A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (12 page)

Alex had already published some of the songs with Chips’s company, Press Music, including the bluesy “Come On Honey” and “Just to See You,” which had been rejected as Box Tops material. On these and a stripped-down “I Can Dig It” (from
Nonstop
), Alex alternated between his deep, husky vocal style, though not as throaty as on most Box Tops sides, and his higher, more natural voice. He used the latter on a countrified version of “The Happy Song” (the flip side to
“Soul Deep”) and a new original, “Deep Inside Me,” a Beach Boys–inspired love song:
“Something deep inside your eyes saw right through me and into my heart.”

“
There was little pre-production involved,” says Terry. “Richard was so fast—an amazingly quick drummer. It didn’t take much time to go over things and pick it up.” Richard recalls being impressed with Alex’s songs. During the first session, “
it was really just the three of us. Alex would be on guitar and singing, me playing drums, and Terry would be in the control room with a bass plugged into the console, and that’s how we would do the tracks. Then we’d come back later, and Terry would add a guitar or a keyboard, or Alex would redo his guitar, or redo the vocal.” Terry asked Nashville steel guitar player Herb Newman, at Ardent on another project, to overdub parts on “The Happy Song” and other tunes.

At first Alex wanted to hire a session guitarist for all the tracks, but Terry convinced him that his own playing sounded just fine: “I told him, ‘No, I think the essence of this is you playing and singing.’” Richard, who would go on to work closely with Alex over the years, agreed: “
Alex was on a learning curve. And in retrospect, that was a beautiful thing—to see him try and make his way, instead of getting an experienced guitar player to come in.”

Still a slight young man, about five foot nine, Alex was graced with long fingers and seemed a natural musician; the past year of playing his Telecaster had paid off, as he became an effective rhythm guitarist. His fingerpicking had gotten stronger on acoustic as well. Working at Ardent on his own material, he felt a sense of freedom he’d rarely experienced while recording at American, where tracks were repeated endlessly until perfected. “
I’d learned to do things very meticulously. If I hit a bad note somewhere, or somebody did something a little off, I’d stop and do it again,” Alex said about his vocal approach with the Box Tops. Dan Penn, particularly, had expected him to follow direction and sing a lyric as he instructed, rather than how Alex felt it: “
There were all these rules and formulas that the Box Tops had to live [with]. That wasn’t the way we really were.” At Ardent, working with Terry in the control booth, the approach was loose, and most songs were cut in one or two takes, mistakes be damned.

During those first sessions, Richard remembers that when not behind the mic, Alex was quiet and reserved: “
He was kind of subdued and careful about what he said, maybe a little hesitant. In retrospect, I think he was a kid who had been just let out into the world and seen the world real fast and had some disappointment with what he saw. He was real cautious, just feeling the waters.”

As Alex spent more time at Ardent, he loosened up with others the way he already had with Terry. “
Alex was around a lot then,” John Fry recalls, “but it was a completely different thing compared to the Box Tops sessions. He was hanging out and getting to know everybody. Those were the days I would see a lot of him, and we’d talk, and I’d occasionally go over to the house and meet his parents.”

Alex had to take a break from recording to do more dates with the Box Tops, who’d now lost all their other members but Gary. Local drummer Bobby Guidotti took Boggs’s spot, and keyboardist Swain Schaefer, who’d played in the Scepters with Danny Smythe, replaced Allen. The group began brushing up on their repertoire, adding tracks from
Dimensions
. As “Soul Deep” peaked, Bell released the catchy single “Turn On a Dream,” a Mark James song (which twenty years later Alex praised to a journalist, saying “it sounded like a million bucks”). With Alex’s “Together” on the flip side, “Turn on a Dream” was not included on the
Dimensions
LP and barely skimmed the Top 40.

The new lineup performed both singles in early December when the Box Tops appeared on
The Mike Douglas Show
, a syndicated afternoon program filmed before a live audience in Philadelphia. The week the Box Tops performed, Douglas’s cohost was Carol Channing. She teased the boys mercilessly after they played “Dream”—asking Alex if, prior to becoming a singer, he’d been a hog caller and inquiring what would happen when rock & roll fizzled and “they rejoined the human race.” After their “chat,” a smiling Alex, the consummate professional, sauntered back onstage and, as with “Turn On a Dream,” managed a convincing lip-synch of “Soul Deep” while doing a loose-limbed dance.

The band did have some things to be happy about. They were finally going to the U.K. for a two-week tour, with Boggs back on board, replacing Guidotti. And their records were getting some good press from a new generation of rock critics whose opinions were taken seriously, including Robert Christgau, then at
Esquire
and about to become senior editor and music columnist of the
Village Voice
, and Lester Bangs, an incendiary writer for
Creem
and
Rolling Stone
. Christgau wrote in
Esquire
that the
Super Hits
anthology reflected

the highest kind of rock-and-roll, a music of such immediate appeal that I regard it as a litmus elimination for phony and hung-up “rock” fans. . . . Production can only be described as exquisite. . . . Each new instrument, each pause, works to build tension and qualify meaning, yet final control seems to fall to some kind of rapacious commercial instinct that might seem pretentious if it weren’t so busy being delighted with itself.

The future Dean of Rock Criticism said of Alex, “Chilton has an ideal but in no way typical rock voice.”

Bangs crowed about the band in the December 27, 1969, issue of
Rolling Stone
in a review that initially seemed like a pan:

THE BOX TOPS?
Are you serious?
Those yokel hacks grinding out rattly pop for the tyrannical Top 40? Those squeaky-clean goons in paisley scarves and blue blazers, mugging with obscene cuteness for all the folks back home on all those corny album covers? Even their
name
is lame!

Jointly reviewing
Nonstop, Dimension
, and
Super Hits
, Bangs went on to rave about the band’s soulfulness and the simplicity of their songs, particularly on
Nonstop
, as an antidote to the increasing self-consciousness of hard-rock groups with extended jams. In fact, Bangs much preferred the short version of “Rock Me Baby” on
Nonstop
to the nine-minute jam on
Dimensions
. Of the latter album, he singled out one track:

A song like “Soul Deep” is obvious enough, a patented commercial sound, yet within those strictures it communicates with a depth and sincerity of feeling that holds the attention and brings you back often. A number of their songs have this same half-definable quality, an approach just this side of Neil Diamond’s pretensions, combined with a clear, airy funk. Blue-eyed soul plus helium, overt melodrama repressed for a clear undemanding flow. A good example is “Together,” one of the Box Tops’ several teenage love songs. Again, the maudlin side of the cliché is boiled away until the slight taste of it remaining acts as a fine seasoning, even enhancing the song.

Bangs ended his review: “Keep a sharp eye out for their next one. It just might be a doozer.”

The reviews were little consolation, though, when the Box Tops arrived in London and discovered that they’d been booked on their most low-rent tour yet. The double bill included a West Indian reggae band called King Ollie and the Raisins as the opening act. Rather than provide the Box Tops with the gear they’d specified in their contract, the U.K. promoter expected the Americans to use the opening act’s subpar equipment. Their pretour rehearsal space was the basement of a London school, and when they phoned Roy Mack to complain, his call to the
U.K. promoter didn’t bring any improvement. As Gary recalls, “
We debated whether or not to try to play on the toy/inappropriate gear. Our first gig was that very night in Ipswich. The English promoter, a guy named Arthur House, had said, ‘They play on the other band’s gear or they don’t play.’ We took a vote. We decided that, as much as we wanted to play, we wouldn’t play on the unprofessional/shitty equipment. . . . Harold and the Raisins played to a somewhat hostile Ipswich crowd and never knew why we didn’t show up until about three o’clock the next morning, when they dragged themselves back into London.”

Now with two weeks of free time, the Box Tops decided to kick back and enjoy themselves. They saw a thrilling concert at Royal Albert Hall: Delaney and Bonnie and Friends, featuring Eric Clapton on lead guitar and backed by the band that would become Derek and the Dominos (excluding Duane Allman). Alex and Gary visited Abbey Road Studios, where Alex was awed by the massive recording rooms. Alex was jolted out of his good spirits one day as he walked by a newsstand and spotted a tabloid with the blaring headline
MANSON ARRESTED FOR SLAYINGS
, with a photo of Dennis Wilson’s wild-eyed buddy in handcuffs. “Alex went white when he saw the papers,” Gary remembers.

While in London Alex had a few heated phone conversations with his father. “
I remember hearing him say, ‘But it’s my money
,
Dad!’” recalls Swain. Alex and Suzi’s relationship had deteriorated to the point that he’d decided to move back to his parents’ house upon his return to Memphis, just in time for his nineteenth birthday. With the new decade, Alex would become a free man—in more ways than one.

Alex started the seventies by heading to Ardent to cut more tunes. Living at his parents’ house, he worked on songs inspired by his trip to London, as well as memories brought on by being back on Montgomery Street. Seeing his brother Howard, now a graduate student in Indiana and home for the holidays, also reminded him of the past. The result was “All We Ever Got from Them Was Pain,” perhaps the most personal song Alex ever wrote: “I see sadness in your eyes, I do think that I know why/They left us on the street to live or die.”

Alex had voiced his plan to leave the band in London, but, according to Swain Schaefer, the band’s replacement bassist threatened “to beat him up and put him in the hospital” if he quit. Gary suggested they start a new group with a different name. Neither idea appealed to Alex. The band’s fortunes continued to decline. “Soul Deep,” their last bona fide hit, had only reached #87 in 1969’s year-end survey. Alex and Gary each retained lawyers to sue Roy Mack for money owed them, though they eventually didn’t pursue legal action.

Back in the studio, Alex began developing his own voice as a singer-songwriter. “
I was trying to learn to write,” Alex later said about the sessions with Terry Manning. “Trying to learn to play. We would approach some things in a very organized way, and some other things we would just be wailing off the top of our heads with the tape running.”

“
He had started ‘The EMI Song’ in England,” Terry remembers. “At Abbey Road Studios, Alex went into the big room there and sat at the piano. He said the first thing he played was those chords, and then he quickly hummed part of the melody in his head. When he brought it back and we started recording, he said, ‘Well, I’ve got a partial little ditty with just some chords,’ and played it. I said, ‘Oh, I love that, we’ve just got to finish it!’ I can still see it exactly: We sat down
at the piano and just went through the whole thing and finished it up, with a lot of new chords and things. But the little intro, the first part of it, he had that without the lyrics.” Alex sang “The EMI Song (Smile for Me)” in a vulnerable tenor, backed by keyboards, guitar, bass, and drums. In Terry’s mind the shimmering love song would be the centerpiece of Alex’s debut album.

Terry was floored by the deep emotion conveyed when Alex fingerpicked and sang “All We Ever Got from Them Was Pain.” He joined Alex on Everly Brothers–style harmonies on the song’s chorus,
“They never gave a damn for us, they never gave a hand to us.”

“I think it was [about]
a family thing,” Terry says. “I’ve always thought it was about his parents or his family life situation.” The song was never included on a proper Chilton release until 2012, because previously, he adds, “Alex wanted the song left off—he said it had a meaning to him [and for that reason] he really didn’t want it released at that point. I think he felt that it would make somebody feel bad.”

Some days in the Ardent studio, Alex was up for just having a good time, occasionally accompanied by Swain Schaefer. “
Alex and I’d get loaded and go into Ardent,” Swain remembers. “I’d play organ, and he’d play piano. He liked Scott Joplin and played a couple Joplin tunes like ‘The Entertainer’ pretty well.” Other covers were more contemporary, like the Rolling Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Alex’s loping version had a kind of kids-in-the-garage amateurism, which Terry captured on tape.

More surprising was the day Alex insisted on doing “Sugar, Sugar,” the chart-topper by the Archies (cowritten by none other than Andy Kim, who also sang on Archies recordings, as did songwriter Toni Wine, Chips Moman’s future wife).

On “Sugar, Sugar,” Alex and Terry were on a tear, laughing and joking throughout the song, turning it into a throbbing guitar fest and screaming out,
“
We’re gonna be stars!”
When Alex kicked it off on his Telecaster, Richard Rosebrough thought, “‘What do you want to do that
teenybopper, bubblegum stuff for?’ Later I got to understand where he was coming from, and I would appreciate a song [like that]. I realized there was something in ‘Sugar, Sugar’ that made it a stand-up, stand-alone song.” Alex later said it was “a sort of humorous thing, meant to be the heavy version, like Iron Butterfly doing ‘Sugar, Sugar,’ real spontaneous.” He certainly had the ear for a good tune, and in this case it was one that also caught the attention of Wilson Pickett and Ike and Tina Turner, who cut their own funky renditions of the song.

At home, although Mary (who had dropped the “Evelyn” except among old friends) had closed her art gallery, the salons continued. Alex occasionally stopped in to see Sidney play piano in a jazz combo in West Memphis clubs like the Sharecropper, but a distance had grown between father and son. Alex wondered if his parents had given him the advice he needed as a sixteen-year-old pop star. “
I really wanted to quit [the Box Tops] right after the first record,” he told Gordon Alexander in 1979. “I think, looking back on it, that would have been a really sound move. [But] I was young and kinda scared. I felt like an amateur. I was looking for guidance from my parents, and all they said was, ‘These guys [Roy Mack, Dan Penn, and Chips Moman] know what they’re doing.’ I stayed against my better judgment.”

•   •   •

In February Alex had to leave town for a Box Tops date at a school in the mountains of North Carolina. A few days before the appearance, he traveled to Knoxville to visit Michael O’Brien, still in college there. “
He spent a couple of days with me in my small garret apartment on Laurel Avenue,” says Michael. “Over that weekend I drove him to the concert. It was a typical Box Tops concert—lots of teenage kids. The band had been playing for about forty-five minutes when Alex cut the set short; he had reached his limit—another show, another set of adoring teenagers. Alex had had enough; he was finished. I drove Alex back to his motel, and he went straight to the phone and called Roy Mack and announced he was quitting. I wondered how someone so young could be so sure of himself. Alex’s resolve was impressive.”

Back in Memphis, when Alex told Gary he’d quit, the guitarist decided to follow suit. “
There was no point in having a Box Tops without Alex. His voice was the identity of the group,” says Gary. “Alex was just fed up with the whole deal. We were really worn out from touring, and we’d realized we were getting screwed out of most of the money we had coming to us.” A few weeks after the group’s breakup, Bell released “You Keep Tightening Up on Me,” which crawled to #74 on the charts before vanishing.

But it wasn’t over yet. Alex couldn’t make a clean break from Chips: “
In 1970, when I left the group, the production company was in trouble with Bell Records [who] threatened to sue because [American] owed them more tracks,” Alex said. “So I came back in and recorded other stuff . . . Through 1970, I did some sessions to fulfill the recording contract.”

Over the next year an occasional Box Tops single would be released, only to quickly fade. Bell sent out press releases about the band, including one on
November 25, 1970, that noted, “Like all good country bands, the Box Tops know how to play music that people enjoy hearing. It’s music that’s good for the soul and good for the heart.”

Some of those last songs Alex recorded at American were among the best. One had been penned by a young California singer-songwriter named Randy Newman, about to release his second LP. The aptly titled “Let Me Go,” with its refrain, “I’m so young,” perfectly matched Alex’s voice with what would become Newman’s signature sound. Alex employed his bluesy vocals, backed primarily by piano and New Orleans–style horns. The flip side, “Got to Hold On to You,” is a more typical love song, written by American session keyboardist Bobby Emmons. The last Wayne Carson song Alex cut, “King’s Highway,” is another gem, and according to Carson “
a hell of a song—that’s my version of a gospel song. I was really glad Alex did that one.” The latter marked Alex’s final appearance on a Box Tops 45; both it and “Let Me Go” would be released in 1971, without making a dent on the Hot 100.

Alex’s departure from both his marriage and the Box Tops inspired the song everyone at Ardent was sure would be his first solo hit: “Free Again.” In the lyrics he admits he “had made a mistake” getting married, among other things. “That was a very serious songwriting effort,” says Terry. “I think that his whole life he wanted to be free. This was the first exposition of it.” With lyrics like
“Free again to sing my songs again, free again to end my longing, to be out on my own again,”
Alex made it clear he was ready to move on. Alex and Terry recorded the song a number of times, with Alex singing one version in his raspy Box Tops voice and another in his midrange. “
I wanted to exploit all of that—I remember thinking we can’t have something that doesn’t sound like the Box Tops, but I also loved the beauty of the soft things, like ‘The EMI Song.’ I wanted to make sure we had both, so we ended up with a dichotomy of voices.”

Jeff Newman contributed some “
crazy rock & roll [pedal] steel guitar leads,” according to Terry, to “Free Again,” as well as banjo on “I Wish I Could Meet Elvis.” The resulting country-rock sound was no stretch for Alex, a big fan of Gram Parsons and his pioneering Flying Burrito Brothers. “
Parsons was a very expressive, emotive singer, and down to earth,” Alex said. “He was maudlin, which influenced me, but I was more a fan of his recording style. . . . Some of the Burritos’ worst, saddest, most tired songs were their best.”

Terry played the catchy “Free Again” and twelve or so other tracks for John Fry, who agreed that Alex had enough good material to be shopped to a major label. Alex signed with Ardent’s production company, enabling John and Terry
to license the album. Terry wanted to call it
1969
, which “
had so many meanings,” says Terry, “the culmination of the ’60s, the moon shot, everything that had gone on with riots and assassinations, Woodstock and all the changes. I wanted the title to reflect the culmination of that intensity.” But Alex and John both feared that by implying it had been cut in 1969, before his Bell/American contract was up, there could be future legal problems. “
Although it was largely recorded in 1969,” says John, “Alex was kind of paranoid and said, ‘I’m not sure if I’m out of my Box Tops contract yet, so we better call it
1970
.’”

Terry crafted a rough mix of three songs—a raspy-voiced “Free Again,” “Come On Honey,” and “The EMI Song”—and traveled to New York that spring with demo in hand to meet with labels. Ron Alexenberg at CBS Records seemed interested at first but couldn’t convince others at the label. Knowing that Jerry Wexler had loved “The Letter,” Terry also made an appointment at Atlantic. With Wexler now primarily based at Criteria Studios in Miami (where he’d hired Jim Dickinson as leader of the house band, the Dixie Flyers), Terry met with A&R man Jerry Greenberg. “
Jerry offered a deal,” Terry says. “He said, ‘What I want to do is release “Free Again” as a single first. If we get the reaction I think we will, then we’ll go with an album.’ When we told that to Alex, he said, ‘Absolutely not! I am an album guy. This sounds just like the Box Tops. All they want is singles.’ And he refused the deal. Turned it down cold.”

Alex called Carl Wilson to inquire about the Beach Boys’ label Brother Records to see if that label could put out his solo debut. Carl invited him out to Los Angeles. Terry joined Alex on the trip, taking along the tracks to play for Carl and Brian. “
They loved it and wanted to put it out,” says Terry. “But there proved to be a lot of issues in the Beach Boys–Brother Records camp at the time that kept it from happening.” The recordings were ultimately shelved, with various tracks emerging piecemeal, beginning in 1985, and the full album finally released for the first time on Ardent Records in 1996.

When not in the studio, Alex spent much of his time with Vera Ellis, a brainy brunette who had graduated from Miss Hutchison’s School the previous spring and now attended Memphis State. She’d first met Alex in 1968 through mutual friends. “
As kids who went to this sheltered, privileged high school, none of us was sophisticated at all,” says Vera, “and we thought that Alex was just Mr. Cool. He had that quiet aloofness, but in actuality, I found out later, a lot of it was lack of self-esteem.” Sparks flew between Vera and Alex, but with his touring schedule, his involvement with Suzi, and their subsequent sudden marriage, the two had to postpone spending time together. Now, by early 1970, they were
inseparable. “Alex was my first love,” says Vera, “and honestly I don’t know if you ever get over your first love or not. Before we got together, Alex was really infatuated with Suzi Greene. When he first met her, he thought she was the coolest thing. She was a little older, and he thought she was so awesome, but then he got over it pretty quick. When his marriage to Suzi was over, he never had any second thoughts. He was just glad to be rid of that.”

Though they’d never cared for Suzi, Mary and Sidney Chilton liked Vera, who hung out at the Montgomery house while Alex continued to work on his writing and guitar playing. “
I would spend a lot of time over there in Alex’s room on the second floor,” says Vera. “His mother was always so good to me, really sweet, and she never acted like ‘what in the hell is she doing over here again?’ I remember one time we were asleep upstairs and we were awakened by Bill Eggleston. There were always characters coming in and out.”

Alex’s Box Tops earnings ended once he quit the band, but he had managed to save around $70,000 (worth around $400,000 today). His parents urged him to get his GED, which he did, and enroll at Memphis State, which he considered. He and Vera started talking about moving to New York City when her spring semester ended. Michael O’Brien helped facilitate Alex’s plan: “
With a summer job I had snared at NYU, I was able to rent a room in the Weinstein dormitory right off Washington Square Park,” which he shared with a college friend, Robert Schiffer. “A couple of weeks after I got settled, Alex flew up to Manhattan and moved in with us,” Michael says. Vera soon followed. “Vera was a very strong positive influence on Alex,” Bob Schiffer recalls. “She was an intellectual and very interested in the world, and she encouraged him.”