The reason for this is as tragic as it is ordinary: In 1972, the band’s parent label Stax Records (owner of their home label Ardent Records) entered into a distribution deal with Clive Davis at CBS Records. When Davis was fired almost immediately after, CBS lost interest in its Stax. By the time Radio City was released two years later — and although it received rave reviews and enthusiastic support at some radio stations — it was nearly impossible to find in record stores. As a result, the album died an obscure death.

But what leaped off the grooves of Radio City and into my headphones years later was very much alive and unlike anything I’d ever heard: It’s loose and tight at the same time; it incorporates both light and dark, sonically and emotionally. And my guitar player was right — I loved Big Star’s drummer, Jody Stephens. Equally powerful and melodic, his style is reminiscent of all my favorite late-’60s British drummers; rock and rollers brought up with tonal and rhythmic jazz sensibilities. By the time they recorded Radio City, Big Star was a three piece consisting of Alex Chilton on vocals and guitar (who’d already scored a few hits in the late 1960s with his previous band The Box Tops), Andy Hummel on bass, and Stephens on drums. There’s enough space in the arrangements for each of them to shine. Ardent Studios engineer John Fry captured it all in stunning high fidelity.

I asked Stephens recently about making Radio City and the nature of his professional ambitions at that time. “I don’t know that I had expectations,” he said. “I was focused on the spirit of the recording. You start with a blank slate, and it’s exciting to create those parts that you feel fit wonderfully with the other two members of the band. I got that done, and then it was just a sigh of relief. I figured rock writers would love it because I did. I figured everybody would love it because I did.”

Interestingly, it was a group of rock writers who inspired Big Star to reunite and record Radio City. Founding member Chris Bell had left the band soon after the release of their glorious debut, 1972’s #1 Record, because despite near-universal critical acclaim (“Every cut could be a single,” Billboard enthused), Stax — a soul label unsure exactly what to do with a band of white Anglophiles — didn’t get enough albums into stores to take advantage. Disillusioned, Bell withdrew.

“We drifted apart after Chris quit the band,” Stephens told me. “Then (Ardent Records co-founder) John King got us back together to do the Rock Writers Convention and that went incredibly well.” During Memorial Day weekend in 1973, more than 100 members of the National Association of Rock Writers convened in a Memphis Holiday Inn to booze, schmooze, and possibly start a union. A reunited Big Star (minus Bell) closed out the convention’s final night and blew everybody’s mind. The response was so positive that King was able to convince Chilton to stay in the band and make another record.

It appears that King conceived the Rock Writers Convention as a way to legitimize Big Star (and by extension, Ardent Records) in Stax’s eyes — which it may have done, but Stax’s ongoing decline, accelerated by its doomed distribution deal, created an inescapable reality. Big Star toured in support of Radio City, opening for Badfinger, but by that time bassist Andy Hummel had also left the band in order to complete his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and later an associate degree in mechanical engineering technology. He went on to have a long career at Lockheed Martin.

There would be a qualified third act: Stephens and Chilton (along with assorted friends and lovers) would go on to record a project that wasn’t so much finished as abandoned. Third (sometimes called Sister/Lovers) wasn’t even sequenced, much less issued. The recordings languished in the vault for years before being released several times; each with a different name, track list and sequence. There was even some serious discussion as to whether it was a Big Star record or an Alex Chilton solo project.

Not that the music was inconsequential: Third — with its pop mastery and exquisite overtones of dissolution — created the blueprint for indie music 20 years later. Still, as far as the late-’70s music industry was concerned, Big Star’s story had ended. Stephens went on to manage Ardent Studios (where all the Big Star records were made), while Chilton embarked on an iconoclastic solo career; one diametrically opposed to his pop music past.

But the ripples of Big Star’s influence were already making their way out of Memphis and throughout the South. Chris Stamey, a young North Carolina native, had heard the Big Star single “When My Baby’s Beside Me” in his hometown — “a radio hit in Winston-Salem (but nowhere else it seems),” he noted in his memoir A Spy in the House of Loud. Chris snagged a copy of #1 Record from a local DJ for a dollar, later discovering the “even more compelling” Radio City, “which seems to have gone directly to the cutout sale bins at the local Kmart.”

Stamey ended up playing bass with Alex Chilton when both men lived in New York in the late 1970s. Around the same time, he also founded Car Records, which issued the only Chris Bell single released during the artist’s lifetime. (Bell died a few months later in December 1978, losing control of his car on the way home from band practice and driving into a pole. He was 27.)

A year later, another young bassist named Mike Mills from Macon, Georgia, discovered Big Star — courtesy of his new friend and musical collaborator Peter Buck, who also turned Mike onto other lesser known groups like The Velvet Underground. The two would go on to form a band initially called Rapid Eye Movement, a name they later shortened to R.E.M.

“Big Star encapsulated everything I loved about rock and roll,” Mills told me recently. “Number one, they wrote great songs. Number two, they sang well. They had great guitar tones and appealed to me in a way that Top 40 radio used to when I listened on my little transistor radio. I was just blown away. Big Star records were something we could aspire to, and R.E.M. did talk them up, along with several other underappreciated bands.”

The ripple effect widened to reach the ears of a young Mississippi multi-instrumentalist named Pat Sansone, who would go on to join Wilco.

“I came across Big Star in the mid-’80s,” Sansone said. “I probably read the name ‘Big Star’ through R.E.M. — I was a big R.E.M. fan as a Southern teenager — so I gobbled up everything I could about them.”

In a way, Big Star would come to Sansone. “I went to the Bebop Record Shop in Jackson, Mississippi, which was the closest place where I could buy cool records. On one of those recordbuying trips, the clerk put Big Star’s Third on my stack and said, ‘You’re buying this.’ I took it back home to Meridian and put it on late at night — wearing headphones so as not to wake anybody up — and it just blew my mind. I bought #1 Record and Radio City as soon as I could. That music went right into my bones as a 15-year-old musician who was already in love with the Beatles.”

Jody Stephens is the only surviving member of Big Star. Andy Hummel died in 2010, as did Alex Chilton, right before a Big Star appearance at South By Southwest (for the first time since leaving the band, Andy played in tribute that night). But Big Star lives on — and not just because they made great records or influenced talented musicians. Stephens, Stamey, Mills and Sansone — augmented by The Posies’ Jon Auer (who also participated in a late-era Big Star incarnation) — have been performing Big Star material live: first with an all-star revue of Third (Stamey’s idea), followed by tours celebrating the 50th anniversary of #1 Record and now Radio City. I asked Sansone and Mills how it felt playing with the OG drummer.

“It’s amazing. There are times when we’re running a song and Jody does Jody, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up — because it’s him: that very particular expression you’ve listened to so many times. Jody’s not winging it. He’s a drum composer. Those parts are composed, and he’s very serious about them. He’s still playing them with power and grace,” Sansone said.

“I stick to the arrangements,” Stephens told me. “It’s important. I’ve seen some musicians change arrangements on stage of songs I grew up with and loved. It might have been fulfilling to them, but it was disappointing to me.”

Mills is doing a deep dive into Hummel’s bass parts. “I feel an affinity to what he did; some of it’s what I would have done, some of it is stuff I never would have thought of. It’s really broadening my palate. But I want people to understand that we’re not slavishly imitating anything. There is a joy to this — that’s the main takeaway for us. We truly love this music and put ourselves into it.”

Their audiences resonate with and reflect this emotional commitment. “There was a lot of weight going into this,” Stephens said. “The weight of having lost Chris and Alex and Andy and John Fry. But when you hear those songs and they’re true to the recordings, it’s emotional for a lot of people — including me. At one show, a girl was holding up her boyfriend because he was sobbing. The audience is rooting for us. They want to feel those things they feel when they listen to the records. Even if it’s melancholy, there’s some comfort there.”

Long live Big Star.