599. “Kangaroo” by Big Star
Joey Michaels on June 29th, 2008Beck covers the song live in Japan:
Actually, Beck does a good enough job covering it that I’m not going to bother with The Last FM this time. The only thing missing is the sabotage.
Alex Chilton, as you’ve now read, became determined to wreck his songs before the record label had a chance to wreck them. While recording “Kangaroo”, Chilton did something that would have made the producer in this short film very happy.
Specifically, he added a cowbell.
Here is what AllMusic reports about the sessions:
” Dickinson recalled his own involvement with the sessions for the reissued album’s liner notes: ” Alex went into the studio late one night, with Lesa Aldredge ( Chilton’s girlfriend) as the engineer, and recorded the vocal and the 12-string guitar on the same track, so there was no possibility of separation,” said Dickinson. ” Alex defiantly played it for me the next day and said something to the effect of, ‘If you want to be a producer, do something with this.’ I did the Mellotron part first, and when I got into the feedback, Alex kind of lost his attitude and started participating again. He said later, during the 45 minutes it took us to do that song, that was the first place he ever trusted me, and he felt like it took his career ten years forward into the future. Anyway, &Kanga-Roo is really where the record started to work.”
So, brilliant producer manages to get a great song out of a self-destructing artist. Awesome story.
I feel for Chilton, though. He was a “big star” from his work with The Box Tops and really could have been a contender.
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