

In 1974, in advance of a weeks-long residency at Max's Kansas City in New York, Alex Chilton and the Big Star crew recorded this session at WLIR in Long Island. The performance captures the band in rare form: raw, forceful, even emotional, and the stripped-down arrangements are recorded with the fidelity one would expect from a mid-'70s radio broadcast. But what this lacks in sound quality is made up with intensity. Recorded after the departure of Chris Bell during the troubled tour for Radio City, this is the sound of a band on the verge of falling apart—as they would, within a few months of this gig. Any Big Star fan's library is incomplete without this dramatic document of the band near the end of its short, turbulent first run.