Etched plate titled On the Balcony by Adrian Feint, 1922
Big Star bassist Andy Hummel passed away this week after a lengthy battle with cancer. His passing comes almost exactly four months after the death of Big Star frontman Alex Chilton, leaving drummer Jody Stephens as the band's only surviving member.
Hummel, a high school friend of Stephens and guitarist Chris Bell, started the process of putting the band together during college and helped bring Chilton in. He assisted in arranging the songs that Bell and Chilton brought to the studio for the recording of the band's debut, the highly influential commercial flop #1 Record. Hummel's only writing contribution to #1 Record, "The India Song", is a much-maligned piece of lightweight pop that sits oddly in the middle of Chilton's bluesier numbers and Bell's Beatlesy power-pop. I think it provides a nice counterpoint to the heavy mood of much of the album and reveals Hummel's love of folk guitar, which is paired well with a Mellotron flute part that sticks in your head.
Chris Bell dropped out of Big Star after #1 Record, but Hummel hung in there with Chilton and Stephens for the band's second record Radio City. His contributions were a much bigger part of the process this time around - he has a co-writing credit on four songs and wrote "Way Out West", one of the album's stronger ballads, himself (although the song is still considered second-rate by many because it's not a Chilton song). Oddly, "Way Out West" was one of the Big Star songs I took to right away, and it was one of the first things I learned to play on the guitar. For years, though, I thought it was written by Jody Stephens, who sang it on the live album Columbia - like a lot of people, I underestimated Andy Hummel's contribution to the Big Star records. After Radio City flopped as badly as the first record, Hummel decided to focus on finishing college and left the band, leaving behind a two-LP legacy that must have seemed ignominious at the time. Over the years, though, the Big Star records have been life-changing for a lot of people, and Andy Hummel was a big part of making that happen.
"Way Out West" by Big Star
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