Cult rock icon Alex Chilton died yesterday in New Orleans.
Ann Powers does him justice in the Los Angeles Times: "What I found on that journey was Alex Chilton. I'd already come to love Big Star's catalog, introduced to me via the mix tapes my friends and I made for each other as we built our own twisted history of Americana from what the band X once called "the unheard music." Alex Chilton was a wandering, heretical patriarch of our new religion. Bands like the Replacements and R.E.M. found him inspirational. (Members of one such group, the Posies, would later play with a reformed Big Star.) College radio DJs turned Big Star's catchy but unkempt songs into the hits they should have been the first time around. The band had been active in the 1970s, but they belonged to us, the kids fighting off the shadow of the Baby Boomers who'd been too dumb to realize how great it was."
Read the rest here.