Words & Music
May 2013
Take Care
Big Star
These days it’s hard to appreciate just how unnerving Big Star’s Third/Sister Lovers album must have sounded to the few who heard it in 1974. Back then, its shambolic, shattered beauty would have been completely at odds with a world still listening to glam and prog rock. Recorded shortly before the group disbanded, the album was rejected by the major labels and lay dormant until a small independent release four years later. Post punk, it became a cult classic, cherished for the stark anguish of songs like Holocaust, Kangaroo and the album’s closing track, Take Care.
Written by singer/songwriter Alex Chilton, Take Care is a bruised ballad, ripe with irony; an intoxicated tale that warns of the dangers of excess. The song opens with the trill of violins and an acoustic guitar. Chilton, sounding like he’s been up all night, slurs the words across the melody, while the drums, sounding almost as weary, stumble against the baroque string arrangement and haphazard slide guitar lines to heartrending effect.
Take care not to hurt yourself
Beware of the need for help
You might need too much
And people are such
Take care, please, take care
The song teeters on the edge of collapse, the fractured nature of the music mirroring the creator’s state of mind, like some kind of musical onomatopoeia. By the second verse Chilton is even struggling with the syntax.
Some people read idea books
And some people have pretty looks
But if your eyes are wide
And all words aside
Take care, please, take care
By all accounts, the sessions for Take Care were drug-addled and chaotic – an atmosphere encouraged by maverick producer Jim Dickinson, who later said that he was ‘nailed’ for indulging Chilton but had done so because he felt it important; ‘What I did for Alex was literally remove the yoke of oppressive production that he had been under since the first time he ever uttered a word into a microphone, for good or ill.’
Dickinson encouraged the group to leave conventional notions of music craft aside in search of more expressive ways of playing. For Chilton, it was a revelation. Concerned in the past with the ‘careful layering of guitars and voices and harmonies’, Dickinson had shown him ‘how to go into the studio and just create a wild mess and make it sound really crazy and anarchic.’
In lesser hands that ‘wild mess’ probably would have been the end of story, as there is far more artistry involved than Chilton would lead us to believe. To create an original and compelling ‘mess’ still requires a skilful balance of both the careful and the careless. Take Care falls in and out of time and tune, while artfully contrasting the formality of a string ensemble against the ramshackle playing of the band. The resulting tension fuels the song’s main instrumental passage, wherein the violins soar skyward as Chilton hangs on for dear life, straining for the high notes before floating down to earth again.
This challenge to what ‘good music’ should sound like would prove hugely influential. First through Chilton’s own production work for The Cramps and Panther Burns and later as a sonic template for artists like The Flaming Lips, Sonic Youth and The Bad Seeds.
Chilton’s was a career in reverse. A pop star at age 16 with Memphis blue-eyed soul group The Box Tops, he then worked his way back to obscure cult artist. His early experiences left him wary of the music industry and determined to put his own music ahead of other considerations. When Big Star formed in 1971 they believed they could do it on their own terms. Yet after two critically acclaimed albums failed to sell and the third couldn’t even get a release, a disillusioned Chilton called it quits for the band.
Alex Chilton closes Take Care with a gentle, bleary farewell – a farewell to Big Star, a farewell to a lover and a farewell to us. Take care, he sings, softly to himself, take care.
This sounds a bit like goodbye
In a way it is I guess
As I leave your side
I’ve taken the air
Take care, please, take care
Take care, please, take care
Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me screens at ACMI, Federation Square, from May 26 to June 13.
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