Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band. Rob Jovanovic

TN, Atlanta, GA and New York, NY. 1970

      4 July 1970. At the Atlanta Pop Festival Jimi Hendrix is wrenching his way through the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ before an estimated crowd of half a million. The three-day festival had showcased the top guns of the day: Jethro Tull, B.B. King and Led Zeppelin were on the bill alongside newcomers the Allman Brothers. Backstage the Stephens brothers are pacing nervously up and down; soon they will be on the same stage in front of the same crowd.

      Their journey to this climactic moment started in 1969 when audition notices were put up for a forthcoming production of the musical Hair at Memphis State University. Jody was still in high school but his brother was going with a friend, Don McNatt. ‘Don was auditioning and encouraged us to audition,’ recalls Jody. ‘My brother Jimmy was always a big supporter and encouraging me to do things. I was still in high school so why should I waste my time auditioning? I thought I’ll never make this audition because this first off-Broadway college production of Hair was a big deal.’

      Hair had caused shockwaves across the country with its irreverent look at American values, the peace movement, the 1960s and the Vietnam war. ‘I was letting my hair grow,’ recalls Jody. ‘It was a little bit over my ears and a little bit over my collar and the principal saw me and threatened to throw me out if I didn’t get a haircut.’ In the shadow of such opinions, both Stephens brothers passed the audition and were accepted into the cast. The show ran in Memphis for two weeks in the early part of 1970.

      Also in the show was Beverley Baxter, Andy Hummel’s junior-high-school sweetheart who was now dating Jody. After one of the shows that Hummel attended, while home from Knoxville for the weekend, he and Jody discussed the possibility of getting together to play sometime. It was left as an open-ended invitation. The two-week run went well but, as expected, in some quarters it was seen as ‘un-American’ and attracted negative press about its use of a racially mixed cast. The ultra conservativeness of the South should never be underestimated. All the future members of Big Star were coming up against it. Despite this local resentment, the overall success of the run caught the ear of the organisers of the Atlanta Pop Festival and they invited the entire cast to be the closing act the following July. Hendrix played and the Hair crew came on after Richie Havens had sung ‘Here Comes The Sun’.

      ‘I don’t recall meeting any major stars there,’ says Jimmy Stephens. ‘I spent most of my time in the press tent; it was on the backstage side so I could see the different performers without having to be in the crowd. Jody was seventeen and I was nineteen so you can imagine what it was like for us to be there. Watching Hendrix playing the “Star-Spangled Banner” on the fourth of July with fireworks going off in the sky. There was some talk that Lennon was going to show but that didn’t happen. It was overwhelming. ’

      By the time of the Pop Festival, Hummel and Bell had returned to Memphis and moved back in with their parents, which wasn’t easy for either of them. ‘Chris was probably my mother’s favourite child and she was very supportive,’ says Sara. ‘My father was a man of very few words and there wasn’t a lot of communication going on but he made sure Chris had guitar lessons or whatever he wanted. I don’t think my father thought he could make a career of it, I don’t think he told him not to do it but probably hoped he’d do something else a little more lucrative.’ The fact that Hummel and Bell enrolled to continue their college education in Memphis must have gone some way to lessening the effect of their retreat from Knoxville. The summer of 1970 proved to be a fertile time for making music in Chris Bell’s back house. Andy Hummel started bringing his bass over. Steve Rhea linked back up with the in-crowd and Terry Manning would come along, as did Jody (after re-meeting Hummel) and his exbandmate from the neighbourhood band days, Tom Eubanks, came along to sing. From meeting Manning at Ardent, Richard Rosebrough would also drop by sometimes.

      ‘Chris was a nice guy,’ recalls Stephens, ‘a bit moody and pensive at times. He wasn’t a wide-open person in terms of meeting people. As a matter of fact, the first time I met Chris, I was with Andy [Hummel] and he introduced us and Chris immediately pulled him off to the side to talk to him. It was kind of an uncomfortable first meeting but Chris and I got to be really good friends.’

      The back house was the perfect place to hang out, though Chris’s sisters only rarely visited.

      ‘Vicky [Bell] was around but I don’t remember lots of input from them,’ says Manning. Some of the gang, especially Chris, David Bell and Manning got almost as much into their photography as their music. ‘The photography was just a hobby,’ says David Bell. ‘At the time, we were all influenced by Blow Up by Antonioni, and everyone was dying to get a 35mm Nikon, or something similar. Chris was quite accomplished with the photography, doing his own developing and making prints in the style of the Jimi Hendrix album covers with the wild, reversed colours.’

      Musically it was a revolving cast of players that got together whenever they could. Manning had started writing his own music, as had Bell and Eubanks. Hummel had been keeping notebooks of ideas and started composing his own stuff soon after. Whenever a chance to play a gig came along it was taken, and whoever was available would make up the band. ‘We began playing college fraternity gigs, department store openings, whatever we could get,’ says Hummel. ‘This was with Tom Eubanks whose dad owned a lumberyard. It was pretty slim pickings, though. We played some original stuff, some James Gang, Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin, Beatles, whatever.’

      ‘There were some memorable gigs,’ adds Richard Rosebrough. ‘The most documented gig was with me, Chris and Terry Manning. We drove an hour up into Arkansas to Blytheville Air Force Base, where we played in this echoing gymnasium. It was dark and there were no lights in the place except for strobe lights. I don’t remember that we had any band name. Chris’s friend from MUS, Jimbo Robinson, drove us up there with a few others.’

      Gigs were played in Arkansas, Tennessee and Mississippi and anything within a fifty- or hundred-mile radius was considered. They played at schools and YMCAs, making fifty to a hundred dollars apiece. ‘I had got a van while I was in Lawson and Four More,’ explains Terry Manning. ‘My dad had bought me a Volkswagen camper bus and so I finally ran it into the ground and blew the engine up.’

      Eventually the group was whittled down to a regular core of Stephens, Bell, Hummel and Rhea. When Steve Rhea went to study in Dallas, the lead singer became Tom Eubanks. He’d been writing some material of his own and the band started playing under the name of Rock City.

      Rock City was (and still is) a tourist attraction in Tennessee. The road from Memphis to Knoxville was littered with advertising boards saying ‘See Rock City’ and ‘See Seven States’, because from the top of Lookout Mountain at Rock City that’s exactly what you could do on a clear day. ‘We did a bunch of shows with Tom and a few as a three-piece,’ says Jody Stephens. ‘We did one show as “Tommy Tutweiler and the Twisters”.’ John Dando, who was one of Chris’s friends, got involved with us as kind of our technician and someone wanted to book us. Dando had to come up with a name on the spot so that’s what he called us, for one night only.’

      At this time most bands in Memphis were still playing predominantly soul music. ‘We were playing things like the Who’s “Happy Jack”,’ recalls Eubanks. ‘I can remember one time when we were doing “Shapes of Things” by the Yardbirds and Chris had his Gibson 335 and an old bassman amp and he was doing feedback. I’d never seen anyone do feedback before, making sounds like an airplane and all these guys were standing there with their mouths open like “What