Chris Bell, the founder of the legendary Memphis power pop band Big Star, was, along with Alex Chilton, the principal songwriter of the group’s debut album, the cheeky and optimistically titled #1 Record (1972). Bell, described as almost suicidally depressed, left the group he started later that same year. In the lore of Big Star’s fractious demise, Chris Bell - a young man torn by his intense religious feelings and the subsequent guilt caused by his homosexuality and drug abuse - often plays the complicated and saintly Abel to Chilton’s destructive Cain.

Bell was the son of a successful local restaurateur, and grew up in the advantaged, predominantly white neighborhood of Germantown in Memphis, Tennessee. School friend and later bandmate of both Bell and Chilton, Richard Rosebrough described his and Bell’s upbringing thusly to Mojo’s Barney Hoskyns: “Our scene was Memphis prep: snotty-nosed, spoiled-brat Germantown kids.” During the late '60s, while Chilton, the son of a local jazz musician, was cutting his teeth as the lead singer for local blue-eyed soul hit-makers The Boxtops, Bell was performing live in local Anglophilic acts such as The Jynx, Rock City and Ice Water and recording intermittently at John Fry’s Ardent Studios.

In 1970, Chilton, fed up with his role in The Box Tops quit the band and recorded a clutch of demos at Ardent studios that he intended as a solo album. Though the record never came to proper fruition, (Ardent Records eventually released these recordings in 1996 under the title 1970) Chilton became acquainted with his future band mates. Over the late winter of 1971, and early 1972, Big Star recorded the phenomenally influential #1 Record at Ardent; a classic that effortlessly combined Beatlesque pop, Memphis soul, youthful restlessness and country melancholia but was a spectacular commercial failure. By the end of the year, terribly depressed and upset over both the failure of his record to sell, and the insalubrious business practices of Stax Records (Ardent’s parent company), not to mention creeping frustration over the extra attention the extroverted Alex Chilton received, Bell left the band.

Bell’s depression and drug use only worsened, and in the summer of 1974, after multiple suicide attempts, his brother David took him to Europe where the two wandered, wealthy-minstrel style throughout the old world; with Bell playing in both English pubs and French castles. The dreamlike self-financed vanity project became even more fantastical, as Geoff Emerick, an engineer on the later Beatles albums mixed the sessions at George Martin’s Air Studios in London. Unfortunately upon his return stateside, Bell’s dreams turned hopelessly bitter as record companies roundly rejected the material (which would make up the lions share of I Am the Cosmos, released subsequently by Rykodisc in 1992). Bell was forced to work for his father’s successful chain of fast food restaurants, his music career all but dead.