Big Star Radio City 33 1/3

Bruce Eaton’s book length essay about Big Star’s second album Radio City for the 33 1/3 series seems to have placed accuracy above all in the story of this recording. It is mostly transcriptions of interviews with band members and the engineering staff at Ardent Studios about how the recording was made. I think it would have been more compelling if these interviews had been paraphrased and put into a more coherent narrative. I was also missing insight/analysis of the songs. The author claims to have read everything written about Big Star yet he makes no references to any other printed material. The book doesn’t really come alive until the end where the author recounts how he ended up playing with Alex Chilton after Big Star broke up.