Big Star: The story of rock's forgotten band Revised & Updated Edition

By Rob Jovanovic

“We’ve sort of flirted with greatness,” R.E.M.’s Peter Buck admitted. “But we’ve yet to make a record as good as Big Star’s Third.”

Although Big Star were together for less than four years and had little commercial success, the influence of their three original albums—#1 Record, Radio City, and Third—continues to grow. Big Star bucked all the musical trends of the 70s. In an era of glam and prog rock they wrote catchy, radio-friendly power-pop tunes that remain influential today. Artists as diverse as Primal Scream, R.E.M., The Bangles, The Posies, Teenage Fanclub, Jeff Buckley, and Wilco have spoken about the Big Star legacy.

In the decade since the original version of this book was published, Big Star have made a belated fourth album, In Space, and released an acclaimed four-disc retrospective, Keep An Eye On The Sky. The band have also lost two original members, an influential producer, and the photographer of their iconic logo. But interest in the group is as high as ever in the 21st century, with new bands such as Yo La Tengo and Hot Chip—and even pop superstar Katy Perry—carrying the flame.

Now fully updated, and drawing on firsthand interviews with the band, family members, friends, and the major players at Ardent Records, this is the definitive history of rock’s forgotten band.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jawbone Press
• Release date: May 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781908279378

Book preview

Contents

Prologue

1 Why do you come so far?

2 They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see The Beatles.

3 He wore a black T-shirt—nobody wore those—and torn jeans.

4 All the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand.

5 We just figured we’d all be killed anyway.

6 Bob Dylan never had anything on John Harold, and he knew it.

7 It really does sound like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing.

8 Mississippi didn’t like guys with long hair.

9 The beer bottles were dancing across the tables.

10 We got fired after the first show in Michigan.

11 He turned to me and shot Demerol down his throat with a syringe.

12 The singularly most heavy moment of my life.

13 Look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers!

14 Another stray American in London

15 Alex Chilton, Rock Legend, Back.

16 He was rather nonplussed to be sought out wearing a paper hat.

17 It sounds like gunshots.

18 We toasted his health with cheap beer and snacks from Taco Bell.

19 We had to have girls because we were entertaining the troops.

20 Without being overly threatening, I pushed him into a corner.

21 Thirty years from now you guys are all gonna love it.

22 He didn’t care what people thought. He just did his thing.

Postscript

Illustrations

Bibliography & Sources

Appendix I: Timeline

Appendix II: Discography

Appendix III: Concerts

Acknowledgements

Prologue

In October 1972, the music world was full of contradictions. The previous months had seen acts as diverse as Donny Osmond and Alice Cooper, Don McLean and Slade achieve number-one singles. Iggy Pop was holed up in a studio recording Raw Power, and David Bowie had just given birth to Ziggy Stardust, but the album charts were dominated by heavy rock (Black Sabbath’s Vol 4), progressive rock (Yes’s Close To The Edge), and inane pop (David Cassidy’s Cherish). Since The Beatles had disbanded two years earlier, the short, catchy guitar-pop song had all but disappeared. But one band was trying to keep that musical torch burning: Big Star, a Memphis four-piece who took the best elements of The Beach Boys, The Beatles, and The Byrds, were ploughing a lonely furrow against the popularity of seven-minute rock songs and self-indulgent guitar solos. On this particular October evening, they were playing a show to fewer than one hundred college students in a university sports hall in Oxford, Mississippi.

Like the rest of the handful of shows that the band had played to date, tonight’s drew no more than an average response from the crowd. The vast majority of those in attendance had never even heard a Big Star record, but they did know who the lead singer was: Alex Chilton had sung a handful of hit singles with The Box Tops a few years earlier. For the show, Chilton—like drummer Jody Stephens, guitarist Chris Bell, and bassist Andy Hummel—was wearing a casual shirt and jeans and had shoulder-length hair. He was constantly fiddling with his amplifier. The band’s casual attire was at odds with the glammed-up excesses and lavish stage productions of the day.

Big Star ran through all twelve songs from their recently released album, #1 Record, plus a couple of new songs (‘Got Kinda Lost’ and ‘Back Of A Car’) and covers of songs by T.Rex, The Kinks, and Neil Young. During the quieter moments, such as when Chilton stepped forward to sing an acoustic version of ‘The Ballad Of El Goodo’, the music was drowned out by the sound of the audience members talking and drinking. For the rest of the set they were happy to stomp along with the catchy, rousing choruses of ‘Don’t Lie To Me’ and ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me’, even if they’d never heard the songs before. Lead vocal duties were shared between Chilton and Bell, with the others singing backup; Chilton’s voice recalled the deadpan delivery of The Byrds’ Roger McGuinn, while Bell’s was more like Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant.

On #1 Record, the balance was perfect: the guitars chimed and the vocals soared. Tonight, however, the three-pronged guitar attack drowned out Stephens’s melodic drumming and almost all of the vocals. They had faced this problem before, having played only a few shows together, not helped by the obvious discomfort of Bell, who was suffering from stage fright, and whose hands kept shaking violently.

At the end of the show, the crowd filtered out and the band packed up their own equipment. Although this was only Big Star’s seventh live show, it would be the last time this line-up would perform together. Bell would quit before the end of the year; the remaining trio recorded another album in 1973 (Radio City) before Hummel quit too. Only Chilton and Stephens remained from the original line-up when Big Star came to record their third and final album of the 70s.

Everyone who heard #1 Record agreed that it was a masterpiece, but a combination of bad luck and record-label mismanagement meant it was almost impossible for any fans reading the great reviews to actually buy a copy. Similar problems affected Radio City, and by the third album things had untangled to such a degree that no one really cared any more. Four years would pass between the album being recorded and then finally released.

And yet after the final breakup, the band’s music somehow managed to transcend the misfortune the musicians had faced, and in the late 70s and 80s Big Star began to achieve cult status on both sides of the Atlantic. Writers and musicians began talking about this great band that most people had never even heard of, and who they could only hear on bootlegged cassettes. By 1992, the clamour had grown so loud that Big Star’s albums were reissued on CD, and the band finally received some long overdue recognition (and record sales).

Now, more than 40 years after the release of their first record, Big Star are hailed as a great band that suffered from being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Given a little bit of luck, their story might have been very different. Over time, they have proved to be the missing link between the power-pop bands of the 60s and the alternative rockers of the 80s and 90s. But back in 1972, no one was playing catchy three-minute songs anymore—especially in Memphis, where soul was king.

1

Why do you come so far?

Memphis, TN, pre-1960

Memphis has a rich and varied history. One of the earliest records of the area being inhabited comes from Hernando de Soto, who found Native American Indians there in the 1540s. For 250 years, Spanish and French forces occupied the area, until the United States took control and built Fort Adam in 1797. Two decades later, the Chickasaw Nation granted the land to the United States, and in 1819 the city of Memphis was founded with a population of fewer than 100 people.

Since then, Memphis has been wounded by civil war, survived widespread yellow-fever epidemics (with 5,000 lives claimed by the disease in the 1870s), and forced its way through the reconstruction and reform movements. But it is best known for its music. It is considered the Birthplace of the Blues, it was a major player in the evolution of rock’n’roll, and it was a hotbed of soul music.

Many factors have contributed to the musical history of the city, with its geographical position and racial mix being two of major ingredients. At the head of the Mississippi delta, as the river runs north to south—from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico—the city of Memphis spreads east from the river’s banks. Its position meant that it picked up a large amount of passing trade from migrating workers and entertainers travelling between Chicago and New Orleans. By the turn of the 20th century, however, it was also the murder capital of the United States, even though the population barely exceeded 150,000. Drugs and drink were easy to acquire, there was a thriving back-room gambling culture, and prostitution was rife in and around the Beale Street area, which was one of the only places where black men could sleep with white women. Many of the city’s downtown establishments operated a racial curfew: at around two in the morning, the whites went home and blacks were allowed in for the rest of the night. The music of the time was mainly of the rowdy alehouse variety, but that soon changed, thanks in large part to a man by the name of W.C. Handy.

In 1903, Handy settled in Clarksdale, Mississippi, just south of Memphis on Highway 61. Thousands of blacks worked in the cotton fields nearby in the stifling heat, and legend has it that one day, Handy, an accomplished cornet player, became transfixed while waiting for a train by a young black man plucking away at a battered guitar and singing the blues. Two years later, Handy moved to Memphis and became a regular player on Beale Street, where he helped bring the blues to a wider audience. In 1909, his song ‘The Memphis Blues’ became a massive hit, and is now thought of as the first blues song to be committed to sheet music. In dragging the blues away from the cotton fields and into places where a white audience could hear it, Handy had changed Beale Street and Memphis forever.

While liquor and drugs formed an underground economy, Beale Street was the only place in the South that allowed the black population to be actively involved in business, even if most of them were illegal. (It was also one of only a few places where women were allowed to work as entertainers, with the likes of Alberta Hunter and Memphis Minnie making their names as singers there.) For black businessmen, Beale Street was the financial and social epicentre of the South—if not the whole country. Cocaine had spread through western Tennessee when the Coca-Cola Company set up a bottling plant nearby, and although cocaine was removed as an active ingredient in 1905, the local dealers had already set up direct links with South American suppliers.

The collision (and collusion) of black and white cultures spilled over into music. The 1920s saw the arrival of a second wave of bluesmen. Walter ‘Furry’ Lewis (who in 1975 would open for the Rolling Stones in front of 50,000 people) and ‘Sleepy’ John Estes further entrenched the city as the Home of the Blues, while just down the road Robert Johnson was supposedly making his pact with the devil. The Great Depression was fast approaching, but the still-thriving cotton trade helped to soften the economic burden on Memphis.

Outside the Beale Street area, Memphis was still cut in half by segregation. Most hotels, restaurants, public toilets, and cinemas were for whites only, while as late as 1959, the Memphis Zoo had days allocated for either black or white visitors, but not both at the same time. Blacks were in the minority until the great flood of 1937 meant many thousands of black farmworkers lost their homes in the countryside and moved into the city. World War II boosted the Memphis economy with the building of the Millington Naval Air Station, an Army depot, and the Mallory Air Force Depot. The fact that cotton prices rose steeply during wartime also helped. The mayor eventually clamped down on the Beale Street vices, which put many blacks out of business, or forced them just across the river into West Memphis, which was actually across the state line in Arkansas and therefore outside the mayor’s jurisdiction. Anyone wanting a night out with an edge to it now had to cross the Memphis–Arkansas Bridge, which was built in 1949.

The music that the night-clubbers crossing the bridge were on their way to listen to was a new mix of Memphis jazz and blues played on the newly electrified guitars that were becoming more and more popular. The resulting sounds were christened ‘rhythm & blues’. At the time, record labels were still somewhat mystified by these new forms of music and used terms such as ‘race music’, ‘ebony music’, or ‘sepia music’ to define and catalogue the rapidly growing market. Despite the politically incorrect naming of the product, rhythm & blues—and its offspring, rock’n’roll—would cross all racial boundaries and sweep young America off its feet.

This was never more apparent than on Memphis radio. In 1948, the white owners of the WDIA station, John Pepper and Bert Ferguson, made the earth-shattering decision to change to an all-black play format. It was the first black station in America, and it ensured that Memphis had a dedicated blues station. Soon after the broadcasts started, a young man by the name of Riley King walked in off the street and asked for a job. (Riley would later change his name to ‘Blues Boy’ King, or B.B. King, and become one of the greatest bluesmen of all time.) WDIA proved to be one of the Black America’s biggest cultural breakthroughs, especially in the South, where racism was still rampant. In Memphis and the surrounding rural areas, there was a potential listenership of almost half a million black Americans. And with cross-town competitor WHBQ also spreading the word of black music and rock’n’roll, Memphis soon had twin points of attack on the record buyers of America.

Meanwhile, with Beale Street fast fading into musical folklore, a new recording studio opened and would go on to shake the world. While the first half of the century had seen Memphis gain a reputation as a hotbed of blues and jazz, the second half belonged to rock’n’roll. But then, as now, a high proportion of Memphians either didn’t know or didn’t care what was happening on their own doorstep, even as the sounds of Memphis were being lauded around the world, especially in the UK. (The Beatles’ cover of Chuck Berry’s ‘Memphis, Tennessee’ was just one example of their love of Memphis music, while The Rolling Stones’ championing of the blues would become legendary.)

The musical revolution began in 1953 when Elvis Presley walked into the Memphis Recording Service to make his first single. The owner of the studio was 31-year-old Sam Phillips, who had opened the facility at 706 Union Avenue in January 1952 to cater to people who were willing to pay to record their own piece of vinyl. Presley paid his money, cut his songs, and left. Another two years would pass before he returned to record a single for Phillips’s Sun label.

In the early 50s, the record-buying public had been eating up the easy listening sounds of Perry Como, Rosemary Clooney, and Bing Crosby, but that was all about to change. With his Sun label, Phillips was now recording B.B. King and Howlin’ Wolf, while his friend, the local DJ Dewey Phillips, would play the results on his WHBQ radio show, Red Hot & Blue. It was Dewey who got hold of a test pressing of the first Presley single for Sun, ‘That’s All Right, Mama’, and proceeded to play it over and over again on his show. The response was phenomenal, and a new mix of music and sex came flooding into every American living room.

Suddenly parents and children were no longer listening to the same music. James Dean became a new kind of screen idol, and rock’n’roll provided the rebellious soundtrack. Record stores and music shops seemed to spring up on every street. In Memphis, the success of Presley helped open the door for the likes of Chuck Berry and Little Richard. Presley was basically a white man singing black music. Sun Records made the most of the opening as young men from around the South travelled to Memphis to try their hand at being a rock’n’roll star: Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Johnny Cash were just some of the ones who would go on to become superstars.

If the 1920s were the golden age of Memphis Blues and the 50s were the glory years of rock’n’roll, however, the 60s saw Memphis emerge as the bona-fide centre of soul. The prime mover behind this latest phase of Memphis’s music history was the Stax label and studio. Banker Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton founded Stax (which took its name from the first two letters of their surnames) after Stewart started recording country acts in 1957. The studio had its first hit in 1961 with the instrumental jam ‘Last Night’ by The Mar-Keys, the first white band in Memphis to use horn players (until then a hallmark of black bands). A year later, Booker T. & The MGs’ found nationwide success with ‘Green Onions’, while over the course of the next decade, more than 150 Stax singles reached the Top 100.

The ‘Stax sound’ came from bands used to playing to both black and white audiences, and who then synthesizing this mix to a precise degree. Otis Redding, Carla Thomas, and Sam & Dave became international stars and thrust Stax into the mainstream. It would also later play a key role in the Big Star story.

The future members of Big Star arrived just before rock’n’roll took off. Chris Bell was born in Memphis on January 12 1951, the fifth of six children: Virginia, David, Vicky, Sara, Chris, and Cindy. His mother, Joan Branford, was British. She met US B-17 bomber crewmember, and Memphis native, Captain Vernon Bell in Norwich during the Second World War. The pair married in England before moving back to the United States at the end of the war.

Once he returned home, Vernon was discharged from his military duties and set up what was to be the first of a string of cafes and restaurants. The Little Tea Shop opened its doors for business in January 1946; the Knickerbocker restaurant on Poplar Avenue was followed by a series of Bonanza Steak Houses and Danvers Fast Food outlets.¹

The Bell family expanded as fast as their restaurant business, and with the family home fast becoming too small for six children, the Bells moved out to East Memphis in 1956. Chris and his younger sister Sara were closest in age, and would often be mistaken for twins, not just because of their looks and age but because they went everywhere and did everything together. All of the Bell children attended White Station Elementary School, at the corner of Poplar and Perkins, and went on to White Station High School, although Chris later changed schools. The Bells were a typically well-off middleclass family who attended the local Episcopal church on Sundays. Chris wasn’t a big music fan (an early favourite was Brenda Lee) but he was an avid comic book collector.

I remember Chris being curious about many things as a young child, says David Bell. He had a sort of scientific bent along with an aptitude for mathematics. I never had the patience that he displayed in putting things together, whatever they might be. This precocious will to learn would later be borne out in his approach to studio work.

On January 26 1951—exactly two weeks after Chris’s birth—Andrew Hummel was born in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, where his father, John Hummel, was stationed with the Navy. After the birth of another son, Robert, in 1952, the family moved back to Elkwood Drive in Memphis; when a third child, Sally, came along, the family moved to Worthington Circle in midtown. John Hummel was a doctor who had been put through medical school by the Navy, so he was required to serve for a certain number of years. When his service ended he set up his own practice as a gynaecologist.

The family’s move to Elkwood Drive was actually a newsworthy event and was covered in some detail. Andy’s mother, Barbara Jo Walker-Hummel, a native of Murray, Kentucky, had been crowned Miss Memphis and Miss America in 1947, and the local press followed her every move. A full page in the Memphis Press–Scimitar was given over to her brief visit to Memphis in 1947 to look at engagement rings during a 30-minute stop-off at the airport between promotional duties. ‘Thousands Brave Electrical Storm To Greet Miss America At Airport,’ the headline proclaimed, while the accompanying article went on to detail the meeting of Barbara Jo and her father with John Hummel.

In Memphis, Barbara Jo hosted a daily TV programme for WHBQ called Lady Of The House, for which she hosted guests and gave tips to housewives from three until four in the afternoon. Meal planning and food preparation was the main thrust of the show, which aired just in time for wives to prepare the evening meal for their husbands. Andy often made guest appearances on the show before he started at school. Barbara continued to appear regularly in the press during the 50s, even if it was just a photograph of her dressing her children or teaching them how to read. As well as bringing up three children, she also found time to perform in musical comedy stage shows (she was by all accounts an excellent singer), modelled clothes, and later ran (unsuccessfully) for political office.

While Chris Bell was at White Station Elementary School, Andy attended the all-male Presbyterian Day School. Elementary school was kind of a big mystery to me, he told me in 2002. I never quite got it, and never really fitted in very well. I was very bored and became rather lazy around the third grade. My parents never seemed to take much of an interest in my schooling other than just sending me off, and then screaming at me when my grades were bad. One thing they did do was make me take piano. Starting in the third grade, I had a lesson every week and had to participate in recitals—which I hated, of course.

Jody Stephens was born in Memphis on October 4 1952, the second of three brothers—Jimmy was two years older and David five years younger. His father, James, came from Virginia, while his mother, Rose, was from Massachusetts; they met in Washington at a roller-skating rink. When they started talking, it turned out that they both were working at the same hospital, James in the X-Ray department and Rose as a secretary. Jody was enrolled at the Colonial Elementary School before moving on to Willow Oaks Elementary, a less exclusive school than those attended by Bell or Hummel.

Jody’s father, James, would occasionally sing and play guitar for his boys, usually in a country style, although most music around the house in Jody’s formative years was described by his brother Jimmy as easy listening. The brothers usually got their pop fix by listening to the Top 40 radio shows. Apart from short stints of piano lessons, none of the Stephens boys played an instrument in their early days. Jimmy and I were on the Willow Oaks [Swim] Club, which was very middleclass, says Jody. He was a great diver, so he was on the dive team as well. Now that I think of it, I may have been on the dive team too, but [I was] not nearly the diver Jimmy was. I don’t think I ever won a race, but I did finish second and third occasionally. They used to give us spoonfuls of honey to rev up the energy level, and I think they even put ice in the water for faster swim times.

My parents tried to get me to take classroom-style piano lessons, Jimmy explains. My first teacher had a nervous breakdown; the second was killed in a car wreck; and the third attempt coincided with basketball. And basketball won. My dad had tried to teach me some things by ear on piano, but a friend of mine was taking guitar lessons and I wanted to [do that instead]. But my parents were concerned that my interest in the guitar would go the same way as the piano, so I never took any lessons.

This was only a temporary setback, however, because soon almost every boy in the country wanted to play the guitar. The number of guitar players in America increased dramatically in the immediate aftermath of The Beatles’ first appearances on prime-time television. By 1966, the number of guitar players in the United States had risen by a factor of four to more than ten million. In Memphis alone, literally hundreds of bands sprang up from nowhere playing both the local rhythm & blues dance hits and the brand new sounds of the British Invasion. Hummel, Bell, and Stephens would be among these teenage rock star wannabes, and despite living in different parts of town, their love of music meant their paths would soon cross.

2

They took our tickets and we didn’t get to see The Beatles.

Memphis, TN, 1960–66

The date was February 9 1964. The Ed Sullivan Show on CBS broke all previous audience figures as a staggering 73 million viewers tuned in to see The Beatles’ US television debut. By now, traditional rock’n’roll had become somewhat passé, and with this TV appearance, The Beatles completely blew it away.

The show itself, broadcast in association with Anacin and Pillsbury Biscuits, was a curious mix of musical numbers, novelty acts, and the biggest band in the world.² In his introduction, Sullivan revealed that The Beatles had just received a telegram from Elvis Presley, wishing them luck in the USA. He then introduced the Fab Four to a torrent of screams from the predominantly female studio audience. The band took the stage in matching black suits with their trademark boots and haircuts, opening with ‘All My Loving’. During the second number, ‘Till There Was You’, the camera focused on each of the band-members in turn, and a primitive graphic introduced them individually as Paul, Ringo, George, and John—Sorry, girls, he’s married. Almost everyone interviewed for this book mentioned this event, and without it there may well have been no Big Star.

The abundance of teen bands in Memphis was catered for in a number of interesting ways. George Klein had been a classmate of Elvis Presley and hosted shows on both WHBQ radio and TV. On a Saturday morning, his radio show was broadcast live from Goldsmith’s department store in downtown Memphis, while other stores had band showcases during shopping hours or to promote fashion parades in the evening. On Saturday afternoons, Klein hosted a TV show, Talent Party. Local and national bands would lip-sync in the studio to their backing tracks while a chorus of dancing girls, the WHBQ-ties, would go-go along to the latest cool sounds in their mini-skirts and bouffant hair styles.

On weekend evenings, local clubs also helped out underage partygoers with dedicated teen-nights, which gave ample opportunity for Memphis bands to play and build up localised fan bases. The Roaring 60s Club, the Tonga Club, and the Clearpool Beverly Room were just three of many, while the city’s various church halls and YMCAs also had plenty of bands to choose from. Styles ranged widely from band to band; the locals mainly soaked up country, blues, rock’n’roll, and soul, while a growing number of others kept on the cutting edge, with the British rock invasion filtering through.

Racial segregation still held sway in much of the South. Despite the great strides made by WHBQ and WDIA, most stations were still either all black or all white. Occasionally a song would cross over, but this was rare. At least the population of Memphis had the choice and the chance to listen to both strands. After all, some of the poorer black neighbourhoods and richer white ones were only a few streets apart. The result was that white bands were influenced by black music, whether they wanted to be or not, and black bands were influenced by white music. Hummel, Stephens, and Bell all heard everything that was on offer.

It wasn’t until The Beatles reached America that Bell took a real interest in music, as he confirmed in a 1975 interview. I started playing [guitar] in high school when I was 12 or 13 years old, he said, and really got motivated to start playing when The Beatles’ records first came out. Before that, music was a side thing, something that went on in the background. After one year at White Station Junior High, Chris’s parents transferred him to the Memphis University School (MUS), an all-male school that prepared its privileged white students for a university education—not the best choice of school for someone so nebulous. Chris’s move to MUS coincided with the Bell family relocating to Germantown, an affluent suburb in East Memphis, where the family had purchased around twenty acres of land and had a big house built. The house that had been standing on the plot originally was moved to the back of the estate and nicknamed the ‘back house’. They had a huge house, a pool, the whole nine yards, Andy Hummel recalled. The driveway must have been a mile long!

Chris started having guitar lessons at 13, and the back house proved an ideal spot to practise in. It was a single-storey building with several rooms, set far enough away from the main house that he could play as loud as he wanted without offending anyone. Sara, David, and the other children would often hang out there listening to Chris (and later his friends) practise for hours on end.³

Meanwhile, Jody Stephens was attending Overton High. Nowadays Overton is a performing arts school, he explains, but when I went there it was anything but. It was pretty stifling and I didn’t have a great time. Jody and his brother were getting into music. Stax records were a big influence on me as well as Jody, says Jimmy. ‘Knock On Wood’, ‘In The Midnight Hour’, Sam & Dave, Eddie Floyd, Otis Redding, The Isley Brothers, then The Who, early Kinks, Hollies, and limited Beach Boys, to mention a few … [they] all stood out. But The Beatles were the major influence—times ten over anything else. The first record I actually bought, that I know I bought without parental participation, was ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’.

Jimmy also