From Genius:
Alex Bell Road runs through the southern suburbs of GBV’s native Dayton, Ohio.
Its name is derived from Alexandersville and Bellbrook, the two towns that were originally at either end of its route.
Alexandersville no longer exists as an independent town, having been absorbed into West Carrollton in 1943.
The song’s cover art depicts the road’s intersection with Chilton Lane.
This is why I found this headline so interesting when “Alex Bell” was released:
Guided by Voices pay tribute to Big Star on new single…
Tribute?
I mean… sure.
On “Alex Bell,” GBV’s single from their high-potency 2022 album Tremblers and Goggles by Rank, Robert Pollard intentionally joins the names of Big Star’s co-leaders, Alex Chilton and Chris Bell.
GBV are absolutely in the lineage of Big Star.
But being in the music industry, the word “tribute” instinctively makes me wince.
After all, I worked for the Recording Academy for years.
Can you imagine the joint Grammys tribute to Brian Wilson, Sly Stone, and Ozzy Osbourne we’ll all be forced to endure next year, featuring Bruno Mars, H.E.R., Yungblud, Lzzy Hale, the Panic! at the Disco guy…
I digress.
But I think we’re dealing with something a little cooler here.
More than almost any Guided by Voices song, “Alex Bell” makes me emotional and weird.
Even thinking about it seems to put me in an unbecomingly fragile state.
And if you dive into the lyrics and the sound, it doesn’t really function as a straightforward “tribute” at all.
Something much more profound — and deeply, poetically rock ‘n’ roll.
So, I worship the ‘70s Memphis power pop band Big Star just as much as GBV.
Maybe this Substack would be about Big Star if they had more music.
If you’ve never heard them, holy mother of god — talk about a perfect three-album discography — #1 Record, Radio City, Third/Sister Lovers.
Go listen to those right now.
In commercially shooting for the moon and missing — only to be reappraised decades later by nerds like me — Big Star drew a clean trajectory across those three albums.
(Don’t talk to me about In Space, Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens’ 2005 “reunion” album with two members of the Posies. Not canon.)
But it’s a great story.
On #1 Record, they’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed.
That’s the one with their innocent, yearning ballad “Thirteen,” which would go on to be covered by Wilco, Garbage, Elliott Smith, and more.
“In the Street,” covered by Cheap Trick, became the That ‘70s Show theme song. That kind of vibe. Remember the line they added? “We’re all all right!”
On Radio City, Bell is largely absent — just a few writing credits.
#1 Record had turned out to be nothing of the sort.
(Hence the sarcastic title. Back in the ‘70s, everything was “XYZ city.”)
Throughout, they sound rattled, frazzled, concussed — yet it only enhances the music, rendering it wirier and more alive.
Then, on Third/Sister Lovers, bassist Andy Hummel is gone, too.
And we witness full-scale, Quaalude-fueled mental collapse, where a heartbroken and unhinged Alex Chilton enlists Stephens for the mother of all bad-idea studio projects — mellotrons, a Vegas-like horn revue, the whole bit.
There’s tons of beauty, like “Nightime” and “Take Care” and “For You.” But some songs, like “Holocaust,” are among the darkest I’ve ever heard in my life. Sample line: “Your mother’s dead/You’re on your own/She’s in her bed.”
Instead of being an unlistenable nightmare, Third/Sister Lovers alchemizes personal lows into shadowy, arcane, experimental beauty, laying the groundwork for Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Grandaddy’s The Sophtware Slump, and beyond.
It’s the kind of record that changes you.
The central, tragic figure of Big Star’s story is the fragile, dreamy Chris Bell — who collided his Triumph with a light pole at the intersection of Poplar and Grove Park in Memphis in 1978, killing him instantly.
(In the wake of Big Star not becoming big stars, his final years were tortured — depressed, addicted, jumping into Christianity with both feet as a salve against guilt for his closeted homosexuality.)
Bell actually started the band, before leaving and handing the keys to the ever-prickly yet vocally angelic Alex Chilton.
Who himself fronted the Box Tops as a teenager, singing a song you’ll recognize immediately in an unrecognizable growl:
Told you it’s a great story.
Anyway, I don’t remember reading in any rock book that Chilton and Bell even particularly liked each other in the first place. I’d characterize it as “love-hate.”
That’s not the point.
Temperamental opposites, their legacies were nonetheless intertwined forever — through Chilton’s troubadour-like, Big Star-ambivalent solo career, up to his own death in 2010.
“Same street always going back around,” Pollard sings in “Alex Bell.”
This isn’t a mere tip of the hat.
To me, “Alex Bell” — deeply proggy, compositionally unpredictable, maddeningly catchy — is about how the lives of two people can flow into each other in an endless Möbius strip.
A continuum of souls.
“You’ll be me,” Pollard sings.
“You’ll be with me.”
I first listened to “Alex Bell” with the rest of Tremblers and Goggles by Rank during my first visit to my mother’s home, where she lives by herself after losing my dad in 2017 and then her second husband during the pandemic.
All my dad’s stuff from back at the house decontextualized and reassembled in strange new configurations, mixed with a guy he never met’s things.
I got some really good advice from a friend of my dad’s after he died: “All of this is shit. What matters is the lessons he taught you.”
And you know what?
As an extremely sentimental and very emotional person, that helped a lot right then.
Still doesn’t make the final, repeated line of “Alex Bell” any less potent:
I see you around every time there’s a ghost in town
Then a fake-out ending.
Then another.
Then “Alex Bell” hurtles into the sky and seems to vanish like a toy balloon.
It’s not a neat ending.
Endings don’t tend to be.
And that’s one of many reasons why “Alex Bell,” in my mind, is a perfect song: it reminds me that our souls are all inexorably on this ride together.
I loved this song upon seeing the title and cover art; it didn’t disappoint when I played it repeatedly. It also rules live! I’m a huge Big Star fan- and by the way, against all odds, the Big Star Quintet doesn’t tarnish the legacy in any way- I got unexpectedly emotional when I saw them last year.
Holy shit I love this. A fantastic balancing act of writing and wiring Big Star and Guided by Voices, rock 'n roll for short, into our own lineages (not yours, not mine), our big rickshaw spaceship of co-existence. Bravo, Enos