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Pop / Rock 04/04/2017

'Thank You Friends: Big Star's Third Live... And More' Coming April 21; A Hit At SXSW

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'Thank You Friends: Big Star's Third Live... And More' Coming April 21; A Hit At SXSW
New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Following its successful launch at last month's South by Southwest (SXSW) Film & Music Festivals, the concert film Thank You, Friends: Big Star's Third Live … and More was the recipient of much critical acclaim. The title will be available in stores April 21, 2017 as a 2-CD/DVD or Blu-Ray combo pack, as well as a stand-alone 2-CD album. Liner notes by GRAMMY® Award-winning writer Anthony DeCurtis and Chris Stamey (from the dB's, and a founding member of the Big Star Third ensemble) will round out the package. The film will also be available via Digital HD and VOD on April 25th.
Cited by Rolling Stone as "One of 20 Must-See Films" at SXSW, two events on opposite ends of the country will kick off the release of the CD/DVD and Blu-Ray packages.
On April 20, Los Angeles' GRAMMY Museum will host a film screening followed by a Q&A with film director Benno Nelson (of production company Yes Equals Yes) and Big Star's Third ensemble members Dan Wilson, Skylar Gudasz and musical director Stamey. GRAMMY® Foundation Vice President Scott Goldman will moderate.
On April 21 — street date — a panel and performance will follow a screening of the film at Durham, N.C.'s Caroline Theatre. The Q&A and performance will feature Big Star's drummer and sole surviving member Jody Stephens, along with the ensemble's several North Carolina performers: Gudasz, Django Haskins, Jeff Crawford and Stamey. The moderator will be WUNC-FM's Eric Hodge.

Big Star's devastatingly beautiful third album has long been revered by artists and critics as one of the most influential records ever produced. Rolling Stoneincluded it in its listing of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Written and recorded when the legendary '70s band was primarily a studio project consisting of guitarist/singer-songwriter Alex Chilton and Stephens, Third (or Sister Lovers, as it was alternatively known) had never been performed in public with the original string and wind arrangements. That changed in 2010, following Chilton's untimely death just two days ahead of a much-anticipated Big Star performance at SXSW. That December, famous friends and fans assembled from far and wide to play a fully orchestrated Chapel Hill, N.C. gig in Chilton's honor. From there, the core players (including Stephens, Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Mitch Easter (Let's Active), and Stamey, plus the Posies' Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer) took the show on the road internationally, enlisting guest stars and orchestras in each city, and performing not only songs from Third, but also material from Big Star's first two albums, #1 Record and Radio City.
That core ensemble, along with a star-studded cast of guest artists, assembled in April 2016 at Glendale, Calif.'s Alex Theatre for the epic concert seen in Thank You, Friends. The film includes performances by a who's who of indie rock, including Jeff Tweedy and Pat Sansone of Wilco, Ira Kaplan (Yo La Tengo), Robyn Hitchcock, Dan Wilson (Semisonic), Benmont Tench, Kronos Quartet, Jessica Pratt, Brett Harris, Haskins and Gudasz as well as a full chamber orchestra conducted by Carl Marsh, who wrote the original orchestrations for Third/Sister Lovers.
David Menconi in the Raleigh News & Observer wrote of the film, "Listening to Big Star's records 40 years on, it's still unfathomable how they weren't all over the radio in their day. Thank You, Friendsunderscores that with great renditions of 'Thirteen,' 'September Gurls' and other shoulda-been hits by an all-star band." Online Music Videos called it a "triumphant film." Witnessing the SXSW performance of Third on the night following the screening, the Lincoln Journal-Star noted: "It was a lovely orchestral rock show … a night I'll remember as I'm sure I'll never get to hear those songs played that way live again."

More on Big Star:
Much like Nick Drake, the Velvet Underground, and other critically esteemed artists whose work only gained commercial traction long after its initial release, Big Star let loose their trademark mix — shimmering jangle pop with a side of elliptical melancholia — into a world that just wasn't ready for it. Formed in 1971 by singer/songwriters Alex Chilton (1950-2010) and Chris Bell (1951-1978), drummer Jody Stephens (b. 1952) and bassist Andy Hummel (1951-2010), the Memphis-based band is now considered to be one of the most influential in modern music, having inspired some of the biggest alt-rock artists of the '80s, '90s and beyond. An underground core of fanatical enthusiasts kept the fire burning. The Replacements famously released "Alex Chilton," a song that paid tribute to Big Star's songwriting genius. R.E.M.'s Peter Buck says, "Big Star served as a Rosetta Stone for a whole generation of musicians."
Over the course of their time together, Big Star recorded three LPs with producer John Fry at his Ardent Studios. 1972's #1 Record included the power-pop anthem "When My Baby's Beside Me," the dreamy "Thirteen" and "In the Street," famously performed by Cheap Trick for the theme of That '70s Show. Radio City (1974), recorded after Bell's departure, featured "September Gurls" (covered by likes of the Bangles and Superdrag). In the fall of 1974, not long after the release of Radio City and the departure of Hummel, Chilton and Stephens recorded a new album that was shelved until 1978, after the group had disbanded. That mythic album was released as Third (later reissued under the name Sister Lovers), and has long been revered by artists and critics as one of the most influential albums ever produced. Third is included as one of Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest Albums of All Time."
According to David Fricke in Rolling Stone, who attended a 2011 New York performance of Third, "It should have been impossible to perform. Recorded in 1974 by the final '70s incarnation of the power-pop band Big Star, and now lionized as one of the most brutally cathartic rock albums ever made, Third was the work of a once-magnificent group reduced to survivors — singer-guitarist Alex Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens — and emotional cinders. It was a document of great anger and pain, rendered in uneasy listening: juxtapositions of masterful rapture and radically violated pop convention, sung by Chilton in a soul-choirboy voice hypnotized by haunting. At the time, Third barely made it out of the studio; it wasn't released until 1978. By then, there was no Big Star at all … Yet a small army of Big Star disciples — more than 30 singers and players —recreated Third live, to loving effect, with a striking fidelity to the 1974 arrangements and weirdness."

Event link for Durham, N.C.:
https://www.carolinatheatre.org/events/thank-you-friends-big-stars-third-liveand-more
Event link for Los Angeles:
https://www.grammymuseum.org/events/detail/thank-you-friends-big-stars-third-live-and-more


Pre-order Thank You, Friends: Big Star's Third Live... And More
2-CD/Blu-Ray: https://smarturl.it/ThankYouFriends_BR
2-CD/DVD: https://smarturl.it/ThankYouFriends_DVD
2-CD: https://smarturl.it/ThankYouFriends_CD






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