Contributions:

Instrumentalist Producer Vocalist

In a business that reinvents itself at every turn, 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, British-influenced power pop albums he did with Big Star in the mid-'70s (and after the group re-formed with a new lineup in 1993), and the spate of cool but chaotic solo albums he recorded beginning in the late '70s, ranging from the deliberately damaged attack of 1979's Like Flies on Sherbert to the lean but soulful stylings of 1987's High Priest and 1995's A Man Called Destruction.

To some, he was a classic hitmaker from the '60s.