I'm in Stockholm, Sweden for a couple of days on a guitar gig, and am having a blast. I had no idea of the fact that Sweden exports the third-most amount of music (behind the U.S. and the U.K.) until today, but it's not surprising when you consider the amount of talent that has come from this country of merely nine million: ABBA, Refused, Ace of Base, Fireside, Entombed, The Cardigans, pop guru Max Martin, the list goes on and on.

My personal favorite: the recently defunct Hellacopters. The band started as an Entombed/Backyard Babies side project and turned into one of the best and most-loved garage revival acts, though that pigeonholing does a disservice to their complex Blue Cheer meets Cheap Trick romp. The Hellacopters weren't doing anything new, but I can't think of anyone in the past decade-and-a-half that did frill-free hard rock as consistently well as these guys.

I am so excited I am bouncing up and down in my chair and making my co-workers very suspicious. Big Star, the brilliant, beautiful and seemingly cursed founders of the power-pop genre, are releasing a box set.

Four discs worth of unreleased demos, alternate takes, rarities, and live cuts are on tap for cult-rock act Big Star this fall when Rhino releases "Keep An Eye On The Sky" on September 15. The 98 tracks cull from 1968 – 1975, and include pre-Big Star bands Rock City and Icewater, solo work from Alex Chilton and Chris Bell, and unreleased material from the "#1 Record," "Radio City" and "Third/Sister Lover" sessions.

While Big Star struggled with success commercially, their early 70's, power-pop sound is often cited as directly influencing bands like Cheap Trick, R.E.M. and the Replacements. Big Star's music is undergoing a resurgence, with a film is reportedly in the works - based on Rob Jovanovic's biography, "Big Star: The Story of Rock's Forgotten Band" - and songs have been used in several TV shows, including the Cheap Trick version of "In The Street" as the theme song to "That ‘70s Show."

Big Star struggled with success commercially, all right. Their first two records were critically adulated pop masterpieces that failed to make their way onto the shelves of any record stores. Alex Chilton grew so depressed over it that he purposely sabotaged their next record because he knew that no matter how good it was no one would be able to find it. The unfinished album Third may be their best. Public opinion has caught up with Big Star -- they're widely recognized as being up their with the Velvet Underground as the era's most influential American band, but boy was it not there to begin with:

While Big Star gigs were that of a rare thing, the fourth disc culls live material from three nights the band performed in January 1973. They were booked as the opening act for soul pioneers Archie Bell & The Drells at the Lafayette Music Room in Memphis. Stephens recalls those performances being rather difficult. "Not exactly our crowd," Stephens says. "After our performances you can hear one person clap. Not a lot of energy coming back from the audience. The good thing about that particular recording is that there were mics set up in the room. It wasn't a board feed, where those can be kind of dry."

For many (myself included), the original Big Star 4 singer/4 writer lineup of guitarists Alex Chilton and Chris Bell with bassist Andy Hummel and drummer Jody Stephens is the band that maybe could've been as great as the Beatles had they not self-destructed. Give a listen to "Thank You Friends", and perhaps you'll agree (you have to fast forward to about 0:20 for the song to start).

Last night was the Los Angeles debut of the unlikely supergroup Tinted Windows, featuring Smashing Pumpkins' James Iha, Cheap Trick's Bun E. Carlos, Fountains of Wayne's Adam Schlesinger and Hanson's Taylor Hanson. Tickets to the show at the Troubadour, Hollywood's best sounding venue, sold out quickly -- fortunately I got my $30 in early (what, you think I get on the guest list for these things?!)

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Tinted Windows, the supergroup we've mentioned before that features Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, Fountains of Wayne bassist/tunesmith Adam Schlesinger and Hanson singer (yes, Hanson) Taylor Hanson, has unveiled a track off their new album which will hit on April 21st.

The bar for supergroups has been set awfully low in recent years (I'm talking to you, Audioslave) -- but Tinted Windows sound like you want them to: Cheap Trick with Fountains of Wayne's lyrical cleverness, Smashing Pumpkins blistering guitars, and a really gifted singer. At least that's my take.

What's yours? What supergroups hit and missed for you in the past?

Only seconds after going through the comments of last night's very hopping Cheap Trick thread, I head over to Pitchfork and what do I see?

According to Billboard.com, there's a new band that exists on earth called Tinted Windows featuring former Smashing Pumpkin James Iha, Cheap Trick drummer Bun E. Carlos, handsome Hanson brother Taylor, and Fountains of Wayne bassist Adam Schlesinger.

I am looking at my calendar right now. It is not April 1.

This barely, almost makes sense. Iha and Schlesinger (who's a master tunesmith, more on this in a second) own a studio together. The Smashing Pumpkins and Cheap Trick are the two most important bands to ever come out of Illinois and it stands to reason that at some point they've met and shared an acknowledgment of that fact, and probably felt very smug about it. Hanson, after their original bubblegum emergence, became a very critically respected cult act (really!) by making a string of albums that at their best sound like a combination of the Jackson 5 and... Cheap Trick. Yeah, let's start a band.

Meanwhile, there's no one better to write songs in this band than Schlesinger, a master tunesmith who wrote "That Thing You Do" for the movie of the same name, "Pretend to Be Nice", the only great song on the Josie and the Pussycats soundtrack, and a host of other moneymakers.

Tinted Windows (I agree with Pitchfork - can't you get a better name than that?) will be playing at South By Southwest in Austin on March 20th, and though SXSW is the definition of the word "clusterf--k", I now wish I was going.

Cheap Trick might not be the greatest band of all time, but they're definitely the least bad.

Arena rock without the overblown self-importance. Pure radio pop without the bubblegum. This song, about coming to terms with the fact that your parents are a little edgier than you might be comfortable with, has always been my favorite.

My friend and I make a lot of top ten lists about music, and Cheap Trick was #1 on our "least hated bands of all time" list along with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts, X and Thin Lizzy. Who else can you think of that might not be everyone's favorite, but rarely inspires revulsion in anyone?