Search - Alex Chilton :: Live in Anvers

The great live Chilton album is yet to come

PH-50-NC | Southeast USA | 09/02/2004

(3 out of 5 stars)

"This one's a little frustrating. As was the case with the live record from 1980 (with the Soft Boys members backing him up), the players aren't bad at all. It's just that the American studio and touring bands are better versed and rehearsed than this European counterpart. Those looking to sample the post-Big Star Chilton should look first to "High Priest" "Set" "Cliches" and "Man Called Distruction." Or "Like Flies on Sherbert," if you want drunken mayhem done once more with feeling.



That said, there's enough here to make it an easy recomendation for my fellow Chiltophiles.



"Ah Ti Ta Ti Ta Ta" (not to be confused with "Tee Na Nee Na Nee Na Noo") is a happy little Ernie K. Doe tune that was new to me (and well done in this live version). Sam and Dave's "634-5789" is also a highlight. "It's Too Late to Turn Back Now" is great, though it has a band introduction in the middle that breaks the mood a bit. "Claim to Fame" is more Stax-flavored R&B, and is one of the better tracks on the album.



The intro to Bangkok is funny--Alex refers to his late-seventies self as a "drunken hooligan," the the performance is fine (but not quite sleazy enough to those in love with the original single). I had high hopes for "Sonata, Grave" (hoped it would be as nice as his solo-guitar arrangement of part of a Bach chorale on "Cliches")--alas, the band joins him for this, and it doesn't really succeed.



"Il Ribelle" and "In the Street" are fine--you won't find yourself reaching for the track-skip button, but his studio versions of both tunes surpass what's here.



In the "I don't need to hear this more than once" category are "Shiny Stockings" and "April in Paris"--both rough here (the pickup band just isn't familiar enough with these tunes/arrangements, both from the Count Basie Band book)--and "Sick and Tired," which doesn't recreate the killer New Orleans groove of the earlier studio version. "Hook Me Up" also misses the deep pocket of the studio version. I really wish the band had just layed out on the standards (Basie material) and let Chilton do them solo--also the classical piece. The album is a mixed bag; worth it in the end, but not for the Chilton novice."

Claim to Fame

E. Hurt | nashville johnnycashville, tenn. | 06/03/2010

(4 out of 5 stars)

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The record under review here is a live set in Flanders, Belgium. The pickup band is pretty good, and Alex is in great form. Here is a typical Chilton set comprising a couple of originals and a lot of great covers. What made Chilton, who has not survived (unfortunately for those of us who revere him as a first-class performer), unique in the annals of pop is his love of the small-scale Southern r&b made by such labels as Stax, Fame and Malaco. This is music that the average music lover knows nothing about. I bet very few of the people who have paid lip service to Alex, the Replacements, and the tedious list of bands Alex supposedly influenced in the blighted '80s and '90s, know anything about, say, Frederick Knight, whose very obscure soul single "Claim to Fame" Alex does up wonderfully on this record. There's a Johnny "Guitar" Watson tune done quite well, a Chris Kenner New Orleans r&b song called "Sick and Tired" that features some great guitar work from Alex, and a song by Ernie K-Doe--another New Orleans r&b singer. In short, this set illuminates a sensibility not shared by the average American ignorant of the kind of music Alex Chilton loved. You hear this stuff in the deep South, in towns like Jackson, Miss., Memphis, Hattiesburg, New Orleans itself, Baton Rouge. A kind of mid-century African-American, humorous, light, soulful kind of music that won't appeal to the maudlin sensibilities of many pop fans, who equate angst with art and art with "self-expression." Alex Chilton may have seemed to be merely perverse, but his song selections were done out of love for a tradition that time has begun to sweep away. This record--which for all intents and purposes is his last real record, since the rather misbegotten Big Star collection released in 2005 was a pure money-making project and barely indicative of what Alex was really into in the last decades of his life--documents that love well enough. I just wish there were more, but Alex realized that rock 'n' roll had to be lived in the moment and on stage, where his gifts were often more apparent than in recording studios.



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Alex Chilton

David Hirsh | Woodmere, NY USA | 08/31/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Alex Chilton about says it all. Very few singers sing with the emotional cool intensity of Alex Chilton. He now wrings out the emotional content of each song with his voice and guitar. Some think that Frank Sinatra could do anything with a song. Those people should listen to Alex and weep.



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