A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (13 page)

“During the day I went to my office job around the corner, and Alex worked on songs,” Michael remembers. “At night friends and musicians would come around, and everyone took turns playing. Alex only wanted to play guitar, and got me to sing. We did Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Great Balls of Fire,’ Elvis’s ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ Gram Parsons’s ‘Hot Burrito #1.’ It was interesting—even though I couldn’t sing, Alex was intrigued by the noise of my voice. It was fun for me. Someone without a lick of musical talent got to be a musician for an evening. I knew how bad I sounded, but what was more amazing is that everyone sat around and listened anyway. Just as in high school, Alex’s presence dominated the room, and he controlled what was cool and what was not. No one challenged him.” Alex’s affinity for untrained, imperfect voices would only grow over the years.

It was an exciting time to be in New York. On June 28, 1970, a year after the
Stonewall riots, the first-ever gay pride parade marched up Sixth Avenue from the Village. Vietnam War protests were a constant. “
Alex was really involved in politics,” Vera remembers. “We would go to political speeches, and he was real interested in that.” Some of his feelings about the draft and the war found their way into his lyrics. When not jamming at Michael’s, Alex and Vera strolled through the Village, eating in tiny restaurants and stopping into such folk clubs as the Gaslight. As Alex watched other aspiring folkies on open-mic nights, he decided to work up some songs to try. He approached the booker of Gerde’s Folk City; the MC knew Alex’s history with the Box Tops but kept it quiet. Vera, Bob, and Michael sat in the audience every Tuesday evening, feeling Alex’s anxiety as he nervously struggled through a short set, including the Byrds’ version of “Deportee,” “Hot Burrito #1,” and Hank Williams’s “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me.” Occasionally he tried an original, like his own “Merchant Marine.” “It was the first time I’d ever really tried to sing and play guitar together,” Alex later told journalist Robert Gordon, “and sometimes I’d shake so bad that I couldn’t play the guitar at all.”

Singing alone with only an acoustic guitar can be frightening for even the most experienced musician who’s previously played with a band, and Alex was no exception. The fact that he’d been a top-selling recording artist did nothing to boost his confidence. “
He was always real nervous about performing in New York,” Vera remembers. “He felt that he wasn’t good enough, but he did it anyway, and he performed in a lot of places. He was really just kind of becoming himself while he was doing that, and learning about himself, and he was writing his own music.”

On Sunday afternoons Washington Square Park hosted hootenannies, a tradition that started during the folk boom in the 1950s. Now the traditional folk tunes, string-band music, and bluegrass were supplemented by antiwar songs performed by local musicians like the braying David Peel, who also included numbers about pot (“Have a Marijuana”), easily obtainable in the park. All kinds of characters hung out there, day and night, and one of them, Grant Weisbrot, a twenty-two-year-old Brooklyn-born mandolin player, became friends with Alex and Vera. Soon he had a new name: Grady Whitebread. “We were good buddies,” Alex said. “I learned a lot about mountain music from him and some of his friends.”

“He was a really unique person, so out of the realm of anybody we knew,” Vera recalls of Grant/Grady. Alex loved playing with the scrawny New Yorker, a City College graduate who worked as an editor at the
New York Post
and loved
bluegrass. He couldn’t really carry a tune but was a great picker. He also educated Alex about what would be a lifelong passion—astrology. “I first got interested in astrology as a teenager, then when living in New York, I got further into it,” Alex said in 1992. “I started studying some good books. I’ve studied it rather extensively and I’ve gotten really, really sharp at it. I’m a pretty good interpreter of [astrological] charts. It is interesting as far as understanding people and it’s just darn ineresting in and of itself. The longer you study something you believe in, the more profound it can get for you.” Depending on a person’s astrological sign, Alex would determine whether or not to spend time with him or her.

Alex gorged himself on New York’s smorgasbord of musical delights. That summer, for example, at the Schaefer Music Festival in Central Park, it cost $1 or $2 to see Little Richard and the Four Tops, while the Pop Festival at Randall’s Island presented Delaney and Bonnie, Van Morrison, and Sly and the Family Stone. Alex caught the masterful country-folk guitarist Doc Watson at a tiny performance space in the Village. He also saw the Velvet Underground, in their last performances with Lou Reed, at Max’s Kansas City, “held over for the entire summer, Wednesday through Sunday, at 11 p.m. and 1 a.m,” according to advertisements in the
Village Voice
. Originally a hangout for artists, Mickey Ruskin’s nightspot at Park Avenue South and Seventeenth Street now hosted Andy Warhol and his coterie of friends. “
I seemed to hang around with a lot of the rock writers of those years—like Richard Meltzer, Danny Fields, and people like that, not that they were my big buddies,” said Alex, “but I did . . . go to Max’s Kansas City a lot. In the back room these writers hung out in a sort of Parisian world of chatting about politics and art and that sort of business.” Other than the Velvets, “I didn’t really get into the music . . . going on there,” Alex remembered.

In the Village he was surrounded by jazz, folk, and rock clubs, all of which he frequented. “
Todd Rundgren had made his first solo album [
Runt
] around then, and I was a big fan of that album,” he said. “That one just knocked me out. And he was all around the neighborhood. There was a glam rock bar on Bleecker in those days called Nobody’s. It was proto-glam. I remember sitting in there one night and seeing Todd come in the door and being very impressed. ‘Who’s that chick with him?’ ‘That’s Patti Smith.’ And nobody knew who Patti Smith was.”

When the lease ran out for Bob and Michael’s dorm room in August, Vera and Alex lucked into another place to live. Alex’s Memphis friend Gordon Alexander had rented an apartment on Thompson Street between Bleecker and West Third, also in the heart of the Village. He’d decided to try San Francisco for
a while and offered the place to Alex for $75 a month. For the first week, Michael joined them, crashing in a sleeping bag under a table while Alex and Vera slept on a mattress on the other side of the tiny studio. With hardwood floors and a brick wall on one side, the apartment had only enough room for the mattress, a couple of chairs, an acoustic guitar, and Alex’s ever-growing collection of records. The couple rarely used the minuscule kitchen. Unlike some neighborhood apartments, with the bathroom down the hall, this one had a tiny “water closet” with toilet and shower. A bonus: Their landlord dealt cheap pot.

The third-floor walkup was directly below #12, the apartment of Gordon’s pal Keith Sykes, a Kentucky-born singer-songwriter who’d moved from Memphis to New York in 1968. Befriended by Jerry Jeff Walker, Keith, at twenty, had successfully broken into the Village folk scene and scored a record deal with Vanguard. When Vera and Alex moved in, the two musicians immediately hit it off, spending time together in Keith’s apartment, which had a high-end stereo and a Teac recorder.

“
Alex and I started hanging out all the time,” Keith remembers, “playing music, listening to records, trying to write songs. He turned me on to all kinds of music I’d never heard before—like Eric Clapton. He’d tell me about why his electric guitar sounded like it did, because the pickup switch is not on the bridge, and details like that.” Sometimes they would record their latest work on Keith’s Teac. “I was groping around a lot trying to find my muse,” Alex said. “
I was sick of bands. I figured I was going to learn to accompany myself so that I wouldn’t even need ’em.”

Keith and Alex would also browse the neighborhood guitar shops: Matt Umanov’s on Bedford Street, where they might bump into famous musicians, and Music Inn on West Fourth. Alex had brought only his acoustic to New York but enjoyed looking at all types of instruments and discussing them with Keith. He would frequently stop in at a crammed record store, Village Oldies, around the corner on Bleecker Street. (The shop’s name eventually became that of its owner: Bleecker Bob’s.) There Alex traded notes with one of the long-haired clerks, Lenny Kaye, a guitarist, rock writer, and record collector about to embark on a musical collaboration with Patti Smith, who also frequented the shop.

Alex’s taste in music continued to expand. Keith recalls Alex turning him on to Moon Mullican, “and the first time I ever heard Aaron Copland’s
Appalachian Spring
, Alex played that for me.” Meanwhile some of his earliest musical loves would inspire his guitar playing. “I’d always been fascinated by folk-style
guitar players,” Alex said, “the finger-style guitar playing that in the late ’60s, early ’70s I tried to learn to play, too.”

“
Alex had so many influences and was always open to so many different styles,” Vera remembers. “We listened to a lot of Robert Johnson, Hank Williams, Loudon Wainwright III.” Some of the folkies still in the neighborhood were friends with Keith, like John Herald, founder of the Greenbriar Boys, whom Alex met and admired. Alex continued to work on his repertoire for Folk City, rehearsing until he no longer “trembled onstage,” he said. “I wanted to get to the point of proficiency and confidence in singing and playing. I wanted to be able to go to a town anytime I wanted with a guitar in my hand and go into a club and get a job.”

That fall Vera went back and forth between Memphis and New York while she tried to sort out her plans for college. One night while she was in Memphis, Alex was approached after his brief performance at Folk City by a woman who introduced herself as a music journalist. Karin Berg, then thirty-four, had moved from St. Louis to New York in the 1950s. A political activist and music fan, the feisty five-foot-tall blonde wrote for several downtown papers. In 1970 she was living in the Village on Horatio Street and writing for the
East Village Other
, “
struggling like all of us to develop our cultural voice,” said Patti Smith, who met Karin that year. Though no one else in the club did, Karin recognized Alex’s vocals from his Box Tops record “Neon Rainbow,” and she was genuinely moved by the new songs he was playing. Alex and Karin began spending time together, talking about music and politics.

Karin also introduced him to Bud Scoppa, a young music writer who had just penned a book on the Byrds and lived on the same block as Alex. That fall he noticed Alex strolling down the street in a corduroy jacket, carrying a guitar. “
He looked like a typically earnest Village folkie,” Bud recalls. “He could have been Tom Rush’s kid brother.” Alex had let his hair grow out almost to his shoulders, but abandoned bangs and parted it in the middle; he sometimes sported a wispy beard. “Alex seemed mysterious and enigmatic even then, and I couldn’t put him with the guy who had sung the Box Tops songs.” Bud also sensed that a romance had developed between Alex and Karin. When Alex introduced Bob Schiffer to Karin at the Kettle of Fish, he could tell “she was head over heels for him,” Bob recalls. “Later, Alex was telling me that it was a perfect relationship because men reach their sexual peak at nineteen and women do in their mid-thirties.”

Alex occasionally stopped by Bud’s apartment, including one auspicious
night when the writer just happened to hear from the subject of his book. “
Roger McGuinn called me,” Bud says, “then he came up to my apartment with his guitar. I don’t remember Alex volunteering to play anything, but McGuinn was very loquacious that night, and Alex was at least happy to be in the room with the guy who I discovered later was one of his big influences.” Alex decided that, like McGuinn, he wanted to take up the twelve-string guitar. His vocals had begun sounding more like McGuinn’s as well.

Alex was inspired by a number of the emerging young singer-songwriters. He learned James Taylor’s “Fire and Rain,” which had just hit the charts, as well as “Motel Blues” by Loudon Wainwright III, whose debut had just been released by Atlantic. Day after day he worked at his own confessional songwriting. His feelings about the draft surfaced in the lyrics of a number that would later be titled “The Ballad of El Goodo.” Thinking about his lost youth resulted in “Thirteen,” in which his fingerpicking played the wistful melody.

A few of Alex’s acquaintances from Memphis made the trek to New York, either with their bands or with demo tapes to try to get a deal. Terry Manning stopped by to see him and was appalled by his tiny tenement apartment. Richard Rosebrough came through with his group Alamo, featuring Larry Raspberry (of the Gentrys) and recently signed to Atlantic. And in December, Christopher Bell paid a call. He’d traveled to New York with a three-song demo tape and his band Icewater, which also included Andy Hummel and Steve Rhea. The boys had all been good friends of Vera’s in high school, but Alex hadn’t seen much of Chris since they’d played together with Bill Cunningham for two weeks in the Jynx.

All these years later Chris and Alex pulled out their guitars and clicked. Their voices sounded so good together that Alex suggested Chris move to New York and perform with him in a folk duo. But Chris preferred bands like the Beatles and Led Zeppelin and had big dreams for songs he’d been cutting at Ardent with various aggregations of players. Chris and Steve took their tape to Elektra, which turned down Icewater as sounding like “Beatle wannabes,” according to Steve.

Though Chris left Manhattan without a record deal, he took home a promise from Alex that when he returned to Memphis, he would check out his band. A seed was planted for bigger things to come.

Alex kept his promise to Chris Bell when he traveled to Memphis in February of 1971 to deal with his impending divorce and other business. Though he didn’t realize it at the time, the most life-changing event of this visit would be checking out an Icewater gig at the VFW Hall in downtown Memphis, featuring Chris, Andy Hummel, and Jody Stephens.

Since 1965, when Alex had first met Christopher Branford Bell, Chris’s life had been consumed by music. An intense, shy young man, he’d continued to play guitar, studying the work of Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton, and Jimmy Page. Infatuated with the Beatles, he’d started writing songs as well. A self-identified “outsider” during his high school years at the Memphis University School, he’d met fellow rebel Andy Hummel, and the two would sneak off to smoke cigarettes between classes and talk about photography and rock & roll. Chris formed a combo called Christmas Past, which occasionally performed in MUS’s cafeteria, and Andy gigged in a garage band called the Chessmen. The pair hung out with girls from neighboring Miss Hutchison’s, including Alex’s old friend Carole Ruleman (who briefly dated Chris) and Vera Ellis. “Andy and Chris were like
an old married couple who just picked on each other all the time,” says Vera. “It was hilarious.”

Chris’s father, Vernon Bell, had amassed a fortune as a restaurateur, beginning with a tearoom and expanding into a string of fast-food places called Danver’s; Chris’s mother, Joan, hailed from England. Born in Memphis a month after Alex, in January 1951, Chris told friends he was homesick for the U.K.—though he’d never actually been there. The Bell family, which included six children, built a luxurious mansion in tony Germantown. The family turned the large property’s original frame house into a hangout for the music-crazed Chris and
friends like Andy, born two weeks after him, the son of John Hummel, a gynecologist, and Barbara Jo Walker, Miss America of 1947. Fellow MUS student Steve Rhea brought along his former neighbor Terry Manning to jams at the Bell backhouse, which had both a rehearsal area and a converted darkroom for photography projects.

“
Steve and me and Chris and a few other guys would hang out there and practice,” says Terry. “We could play as loud as we wanted to without disturbing anyone. . . . Chris was
very
interested in the fact that my ‘real band’ had been recording at Ardent, and . . . he knew that I was working at Ardent and Stax, engineering recordings by professional artists. He would always ask me to take him over there, show him the equipment. He would bring me songs he was writing for input on how he was doing. So when I wanted some guitar playing on my recordings [which became Manning’s LP
Home Sweet Home
], it was natural to have Chris come in to play. He was thrilled, and very excited to be in ‘the real big-time studio.’” Consequently Chris and Steve formed a loose-knit combo called Icewater and started working up songs they hoped to eventually record with Terry’s help.

At Ardent Chris immediately clicked with John Fry, and he soon introduced Richard Rosebrough to the scene. “
He was real excited when he made contact with the Ardent circle,” Richard says. “It was just a matter of days before I went over to National . . . and once I got my foot in the door, I kept coming back. I’d always wanted to be a studio drummer.” Chris’s days at Ardent were cut short in the fall of ’69, when he and Andy entered the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. But after finishing freshman year, the two withdrew from UT, moved back in with their parents, and enrolled at Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College), where they signed up for photography and filmmaking classes. That summer, when not rehearsing with various combos and cowriting songs with drummer and vocalist Steve Rhea, Chris spent hours at Ardent.

John Fry, taking note of these prospective engineers, decided to teach them production skills. Richard Rosebrough recalls, “
I started hanging out so much, John Fry finally said, ‘Well, if you’re going to hang out, we’re going to have to put you to work,’ and he gathered about six of us and started a recording school and taught us all how to engineer. In this recording class, which John held at eight o’clock in the morning, there was me and Chris Bell, Steve Rhea, and others. We met six or eight times, and John gave us his view of what went on in the studio. It was the best class anyone could have taken on recording engineering.”

Enthralled, Chris took the series of classes twice, and John entrusted him
with a studio key. Chris and Steve came in to Ardent after hours to record Icewater originals, including the Beatles-esque “All I See Is You” (written by Rhea) and the pseudo-psychedelic “Feeling High,” which also included Terry Manning. When Steve moved to Dallas to attend college, his drum seat in Icewater was filled by eighteen-year-old Jody Stephens. Born in October 1952, Jody had met Andy as a kid, first through a mutual pal at their church and again when his brother Jimmy played in the Chessmen with Andy. The two had reconnected when Andy spotted Jody on drums in a production of
Hair
at Memphis State. “Andy struck up a conversation,” Jody recalls, “and told me they were looking for a drummer, and why didn’t I come over and jam a bit at Chris Bell’s backhouse.” Jody, Andy, and Chris began playing the occasional Icewater gig as well.

Chris’s next recording venture at Ardent included a vocalist named Tom Eubanks, another former member of the Chessmen who occasionally jammed at the Bell backhouse. For their collaborative outfit Eubanks and Bell chose the moniker Rock City, the name of a kitschy tourist attraction atop Lookout Mountain outside Chattanooga. With Jody on drums and bassist Randy Copeland, the sessions began in late ’70 and were sonically inspired by such U.K. artists as Badfinger, Led Zeppelin, and T. Rex, with an occasional nod to progressive rock, particularly on a track called “Sunday Organ,” featuring Terry on synthesizer and keyboards. Tom brought in seven originals, and he and Chris cowrote two songs, but the collaboration suffered due to their very different lifestyles: Tom, whose father owned a lumber company, was a husband and father holding down a day job, while Chris had the luxury of spending most of his nights in the studio, with no other responsibilities beyond the occasional gig—such as the Icewater concert at the VFW Hall.

Alex showed up that night and dug Icewater’s sound, a mix of originals and Led Zeppelin, James Gang, and Terry Reid covers. A few days later he bumped into Chris at Ardent. Alex had his twelve-string guitar with him, and when he played a new song, the bucolic fingerpicked “Watch the Sunrise,” Chris recorded it. Impressed with the results, he invited Alex for a beer. Since their December meeting in New York, Chris and Alex had each checked out the other’s work and liked what he heard. They now put their heads together: Would Alex consider moving back to Memphis and starting a new group with Chris, Andy, and Jody? One that would include all-original songs, collaborations between Alex and Chris? They could be like Lennon and McCartney, with production whiz John Fry playing the role of George Martin. Though he’d sworn off playing
in bands, Alex found Chris’s invitation intriguing, thinking it could be worth a try. He’d admired Chris’s guitar playing as far back as the Jynx days.

The first test was writing a song together, and Chris and Alex reconvened at the Chilton home a few days later. As the two hung out in his bedroom, guitars in hand, Alex helped Chris finish a couple of songs he’d started for his Rock City recordings. “I remember he . . . had this
song that later became ‘Feel,’” Alex recalled. “He had the A section—he had the music all planned out, but he only had the lyric
‘Woman what have you been doin’ / the love that you’ve been stealin’ is giving me a feeling,’
and that’s all he had. And then he had this other music bit in there, and he started playing that, and I just chimed in with the line
‘Feel like I’m dying, I don’t want to live again’
and then came up with
‘You just ain’t been tryin’, it’s getting very near the end.’
 . . . That’s pretty much the way it went. I’d turn up with something I had, and he would make a change or two or give me a line or two or three.”

The pair also finished Chris’s moody “Try Again,” then drove over to Ardent to cut it, with Chris later recording “Feel” and adding both to Rock City’s would-be album,
See Seven States.
“Basically the format of [Chris’s] groups and the format of those [Rock City] recordings was sort of like what [the new band] became in some ways,” said Alex. “So we just picked it up from there, and I just kind of tried to fit in.”

The timing turned out to be perfect. When Alex flew back to New York, Gordon Alexander contacted him to say he was returning from San Francisco and needed his apartment. Alex moved upstairs with Keith Sykes for a while before packing up and heading back to Memphis. The two still enjoyed playing guitar together, and with his confidence boosted, Alex suggested doing some gigs before his departure. “
We played a few things in little clubs,” Keith remembers. Alex had written a song called “Vera Lynn,” which he recorded on Keith’s Teac machine, and Keith showed him a bluesy riff using a D chord inspired by a Blind Willie McTell song, resulting in another new song, as yet untitled.

Chris, who stayed in touch, let Alex know that Rock City was a bust. Tom Eubanks had shopped
See Seven States
to no avail, and the pair discontinued their collaboration. In the meantime John Fry had made a deal with Stax Records. “[Label president] Al Bell said that Stax wanted a rock band and asked if we would be interested in activating the Ardent Records label,” John recalls of the deal with Stax, with whom he already had a three-year association. “He would let us sign whatever artists we wanted and do all of the creative. They
would do the marketing, promotion, and distribution.” Chris’s new band with Alex, Andy, and Jody would be Ardent’s first signing.

“
About the summer of ’71, I came back to Memphis, and we started getting together and playing and running down some of the tunes we would record,” Alex said. “I had met Andy a time or two, and I’d never met Jody before. We just got together and started playing, and I had ‘Thirteen’ and a couple more [songs], and we learned those, and Chris had a few, and we learned those. I’d always been a fan of Chris’s stuff. But basically what I did was join Chris’s band.”

“
Alex and I respected each other,” said Chris, “and although we didn’t aim for a [specific] sound, we did have some plans for an image and what kind of music we liked. We both had different tastes in music, but we respected each other’s tastes.” “
It was pretty close [to what I wanted to do],” Alex agreed. “It was a democratic group, kind of a compromise. Chris was really into British pop music. I was always a big fan of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, all the mid-sixties stuff. So getting together with him, the concept of the group was to make music like mid-sixties music, and so the songs we were writing and the music we were trying to play . . . that’s what we were sort of aspiring to. Our band loved the Beatles, and the Byrds sort of fell into our category of things we really dug, and that’s what we wanted to sound like.”

The band frequently gathered at the Chiltons’ and set up in the former art gallery downstairs, which, in addition to the Chickering piano, had room for their equipment: Jody’s blue pearl Ludwig drum kit, the Fender Twin and Super Reverb amplifiers, a black Kustom bass amp; Chris’s red Gibson 330 and Fender Strat; Alex’s Les Paul, Strat, and acoustic guitars; and Andy’s Fender Precision bass. Once the songs began to gel, the still-unnamed group gathered at a makeshift rehearsal/demo studio John had set up in a frame building adjacent to Ardent. Over the next four months “
we’d just show up at practice and learn the songs,” says Jody. “It was always a joy to work them up. . . . The songs were so inspiring.”

“Chris and Alex
were a good match,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “hanging out, drinking beers and smoking joints together and trading off ideas in the studio. They complemented one another. And being in the confines of Ardent made it all work, because it was a permissive environment.”

“
Chris was a very driven, creative guy,” Andy Hummel said, “even when I knew him in high school. He had a very clear vision in his head of what music ought to sound like. Alex was bursting with tunes and ideas, too. Ardent’s relaxed atmosphere was really conducive to creating music. Nobody was trying to
turn you into something you didn’t want to be, which was very encouraging to Alex. He was really upbeat then.”

Alex and Chris’s songwriting collaboration continued at Ardent as it had at the earlier writing sessions. “
Chris would show up with something that he’d almost finished, and I would just start chiming out whatever was in my head,” said Alex. “If he liked something of what I was chiming, then we’d throw that in to finish the thing off. Basically it was the same with me. I’d show up with a tune pretty much finished, and he might make a change or two. He was a very determined worker, and so was I.”

By early fall they were ready to record. Alex had joined Vera at Memphis State, where he took philosophy (his favorite) and English, but most of his time revolved around the new band. He and Andy were eager to learn more about engineering as well. Andy took the class from John, who remembers Alex as a quick study who wasn’t a student but just absorbed engineering by observing what was going on around him—similar to how he had watched his father at the piano and learned from him. “Alex had a lot of curiosity, and he became quite adept at being able to get things up and running in the studio,” according to John.

“I didn’t know much about recording then, but I knew enough about music theory from my dad,” Alex said. “I think
my knowledge of music theory was superior to anyone else’s in the band. I was probably the only guy in the band who knew what a diminished chord was. Put me in a recording studio, and I can fool around and make fairly innovative music.”

“
I went by the studio one night when the whole band had finally formed,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “and they were doing a full-tilt band tracking session. They were like little kids out in the studio. Joints were passing behind the sound walls, and John Fry was in the control room engineering. They really had a pretty unique sound.”