Each Friday I pick a song–new, old, borrowed, blue–that’s been on my mind and in my ears, and write a short post about it.

This week, The Replacements sing about Alex Chilton:

I don’t remember when I first heard this song, but I was young enough not to know who Alex Chilton was.  It only takes half a listen before you really want to know who this guy is– the coolest guy in school? No, because you’ve seen his name before, listed as the producer on the back of the ‘Mats album, Tim.  Is he just some record producer (young idiot “you”/I ask)?  Well, in those days you couldn’t just do this to find things out and I no longer remember how I did my research; probably I just asked somebody older and cooler in a way that didn’t make me sound totally stupid (“Hey, that Replacements song, Alex Chilton, I heard it the other day.  It’s cool they wrote a song about [idiot Doug trails off hoping Older and Cooler Guy/Girl will fill in the blank]”) or maybe I went to my local public library–a world of knowledge in one building!  Anyway, the important thing is this is a really good song by a really good band about a really good musician, and if he was from Mars, then that’d be cool.  Pleased to Meet Me, incidentally, was recorded in the same studio that Big Star used for all their albums, by the producer Jim Dickinson, who recorded all the Big Star albums.  And Alex Chilton plays guitar on the track, “Can’t Hardly Wait.” If he’d played it on this one, the whole world might’ve needed a ticket for an aeroplane.