The deepest hurt in Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me occurs far from the world of rock ‘n’ roll, on a living room couch, where David Bell and Sara Stewart sit talking about the death of their brother, Chris Bell. As a founding member of the Memphis guitar-pop band Big Star, Bell collaborated with fellow singer-songwriter Alex Chilton on #1 Record (1972), a dazzling combination of folk, jangle-pop, and hard rock that won ecstatic reviews in the music press but was doomed by poor distribution. Bell quit the band in frustration, and a solo career went nowhere; by the time he died in a car crash in 1978, he was working at a fast-food restaurant. Now Big Star is the most beloved cult band in all of rock, but to Bell’s siblings this is small consolation. When Stewart tearfully confesses that she resents Big Star, David sympathizes with her: “You’d rather have him instead of having the music out there.”
This sent Bell on a long, lonely odyssey to get his music recognized, even as the rest of the band, buoyed by a triumphant live show at a rock writers’ convention in Memphis, regrouped for a second, more R&B-tinged album, Radio City (1974). According to Fry, a drug overdose landed Bell in the hospital, and David Bell says his brother was drinking heavily by the time he traveled to the UK to mix some of his new music with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. Nothing came of this venture, and Bell returned home to obscurity, trying to reconcile his drug addiction with the devout Christianity that had given his songs such a spiritual lift. One bright moment arrived when Chris Stamey, who had played in Chilton’s backup band (and later formed the dB’s), used his Car Records label to issue a single of Bell’s soaring “I Am the Cosmos.” Its opening lyric—”Every night I tell myself I am the cosmos, I am the wind / But that don’t get you back again”—was classic Big Star, contrasting the infinitely great and the pitifully small.
Directed by Drew DeNicola
