“Thirteen”
BIG STAR
From #1 Record

This deceptively emotional meditative tour de force from “#1 Record” to me has always been one of the key pieces of evidence in how advanced an artist Alex Chilton was in those days. He had seen the rock world, close up, from an extremely early age. (Chilton had been the lead singer of the Box Tops, whose worldwide hit “The Letter,” with Chilton’s preternaturally gravely lead vocal, came in 1966, when he was 16.)

Five years later, on the first album from his famously under-appreciated next group, Big Star, Chilton captured something important about both rock and adolescence.

“Thirteen” may be the quietest and most unadorned song Big Star recorded (a significant status for a group with its rococo ambitions); its emotional progression, by contrast, is arguably the group’s most explosive, complex and nuanced.

The music, if you haven’t heard it, is based on almost entirely on a lulling guitar line that repeats through most of the song. The only production touches are a faint bass and a few layered bits of guitar foofara. There’s no chorus, just three stark five-line verses, sung with a precarious frailty, broken by a delicate, simple guitar break before the last verse.

Lyrically, you take in the title and the first verse and you have a deftly limned portrait of a newly born teen, dealing with love for the first time and speaking with a deliberately clichéd naivete:

Won’t let you let me walk you home from school?
Won’t you let me meet you by the pool?

In the second verse, the school yard clichés are displaced by an oddy combative couplet: “Won’t your tell your dad get off my back/ Won’t tell him what we said about “Paint it Black’?”

I think what’s Chilton’s doing here is saluting the birth of teen defiance, set to the tune of the 60s rock that formed him. Far younger than most kids, he saw the effects of rock on kids across the counry—saw it roil their souls at it did his. Indeed, swept up, he continues, “Rock ‘n’ roll is here to stay/ Step inside now it’s ok/ And I’ll shake you.” Those sexually charged words are, like the rest of the song, sung with a tremulousness and insecurity that entirely subverts their overt meaning.

Then comes the guitar break, and the singer, heart bursting, makes a further cosmic jump:

Won’t you be an outlaw for my love?

One minute he’s a child going to a dance, and the next, he hears “Paint It Black,” and he’s on the run like Clyde Barrow. But then, at this moment of overwhelming emotion, all he can say is…

If it’s so then let me know
If it’s not, well, I can go

.. and the moment dissolves, again, into insecurity.

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Last week’s “Song about rock.”

The complete “Songs about rock.”