Chris Bell
In interviews with writers and filmmakers about his brother, the late musician Chris Bell, David Bell is often asked why he spent his time hanging out with his aforementioned younger sibling during their adult lives. It’s often the case that an older, more responsible person who would want to maintain some distance from an unconventional kid brother.
“For me, he was probably the most interesting person I knew growing up from a very early age,” David, who’s now in his early 70s, says of Chris. “He was always sort of the hippie that I wanted to be. I wasn’t courageous enough to be as outlandish as he could be. He had the wherewithal, he had the venue, he had the chops for doing it.”
Today Chris Bell is best known as the co-singer, co-guitarist, and co-songwriter for the legendary ’70s Memphis-based power pop group Big Star, whose story has taken on mythic proportions long after the group first broke up. Despite the critical acclaim its music received at the time, Big Star never achieved commercial success, which drove Bell to leave the group shortly after its debut album #1 Record. His own solo career experienced setbacks very similar to that of his erstwhile band, and he only released one single, “I Am the Cosmos,” during his lifetime. Tragically Bell was killed in a car accident on December 27, 1978 at the age of 27, virtually unknown except maybe to those who were close to him in Memphis.
In the nearly 40 years after Chris’ death, interest in his life and music has garnered greater significance and appreciation thanks to the efforts of friends, fans, and especially David Bell, who never gave up on the notion that his brother’s well-crafted songs — whether they were hard-rocking Beatlesque tunes or introspective heartbreaking ballads — deserved to be heard. In a way, David and Chris Bell’s relationship parallels the story of brothers Theo and Vincent Van Gogh, in which the former served as a champion of the latter’s gifted and underappreciated talents. “I just always felt that this music was just as valid today as it was in the ’70s, which is also obviously the case for the Big Star catalog,” says David.
This year alone, on the 45th anniversary of the release of Big Star’s #1 Record, Chris Bell’s music was the subject of three separate archival releases from Omnivore Recordings: Looking Forward: The Roots of Big Star, which collects recordings Bell made with other bands before the formation of Big Star; a newly-expanded version of I Am the Cosmos, a posthumous compilation of solo songs Bell recorded after he left Big Star in 1972; and most recently The Complete Chris Bell, a 6-LP boxed set that packages both those aforementioned releases and more. In addition, a book on Bell’s life, There Was a Light, written by Rich Tupica, is slated to be published.
“He was mercurial,” David says of his younger brother. “Very funny and had a terrific dry wit that could just make me wet myself. A lot of times it would be at my expense, but I just had to roar with laughter because it was so true.” And former Big Star drummer Jody Stephens describes his former bandmate as “a guy who was passionate about being a musician, who was certainly diligent in his pursuit of that, with his complete life’s focus being that. Chris was a really sweet guy, too.”
Ironically, the pursuit of music began sort of as an afterthought for Christopher Bell, who was born in Memphis on January 12, 1951, one of six children born to Joan Branford and Vernon Bell, a World War II captain who later became a successful restaurateur. According to David, Chris had picked up a guitar and taken lessons, but his passion for music really took off when the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. David was an eyewitness to his brother’s musical endeavors, including the times when Chris played guitar at the back house of their family’s estate in Germantown, a suburb of Memphis. “He was interested in so many things,” David recalls, “and he was so competent in so many things: photography, electronics, building a radio. And of course the music, which is why I’m so deaf today (laughs) sitting in front of speakers at that back house. It was always very loud.”
Whereas Memphis is renowned for its blues and soul music and early rock and roll, Chris’ tastes were more Anglophilic, especially for the Beatles and the other British Invasion groups. “He hated it when he had these bands at age 14 or 15, and people would be asking for Memphis stuff [like] “In the Midnight Hour,”” says David. “He wanted to play the Who, he wanted to play the Beatles. That was the spark that really set him going.”
With other like-minded local musicians, Chris became active in bands beginning in 1963 that included the Jynx, Christmas Future, Icewater, and Rock City — groups whose sounds drew inspiration from British pop. A crucial period in Chris’ musical development during this period was him hanging out at Ardent Studios, founded by producer/engineer John Fry. It was at Ardent that Bell and other young aspiring musicians learned about recording techniques under Fry’s tutelage. “I don’t think there would have been a Big Star had it not been for John and for his making available the studio,” says David. “Once they had proven themselves through his course in engineering, the responsible ones would get a key [to the studio] and they can do pretty much what they wanted recording-wise after hours.”
Also part of that Ardent cabal of musicians were Andy Hummel (whom Chris went to college with) and Jody Stephens, who was at the time part of a college production of the musical Hair circa 1970. It was Hummel who first introduced Stephens to Chris. “It was outside of Ardent somewhere,” Stephens recalls of that initial meeting. “Chris said, ‘Hello,’ and then he said, ‘Andy, come here for a minute.’ He and Andy walked off about 20 feet away and they talked. I thought, ‘He must be a pretty private person.’
“Musically he was pretty-mind blowing,” Stephens continues. “His approach to his guitar playing was very deliberate, very creative, and his approach to singing was as well. He would figure out vocally a way to deliver it that might have a little twist to it from the other songs.”
Completing the Big Star lineup with Bell on vocals and guitar, Hummel on bass, and Stephens on drums was singer/guitarist Alex Chilton,fresh off his stint in the successful pop group the Box Tops. Bell and Chilton collaborated together on the songs that would make up the band’s now-classic debut album #1 Record; Chris sang lead on several tracks, including the bouncy rocker “In the Streets” and the urgent “Don’t Lie to Me” and “My Life Is Right.” “I never saw a sense of rivalry,” Stephens recalls of Bell and Chilton’s working relationship. “It was always certainly a cordial relationship between the two and certainly a very creative one. They were two brilliantly creative guys who were great at their instruments.”
Released by Ardent Records in August 1972, the label arm of Ardent Studios, #1 Record had all the hallmarks of Big Star’s sound: British-influenced melodic rock with Memphis soul and grit; infectious melodies; pristine guitar sounds and vocal harmonies; and the first-rate production/engineering skills of John Fry. It is generally agreed that Bell was the driving force behind that album. “If you could pick one person to call producer for #1 Record, it would be Chris,” says Stephens. “Certainly everybody contributed ideas. But Chris was in the driver’s seat for the first record, with Alex and Andy contributing. It was his vision on #1 Record. He guided us all through it. He was very meticulous about performances. Chris always had definite ideas about performances and how things were to go.”
While #1 Record earned praise in the music press upon its initial release, it was hampered by distribution problems that made it hard to find in the record stores. Bell took the record’s commercial failure and lack of wider recognition very hard — he quit Big Star in December 1972. Older brother David was living and working in Europe around the time Big Star was recording but was kept abreast through tapes Chris would send him. “He was very very busy during that time,” David says. “He engineered probably ¾ of the album, and he produced probably half of it. So he wasn’t just writing, singing, and playing. This was his project, which is why when it went absolutely nowhere he was so crestfallen.”
Chris Bell
“It did surprise me,” Stephens says of Bell’s departure. “In retrospect, I think Chris thought he would live in the shadow of Alex. The record gets released and the reviews come back. They’re wonderful reviews, but they always spotlighted Alex. The reason is they spotlighted Alex is, ‘You don’t know who Big Star is, but you know who the Box Tops were.’ ‘And here’s Alex Chilton, lead singer of this successful band called the Box Tops and he has a new band called Big Star.’ That’s why I think he quit the band.”
According to Bob Mehr’s liner notes for the new edition of I Am the Cosmos, in an act that was an indication of his fragile emotional state at the time, Chris snuck into Ardent Studios one night and erased the multi-track masters of #1 Record. He then attempted suicide at his home and was later hospitalized. “I do remember one outburst he had with me,” David says, “but he was much, much younger. I was out of the country when I came back Christmastime in ’72, and he had pretty much a breakdown.”
After his recovery, Chris resumed working on music sometime in the latter part of 1973. Following his estrangement from Big Star and John Fry, he recorded at another local recording facility, Shoe Studios. He worked on new songs, including his now-signature work “I Am the Cosmos,” which would later undergo a number of revisions in the studio. The dreamy and heartfelt song perfectly captured Chris’s feelings at the time: “frustration, confusion, second-guessing,” as Rob Janovic wrote in his 2004 book about Big Star.
Around this period, Bell took an interest into Christianity (Two of his songs, the moody “Better Save Yourself” and the gorgeous “Look Up,” reflected his spiritual point of view). Musician Tommy Hoehn, a friend of Chris, was quoted as saying in Janovic’s book: “When I met Chris, he was born again and was totally on fire for the Lord. He was so convinced that God was changing his life.”
Chris was still experiencing personal issues, particularly with drugs, during the summer of 1974 (Big Star, meanwhile, recorded and released its second album, Radio City, without him). One day, David, who returned to Memphis for a visit, saw Chris injecting Dilaudid. In order to save his brother’s life and help rejuvenate his music career, David suggested that Chris record at the Chateau d’Herouville studio near Paris, where artists like Elton John, Jethro Tull and the Bee Gees have worked at. “We just sort of talked about being someplace else,” recalls David, “getting out of Memphis, getting out of the environment that was so depressing for him, getting out whatever availability drugs were having for him at that point, and trying to figure out what positive steps we could take to help move out of that.”
Both Chris and drummer Richard Rosebrough arrived in Europe sometime in September 1974, first in Italy where David had an apartment. The trio headed to Switzerland (an evidence of that visit is the scenic and breathtaking photograph that David took of Chris in front of the mountains that would later be used for the cover of the I Am the Cosmos album) — and then later to France where they arrived at the Chateau d’Herouville in October of that year. There, Chris recorded new music with Rosebrough, including the tracks “Make a Scene,” “Better Save Yourself,” and “Speed of Sound.” His mood was upbeat during this time, according to David. “He was happy to be someplace else. He was a little sorry when he saw that the [console] they had was apparently the exact same thing they had in Ardent. He was very pleased and happy to be at the Chateau. He was really working well with Richard.”
As luck would have it, Claude Harper, the engineer at the Chateau, knew famed Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. Through Harper’s intervention, Chris and David then traveled to London to have Chris’ songs mixed by Emerick at AIR Studios, which was founded by the Fab Four’s legendary producer George Martin. “He was really happy with Geoff Emerick’s mix of “Cosmos,” says David. “I dared to challenge once or twice him on a final mix and I remember saying to him, ‘Don’t you think that “Cosmos” is a little muddied?’ And that’s exactly what he wanted. He didn’t defer to suggestions. He had his ideas and didn’t bend himself to what Geoff Emerick would make. [Chris] would be sitting right next to him at the console, fiddling with faders. I was very impressed. But then I was always impressed with my little brother.”
The icing on the cake during that visit to London was Chris meeting Paul and Linda McCartney at Abbey Road Studios.“The look on his face after we left that studio having about 15–20 minutes talking to Paul and Linda — and then touring the rest of Abbey Road — was like he just came down from Mount Everest and seen God,” says David. “These were his ultimate heroes.”
Buoyed by that experience, the Bell brothers made another trip to Britain in April 1975 and spent the next several months overall in Europe. As Chris performed live on stage to generate some buzz, David shopped his brother’s tapes to the record companies. “There were a couple of labels,” recalls David. “Charisma seemed to be interested but eventually came to nothing. [Someone] at Rocket, Elton John’s label, kept telling me, ‘I want to get this to [John’s producer] Gus Dudgeon, I want to see what he thinks.’ Of course that was a name that we knew well. But other than Rocket and Charisma, I never heard anything about why [they passed on the tapes] and what it was.”
By 1976, Chris returned to Memphis and later was part of a new group, the Baker Street Regulars, which also included his former Big Star bandmate Stephens and musician Van Duren; that band stayed together for a couple of months. But faced with a music career that wasn’t progressing enough, Chris went on to manage one of his father’s restaurants. Says David: “There was a certain point when my brother decided — mainly through his spiritual endeavors and convictions — ‘I should be the good son. I should stop making my father worry so much with his crazy rock and roll life.’ He was trying to do the right thing by my father, and yet music was never going to leave him. He would do what he could to get back in.”
There were signs of positive things happening for Chris Bell in 1978. One of them was when Car Records, a label founded by Chris Stamey of the power pop band the dB’s, released Bell’s single “I Am the Cosmos,” along with the tender and romantic ballad “You and Your Sister” (which featured Alex Chilton on backing vocals) as the B-side. Another bright spot occurred when EMI Records packaged Big Star’s #1 Record and Radio City together as a two-fer in the U.K. “I remember how thrilled he was when EMI did that double album,” says David. “He had seen on all the Beatles albums that read ‘EMI Records, Hayes, Middlesex, England.’ That’s what was printed at the bottom of the gatefold release.”
That same year Chris was collaborating with musician Tommy Hoehn. On December 27, after a late-evening rehearsal with Hoehn and a stopover at Ardent Studios, Chris was driving back to his parents’ home in Germantown when he lost control of Triumph sports car. It struck a light pole and he was killed instantly. Ironically, Stephens was looking for Chris earlier that evening and had went to the studio, only to find out he had already left. “So I was following the same path that he took,” says Stephens. “When I got to Poplar Avenue, I saw a car accident and there was a telephone pole down on the car. I didn’t really look close. It was late at night and I went home another way. And John Fry called me the next morning. I was still in bed, and he told me that Chris died in a car accident. I put two and two together, and that’s how I learned about his death. It was hard.”
Almost 40 years later, David Bell describes first hearing the news of his brother’s death as the worst day of his life. He recalls at the time driving a relative to Mississippi and then later staying the night at a friend’s house before returning to Germantown the following morning. On his way back, David stopped by at his father’s restaurant. Upon entering the kitchen from the back of the establishment, he saw a note posted on the door that said the restaurant was closing the next day.
“A waitress came up to me, grabbed my arm, and said, ‘David, what are we going to do without old Chris?’” says David. “I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ Then I walked towards the front of the restaurant where the cashier was. And all of a sudden, something clicked in my brain. I said to a hostess or cashier, ‘Please tell my parents I’m on my way home. I don’t want to hear anything. Just call them for me, please.’ So I drove home. When I was driving up that drive, Jody was just leaving, and that’s how I found out.”
Chris Bell’s funeral took place the following day on December 28. His sister Sara later said that she had a premonition that Chris would die young, a sentiment shared by her older brother David. “I remember sitting on the steps of my parents’ house, and thinking, ‘What am I going to do when he dies?’” he remembers. “So there was that feeling. Whether that was before the drug problems or after, I’m not sure, I don’t know. Sara and I both had that sense.”
“I always wondered how Chris would fit into the world if he wasn’t a musician and pursued something he loved and was committed to so much, “ Stephens says. “Some people you look at and you think, ‘They were so committed to pursuing being a musician, that they kind of [excluded] everything else in that pursuit.’ It seemed like Chris was that way.”
The cover of ‘I Am the Cosmos’
For almost 15 years after the tragedy, Chris’ post-Big Star recordings remained unheard. Then in 1992, Rykodisc issued I Am the Cosmos, a collection of Chris’s solo works, including his now-signature title song; David Bell wrote the set’s liner notes, which provided him catharsis. “That was such a joy for me when it came out,” he says of that belated release. “It’s music that I’ve been sort of sitting on for those almost 14 years after he had been killed. It was a terrific fulfillment for me. I was actually not surprised when all of a sudden things started happening in the early ’90s, and I was getting a lot of phone calls from lots of different people interested in Cosmos.”
This past fall, an updated and expanded version of I Am the Cosmos was put out by Omnivore Recordings, which also released Looking Forward, a collection of Bell’s recordings with his previous bands Icewater and Rock City from the late ’60s and early ’70s prior to Big Star. “Chris was such an integral part of that sound and that band,” says Cheryl Pawelski, who served as the producer on the new Chris Bell releases as well as recent Big Star reissues, “that it was high time to get back to the Chris Bell stuff.”
Unlike the previous Rhino Handmade version from 2009, this new reissue of I Am the Cosmos solely concentrates on Chris’s post-Big Star work, excluding some of the pre-Big Star tracks that are now on the standalone Looking Forward. As far as whether this is all the Chris Bell music that is available following the release of The Complete Chris Bell vinyl set, Pawelski says: “Unless something turns up, you just never know. A lot of people have been looking for a long time. I have to imagine this is the most comprehensive collection of Chris stuff out there.”
‘The Complete Chris Bell’
In addition to containing I Am the Cosmos and Looking Forward, The Complete Big Star also features a 1975 radio interview with Bell by British journalist Barry Ballard. “He sent us from the U.K. his original cassette,” Pawelski says. “The interview took place when Chris was over there working. It’s a pretty comprehensive and interesting interview. Barry asked some really good questions. We were able to clean it up and edit it to the point to where we could fit it on two sides of vinyl. He actually talks about Alex working on Third. It’s quite a nice document to have.”
Bell’s posthumously-released recordings, especially from I Am the Cosmos, show how much of a perfectionist he was in achieving a sound that remains fresh to this day (the tracks on the Cosmos reissue were from the original masters and not remixed, Pawelski emphasizes). For this project, Pawelski and her team had an opportunity to repair a bad tape splice on the “I Am the Cosmos” track. “I called David specifically on it,” she says. “I said, ‘People have been used to this anomaly in this unbelievably great song, and we do have the opportunity to fix it now. I don’t want to do that without your permission.’ He thought about it for a while and he said, ‘You know, Chris would want it to be as perfect as possible. So let’s do it, let’s make it right.’ And so we were able to fix that. That is the only thing that we altered…I wanted to make sure we did right by Chris’ legacy.”
In addition to the reissues of his and Big Star’s recordings (#1 Record was ranked in Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list], Chris has been mentioned in articles and books about Big Star as well as on the 2012 band documentary Nothing Can Hurt Us. Bell and Big Star had their biggest mainstream exposure in the late 1990s through the television sitcom That ’70s Show, which used “In the Street” as its theme song. And in the recent Big Star Third concerts, featuring a rotating cast of esteemed musicians performing the music of the band’s then-aborted third record, two of Bell’s songs, “I Am the Cosmos” and “You and Your Sister,” have appeared on the set list.
Both Big Star and Bell have been acknowledged influences on a new generation of alternative rock musicians, including R.E.M. and the Posies, who themselves recorded Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos.” “I used to always prefer the first [Big Star] record in general because I like Chris Bell’s contributions,” said former R.E.M. bassist Mike Mills in an interview with the Guardian. And the Posies’ Jon Auer told San Francisco Bay Area Concerts last year: “Alex Chilton got the lion’s share of credit for that group; but we’ve always felt that Chris Bell has so much to do with it as well…for me, and maybe for [Posies bandmate] Ken [Stringfellow], I just don’t think that Big Star really existed without Chris Bell.”
Cover of the upcoming Chris Bell biography, ‘There Was a Light,’ by Rich Tupica.
“It’s true with Alex [Chilton] too,” says Stephens about Bell. “They deliver us a song vocally that captures everybody, engages people emotionally. There’s nothing like a melody line that expresses where you are emotionally in your life, something that bonds you to that, and you remember that forever. It’s really melody and the soul that they delivered — their vocal and guitar performances.”
David Bell, who from the very beginning believed in Chris during his lifetime, and had preserved his songs after his death, says that he wishes that people will discover the beauty and hope conveyed from the music. “Even though there are some sad songs,” he says, “there’s always hope to me. I’d never lost hope and very personally feeling that whenever my time comes — and I’m about to turn 72 — that I am definitely going to be seeing him when I get there. He was the most important spiritual influence in my life. It wasn’t just the music was great, and I loved the music. He had a sense of humor. He’s been incredibly instructive for me and I think that his music reflects that.”
It all goes back to that sense of devotion that David has carried for his hip kid brother through all of their years together. “For the person who’s going to say to me, ‘Why would you spend time with your younger brother?’” says David. “Well, listen to what he produced.”
Special thanks to David Bell, Jody Stephens and Cheryl Pawelski. Additional sources for this story include Bob Mehr’s liner notes in the 2017 Omnivore Recordings reissue of ‘I Am the Cosmos,’ and the book ‘Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop’ By Rob Janovic.