Whether one believes the sophomoric trivia or not, Big Star – the band – did find its namesake in Big Star – the grocery store chain. Founded in the late 1930s as part of the Pender Grocery Company, Big Star was a self-service supermarket that popped up all over the southeast with its trademark astral insignia. Over the years the company’s corporate interests were bought off and sold piecemeal to various other chains, leaving a few remaining Big Star franchises in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Memphis at the lowest ebb of 1970 was a town coasting on social and cultural fumes – there was widespread economic depression, racial division and a kind of musical aporia recipitated by the waning days of Stax and Sun Records. Needless to say the Bluff City as it was then had more of the Stagolee grit and less of the chamber of commerce whitewash.

In the city’s baroque sleaziness one could imagine the adolescent mischief surrounding a quartet of puerile musicians skulking about Overton Park like it were London’s West End. These proto-punks on the Mississippi – Alex Chilton, Chris Bell, drummer Jody Stephens, and bassist Andy Hummel – would emerge from a midnight jam at Ardent Studios, a small storefront operation on National Street, well off their faces and in search of cheap beer and junk food. Across the road was the bright neon sign of an all night Big Star. The rest, as they say, is discography.
Legendary music producer, Dixie Flyers guitarist and southern raconteur James Luther Dickinson, along with local business partner John Fry, moved Ardent to its current midtown Memphis location on Madison Avenue in 1971.

In the following year Big Star’s debut, the visionary jangle-pop masterpiece #1 Record, was released by Stax and Columbia Records but generally ignored by the public. The R&B-heavy Radio City followed in 1974 with much the same result. The tumult of recording had, by this time, prompted bassist Andy Hummel to exit for college and guitarist Bell to begin working on his own solo masterpiece I Am the Cosmos until his untimely death at decade’s end. But within the following year Ardent’s studio A and B would become the site of Chilton and Jody Stephen’s extraordinary requiem to Big Star, alternatively titled Third and Sister Lovers.

Erstwhile drummer Stephens currently manages Ardent, which has become, in recent years, a kind of unofficial HQ for Big Star reunions and recording. Though Alex had migrated from Tennessee to Louisiana many years before, he still pops his head in on occasion, as does producer Jim Dickinson, who has since worked with every hipster from Tav Falco to Bobby Gillespie to Michael Stipe. Stephens has a reputation for being one of the most inviting of Memphis’ record business elders and he does not disappoint during a recent brief visit. He sneaks out of a lengthy conference call just to smile and shake hands with a trademark Tennessean geniality. From the lobby the wood and glass halls of the newly remodeled building wind around a central courtyard and end up in the control room of studio A. The wide analog mixing console blinks with the arrhythmic pine and peppermint hues of a Christmas evergreen. The recording booth next door reeks of hash smoke. Standing in the holiest of holies, the Big Star fanatic might strain in the dead air to hear the irradiated synthesizers of "Kanga Roo" and the thrice echoed guitars of "Big Black Car" performed more than 30 years before.

Depending on who recounts the myth behind the music, the protracted creation of Third/Sister Lovers at Ardent was either an Orphic festival of excess and debauchery or a pathetic binge of drinking and drugging. With Bell and Hummel absent, Chilton, Stephens, and Jim Dickinson recorded demos for the album at irregular intervals throughout ‘74 without a label contract or budget despite the critical plaudits of both previous Big Star releases. Chilton’s megalomaniacal abuses of the time may have been well documented but they extended beyond the pills and liquor to his grandiose ambitions of the studio-as-instrument – including the addition of a mellotron, a crew of backup vocalists and a string section, a deflated basketball, and a seriously detuned piano. When studio owner Fry encouraged Chilton to polish a potential single "Downs" with an eye toward radio play, the songwriter responded by sabotaging the three-minute demo with a near untranslatable recording.

With Chilton on guitar and vocals and Dickinson behind the board, tracks like "Kanga Roo" and "Holocaust" became outrageous experiments that stretched the psychedelic tapestry of blue-eyed soul, the pop ballad, and the ambient soundscape to its last thread. Their interplay of synthesizers and feedback had the hollow, interstellar timbres of the Radiophonic Workshop while the reverbed piano and parched vocals buried underneath seemed permanently coated with the black residuum of a Highway 61 coke factory. If "Kanga Roo" was the conceptual lynchpin behind Third/Sister Lovers, as most Chilton devotees speculate, then it must have also been indicative of his eccentric working methods at the time.

As the legend goes, Chilton came into Ardent one evening with his girlfriend and a 12-string guitar, laid down a single track with both vocal and instrument in one take, and then instructed Dickinson that the rest of the song was his to finish. Apocryphal or not, it’s a hell of a story. Even innocuous ballads became mocked and perverted by Chilton’s deconstructive gambols, as when he triumphantly changed the lyrics and title of "Stroke It Noel" to reflect violinist Noel Gilbert’s masturbatory proclivities on the strings. There were hints of the upbeat Big Star of #1 Record on "O, Dana" and the Kinks’ cover "Till the End of the Day" but they proved fleeting and irretrievable in the morass of Ardent’s increasing chaos. The true indicator of Third’s genius was, that, despite Chilton’s absolute determination to dismantle every song at its conception, a superlative beauty remained in tracks like "Nighttime," "Big Black Car," "Blue Moon," and the Stephens-penned "For You" that rivaled anything meticulously written and produced at Abbey Road. When recording finally stumbled to a premature end – mainly due to a complete lack of label interest – Chilton and Dickinson refused to complete a track order, instead handing the whole collection of songs over to Fry for a white-label pressing. Five hundred copies were reportedly distributed to radio stations, record labels, and critics without any response.

Third disappeared for nearly four years before being released by small American label PVC at the beginning of 1978 unbeknownst to the remaining members of Big Star, who had since parted ways and buried the band name. Chilton continued to cement his cult status from Memphis to New York with the rhythm and blues-meets-punk classics Bach’s Bottom and Like Flies on Sherbet. By the late '70s he had also produced the Cramps’ earliest recordings and joined Memphis artist and bon vivant Tav Falco to form Panther Burns. By the time of Third/Sister Lovers’s official remastered release in 1992, the mystery surrounding the "lost" Big Star record had a cult following reserved only for studio relics like Dylan’s Basement Tapes, the Beach Boys’ Smile, Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, and Chris Bell’s own I Am the Cosmos recordings. The name Big Star, which had signified little more than a grocery chain when punk was as its apex in the 1970s, became a royal appellation to the post-punk singer-songwriters par excellence: Paul Westerberg, Matthew Sweet, Michael Stipe, Elliott Smith, and Jeff Buckley.

Memory Hills Garden is northeast of midtown Memphis in the very affluent Germantown neighborhood. Here the Monday morning rush is limited to a few grounds keepers and the occasional rumble of a tractor whose front-end loader is carving out a fresh plot for the cemetery’s newest resident. Christopher Branford Bell’s unadorned headstone sits near the rear of Memory Hills and backs up to a thick patch of undeveloped acreage. Driving back and forth along Poplar Avenue, it had taken the better part of two hours to locate the former Big Star songwriter’s resting place - so circuitous and arbitrary was Memphis’ highway system. In the ensuing confusion the Poplar Avenue and Grove Park intersection appeared with a foreboding flash. It was here where Bell’s Triumph sports car had plowed head on into a telephone pole during a late-night drive in 1978. Tennesseans are extremely inept behind the wheel as was illustrated moments later by a screeching automobile driving against traffic that nearly collided with another passing motorist.

There are only two or three Big Star groceries still operating in the city of Memphis – one north along Chelsea Avenue, the other off Knight Arnold Road. The first has the look of a dilapidated relic, or worse yet – a potential health code violation waiting to be cited and padlocked by city inspectors. The other, however, was a tidy and respectable mom ‘n' pop operation that stood cozily unaware, with all of its southern naiveté, that it was in some way responsible for the greatest band and the greatest album of the 1970s. How often must have rock ‘n' roll collector geeks past through these doors between their tours of Graceland and Beale Street to admire another Memphian landmark? Never, according to the assistant manager who greeted the question with a kind of skeptic humor. Big Star? Never heard of ‘em. A moment of awkward silence. Really? A few bars hummed and a brief discography explained. Nope. That did not stop him from pulling out a standard issue Big Star Groceries T-shirt from a nearby box and offering it up as a token of Memphian hospitality. Enjoy it.

Big Star performs at The Fillmore on Saturday, Oct. 20. Oranger opens.