Big Star by Rob Jovanovic

Author:Rob Jovanovic [Rob Jovanovic ]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007396191
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

12

‘The singularly most heavy moment of my life’

Memphis, Milan, Paris, London. 1973 to 1974

For the first six months of 1973, Chris Bell shunned all aspects of the music industry. Such was his disgust at the failure of #1 Record, he couldn’t bring himself to work at all. Reading the glowing reports of his former band’s triumphant comeback at the Rock Writers’ Convention couldn’t have done much for his confidence and he slumped further into a crushing spiral of depression and increasing drug use. ‘I remember coming home [from Italy] for Christmas [1972] and being met at the airport by my father,’ recalls David Bell. ‘He told me that there had been some trouble at home and that my brother had tried to kill himself. It was with pills, and an ambulance was called to the house. I subsequently saw him in the hospital and that’s when I began talking to him about coming to Italy with me…’

By the late summer of 1973, Chris Bell seemed to have recovered some sense of balance and had even taken some tentative steps towards recording again. He had the songs that he’d taken with him when he left Big Star and he’d had a few more ideas. He also received encouragement from some of the writers who had written favourably about #1 Record, including Bud Scoppa and Andrew Lauder. In the autumn he headed to California to spend some time with two of these writers, Greg Shaw and Mart Cerf. Shaw was working at United Artists and Bell hoped to place some of his tapes with the label. ‘I was working in the Creative Affairs department,’ says Shaw. ‘It was basically just me and the guy who hired me, Marty Cerf. We were both big fans of Big Star and wrote about them in Phonograph Record magazine. I also organized the guest list for the big Ardent Records party masked as the Rock Critics Convention.’

Bell stayed for a while at Cerf’s house, sleeping on his couch while still, occasionally, working on demo recordings. ‘Cerf’s house was something of a circus at the time,’ recalls Shaw. ‘Also crashing there was Screaming Lord Sutch’s girlfriend, Thann Quantrill, and their young child Tristan, who was also screaming. David Sutch himself would drop by frequently. Chris, I’m pretty sure, was in a state of depression, and seemed quite vulnerable; there could well have been some drug abuse as well, knowing the people who were around him.’

Ultimately Bell’s time in California came to nothing, but he headed home to Memphis in December 1973 with words of support ringing in his ears. He immediately polished off a new song he called ‘I Am the Cosmos’ and looked around for a suitable studio. He didn’t have a great budget and didn’t want to go back to Ardent, so he turned his attention to Shoe Studios at Hollywood and Broad in Midtown.

Shoe was owned and run by Warren Wagner and Wayne Crook, a couple of audiophiles in the mould of John Fry.27

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