Imagine a young (at heart) rock musician getting a chance to perform with his heroes, in a band with a big name, but relatively few shows to show for it. The player can’t believe his good luck as he convenes with members of R.E.M., Wilco, the dB’s, and the Posies for their first rehearsal in Athens, Georgia. And yet his bandmates feel the same way. After all, he’s from Big Star — the band, not the grocery store.
Still, Jody Stephens feels like he’s the fan. “Soon we’ll have a couple of dates under our belt as a five-piece,” he says of a then-impending Big Star tour. “And you know the cool thing about starting in Athens is, we’re rehearsing at the R.E.M. building!” As he evokes the Georgia band’s longtime rehearsal space on West Clayton Street, Stephens’ enthusiasm is contagious. “You walk in the space and realize it was the incubator for all those R.E.M. records. All the time and thought and creative moments that must have taken place there — it’s pretty inspirational.”
Stephens is no rookie. The Memphis-born drummer and singer/songwriter has also built a storied career developing artists for Ardent Studios. But his wonder at rehearsing in R.E.M.’s building is key to understanding him — his enthusiasm, his humility, and his perpetual youth. Having turned 20 in 1972, just after Big Star’s #1 Record was released, the string of 50th anniversary celebrations of the record in 2022 can’t help but remind him that he’s now 70. Yet deep down, he’s an unabashed fanboy, delighted to be playing shows with members of prominent bands who cite Big Star among their biggest influences.
Indeed, it was fandom that led Stephens into music. “When did the Beatles play Ed Sullivan?” he asks. “February of ’64. Just prior to that, my brother, Jimmy, and I got turned on to the Beatles and were already fans. Our next-door neighbor, Billy McMann, turned us on to the Meet the Beatles record, and we were both immediately taken with it. From that point on, Jimmy fancied himself more Paul McCartney and I fancied myself more Ringo Starr.”
Stephens would have been 11 when the famed Ed Sullivan broadcast set him and his older brother on course for a lifetime of music. As for his younger brother, David, not so much. “My younger brother did play trombone,” Stephens recalls, “but he was five years younger, so he was a bit young when we were doing what we were doing. We were pursuing British Invasion stuff and didn’t really need a trombone.”
“A five-piece rock band is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. It’s hard to take ten people on the road and have string sections and brass sections, and break even.”
— Jody Stephens
Meanwhile, the elder Stephens brothers weren’t the only Memphis kids enamored with the sounds of the British bands putting their own spin on American R&B. Teen groups were springing up throughout the Mid-South, and Jimmy Stephens was quick to leap into the fray, first as a singer. The bass player was Andy Hummel, who recalled the time in Rich Tupica’s There Was a Light: The Cosmic History of Chris Bell and the Rise of Big Star (HoZac Books):
“In seventh grade, I got clued in to the fact there were bands … and started playing in a little garage band called the Chessmen. I was in a band with Jody Stephens’ brother, Jimmy Stephens; he was one of the singers in the band. That’s how I first met Jody. He sat in on drums a few times when our regular drummer wasn’t available.”
“I’d known Andy since I was in the seventh or eighth grade,” Stephens recalls today, speaking of his late friend, who passed away in 2010. “I just hit it off with Andy. I’d go over to his house. His mom and dad seemed to like me, which I was thankful for. His mom, Barbara Jo Walker Hummel, was a pretty outspoken woman and had been Miss America back in 1947. And his dad was pretty cool. They both were always busy with something. And I think I picked up on that a little bit. I like to be busy with something.”
For years, Stephens didn’t even have a drum kit. “When I hit seventh grade, I tried out for the band, because that was a way to have access to a snare drum,” he says. “But see, I wasn’t very successful at that [laughs]. I was fourth chair most of the time, because I just could not sight-read. But I learned about flam paradiddles and paradiddle-diddles and all that sort of thing, which wound up being helpful on Radio City.”
In one breath, Stephens connects his earliest teenage experiences with Big Star’s second release, dubbed “pure power pop perfection” in the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. But generic labels were of little concern to Memphis youngsters at the time. They just wanted to play like their heroes, and in 1965 a guitarist named Chris Bell even formed a band whose name rhymed with Kinks: the Jynx. Eventually, Stephens caught up with his brother and other slightly older kids. “I got my drum kit in ’67 or ’68, and we put a neighborhood band together that included Tom Eubanks,” he says. Eubanks would be playing with both Bell and Stephens later, as they and their musical tastes evolved.
Before the decade drew to a close, Bell and Hummel, who had become best friends at Memphis University School (MUS), spent a dead-end year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, mainly experimenting with drugs, then returned to Memphis to pursue music more seriously. For Bell, that meant more work at Ardent Studios.
Before Knoxville, Bell had recorded in a relatively new studio that first began when radio enthusiast John Fry set up recording equipment in his parents’ garage with his best friends, John King and Fred Smith (who went on to found FedEx). Fry had even recorded local hits there, and eventually he set up the first stand-alone Ardent on National Avenue in 1966.
Fry, King, and their first in-house engineer, a young Memphis State student from Texas named Terry Manning, all shared the same obsession with British music, which grew into an interest in more psychedelic sounds. When Bell and Hummel returned to Memphis in 1970, Manning recruited Bell to play guitar on the solo album the engineer was cutting, Home Sweet Home.
“Jody plays the song rather than just playing the drums, which is a very important component in making a great recording.” — Terry Manning
Meanwhile, Bell, Hummel, and drummer Stephen Rhea were playing their own material, exploring the era’s heavier sounds, and getting familiar with the studio, when Rhea switched to singing and playing guitar. As Hummel explained in There Was a Light, “We needed a drummer. I said, ‘Oh, I know this guy Jody Stephens who I played with in the ninth grade and he’s dating my old girlfriend, Beverly Baxter.’”
In the same book, Stephens himself takes up the narrative: “I was still in high school, but I was playing drums in the first college production of Hair, at Memphis State. Andy came to see one of the shows and came up and said, ‘Hey, we’re putting a band together, are you interesting in coming and jamming a bit?’ I said, ‘Sure.’”
Thus, through the tangled teen web spun through garages and dens across Memphis, the band Icewater was born. When Rhea eventually left, they became a three-piece, though old friend Tom Eubanks was brought into Ardent at times as well, as they honed their skills at writing and arranging songs. It was also around that time that Stephens’ Adonis-like looks became a factor. As Hummel recalled in There Was a Light, “Jody was just a really good drummer, that’s the main thing. He was maybe somewhat of a calming influence. … He was also a really good chick magnet.”
Terry Manning’s first wife, Carole Ruleman Manning, also recalls in the book, “Any female who met Jody immediately thought, ‘Wow, this guy is seriously good-looking and it’s not fair for him to have longer eyelashes than I do.’ He could have modeled anywhere on earth.”
Looks aside, Stephens was focused on the music; the sheer hedonism of rock-and-roll did not appeal to him. As Rhea noted in There Was a Light, “Jody never smoked dope or did any of that craziness. He’s just a down-to-earth guy.” But Stephens did embrace the heavier rock sounds that evolved with the counter-culture, as Icewater played around Memphis, usually as a trio. That’s when another key player entered the scene: Alex Chilton. After becoming an overnight star with the Box Tops in 1967, he’d rebelled against the micro-managed pop band, learning folk guitar and searching for a direction. That’s when he dropped in to hear Icewater, which Bell had dubbed Rock City by then.
“When Alex came to see us at the VFW hall Downtown,” Stephens recalls, “we were playing ‘The Bomber’ and ‘Funk #49’ by the James Gang. We were a three-piece, and Alex came to see us in December of 1970, I think. And it seemed that Alex was pretty much into the folk scene, Roger McGuinn and all that.” As it turned out, blending the folk, British Invasion, and hard rock influences together with Chilton on board is what would transform Rock City into the quartet known as Big Star.
At the time, says Stephens, “It was the pursuit of just playing music. I don’t know that it was an effort to do anything other than what came naturally for Chris and Alex. There’s not a rulebook of ‘This is the kind of music we’re doing, and you take steps 1, 2, 3, and 4 in how you play it.’ We all played as [we were] influenced by all the bands we listened to. A lot of which were British Invasion bands, but, you know, a lot of soul music too.”
All of which contributed to the unique sound Big Star created over three wildly divergent albums in the ’70s. The vagaries of that band are well-documented elsewhere, but it’s worth quoting Terry Manning’s personal recollection of Stephens’ role in those recording sessions: “Jody has always been a powerful and rock-solid drummer for, and contributor to, recording sessions. Somehow he seems to ‘hit harder’ than many drummers, yet he never overpowers the song; he plays the song rather than just playing the drums, which is a very important component in making a great recording.”
And great recordings, chiefly engineered by John Fry, are at the heart of the Big Star legacy, which nonetheless foundered initially due to poor distribution and insufficient publicity. The band struggled so much at the time that Bell left in frustration after the first album, with Hummel following suit after the second. Still, Stephens stuck it out with Chilton.
“It was a shock when Chris left,” he recalls. “And it was a bit of a shock when Andy left, but not really. He saw the writing on the wall, that we weren’t going to make careers out of this. And so he left to go back to school and kind of get his life started. And I just continued on because I loved the process of watching John Fry work, and Alex work, so I just wanted to hang in there with the third album.”
That experimental, sometimes dissolute album is often called Third, but it’s also known as Sister Lovers. While it was being recorded in 1974, Chilton was dating his muse of sorts, Lesa Aldridge, while Stephens dated her sister, Holliday. With groundbreaking production by Jim Dickinson, blending layers of folk and noise guitar with symphonic flourishes under Chilton’s angelic voice and acerbic lyrics, the record, eventually released in 1978, marked an aesthetic high but a new low bar for Big Star album sales. It did continue the trend, begun on the second album, of featuring Stephens’ vocals on one track, his self-penned “For You.” But well before 1978, the band was done. And though Chris Bell had quit long before, his tragic death in a car crash that year only made the end that much more final.
“You know, I just turned 70, and I don’t give up playing just because I’d give up this community of people.”
— Jody Stephens
“After that, I didn’t see a way forward,” Stephens reflects now. “So I thought, I’ll just leave this and go back to school. And for a while I waited tables. And then Diana and I got together in ’83 [eventually marrying in 1987, and still together today], and then I went back with the purpose of finishing uninterruptedly, and I did — started in ’70, finished in ’85!”
His marketing major paid off. He recalls a phone chat a few years later, when “John Fry said, ‘We’re creating a position here at Ardent, a marketing position. We’re creating a production company and we need someone to represent that, to go to New York, work the studios, and pitch the labels we’re producing. John Kilzer was the first artist I had to pitch … and that worked! I ended up placing him with Geffen.”
One is tempted to say, “the rest is history,” for Stephens has remained at Ardent ever since. Since the deaths of John Fry and stalwart Ardent producer/engineer John Hampton in 2014, Stephens and Ardent chief manager Keith Sykes have been the studio’s public faces. These days, they’re laboring to prepare Ardent for the future.
“We’re redesigning the control rooms,” he says. “Some pretty amazing main speakers are going in. Abbey Road has a pair of them. Both consoles, all the modules are out. It’s something to see. And it’s going to be spectacular when it’s done.”
But that’s only half the story, as Stephens has been actively drumming with bands since at least the early ’90s. Some, like that decade’s supergroup of sorts, Golden Smog, are not particularly related to Big Star, but have taken on a life of their own. “In Minneapolis this April, Golden Smog had two sold-out shows of 1,300, 1,400 a night,” he says. ‘That was fun. And we got to rehearse at the Jayhawks’ rehearsal room!”
Since 2015, Stephens has thrown his energy into a duo with Luther Russell, called Those Pretty Wrongs. While he originally focused mainly on writing and singing, with the same childlike wonder that has marked all his vocal performances, he’s gradually working his drums into the duo’s recordings more. Their third album, Holiday Camp, due out in March of 2023, has fuller arrangements (and more drums) than their previous work, including Moog synthesizer and Mellotron parts contributed by Wilco’s Pat Sansone.
He’ll occasionally contribute drum parts as a session player, but, as he puts it, “I don’t want to be in other bands, playing drums live, other than the Big Star stuff and when I’m lucky, the Golden Smog stuff.” And yet “the Big Star stuff” has taken up more and more of his time lately. After the band’s initial commercial bomb, its reputation only grew, as new groups emerged in the ’80s and ’90s claiming them as an influence.
By the early ’90s, interest in the band had so grown that Stephens and Chilton formed a new version of the group, with the Posies’ Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow on guitar and bass. That ensemble performed for far longer than the original lineup, and were preparing to play the South By Southwest festival in 2010 when news reached Austin that Chilton had just died of a heart attack, at the age of 59. (Andy Hummel died shortly after.)
Even after that, love for the band has ensured that the music will still be performed. Since the year of Chilton’s death, Jody has presided over an all-star group, with somewhat flexible members, who have recreated Big Star’s Third in select concerts all over the world.
“It was Chris Stamey’s brainchild and organizational skill that made it happen,” Stephens explains. “He actually thought of it before Alex passed away, and approached me with it. And it wasn’t like any of us put much in our pockets at all. I remember one gig we broke even, but we’ve played in Sydney, Barcelona, London, San Francisco, you name it. Van Dyke Parks conducted the Kronos Quartet as part of the two San Francisco gigs. Then we did the film [of the concert], also with the Kronos Quartet, but with Carl Marsh conducting. So we get to do all this amazing stuff.”
Now, carrying on as a stripped-down quintet and focused more on #1 Record, the Big Star revival show continues apace. Stephens comments, “What we’re doing with a five-piece rock band is something I’ve been wanting to do for a while. And it just happens to make it feasible. It’s hard to take ten people on the road and have string sections and brass sections, and break even. But everybody comes to this with a heart to do it.”
It helps that this latest “everybody” includes Pat Sansone (Wilco), Mike Mills (R.E.M.), Chris Stamey (the dB’s), and Jon Auer (the Posies) playing with Stephens — all seasoned players who point to Big Star as one of their key inspirations.
Only last month, in a benefit show organized by community radio station WYXR, the latest Big Star quintet played the homecoming gig of their dreams: celebrating the 50th anniversary of the band’s debut, in the heart of Midtown Memphis, where the band was born. The guest bassist on “September Gurls” was none other than Jody’s brother, Jimmy.
For Stephens, it’s a hopeful sign that he can carry on doing what he does best. “I’m glad we did #1 Record early on in my life,” he muses, “or I wouldn’t be around to celebrate its 50th anniversary — or at least be capable of playing. You know, I just turned 70, and I won’t give up playing just because I’d give up this community of people.” And with that, Jody Stephens is off and running. He has a sound check to attend, and bandmates waiting in the wings.
