The Baker Street Regulars: The band that formed after Big Star broke up
When you’ve lived out a career not experiencing much acclaim, you don’t expect your influence to transcend generations. In most cases, it doesn’t, but then you look at Big Star.
To all intents and purposes, this was a band that should have never really made it off the starting block. They only ever made one album with their original line-up in tow, and their success was hardly something to be bowled over by. But nevertheless, in the years that ensued, they had everyone from REM to Elliott Smith and Primal Scream hailing them as geniuses – so what went so right, when it seemingly looked so wrong?
The basic answer to this was frontman Chris Bell, whose effervescent songwriting ability transcended the small town suburbia of Memphis, Tennessee, in the early 1970s, and expanded indie horizons to an unfettered ground no one had ever explored before. Yet there was an element of Bell knowing he was too good for his underappreciated roots, and he soon became the lone wolf who left the rest of his bandmates to continue without him.
There was no denying that this only amped up the heat of the frictions rather than dousing them. Two more albums followed after the debut #1 Record, in the form of Radio City and Third/Sister Lover, but with the muted reverence not exactly satiating the hunger for Alex Chilton, Jody Stephens, and Andy Hummel, it was time to hang up their dreams of rock and roll.
Like many of those in bands who have decided to call it a day, you’d think that the former Big Star members would be scared off from the music industry and seek out a more stable, if mundane, way of making a living. Bassist Hummel did just that, landing on a path of education and becoming an engineer for more than 30 years. But for his three comrades, the dream didn’t die just yet.
Chilton and Stephens cut their losses and went to play with other bands, but the ever-persistent Bell still sought out his ambitions of being a frontman in the spotlight. He moved to London for a brief time in the mid-’70s, but was turned down by every record label he approached. Seemingly dejected, he returned to Memphis to flip burgers in a fast food chain by day, but by night, his musical prowess still lived.
Roping in Stephens alongside Memphis local scene stalwarts Mike Brignardello and Van Duren, the four-piece formed The Baker Street Regulars, a band who were notable in their name if not so much for their nature. They never recorded a single track, so it’s impossible to guess what they really sounded like.
But if the allusion to the Baker Street Irregular characters in the Sherlock Holmes series was anything to go by, it was oddly symbolic of everything they achieved in that short-lived time. Keeping quiet, going under the radar, no one expected them to have any impact. Yet that influence was far more covert and significant than you’d think.
Within a few years, Bell would tragically be dead in a car crash at the age of just 27. It was unerring, in this sense, how he would join the club with the likes of Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin, without even a hint of even the same stardom. But if that fact was anything to go on, we all know the life that this man really should have lived.
