No Real Version Exists: How Big Star’s Third Became an Album Without a Master Copy

Most albums get a release date. Big Star’s third record got a rumor, a stack of test pressings, three titles and a reputation that grew in the gap. The band cut it at Ardent Studios in Memphis starting in 1974, with Jim Dickinson producing, and it did not reach shops until 1978. Even then, nobody could say which version was the real one.

A band that was already breaking up

By the time sessions began, Big Star had made two records of near-perfect power pop, #1 Record and Radio City, and sold very few of either. What walked into Ardent was less a band than a pair: Alex Chilton on vocals and guitar, and drummer Jody Stephens, who by several accounts sang more harmony parts here than on the earlier albums. Dickinson, a Memphis session veteran with a taste for the wrecked and the half-finished, played on the record as well as producing it, with credits that include bass, drums and Mellotron.

The working title on the session sheets was Sister Lovers, a reference to the Aldridge sisters that Chilton and Stephens were then dating. It is the name the record carries in collector circles today, and it is a reminder that the album began as ordinary studio shorthand before it became a legend.

Strings, a cover and a piano in the wrong place

What makes Third strange is the arrangement. Carl Marsh wrote string parts that Stephens helped bring into the sessions, and Chilton then decided where to place them, sometimes on tracks well beyond what they were written for. A cover of Velvet Underground’s Femme Fatale features Steve Cropper on guitar. William Eggleston, better known as a photographer, plays piano on Nature Boy. None of it was built to sound like a hit, and some of it barely sounds finished by design.

The record nobody could release

Accounts differ on the exact reasons the project stalled, but the pattern is consistent across them: money was tight, the music was far from commercial, and Chilton and Stephens were losing interest in continuing. Test pressings went out to labels and found no takers. The tapes went back on the shelf.

Then the record escaped in pieces. In 1978 it surfaced through Aura in the UK and PVC in the US, with a changed running order and a changed name. Over the years it appeared as 3rd, The Third Album and Sister Lovers, each with a slightly different track list. A reviewer of the later box set put the problem bluntly: there never was a real version of the record, only a series of mixes and configurations that kept evolving.

Why the gap helped

Rykodisc brought out a CD in 1992 with bonus tracks, assembled with Dickinson involved, and the album finally had a form many listeners could actually own. In 2016, Omnivore Recordings issued Complete Third, a three-disc set of 69 tracks, 28 of them previously unreleased, running from demos to rough mixes to final masters. Disc three sequences the finals in the order of the original test pressing, which is the closest anyone has come to settling the argument.

The long delay gave the album something no scheduled release could: a story that grew by word of mouth. For young bands in the late 1970s and 1980s, hunting down a fragile, orchestrated record that the industry had refused was proof that the underground had its own canon. R.E.M. and the Replacements are the usual names cited when people trace Big Star’s influence, and it is easy to hear why a record that sounds this unguarded would reward that kind of devotion.

What to listen for

Start with the strings, not the songs. Notice how they sit slightly apart from the band, as though borrowed from a different record. Then listen for the places where the drums seem to drop out of the argument, and how the voices stay close to the microphone. Third is not a lost classic that was merely unlucky. It is a record whose unfinished state is the point, and the fact that no definitive copy exists is why people keep returning to it.

Sources: Wikipedia on Third/Sister Lovers, The Vinyl District’s Ardent Answers, and The Second Disc’s review of Complete Third.