Third/Sister Lovers (1978)

Third (reissued in 1985 as Third/Sister Lovers) is the third studio album by the American band Big Star. The sessions started at Ardent Studios in September 1974. Though Ardent created promotional, white-label test pressings for the record in 1975, a combination of financial issues, the uncommercial sound of the record, and lack of interest from singer Alex Chilton and drummer Jody Stephens in continuing the project prevented the album from ever being properly finished or released at the time of its recording. It was eventually released on March 18, 1978, by PVC Records.

After two commercially unsuccessful albums, Third documents the band's deterioration as well as the declining mental state of singer Alex Chilton. It has since gone on to become a cult album, and was placed at number 449 on Rolling Stone's 2012 list of the "500 Greatest Albums of All Time". Its reputation growing with time, the album moved up to number 285 on the magazine's 2020 listing. The album is included in Robert Dimery's book 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die.

Composition and recording

After the commercial failure of Big Star's first two albums, #1 Record (1972) and Radio City (1974), Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens returned to Ardent Studios in late 1974—accompanied by what biographer Bruce Eaton describes as "a large and revolving cast of Memphis musicians"—to record, under producer Jim Dickinson, "a batch of starkly personal, often experimental, and by turns beautiful and haunting songs that were anything but straight-up power pop." Ardent's John Fry, producer of the first two albums and also involved with the third, recalled that the sessions were burdened by severe personal issues; Eaton tells how Fry "finally called a halt to the escalating madness" and the album was mastered by Larry Nix on February 13, 1975.

Different opinions exist regarding the categorization of Third as a Big Star album. According to Chilton, "Jody and I were hanging together as a unit still but we didn't see it as a Big Star record. We never saw it as a Big Star record. That was a marketing decision when the record was sold in whatever year that was sold. And they didn't ask me anything about it and they never have asked me anything about it." Stephens said, "I've seen it in different ways. To a great extent it is an Alex solo record ... It's Alex's focus, it's his emotional state of being but I brought in the string section for the one song I wrote and Alex hit it off with Carl Marsh ... and started using Carl and the string section for other things. What would that album have been like if it didn't have the strings?" According to Eaton, the mastering card identifies Chilton as the recording artist.

Jovanovic, meanwhile, notes, "Whether the band was still called Big Star is debatable. The session sheets have the band name 'Sister Lovers' (Chilton and Stephens were dating Lesa and Holliday Aldridge at the time) clearly written on them. This may well have been a joke, although Chilton and Stephens did use the Sister Lovers name for a radio broadcast in early 1975." Lesa Aldridge, a cousin of photographer and Radio City album cover creator William Eggleston, contributed vocals and was, in the words of Dickinson, "a big, big part of the record". Dickinson said that Chilton, whose relationship with Aldridge was stormy, "reached a point ... where he started to go back and erase her—there was a lot more of Lesa on the album than there is now". During the sessions, Chilton recalled, "Jim and I did all sorts of weird things ... in off hours here and there".

Steve Cropper contributed guitar to a cover of The Velvet Underground's "Femme Fatale", while Eggleston played piano on a cover of eden ahbez's "Nature Boy".

Release

In 1978 the tapes were acquired by the PVC label and given their first official release. Third was first released by Aura Records in London in 1978. The PVC release in the US came later that year. Numerous reissues by other labels on vinyl and CD would follow, often varying the title, running order, and cover art, as no 'definitive' version had ever been agreed upon by the band. In addition to the original songs, covers of The Kinks' "Till the End of the Day", eden ahbez's "Nature Boy" and Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" were variously included or omitted. The 1992 CD release on Rykodisc, assembled with Jim Dickinson's involvement, was regarded as the first attempt at a presentation of the original album concept devised by Dickinson and the band in 1974. In October 2016, Omnivore Recordings released Complete Third, a box set that includes every demo, rough mix, outtake, alternate take, and final master from the Third sessions ever known to exist.