He was best known as co-founder of power-pop band Big Star, but as a teen Alex Chilton was the lead singer of the Memphis rock group Box Tops. While he performed as the lead singer, Chilton had little creative input and yearned to try his own hand at recording his own kind of music, so in defiance of his contract with American Studios, Chilton and Terry Manning made a stealth album in 1969 at Ardent Studios. Originally titled 1970 when released by Ardent in 1996, the release quickly went out of print. This 2012 reissue titled Free Again: the 1970 Sessions includes bonus features like extra tracks and liner notes and as expected shows a young Chilton experimenting with pop sounds, messy blues rock, and full on attitude as he plays original songs and reinterprets covers like Archies’ and James Brown’s “Sugar, Sugar/I Got the Feelin’” and The Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Fans of Chilton and Big Star will be thrilled with this compilation, and newbies will find a young cult hero in the making. – Written by JFelton
SIMILAR | Chris Bell, Big Star, Alexander “Skip” Spence, Tom Verlaine, Paul Westerberg