Photos by Nick Soto
On Saturday nights across America, tribute acts take the stage to honor the legends of classic rock (or to serve as the background music for a night of cheap cocktails). There are long-running Grateful Dead cover bands in every little city, and Led Zeppelin Lites that litter music halls with faux Jimmy Page double-neck guitar solos that play all the notes, but just don’t have the right feel.
On state fair and food festival stages (and maybe even a rock and roll cruise) a single living band member retains the name of a once-great group, employing several touring musicians who weren’t even alive at the height of the band’s fame. In the 1990s, I can recall seeing groups that called themselves Foghat and the Marshall Tucker Band and eying their youthful lineup with suspicion. Can Foghat be Foghat if it’s only the original drummer on the stage? Does anyone really care as long as “Slow Ride” sounds close enough to the recording?
When it comes to the legendary Memphis power-pop group Big Star, a quick Google search makes it plain as day that nearly all of the band’s songwriting and guitar talent have left this mortal coil. Leader (and icon) Alex Chilton died of a heart attack in 2010; original member Chris Bell left the band after its first album and died in a tragic wreck in 1978; bassist Andy Hummel lost a battle with cancer in 2010.
That leaves drummer Jody Stephens, 72, as the sole survivor. But to call The Big Star Quintet a tribute act sells Stephens and his bandmates short and this was obvious in their dynamic performance at Bearsville Theater on Saturday (their second night of a two-night run).
Stephens’ band of Big Star acolytes embodies the spirit of the original group and its members have the pedigree, lineage, and chops to make them the obvious choice for such a project. It was the dBs’ Chris Stamey, a longtime Chilton collaborator and admirer, who came up with the idea for Stephens to tour live performances of Big Star’s Third album back in 2009. Since then, a revolving cast of extended Big Star musical family members have performed these songs live, with Stamey and Jon Auer (The Posies, late-era Big Star) forming a consistent core.
Joining Stamey, who serves a kind of jack-of-all trades, and Auer (guitar, keyboards, vocals), are Pat Sansone (guitar, keyboards), and John Stirratt (bass). Sansone and Stirratt are best known as Jeff Tweedy’s sidemen extraordinaire in Wilco; they are also the duo responsible for The Autumn Defense, a side-project that has long worn its seventies rock harmonies on its sleeves.
Saturday’s The Big Star Quintet show in Woodstock leaned heavily on material from the band’s first two albums, #1 Record (1972) and Radio City (1974), which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. Over the course of two sets, thirty songs, and more than two hours of music, the group covered a lot of territory. The setlist dug into Chris Bell’s solo work (Auer referenced The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton” when he quipped “you never travel far without a little Chris Bell”), catalogue deep cuts (“Kinds Got Lost”), and mined material from Third (“Nightime,” “Thank You Friends,” “Jesus Christ”), an underground classic that undeniably influenced Wilco and a litany of indie artists.
The show opened with the first song on #1 Record, “Feel.” Sansone’s tenor and Auer’s SG riffing got things off on solid footing. “Ballad of El Goodo,” one of Alex Chilton’s true masterpieces, followed. Auer nailed the lead vocal, Stamey played a delicate acoustic, and the four-voice blend on the chorus was an early highlight in a night filled with them.
Bearsville Theater continues to prove itself as a fine venue in terms of acoustics, particularly when it comes to folk music or song-oriented rock. The mix was great all night with the vocals forward, the guitars chiming through Fender amps, and Jody Stephens’ propulsive drumming serving as beat conductor.
For a second I thought they might play all of #1 Record in sequence, but Stamey called out that the band was about to rip into something “completely different” before launching into “Don’t Lie to Me.” The boogie shuffle featured a three guitar onslaught, supported by Stephens’ powerhouse kit work. Stephens is in his seventies but looks at least a decade younger than he is and he plays with the energy of a guy half his age. Stamey played slide guitar and Sansone and Auer traded licks in a hot dual solo.
The quintet format allowed for a lot of flexibility for the group to trade instruments or get innovative about covering the recorded parts of Big Star repertoire. The Big Star guys were students of John Fry’s Ardent Studios in Memphis and they got inventive with their arrangements and overdubs. In some ways they were in the right place at the right time at Ardent. There was a Mellotron in Ardent Studios, and there was state of the art equipment and a master engineer (I contend the guitars on the first two records are the best guitars have ever sounded on a rock album). Given time to tinker, Chilton, Bell, and Andy Hummel created their own Beatlesesque masterpieces. On “India Song,” penned and recorded almost in its entirety by Hummel, the Mellotron is featured heavily. On Saturday night, a Nord Stage 3 took the place of the Mellotron (and sounded incredibly accurate), and Jody Stephens came to the front of the stage to sing his departed bandmate’s song (Jody also came up front to sing “Way Out West” and “Thirteen”). Stephens recounted that he first met Andy when they were both only thirteen years old, and that when “India Song” was recorded he didn’t have any clavs so he just used his sticks alone as the recorded percussion instrument. It was cool to see him replicate that on the Bearsville Stage.
Many of the most fun moments on Saturday involved the way the Quintet replicated famous recorded elements of the songs (or what each member of the group would play for each song as the five musicians switched instruments all night). Stamey played the harmonica part on Chilton’s “Life is White,” Sansone and Auer nailed the guitar interplay on the classic “Thirteen” (after making sure they were properly tuned so Jody could sing the vulnerable vocal). John Stirratt kicked off the holiday season early with his sleigh bells on “Jesus Christ”.
The crowd, which Jody called “reverent” at one point, was moderate in size, but the show wasn’t sold out and it wasn’t body to body on the dance floor. Long considered a record collector’s favorite “underrated” band (so much so, that I don’t think can possibly true anymore after documentaries, deluxe reissues, and several books), the fans that did attend were singing along, mouthing the lyrics, and hanging on every word of Jody’s stories that he interspersed with the music. Perhaps one of the most entertaining stories involved an adolescent Stephens sneaking backstage at a 1966 Beatles concert and getting kicked out.
Stephens also recounted tales of the Ardent days — names like Richard Rosebrough, Terry Manning, and John Fry were probably well-known to folks in attendance if not the general public, because it was a communion of the cult of Big Star. I counted one Hudson Valley record store owner, one former record store owner, a retired music journalist-turned-executive who was a buddy of Stamey’s, and Hudson Valley writer Holly George-Warren, the author of Alex Chilton’s biography A Man Called Destruction, in the audience. Jody publicly thanked George-Warren towards the end of the set for helping to bring the band to the attention of Bearsville’s promoters.
Full disclosure, I’m a big record collector, and among record collector bands, Big Star is way up the list. It’s almost a right of passage to hear how any collector sourced an original copy of #1 Record, Radio City, or Third, all of which command steep prices these days. I know many Gen Xers who brag about 97-cent cutout bin copies found decades ago. Even stories of how anyone came to know the band in the pre-internet days are entertaining. For me, it was my cool guitar-playing friend Steve who made me a mix CD that included “Life is Right,” and “Thirteen” on it when we were trying to figure out what songs to cover for our fledgling band. One listen and I was down the Big Star black hole. Within a couple weeks I found a compilation CD of the first two records, which became a constant companion for the rest of my high school and college years. Beyond the production values and the tasty guitar parts, Big Star nailed the melancholic and introspective lyrics. From heartbreak to teenage ennui, Bell/Chilton certainly resonated with me. I know everyone in that room on Saturday had a similar story. They’re that kind of band — one you obsess over if you’re a certain kind of fanatic.
For all the reverence and tenderness of the evening, there was plenty of good uptempo rocking too. “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “Mod Lang” were swaggering riff rock and the band’s arrangement of “O, My Soul” was also impressive. They joked that the tricky number had been 10-12 years of practice in the making. It made me appreciate Alex Chilton’s fearless performance of “O, My Soul” on the legendary WLIR radio show even more than I already did. If you’ve never heard the in-studio WLIR show from 1974, seek it out. Chilton is leading a lean trio version of the band and his guitar parts sound like a couple guys are playing but it’s just him playing rhythm, lead, and singing at the same time. There’s a reason the guy is an underground legend for record nerds like me.
He was someone a young Pat Sansone idolized too. Stamey was the utility man and musical director, Auer played some of the coolest leads, and Stirratt ably sang harmony and held-down the low end, but Sansone shined brightest. His voice sounded the most like Alex in timbre and phrasing. And, whether it was on a Stratocaster or an acoustic, Sansone’s clean guitar playing was always tasteful and true to these great songs. To kick off the second set, Sansone took the stage alone for a brilliant take on “I’m in Love with a Girl.” Later in the set, Sansone took a moment to mention that playing Big Star music on stage with Jody Stephens was “one of the great pleasures of my musical life.” Sansone said that growing up in Mississippi during the 1980s as a kid obsessed with the music of 1967 in England wasn’t always easy, but when a knowing record store clerk turned him on to Big Star’s Third it rocked his world.
Sansone’s Wilco counterpart John Stirratt also sounded great on “Try Again” and “In The Street,” which should have been a huge hit for Big Star, but it never happened. At least after a Cheap Trick cover and used as the That 70s Show theme song, it paid Bell/Chilton some publishing royalties.
No Big Star show during back-to-school week would be complete without “September Gurls,” the obvious final encore. Stamey did a yeoman’s job on the soaring solo and the harmonies brought chills before the crowd headed back into the chilly night. In the parking lot I thought about the summer’s end, about the spirits of Alex Chilton and Chris Bell and Andy Hummel and how their music has lived on through the kind spirit of Jody Stephens and his current bandmates. And on a cold night, after hearing thirty incredible songs that I would put on par with the output of The Beatles, I pondered yet again about how impossible it was that Big Star never had the number one record it deserved.
Big Star Quintet – 9/6/2025 – Bearsville Theater – Woodstock, NY
Set I:
Feel; The Ballad of El Goodo; Don’t Lie to Me; The India Song; When My Baby’s Beside Me; Mod Lang; O, My Soul; Life is White; Got Kinda Lost; Try Again; Way Out West; What’s Goin Ahn; You Get What You Deserve; Daisy Glaze
Set II: I’m in Love with a Girl; Watch the Sunrise; Life is Right; Blue Moon; Nightime; Back of a Car; Jesus Christ; She’s a Mover; ST 100/6; I Am the Cosmos; In the Street; Thirteen; Thank You Friends
Encore: Morpha Too; You and Your Sister; September Gurls
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