I would give up every rock and roll lyric ever written for these two lines of thirteen: "why dont you tell yr dad to get off yr back/why don't you tell him what we said about painted black" except it wouldn't have worked because it required us to feel the stones, profoundly, like a baptist feels the bible.

Chilton for me, from the boxtops onward, about the history of rock and roll--not in a clever, intertextuality, or a postmodernism, or studio tricks, but in the gut, in the immersive and beautiful idea that popular music had become a lingua franca. the language that we use to fall in love, and to grieve, and to be born, and to eventually die--he had the desire to fuck that is essential to rock, he never wasn't the one eyed cat peeking in the seafood store, but also had all of these emotions that seemed so complicated, and adult.

Chilton aside from reminding me of a brace of 70s singer-songwriters who did the same thing also reminds me of a bunch of country guys. People like Townes Van Zandt Nick Lowe or Warren Zevon or Willie Nelson or Loudon Wainwright...but he was unique, maybe because of his earnestness, or maybe because he knew Memphis so well.

Willie might be the odd man out there--but listen to some of the songs on the Atlantic sessions. Willie knew how to write, and the first thing that I went to yesterday, after hearing Chilton died, was Sad Songs and Waltzes, because it is such a clever song, and a heart breaking song, and a song that knows how geography can break yr heart as efficiently and as ruthlessly as any lover. It's a Chilton song.

I heard LCD Soundsystem's New York I Love You after that, and the same reason, the same feeling...it means something that someone can work as a bridge b/w those two seemingly disparate but not very seperate feelings.