I'm not Alex Chilton's biggest fan. "Thirteen" is one of my favorite songs, but I don't know much about his oeuvre, have no particular fondness for his albums. And yet, hearing of his death yesterday brought back so many memories of being young and the endless hours I spent chasing down music. More than the person himself, Alex Chilton represented a way of understanding, finding, and thinking about music that I now realize was a distinctive era, which I feel has now come to an end. Today I am remembering being thirteen, and thanking Alex Chilton for being the white rabbit who led me through wonderland.
There were three major phases of my adolescent music listening. The first began when I was 7 years old. When I couldn't fall asleep at night, which was often, I would stay awake listening to the radio, 92.5 Kiss FM in Toledo, Ohio. My favorite songs were "Never Tear Us Apart" by INXS and "Stand" by R.E.M. In the next few years, I listened every week to Kasey's Top 40 and obsessively made mix tapes called "Pop Hits, vol. 3." Like any collector, with the resources I had available I made these precious and fleeting songs mine. To have access to them at any moment. This era reached its apotheosis in 1991 when U2 released Achtung Baby, my Favorite-Album-of-All-Time. It came to a crashing end in 1993 when U2 released Zooropa, and I was Very Disappointed.
I was 13, had an excessive amount of knowledge of the pop music of the previous 5 years, and I was sick of what I could access through commercial radio. By then, I was listening to the weekly alternative radio shows from Detroit and the local college station, reading Rolling Stone at the library, and most importantly, checking out CDs at the library. I rarely had money to spend on music, but the library gave me access to the back catalogs of the bands I heard on the radio. When New Order released "Regret" and I fell in love with it, I followed their career backwards to Power, Corruption and Lies and back to Joy Division. Same for the Cure, REM, and all the other "little" bands of the 80s who made it big in the 1990s. I had discovered the musical world beyond commercial radio. More than liking or disliking, I was addicted to the process of finding music. It was slow and time-consuming, but the highs were so high! You were so deeply invested in the music you found. And it was this process that led me to Alex Chilton.
For the next couple of years as alternative rock became a popular category of music thanks to bands like Green Day and Weezer, and films like Singles and Reality Bites capitalized on the Seattle Sound, I discovered Paul Westerberg. As I waited patiently through the week to hear "Love Untold" on the Sunday night alternative count down show, I found out through the library computer catalog that he had once been in a band called the Replacements. I found my way to "Alex Chilton." "I'm in Love. What's that Song?" It was so cool. Alex Chilton was at least 4 degrees removed from mainstream music and it was thrilling to be in the know.
Everyone is writing about "Alex Chilton" today. Its lyrics are the headlines of many articles, and deservedly. It's a beautiful song, and I think it gets at what I am trying to write about. It's about loving music, about the idolatry music inspires, of the feeling of belonging to the millions who scream for Alex Chilton.
Alex Chilton was the end of the road in more ways than one for me: the genealogical era of my adolescent listening came to an end fairly soon after I discovered him. There were various reasons for that, and since this is a blog, I'll list some of them. Partly it was because I got really tired of the alt music--I couldn't stand the big alt stars, I had another Big Disappointment with Radiohead's Kid A (I know everyone likes the album, but I didn't), the radio show I had been following ended, and the Modern Rock station in Toledo turned into Classic Rock. The Beatles got really big, and I fell hard for the 1960s. I was already listening to so much older music, but I cut off all contact with contemporary music, and I made the 50s, 60s, and 70s my sonic home. I also found a friend to share these obsessions with. Looking back, I see the major change was that I was coming to see access to music as unlimited. Music was no longer a precious commodity requiring specialized knowledge, but music was increasingly available, a torrent, to be dipped into when desired.
When I got to college, we were the first class to have cable television and internet access in our dorm rooms. I remember discovering you could listen to anything you wanted at any moment. Many others have written about what the internet revolution has meant, and I just want to highlight the ready access to everything. I became saturated with music, suggested by friends and random acquaintances, recommended by websites, and the only delay was how many other users I could download from at a given moment.
I had listened to so much music by my early twenties, that I forgot Alex Chilton, until I came across him again, in much the same manner as our first introduction. A recommendation to listen to the Replacements, and I was again one of the millions.
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