, how you like your kisses, how you like your broken heart songs. I don't know where you live, you don't know where I do, and I wasn't born when this song was written and you probably weren't either (74 or so). But what I know, absolutely beyond a doubt, is that if you've had your heart broken, if you've had that awful claw of a feeling like something's so fundamentally fucked and Wrong but you can't do shit about it, then you know the first four lines of this song, even if you've never heard the song before.

You know how the first line starts with a sort of waver in his voice, a trumped up confidence he wants no one to bluff. Hear the guitar back there, starting on a bright D chord so straight it sounds ironed. You know the second and third lines almost carry their own wry smile, like Chris Bell knows, just like you know, what a dumb fucking thing it is to say: I am the Cosmos. Right. The wind, too? Awesome. Hear the guitar back behind the first track, just a half-step down from the first line, a confused and ready-to-be-sad sounding C#m. Hear the third line's guitar, the E, G, and A chords, building up to balance the second line's confusion. Those two lines together, musically define the musical trick of building up bright sounds to belie how nervously the words are being sung.

You know the fourth line. You know the half-hopeless and half-hopeful and all howl tear of it. You know, after that last lightening music line, that sound of building up, that the only way is back down, and hear it: the G, F#m and E of the denouement of the statement, the smile on the way to the door, flowers behind your back, getting snapped off and shoved away right back down the stairs from whence it came.

I could keep going on like this. I could get worse. Literally: Every note in this song in one way or another destroys, or is capable of it. It's almost too much to listen to, sometimes: Bell's vocals sound so cried out, so overwailed, that it's hard to listen to when you're in a really great mood and fucking impossible to listen to if you're hurting. And the lines of this guy: they may not stand up with their tough sorrowful positions just on reading them, but when you hear the crack in Bell's voice when he sings "Just when I was starting to feel okay, you're on the phone", when you know that crack because a phone call is exactly what he wants most and the one thing that'll just start a new spiral. When you hear him sing "Don't know what's going on inside" you can hear the tears behind that line, you can hear how much he'd rather say almost anything -- "I love you!" "I hate you!" "You owe me thirty bucks still!" -- than the awful senseless truth of what he actually feels.

I know, very very much, that I'm pretty much completely skipping the whole non-autobiographical dictate of music and writing, and that's fine, but Chris Bell's music is nearly all in first person, and it's hard, after reading the liner notes or whatever else you can find regarding his career, not to feel that, like Nick Drake, he wrote the songs he wrote because he felt the songs so deeply, and out came this shimmering noise. But just so it's out there: my apologies to the memory of Chris Bell if he was blissfully light-spirited when he wrote "Cosmos".

That first time I heard the song, on the Columbia album, I was devastated by the song, absolutely. It's sublime, a song even Langley Project couldn't've made silly and glad sounding. But what killed most (which is a ridiculous thought/idea, whatever) about that first time is the end. Bell, and the reincarnated Big Star on Columbia, end(s) the song with seven repeated singings of "Really like/want to see you again". It'd be a failed pop music joke if the song were to end in that repeated, devastated, pleading attitude, of course. Over and over of anything is enough for anybody to stick lit matches in their ears.

But Bell totally destroys the song, the pleading, takes the mood and douses it in kerosene and with a change of just one word lights the whole thing against the darkening sky of fading pop songs. On the seventh, penultimate cry of the end lines, Chris Bell sings "Never want to see you again" and, of course, the line immediately preceding and following is "Really want to see you again."

Oh. God.

As MZDanielewski says, on page 142: Imagine that. In your sleep.

When I tracked down I Am the Cosmos, I was the only of my friends to flip for it quite as high, so I have not a single delusion that this thing that seems so spectacular to me is nothing but a passing, passable, cute pop-music inversion, a cleverness just for its own sake.

I'd like to think otherwise. I'd like to think that any human worth their eight pints will hear a sad heart's song, will be able to hear its rises and breaks, its convictions and assurances and bluffs. I'd like to believe all of it, because it'd make me more hopeful when I hear this song with my own broken heart.

But, again: I don't know how you like your vegetables cut, how you like the sound to be balanced in the car in terms of front and back speakers. I don't know what pressure you keep your bike tires at, and don't know what you put in your coffee. I don't know if you've ever been in love, I can only hope you have. Can only hope this song will and won't resonate so perfectly with you.

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