Born on March 17, 2010

Alex Chilton defined the sound of power pop, first as the teenage voice of The Box Tops and later as the creative force behind Big Star’s cult-classic albums. Though his records sold poorly during his lifetime, his melodic, bittersweet songwriting became the blueprint for generations of alternative rock bands, from R.E.M. to The Replacements.

He ran away at seventeen to become a magician, performing sleight-of-hand tricks on vaudeville stages before writing novels where the magic never quite left. Sid Fleischman won the Newbery Medal for *The Whipping Boy* in 1987, but he'd already mastered something harder than literary acclaim — making kids who hated reading finish an entire book. His characters were con artists, pickpockets, and hustlers with hearts, because he understood that children don't want heroes who follow rules. They want heroes who break them cleverly. When he died in 2010, he left behind twenty-five novels that still sit dog-eared on library shelves, passed between siblings with the same whispered recommendation: "This one's actually good."

He championed world music on BBC Radio before anyone called it that, but Charlie Gillett's real genius was spotting unsigned bands in demo tapes sent to his Honky Tonk show. He broke Dire Straits in 1977 after Mark Knopfler mailed him a five-song cassette. Then came Elvis Costello, Ian Dury, and later Bhangra artists who couldn't get airtime anywhere else. His 1970 book "The Sound of the City" traced rock and roll back to specific record labels in Memphis and Chicago, arguing the music wasn't about rebellion but about independent producers working outside the major label system. When he died in 2010, his personal archive contained 40,000 records from 140 countries—a library of every sound the mainstream ignored.