JODY STEPHENS CELEBRATES 50 YEARS OF
# 1 RECORD WITH AN ALL STAR BAND

Legendary drummer joined by Jon Auer, Mike Mills, Pat Sansone & Chris Stamey in a six city tour that stopped at The Ardmore Music Hall

History is riddled with artists who only experienced real recognition and success years after the paint dried. It remains a mystery why some innovations are overlooked, or worse, ignored, when they are first set free to the world. But no one’s story is quite like Big Star’s. Chris Bell, Jody Stephens, Andy Hummel and Alex Chilton were praised by music critics and anyone else who heard them when they released their debut, # 1 Record, in 1972. The trouble was, not enough people did. Despite excitement from the likes of Rolling Stone, Billboard and Cashbox, # 1 Record was a commercial failure. As a result, a devastated Bell left and the Memphis band shuttered, though Stephens, Hummel and Chilton would soon reunite for a second album, 1974’s Radio City. Once again, it was a creative triumph, but outside forces prevented it from finding an audience. Another LP, known as Third/Sister Lovers, was made by Stephens and Chilton, though it wouldn’t be widely available until 1978 – four years after Big Star dissolved and the same year Bell tragically died in an auto accident. Yet it never mattered how many seasons had passed or if they were even a band anymore. Everyday, new listeners were stopped in their tracks, moved by the complexity of a sound that compelled so many to pass their music into the hands of another.

“It’s interesting once you start getting into playing original material, and you basically start with a blank canvas – everybody,” Jody Stephens tells me by phone in December 2022. “You’ve got this blank canvas, and you’ve got to fill it with color and composition and dynamics and all that kind of thing.”

Big Star’s brush strokes contained something that would prove to be everlasting, even magical, and over the years, they were never far from the lips of those who loved them. REM, Teenage Fanclub, Wilco, Primal Scream, Yo La Tengo, The Afghan Wigs, Elliott Smith, The Bangles, The Flaming Lips and The Replacements were just a few of the artists who made their allegiance known, helping new generations to discover what so easily could have been lost to time. Incredibly, their eventual emergence in mainstream culture lead to a second chapter beginning in the early 1990s. Worldwide tours and even an album, 2005’s In Space, featuring Stephens and Chilton joined by Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer of The Posies, followed. But in 2010, before a planned gig at South by Southwest, Chilton died unexpectedly. Original bassist, Andy Hummel, passed away just months later. As the groups sole surviving member, Stephens has since led a series of tribute shows celebrating the bands music. In 2015, he began a new musical project, Those Pretty Wrongs, with Luther Russell. Their next release, Holiday Camp, is due in March 2023.

This past September, Stephens announced a handful of shows to mark # 1 Record’s 50th anniversary. Plans for the six city tour – which included a stop at Philadelphia’s Ardmore Music Hall – came together after he had the initial idea to perform in Memphis. So he reached out to his friend, Robby Grant at WYXR, and organized a core band featuring Jon Auer, REM’s Mike Mills, Wilco’s Pat Sansone and Chris Stamey of the dB’s.

“He liked the idea and so we went about booking that date and figuring that out,” he says of what would be their December 3rd appearance at the city’s Crosstown Theater. “Chris Stamey then said, ‘Why don’t we add some dates to it?’”

With the third of December blocked out, a string of shows were locked in around it. In the end, the tour would be launched at the end of November, though they played a benefit show for the Autism Healthcare Cooperative several weeks earlier at LA’s Alex Theatre. There, the main players were joined by a small orchestra and a large cast of special guests including Susanna Hoffs, The Lemon Twigs, Chris Price, Luther Russell and many more.

“We had a nice little running start for that. Then our first date as a five piece was Athens, Georgia, and we had a couple of days at REM’s headquarters to rehearse. So that was fun – all that magic that's happened in their rehearsal room.”

Immediately, his words highlight the strong link that exists between a band and their home base. For REM, that spark was harnessed where Stephens, Auer, Mills, Sansone and Stamey carved out time to play. For Big Star, that place was the John Fry run Ardent Records.

“Andy Hummel took me over, and Chris Bell and Steve Rhea were in the studio working on a song called ‘All I See Is You.’ Steve had played drums on it and was singing it and Chris was playing guitar. They were recording it themselves, and that was courtesy of John Fry teaching them how to record and nurturing them, and then giving them a key to the studio so they could come and practice that craft.”

When Big Star formed, Ardent would be the perfect environment for their sound to bloom, and they remain forever linked – as synonymous and interchangeable today as The Beatles and Abby Road. Although as Stephens explains, Fry was a mentor, and he and his studio weren’t just instrumental to their creative success – they were a guiding force.

“There would be no Big Star without John Fry and his Ardent studios. There’s John Fry’s talent, but then there’s the means that he had to have Fairchild compressors, and have real echo chambers, and have EMT plates, reverb echo, played reverb echo,” he says, remembering the remarkable resources and recording tools that were at their disposal. “They had all these things that Abby Road had, and a lot of the processing gear.”

When asked about bringing the bands catalogue to a live audience so many years later, Stephens spoke about the importance of staying true to the records and the very deliberate way Big Star worked within Ardent’s walls.

“The way Chris and Alex’s guitars interacted with each other was thought out. And sonically, the way the guitars sounded and making sure there were differences and different chord patterns and the parts. And then we had John Fry mix it. John was a brilliant engineer, a mix engineer. He was a big Beatles fan, too, so we all had that in common. And we’re lucky that, sonically, our records just sparkled because of John Fry.”

Adored for their warmth, clarity and depth, Big Star’s songs are now rightly recognized as landmark recordings, looming so large that it’s easy to forget that 50 years ago, the idea of a future run of anniversary shows was unfathomable.

“Here’s what I like to add, these days,” he says. “John Fry was a mastermind in the way that record sounds, but it was John King who got it into the hands of all the rock writers out there that had a platform.”

As head of marketing and PR for Ardent, King slyly organized the Rock Writers Convention of 1973, gathering the industry’s top critics and tastemakers under the same roof he just so happened to book Big Star to play. At that time, the dismal sales of # 1 Record and the departure of Bell had seemingly ended the band, but Chilton, Hummel and Stephens agreed to appear. Famously, their performance garnered so much excitement that it reinvigorated appreciation for the album and convinced the musicians themselves to revive the group.

In Philadelphia last month, Stephens, Auer, Mills, Sansone and Stamey glided across the golden, rolling hills of the Big Star catalogue, filling performances of “Feel,” “September Gurls,” “What’s Going Ahn,” “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” “Thirteen,” “I’m In Love With A Girl,” “The Ballad of El Goodo” and so many more with unbridled joy. They also honored Bell, bringing beloved solo songs like “There Was A Light” and “I Am The Cosmos,” to life like the bright lights of a nearby constellation. It was in those moments at the Ardmore Music Hall, sold out and packed with so many people it was hard to move, that it was difficult to imagine a world where Big Star music’s had been forgotten. Though the frequent bursts of thunderous applause had seemed to suggest that everyone else felt that way, too.

“So Jon Auer and I wrote this one,” Stephens said from the stage that night, introducing a performance of “February’s Quiet,” from In Space.

“And as Alex said about the record that it’s on: ‘You won’t like it now, but you’ll like it thirty years from now.’”