Big Star is one of those bands that most members of the general public have never heard of, but whose influence that same public has heard across hundreds of songs by bands they do know and love – artists like R.E.M., the Posies, Elliott Smith, and the Replacements (who actually wrote a song explicitly celebrating Big Star’s leader, Alex Chilton). Their humorously titled debut album was met with rapturous reviews and terrible distribution, limiting its commercial impact, but today it’s generally regarded as a classic of the early power pop sound. The massed vocals on “The Ballad of El Goodo” and “Don’t Lie to Me” and the heavy but crisp guitars on “When My Baby’s Beside Me” would be adopted by countless other bands over the next twenty years – and many would try, and fail, to duplicate the brilliance underlying both the sound and the structure of “Watching the Sunrise.”