A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (19 page)

Alex’s tirade may have been due to his frustration over what he felt was a subpar radio performance and his concern that the Max’s shows could be disastrous. For a band that hadn’t played live very often, the stretch of gigs at Max’s Kansas City would be a test for Big Star: two sets for each of five nights, from Thursday, March 14, to Monday, March 18. Sharing the bill was the Butts Band, consisting of former Doors guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, along with a British vocalist and musicians. They had a blues-rock sound similar to Rare Earth’s, and had just released their self-titled debut album. Still reeling from Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, followed by two final Doors LPs that
flopped, the self-deprecating Krieger said that the “Butts Band equaled a bunch of losers desperate for a gig.”

Alex was nursing a hangover and missing Lesa. He felt the irony of sharing a bill with Krieger and Densmore; it had been seven years since the Box Tops and the Doors played together in Texas, where he’d met Suzi. As Big Star awaited a sound check in the downstairs restaurant, a writer began pestering Alex for an interview; then in walked a perfect target for his wrath: David Clayton-Thomas, the six-and-a-half-foot-tall lead singer of Blood, Sweat and Tears. “
Alex says, loudly, ‘Oh, there’s that motherfucker David Clayton-Thomas,’ so that he can hear him as he’s walking past us,” John Lightman recalls. “[Clayton-Thomas] turns and looks directly at me. He stops and he’s about to fight, and he thinks that I said it because Alex is sitting near me. I give him the deer-in-the-headlights look and the shrug of the shoulders, so he just kind of holds up the finger and flashes it to the whole table in general and keeps walking.”

By showtime, Alex’s foul mood did not bode well for Big Star’s opening set before a full house. Along with curious Doors fans flocking to Max’s on opening night were those who’d read the rave reviews of Big Star’s albums. Plenty of rock writers showed up as well, just as they had the previous December. “
Big Star had a buzz going immediately,” recalls Binky Philips, lead guitarist of New York band the Planets, who went to Max’s en masse to catch the show. “We got a table directly in front of Alex. The band came on, and it was evident that Alex was having an, uh,
taciturn
night. The music never gelled. Alex remained very ambivalent throughout the show. The other members seemed kind of confused and maybe even a little resentful, like, ‘Alex, this is Max’s, why are you barely phoning it in?’ But the audience seemed not to care. I had never seen a band gain a worshipful cult as quickly.”

Philips left after the show, but the Planets’ African-American vocalist, John Taylor, went backstage to meet Big Star. The gregarious Taylor was wearing a pacifier dangling from a cord around his neck—a quirky adornment he’d devised as an attention-getter and homage to his guitar player’s name (Binky).

Taylor spontaneously invited Big Star to the Planets’ rehearsal space the next day, and, perhaps hoping they could get a bit of practice in, Jody, Alex, and John made their way to the cramped place on Friday afternoon. “Just as we finished tuning up, the B Stars walked into our tiny, crude space,” Philips says. “We played five songs—probably an Eddie Cochran cover and some originals. Jody stood the whole time, kind of rocking back on his heels. Alex crouched down into a sort of upright fetal position in the corner of the room furthest from the
amps and drums. He seemed miserable the whole time, never met my eyes, and looked like he might’ve had a bad, bad headache. The Planets back then were simply violent with our volume. I don’t know how any of us could stand it. We took a break. Alex stood up, smiled weakly, and said a polite little ‘Cool.’ I was stepping out to hit the bathroom down the hall. Suddenly, Jody was by my side, grabbing my right arm. ‘That is what
my
band should sound like!’ he growled, jerking his thumb back into our noise room. He was genuinely, deeply pissed off. I was just nonplussed. No idea what to say. I felt bad for the guy.”

That night Jon Tiven took the train from the Bronx, where he attended Sarah Lawrence College, to see Big Star, and afterward Alex asked him to join them onstage the following night. “Alex said, ‘I really
need a second guitar player. Why don’t you bring your guitar and play?’” Tiven recalls. “So I slept on his floor at the Gramercy Park, took the train back to Sarah Lawrence, grabbed my guitar, and came back the next night and played guitar at Max’s Kansas City. There were all these press people, plus Clive Davis, and Bruce Harris from Epic Records, in the audience. It was intimidating, and this was my stage debut. I came up and did ‘Mod Lang’ and ‘Baby Strange’ with my Gibson Melody Maker.”

The band flew back to Memphis to prepare for their upcoming tour. Alex brought back pacifiers for himself and Lesa as souvenirs, and the two began wearing them on strings around their necks. One night at Trader Dick’s, Lesa was sucking on hers when captured by Bill Eggleston’s video camera. The footage would eventually become part of the photographer’s film
Stranded in Canton
.

The last week in March, Big Star set out for a three-week jaunt through the Northeast, Ohio, and Michigan. Aiding John Dando as crew was Alex’s old friend Paul Jobe. First stop: Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Big Star was opening for U.K. heroes Badfinger. The Beatles’ protégés had just hit the States after a tour of Japan. They hadn’t scored a hit since 1972’s “Baby Blue” and had recently signed a new contract with Warner Bros. (The deal would have disastrous results; the following year, the label falsely accused the group of spending funds held in escrow and in retaliation pulled Badfinger’s LP from stores; in despair, vocalist-guitarist Pete Ham hanged himself.)

The morning after Big Star arrived in Cambridge, John Dando discovered that the band’s Ryder van had vanished from the hotel lot. “
Dando had locked everything up and checked it twice,” says Paul, “but according to the police, that was a very popular van, and so that’s why the thieves went after it. They broke the glass out and hot-wired it, and from what I was told, it was found later somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike and burned out or something.” Inside the
van were Alex’s Stratocaster, Martin acoustic, and twelve-string guitars, amplifiers, and John Lightman’s bass, a rare and valuable model. Alex didn’t express any anger toward the crew, says Paul, “though John was trying to blame us for it, and we told him, ‘Hey, these things happen.’ We could have brought everything from the van into the hotel room, but it was too much. It was crazy.” Dando notified the Cambridge venue, the Performance Center, which scrounged up some instruments for the band, as the MC that night told the packed house. One of those who came to the rescue and lent equipment was Billy Squier, a twenty-three-year-old Boston guitarist sixteen years from his first hit.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday, March 31, Big Star opened the show with “In the Street.” The band was flustered, getting used to the borrowed equipment and trying to keep the instruments in tune, and Alex had a hard time hitting the high notes. At the song’s end he quickly segued to “Baby Strange,” one of five covers in the eleven-song set. As in “Strange,” the lyrics of Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” (about which Alex told the audience, “We don’t know it really well”) alluded to S&M; both fairly obscure tracks, “Strange” was the flip side to the T. Rex hit “Telegram Sam,” and Lou Reed’s song was on the 1969 self-titled Velvet Underground LP. Alex snarled “Mod Lang,” afterward saying, “That’s what I like about ‘Mod Lang,’ you can never tell if you’re in tune or not.” He cut his solo acoustic numbers short, prefacing them in a forlorn drawl, “I lost three guitars last night. I had seven, but I don’t have any of the other four here.” “Motel Blues” was followed by a rushed “Thirteen,” with Alex urging his band back to the stage: “Let’s do some more electric songs.” Following a bedraggled “September Gurls,” Big Star closed their forty-minute segment with a pair of Kinks covers, “Come On Now” and a spirited “’Till the End of the Day.”

The band, depressed about their lackluster show, watched Badfinger’s high-energy performance, and then, fired up, kicked ass on their second set. “
I remember the first set as being really bad,” says Jody, “and the second being one of the best the band ever did as a three-piece.” “
The first set was awful because none of us were comfortable,” John Lightman concurs. “We took a break and we didn’t even want to meet each other’s eyes, because we all knew how bad we just sucked. Then we had another show to do, and everybody just had the attitude of ‘What the hell, we may as well just blow it out, what have we got to lose?’ Unfortunately, only a few people remained in the audience—Dando, Paul, and a couple of others—but by their account, that was the best show Big Star ever did. The first set was like a horrible rehearsal, then the next one was just perfect.”

The following day Alex and Jody, homesick for the Aldridge sisters, flew
back to Memphis, picked up new instruments, saw their paramours, then returned to meet up with the band. Many of the bookings were in university towns, the first at Utica College in central New York. John King had befriended the Utica FM station’s managing director, Tony Yoken, who loved Big Star and played tracks from
Radio City
on WOUR, the area’s major album rock outlet. The station frequently broadcast live concerts from Utica College, and after Yoken and DJ Jim Lapiana saw Big Star at Max’s, courtesy of John King, they booked the band to play a show there to be streamed on WOUR.

Alex, still smarting from the bad set in Cambridge and displeased with the WLIR show in Long Island, threw a fit when he discovered that the college gym, with its bad acoustics, was the site of the live broadcast before an audience of students. “In the dressing room prior to the concert, Alex was being uncooperative,” Yoken told Rob Jovanovic. “He wouldn’t speak to me or the other radio DJs. He’d been drinking quite a bit, and he went totally ballistic. . . . For about 20 minutes, it seemed, he was hollering that he would not go onstage to play. Somehow he calmed down enough to be coaxed out onstage.”

Big Star’s next date was the Yellow Ballroom in Syracuse. The band played well that night, Paul Jobe remembers. “They put a lot into it. Jody is just an excellent drummer, and John really had a great ear for bass. He was a big Jack Bruce fan. Alex sounded really good. When he wasn’t too wasted, he sounded great.” Alex was upbeat, since he’d soon be seeing Lesa, who was flying to Michigan for Big Star’s week of shows at the East Lansing club the Brewery beginning on Tuesday, April 9. “I don’t think Dando or Jody particularly liked it, but it was cool with me,” says Paul. “And Alex loved it, especially since she brought some pot with her.”

The first night at the Brewery, perhaps with a case of the munchies, Alex started snacking onstage in the middle of the set. “
The house hors d’oeuvre was fried mushrooms, and Alex was eating the fried mushrooms onstage while he was trying to play,” says Dando, “and he couldn’t sing because his mouth was so full. . . . That was just the way he was. He really didn’t care much about getting to an audience—he was just playing for himself. He wanted to be very loose onstage—he didn’t want to appear to be a rehearsed, polished sort of act. And Alex loved free food. He’d take advantage of any free food he could find.”

Big Star’s opening night, unfortunately, was sparsely attended. People talked during Alex’s acoustic set, and when the band played their rockers, Lesa was one of the few to hit the dance floor. Having Lesa there helped, John Lightman recalls: “
She was just really cool, creative, intelligent, and fun to be around,
as real and natural a person as you’ll ever find. No pretenses, you could relate to her right away, just a salt of the earth person. Alex was kind of jealous of her and envious of her getting any attention, though. She was usually hyper, but then on that trip she had a bout of depression and told me, ‘Sometimes it’s just too hard to even make yourself eat.’ ‘Good lord,’ I thought, ‘where did this depression come from?’ because the day before she had not been like that.” As Alex’s mood began to darken, so did Lesa’s.

Dave DiMartino, then music director for Michigan State radio station WBRS and rock writer for the college paper (who later became a music writer for
Creem
and other publications), found the Big Star sets awe-inspiring: “
Most of the night’s repertoire was devoted to the more upbeat songs from
Radio City
, and I was fascinated by the covers the band played, which included a batch of Kinks—‘You Really Got Me,’ ‘Sitting in the Midday Sun’—plus T. Rex’s ’Jeepster,’ Lou Reed’s ‘Candy Says’ and ‘Sweet Jane,’ and
Berlin’
s ‘The Bed.’ You have to put yourself back in time to really get the extraordinary oddness of the band covering these songs in that pre-punk era—that Chilton was attracted to these largely nonhits I think in retrospect was quite telling.”

To spread the news, DiMartino wrote a rave review and also set up a radio interview with Alex. “It was horrible,” Dave recalls. “Not that he wasn’t a nice guy. But he genuinely had very little to say. Though I would do my best to offer up open-ended questions, he’d largely respond with one- or two-word responses, like, ‘Yeah, maybe,’ ‘I don’t know,’ ‘It could be,’ ‘Yeah, you may be right.’ Admittedly I wasn’t the world’s greatest interviewer at the time, but I’d done enough—and have done many more since—to realize the man simply wasn’t that interested in talking about himself or his band. Ironically, he, a CBS Records promo guy, and I then drove over to the Brewery and had a much more engaging conversation. I do remember being stunned and extremely impressed that he said one of his favorite albums was
Robin’s Reign
[the 1970 solo debut] by Robin Gibb. Cool dude.”

The same day DiMartino’s rave review ran, the Brewery manager fired the band for not drawing a crowd. Because of the article, “the nervous club owners, expecting a big crowd, hired the band back for two more nights,” Dave recalls. “Not that it made much of a difference.”

Lesa flew home after the East Lansing run; on a day off the band drove to London, Ontario, stopping at Niagara Falls for a little sightseeing. Then they moved on to Cleveland to play the Agora Ballroom, home base of the
Raspberries. Alex had spent much time in Cleveland with the Box Tops, but the Big Star gig was canceled due to lack of ticket sales.