I’m not ashamed to admit that I learned about him from Paul Westerberg when I was 16. I imagine a lot of people did. That’s what it’s all about — discovering your heroes’ heroes, connecting those dots and following the trails ever backwards and sideways, falling in love with things you didn’t even know existed. But rarely has a signpost been as direct as the Replacements’ 1987 love letter. It was called “Alex Chilton.” 
 
 What I learned then is what wiser people before me held like a secret and what many others may just be learning this morning — that Alex Chilton, who passed away yesterday in New Orleans of an apparent heart attack at age 59, was the brilliant, immeasurably influential leader of Memphis power-pop giants Big Star. That he sang the Box Tops’ 1967 hit “The Letter” when he was only 16. That Big Star recorded two absolutely essential albums, 1972’s #1 Record and 1974’s Radio City, (later reissued together as a double album) and the troubled, storied Third/Sister Lovers, which didn’t see release until 1978, four years after the band’s typically clumsy demise. And that the music I connected with most was covered with his fingerprints, regardless of how much the universe conspired to wipe them clean. 
 
 This was quintessential pop in every sense of the word except the “popular” part — even the band’s name was a cruel joke. The legend only grew after these records were name-checked repeatedly by acolytes including R.E.M., the dB’s, the Replacements, the Bangles, and the Posies (whose Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer subbed in for the late singer-guitarist Chris Bell and the otherwise engaged bassist Andy Hummel live, and on one better-than-it-needed-to-be studio album over the past two decades). These records were hard to come by for years, only adding to the legend. Chilton embodying the role of boozy, resolutely grumpy, underappreciated genius was the cherry on top. 
 
 The cool ambivalence that can only come from knowing you’re the smartest person in the room is a familiar pose now; it’s not a stretch to say that Alex Chilton invented it. We may now take for granted that rock’n’roll is less about a catsuited maniac onstage than the guy in the back row going home alone, but in 1972, that concept must have felt more alien than Ziggy Stardust. Chilton is the shaggy underdog in the story of how modern rock came to embody the shaggy underdog. No one can put it any better than he did: “I’ve been built up and trusted / Broke down and busted / But they’ll get theirs / And we’ll get ours if we can.” 
 
 Weirdly, the Big Star song that has been heard most widely is “In the Street,” covered by Cheap Trick as a sitcom opening theme and re-titled, absurdly, “That ’70s Song.” The cynical take would be that Cheap Trick wanted the glory, and the residuals, duly owed to Chilton (Rick Nielsen does help himself to a songwriting credit); it’s probably closer to the mark to reason that Chilton wanted nothing to do with any part of theenterprise, paycheck or not: Big Star had spent their entire existence in the shadows — why shine a bright, tawdry light now? 
 
 Bob Mehr, the reporter for the Memphis Commercial Appeal who broke the news of Chilton’s death Wednesday night, was scheduled to moderate a Big Star panel Saturday night at South by Southwest, with Chilton, Hummel, and Stephens slated to perform. Rumor is that this may now become an ad hoc tribute. How perversely fitting, then, that in a town overrun by every heartsick aspiring indie darling with access to an amp and a van, the one truly must-see draw will be Big Star. And that Alex Chilton will be missing that, too. 
 
 A SPIN story from 1986 about Chilton’s 1986 solo re-emergence 
 
 Read more from this issue >> ||||| testing captions 
 
 
 
 “Everywhere I go, there are all these Big Star freaks, and they’re nice little guys who are usually in college, and they’re kind of lonely and misunderstood, learning to play guitar.” 
 
 – Alex Chilton, Pulse!, June 1992 
 
 This is how Alex Chilton, who died Wednesday, described the people who kept Big Star from being forgotten, before he re-formed the band with drummer Jody Stephens, before they put out another live recording as well as another album of new material. People like me, I suppose, who own all three of the original Big Star albums on both vinyl and CD. 
 
 Brian Eno is credited with the observation that just 5,000 people bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band. The same could easily be said about Big Star, and with much greater validity. Their songs have been covered over the last 30 years by everyone from Elliott Smith to Wilco to the Bangles to a number of lesser-known artists. 
 
 The Replacements – also highly regarded, also with little commercial success – immortalized Chilton in a song called “Alex Chilton.” Sadly, this was the first introduction many people of my generation had to a man who should have been catapulted into rock stardom based on the infectious quality of the sound Big Star produced. 
 
 Perhaps the most famous song in their catalog is “In the Street,” which would become the theme song for “That ‘70s Show.” Two different versions of the song were served up over the opening credits, one in the first season, a second in the seasons that followed. True to the legacy of so-called-failure that unfairly hung over Big Star - and to some degree Chilton - neither of those versions was actually the version performed by Big Star. 
 
 Alex Chilton’s early success came as frontman for the Box Tops, a band that had a handful of Top 40 hits – none of which he wrote. It was his work with Big Star, creating and playing a style of music that most would eventually refer to as power pop, that defines his legacy. 
 
 The difficulties that transpired over the course of Big Star’s three-album career are well-documented and hardly require fully hashing out here. In short, it boiled down to a distribution nightmare hard to even imagine in today’s digital age. In places where they were being played on the radio none of their records could be found in stores, and in places where they were receiving little to no airplay the shelves were fully stocked. By the time their third album was released the toll of all this misfortune could be heard seeping out of the record grooves in nearly every song. Years later writer Erik Davis would refer to Big Star’s third album as “the kind of album they made Prozac to prevent.” 
 
 All this combined to create an almost mythical story. Listening to those albums in college, myself an aspiring musician of the same aesthetic mindset, it was like listening to a tragic novel being read in slow motion. How could this music have fallen through the cracks? Alex Chilton wrote about the pains of being young, the universal emotions we all go through, and somehow managed to make it earnest, heartfelt and achingly real without making it embarrassing. 
 
 The tragedy finally gave way to hope. In the 1990s there was finally a resurgence in interest. Bands credited Big Star as an influence. Rykodisc released their three studio albums and a live recording on CD. Alex Chilton even went back out on the road with a revived version of Big Star. That version continued until his death; it had a gig booked Saturday night at this year’s SXSW. Big Star became a symbol, unwittingly, of sticking to your artistic sensibilities, regardless. 
 
 In 1992 Chilton said, “People have been telling me I’ve been wrong every step of the way, and in retrospect it doesn’t look like I was so wrong after all.” The 18 years that followed would prove he was right. ||||| Image Credit: Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty ImagesWith the passing of singer-songwriter Alex Chilton, rock music has lost one of its great cult figures and touchstones of influence. Chilton, who died at the age of 59 in New Orleans on Wednesday from what appears to have been a heart problem, achieved teen stardom in the ’60s with the Box Tops. Then, in the following decade, he played with Big Star, whose track “In The Street” would ultimately become famous as the theme song for That ’70s Show. But Chilton’s limited commercial success offers no indication as to his influence on rock. He was a musical figure—like Nick Drake or Gram Parsons—whose importance lay not with his chart placings, but in the place his music found in the record collections of subsequent generations of stars. 
 
 At the start of his career, Chilton had a string of pop-soul hits with the Box Tops, including 1967’s chart-topping “The Letter” and the following year’s “Cry Like a Baby.” But in 1970, Chilton disbanded the group and joined the then nascent Big Star. The latter power pop outfit is regarded in many quarters as one of the greatest rock acts of all time, thanks in large part to Chilton’s skilled songwriting. Unfortunately, there is little doubt it was also one of the more luckless and, during its brief lifetime, underappreciated. 
 
 Big Star’s debut album, #1 Record, was well reviewed—and featured the beautiful, heartbreaking ballad, “Thirteen,” which you can hear below—but its release was poorly managed by the band’s label. A second album, Radio City, also failed to break through, while Big Star’s third collection, which was produced by the legendary Jim Dickinson, was initially regarded as too uncommercial to be released at all (it would finally be issued to stores in 1978 under the title Third/Sister Lovers). In 1974, Big Star broke up. 
 
 The mercurial Chilton would continue to perform and record over the next 35 years, and his 1987 album, High Priest, is just one of several releases worth checking out. However, it was the three Big Star albums that rippled through the collective rock consciousness and whose influence was acknowledged by countless bands, from R.E.M. to Wilco to Britain’s Teenage Fanclub. The Replacements even included a song called “Alex Chilton” on their 1987 album Pleased To Meet Me. “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round,” claimed the Minneapolis rockers, “They sing ‘I’m in love. What’s that song?/I’m in love with that song.'” 
 
 Chilton himself may now be sadly gone. But I suspect many more will fall in love with his songs in the years to come. Please feel free to leave your own thoughts on the great man’s passing below. 
 
 (Follow the Music Mix on Twitter: @EWMusicMix.) 
 
 More from EW.com’s Music Mix: 
 
 Alex Chilton: Paul Westerberg, the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn, and others pay tribute 
 
 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ceremony: Eyewitness report 
 
 The Lonely Island and Julian Casablancas’ “Boombox” comes to SNL (finally!) 
 
 The Specials: Terry Hall and Lynval Golding on the ska-rock legends’ reunion shows—and why their absent keyboard player is a ‘Scrooge’
– Critics mourn Alex Chilton, who might not even have been on your radar before his death yesterday. But the Big Star frontman—whose songs have been covered by everyone from Elliott Smith to Wilco—will be now, and for good reason. Some takes on his legacy: Chilton "pretty much influenced everything that influenced the music you listen to now," writes blogger Balk on the Awl. So listen up. The musician's "limited commercial success offers no indication as to his influence on rock," writes Clark Collis in Entertainment Weekly. His "importance lay not with his chart placings, but in the place his music found in the record collections of subsequent generations of stars." Steve Kandell didn't get turned on to Chilton until he heard the Replacements "1987 love letter," he writes in Spin. "What I learned then is what wiser people before me held like a secret and what many others may just be learning this morning." And that's that Chilton was "brilliant" and "immeasurably influential." "Brian Eno is credited with the observation that just 5,000 people bought a Velvet Underground album, but every one of them started a band," Nick Lusk writes on CNN. "The same could easily be said about Big Star, and with much greater validity."