Alex Chilton - RIP

---

I hate to follow the Peter Graves post so quickly with another obit, but the NPR "Fresh Air" podcast to which I subscribe has just gotten me acquainted (too late) with Alex Chilton, a member of the bands The Box Tops and Big Star. While not a huge commercial success for the most part, his music was popular with critics and the indie crowd. At the age of 16, he throatily performed the international hit "The Letter" with the Box Tops.

"Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane,
Ain't got time to take a fast train.

Lonely days are gone, I'm a-goin' home,
'Cause my baby just a-wrote me a letter."


Perhaps Chilton's most recent contribution to pop culture was the theme for the Fox TV series, "That 70's Show." The song "In the Street," performed by Cheap Trick for the show theme, was actually written and performed by Chilton with the band Big Star in the 70's. I found it refreshing to learn in an interview with Chilton that he didn't take umbrage to the changes made to his lyrics for the TV theme. With Pink Floyd being in the news recently for a breach of contract lawsuit against their record label for allowing the iTunes Music store to sell their songs as singles instead of strictly in album form (supposedly violating the integrity of the band's work product, not to mention, I'm sure, their profits), it's refreshing to hear an artist eschew pretentiousness about his work. He says he did not consider his songs a "sacred objects."

As proprietor of the Childhood Recovery Project, I should like "That 70's Show" better than I did, but I only found it a serviceable comedy with occasional flashes of nostalgia and never thought of it as appointment television. But it did have a cool theme song, and there was a certain magic to many of the scenes with Kurtwood Smith and Topher Grace as the no-nonsense father and the "dumb-ass" son who seems intent on disappointing him in new and creative ways every week.

As of this writing, the March 19 edition of Fresh Air is still in the podcast stream on iTunes. This program includes parts of interviews with Chilton from May 29, 1991, and May 1, 2000. Both the recent compilation of interviews and the original interviews be streamed at any time from the Fresh Air website.

Sorry I didn't get to now you sooner, Alex.