December Boy: On Alex Chilton

“I never travel far without a little Big Star,” Replacements lead singer Paul Westerberg declared on the 1987 song “Alex Chilton.” I am among a generation of people who first came to Chilton’s music through a wide variety of covers of his tender 1972 song “Thirteen”—first by the alternative-rock band Garbage and then a little later an aching, faithful homage by Elliott Smith that would appear on his posthumous compilation New Moon. In the Big Star documentary Nothing Can Hurt Me, producer Jim Dickinson (who’d later go on to work with Chilton, doing brilliant production work on Third) remembered that the first time he met Alex he was 11 or 12, running around on peyote that Eggleston had offered him.

Source: www.theringer.com