Andy Hummel of Big Star, being interviewing by Jason Gross, Perfect Sound Forever blog, July 2001: PSF: How would you describe the atmosphere for the recording of #1 Record? How much was Alex or Chris in charge? Where did you fit in? Hummel: Well, Chris WAS in charge. I would pretty well credit him with recording and producing that LP. Of course, he had a lot of artistic help from Alex but Chris was the technical brains behind it. He was the only one of us at that time who new how to record. Early on, I was just trying to play bass and keep up with the rest. But later on, after I had taken the audio engineering course and become more comfortable with the bass, I began to play the guitar and piano and write music a lot more and to just generally expand musically. After we moved to Madison Ave., I began to go into the studio alone at night and record my own music which is where India Song came from. I engineered a little of the later No. 1 stuff, but Chris was the main force. I dont think I really began contributing heavily until Radio City. PSF: How would you describe Chris songwriting technique (from what you saw)? Hummel: On the first LP, Alex and Chris pretty well just brought completed songs into the studio to record with a guitar part and lyrics. Then we played them together to learn them and developed the bass, drum, and other parts. The songs may have been tweaked a bit here and there during this process but for the most part they were a done deal when they were brought into the studio. So I dont know a whole lot about Chriss writing technique at this point other than to point out that he was a guitarist first and foremost and I think most of his songs began life as guitar riffs of one sort or another. His producing was agonizing, very meticulous, and quite frankly a bit overdone in my opinion. He spent hours and hours in the studio alone, with Alex, or with the whole band overdubbing, adding special effects, and just generally looking for every conceivable way to jazz up the tunes. He got MUCH worse about this after he went solo too. PSF: What kind of fond memories do you have of the recording of the first record? Hummel: Not too many actually, at least in the early days. It was a very trying time in my life. Chris and I were both still living at home and going to college while trying to do the Big Star thing, there were a lot of drug floating around, and I was just kind of trying to figure out where I fit into everything that was going on. Later on, as I began to learn how to record, and got my musical chops back on other instruments and stuff I began to really enjoy. I would spend hours and hours in the middle of the night in the B studio on Madison recording just anything and everything I could think of - sometimes with friends, sometimes with Alex and/or Richard, and sometimes just by myself. PSF: What did the group think of the first album when it was completed? Hummel: I dont know about the others but I was sick and tired of most of it by then other than some of the acoustic tunes which Ive always really liked. PSF: What was the circumstance of Chris leaving the band? How did everyone else feel about it? Hummel: As I said, Chris leaving was an extremely complex affair involving disappointment with the way the release, promotion, and sales of the record had gone plus a lot of personal problems he was having at the time. I wont comment further on the latter but on the former, look at it from our point of view. We had produced, as time has proven, a superb product using very limited resources. We had done our job. We had taken care of the artistic part. Now the business end should have kicked in and taken care of their part - Stax, Ardent, et al. Would you say they did their part? Why didnt the record sell? It was/is a great record, right? It wasnt/isnt fair. Big Star did our part of the deal superbly then the business folks completely dropped the ball. At least thats how I look at it.
Posted on: Sat, 27 Sep 2014 18:02:58 +0000
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