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We Really Lost Big Star's Alex Chilton This Time

It is still hard to believe that Alex Chilton is really gone. He died St. Patrick's Day 2010 in New Orleans. Reports are saying heart attack.

We thought we had lost Alex once before - in 2005 during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. From what I remember he didn't leave New Orleans after the hurricane hit, but he did loan his car to some friends so they could get out of town. Everything seemed OK until another set of levees broke and supposedly flooded Alex's neighborhood. I believe it was about four or five days before anyone heard from him. He was rescued and taken to Houston.

The news now, however, is final.

Friday, March 26, 2010, we will have a special Alex Chilton-centric show on Deaconlight at ErrorFM.com. I'm still working out the details, but we'll do something nice to remember Alex and his music.

-- 21 March 2010 (DD)

Deaconlight in Rob Jovanovic's Big Star Bio

The Big Star book by Rob Jovanovic called Big Star: The Short Life, Painful Death, and Unexpected Resurrection of the Kings of Power Pop has a reference to Deaconlight in it! I had thought Peter Holsapple was referring to Gardner Campbell, who used to take his own records into the station since we didn't have them in our library, but Peter tells me it was probably (the late) Jim Brawley.

Here is the Deaconlight part (posted on Deaconlight.com by permission from Rob Jovanovic):

"Late in 1977 Chris Stamey managed to land a support slot for his friend Peter Holsapple's band, the H-Bombs (a band which also included future Let's Active leader Mitch Easter) to open for [Alex] Chilton's band at Max's Kansas City. Holsapple was excited about the opportunity because he'd been a Big Star fan from the word go. 'A number of us kids in Winston-Salem had heard one of the college DJs play stuff from #1 Record on a latenight program called "Deaconlight" on the Wake Forest University radio station WFDD-FM,' recalls Holsapple. 'I'm pretty sure Chris Stamey was the first person to actively seek out a copy of the record. My high school band Little Diesel played a bunch of songs from that album, too. You could say that my friends and I had pretty rarefied tastes even at fifteen to seventeen years old. We lived in a town in the midst of Allman, Marshall Tucker, Skynyrd mindset. Our band song lists had a lot of what we wanted to play, but we had to know "Midnight Rider" in order to play a lot of places. So we were pretty pumped to find out about an actual Southern band playing actual Beatles-style pop, and not jamming endlessly.'"

Find out more about the book here.