It’s a question that Drew DeNicola, director of the documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, has pondered many times. “That’s why [in the documentary] we bring in the rock writers’ convention,” DeNicola says. “That allows us to bring in the ‘glory of rock’ that was around at the time. There was a sense at the time that rock was losing its edge and craft. And in some ways, Big Star was the first real revisionist rock band – they were celebrating the mid-to-late ‘60s rock renaissance.”
The rock writers’ convention to which DeNicola refers – and which provides the entry point for Nothing Can Hurt Me – was a gathering of American rock critics, including Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer and Jaan Uhelski, all of whom had been brought to Memphis by Ardent Records. Big Star had formed a couple of years previously by Chris Bell, Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel and Jody Stephens, before breaking up in the aftermath of the underwhelming reaction to the band’s debut album, the audaciously titled #1 Record.
Spurred on by the positive reaction to the band’s live set at the writers’ convention, Big Star reformed as a three-piece, with Bell declining to return to the fold. A second album, Radio City, followed in 1974, before the band broke-up again in 1975 (a third album, Sister Lovers, was posthumously released in 1978).
By the early ‘90s, bands such as The Replacements and REM had rekindled interest in Big Star, providing the catalyst for a reformation (minus Hummel, with Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer from The Posies rounding out the lineup), and even a fourth album, In Space. It was around this time that DeNicola, a college student and DJ, first came across Big Star.
“I got into them about the time the third record came out, and that was the first record of theirs that I got into, which is kind of bizarre,” DeNicola says. “At the time I thought the music was completely contemporary – the production was so clean, but there’s also so much noise in it. As you continue to listen to it, the melodies are so great, so melancholy. And the ‘get me out of here’ aspect of the lyrics is so big for teenagers, so it really resonated,” he says.
Some years later, and Danielle McCarthy from Magnolia Pictures was visiting Memphis, kicking around the idea of a documentary on Big Star. “Danielle started connecting with the right people, and people were saying that a documentary needed to be made,” DeNicola says. DeNicola was approached to direct the documentary, and began the long process of accumulating interview and period footage for the film. While the story of Big Star is often associated directly with the cult of the talented but volatile Alex Chilton, Nothing Can Hurt Me restores the principal role of founding member Chris Bell.
Bell, in fact, formed Big Star in 1971, inviting Chilton to join. Bell spent his post Big Star years battling depression and drug abuse, eventually dying in a car crash in 1978. “To be honest, I had thought Chris Bell was a minor figure compared to Alex before I started the film,” DeNicola says. “But when I was listening to the tapes of the band in the studio at the time, I discovered that it was Chris Bell was actually running the show. He had a very clear vision for the band.”
As for Chilton, DeNicola says he was typically indifferent to the Big Star legacy. “He said ‘that’s not the sort of thing I’m inclined to’,” DeNicola says. “He said it with a big grin. I met him a few times for drinks, and he was completely friendly, and charming and friendly. I think the movie leaves it open the degree to which he really enjoyed the revival of interest in Big Star.”
Along with original bass player Andy Hummell, who died in 2010, and producer and musician Jim Dickinson who died in 2009, Chilton also died during the making of the film. The deaths of a number of protagonists necessarily affected the tone of the production.
“I had had this idea of Jim Dickinson being the informal narrator of the story, but then he died, so we couldn’t do that. Basically, the death of so many people involved in the Big Star story was just very sad,” DeNicola says.
Nothing Can Hurt Me is more than just a cinematic portrayal of Big Star’s recording history: it’s about the Memphis sound, and the musicians, production staff and protagonists of the early ‘70s Memphis scene, including John Fry, engineer at the city’s famed Ardent Studios, Jim Dickinson, and even photographer William Egglestone, whose pictures adorned the second Big Star album.
“The story of Big Star is also the story of Ardent Studio, and that’s also the story of John Fry,” DeNicola says. “Once I got involved, Danielle had already done a lot of scouting, and I came down and questioned whether this was a band at all – it’d gone from four members, to three, to two. So I started looking at what else was catching attention, and it was Memphis, and all the people who were there at the time. I wanted to talk about how Memphis was operating in a bubble, removed from the rest of the world.”
BY PATRICK EMERY
