Alex Chilton

Alex Chilton thrived for four decades with a three-fold career: his early recordings as a blue-eyed soul vocalist with the Box Tops; the idiosyncratic power pop albums he did with Big Star in the mid-'70s; and the spate of cool, chaotic solo LPs he recorded, ranging from the deliberately damaged attack of 1979's Like Flies on Sherbert to the lean but soulful stylings of 1995's A Man Called Destruction. To some, he was a genius pop musician. To another audience, he was a quirky iconoclast whose influence spawned the likes of the Replacements and Teenage Fanclub.