A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (25 page)

Back in Memphis, Alex reunited with Lesa. Despite her dalliance with Bernard and Alex’s own flings, the two couldn’t stay apart for long. “
It was love/hate, love/hate, fight, make up, fight,” Pat Rainer recalls. “It was just youth and hormones and artistic mayhem and madness.” “
When it was the two of us alone, things were good,” Lesa says, “but when we went out, that’s when everything went wrong.”

Lesa and Alex’s happiest times together were when they played music. Alex continued to encourage her to sing and write songs. That spring they formed a trio with Karen Chatham. Their repertoire was inspired by a Carter Family record that Danny Graflund had played for Alex, who became A.P. to Lesa and Beth’s Maybelle and Sara. They worked up a batch of old-timey country-folk songs from the 1920s and ’30s, along with a diverse batch of contemporary covers. The girls’ breathy vocals could sound enchanting or drift off key; it was just the kind of musical amateurism Alex was looking for. At a concert at Southwestern at Memphis, he introduced their trio as Gangrene and the Scurvy Girls. Backed by Alex on twelve-string guitar, each gal got a solo turn; Lesa sang a sweet version of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” The group harmonized on the Carters’ “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” “Fresh Wound” by the Bonzo Dog Band, Lou Reed’s “Crazy Feeling,” a yodeled “Annie Oakley,” and after several false starts, looking for the right key, the Louvins’ “If I Could Only Win Your Love.” The group fizzled following another argument and subsequent split between Lesa and Alex.

In late May, just a few days after Lesa’s twenty-first birthday, her father, Bill Aldridge, died suddenly of an aneurysm at age forty-six. The tragedy sent the family into a tailspin, and Elizabeth Aldridge left Memphis to visit relatives in Europe. Lesa moved to New York to stay with a cousin in the Village and got a job as a cashier at Max’s Kansas City. Alex moved in with twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Tommy Hoehn, who offered him a place to stay, rent-free, and
the two occasionally worked on songs together when they weren’t partying. “
Alex was as down as you can get,” Tommy remembered, “and we lived together in a bit of a haze.”

“
I was very frustrated about a lot of things,” Alex said. “I was into a cycle: I was frustrated, so I would drink more. Drinking made my situation worse, of course, which would frustrate me even more. The music business is a funny place to be, as you can start out with certain intentions and quickly get bogged down in quicksand, and I’ve seen my share. But there were a number of reasons why I was drinking. I’d grown up where both parents drank a lot, so my role models were very alcoholic. I also had troubles in my career and in love, and all those things combined to send me off on a journey into escapism.”

Bootlegged tapes of
3rd
were beginning to circulate in Memphis and elsewhere, and fans of Big Star were either baffled or enthralled by it. Andy Hummel, who got a test pressing, was among the latter: “
I thought it was one of the great LP’s of all time,” Andy later recalled. “Alex was very self-destructive but absolutely brilliant . . . He had an innate musical genius that, combined with this compulsion to be different and new, resulted in some truly great music. If you add to that the totally insane, intense emotional relationship he and Lesa were having at the time—well, intense emotion is always conducive to producing art.”

Alex saw the record as just one more failure, and by that summer he’d gradually sunk into utter despair. “
I remember walking into my den, and Alex was sitting on the floor crying,” Tommy Hoehn recalled. “I said, ‘What’s wrong, Alex?’ And he said, ‘It’s the lowest I’ve ever been in my life.’ And it was. Most people thought
Sister Lovers
[
3rd
] was garbage; they thought it was crap. He was a drunk and a drug addict and he couldn’t get arrested in the city.” Alex had continued to pop Nembutals, Seconals, Tuinals, Quaaludes, whatever was available.

One night, after attending a Doug Sahm concert with friends, Alex went barhopping. Completely wasted on booze and pills, he got a ride to his parents’ house, where he stumbled upstairs to the bathroom, got in the tub, and—just as he had ten years earlier—took a razor to his wrists. Somehow the Chiltons woke up and rushed into the room, fearing they were losing another son in the bath. Sidney raced Alex to the same hospital where Chris Bell had been taken when he tried to kill himself four years before. After being stitched up, Alex was admitted to the psychiatric ward. A week later, following barbiturate withdrawal,
he decided that he was through with pills. He checked himself out against medical advice and went home to Montgomery Street. There, his mother tried to nurse him back to health.

When Tommy Hoehn stopped by to see him, he joked around, calling Alex “Frankenstein” due to the bandages wrapped around his wrists. Another friend offered to drive him to the Procape one night. Mary Chilton blocked the door: “I want you to know that my son is in a very fragile condition, and I’m holding you personally responsible if anything happens to him.”

It was ultimately Wilhelm Reich who helped lift Alex out of his depression. Alex had always listened to his brother Howard’s counsel when it came to literary, philosophical, and political matters. A PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Indiana, Howard, along with Alex’s philosophy professor at Memphis State, had opened up the psychoanalytic world to him. While recuperating, Alex began reading Reich’s signature 1933 work,
Character Analysis.
“
I began sorting things out,” Alex later said. “
Character Analysis
helped me understand myself and people around me. . . . That book put the whole Freudian psychoanalysis into really succinct terms, and from then on, I kind of knew what I was doing and where I wanted to go. All those psychoanalysts are obsessed with sex, but he had the best theory of sanity.”

“
It’s a great description of early psychoanalytic theory,” Alex told journalist Jonathan Valaria in 2000. “I took a lot of that to heart. In the book, Reich basically described how he would go about treating a patient, and somehow through that I developed a method of looking skeptically at a person, and prodding certain areas about what was mysterious about the person. I’m not into mysteries at all. Although some people you love, you can’t figure them out as well as you want. And so between the character analytic technique and astrology, I managed to deal with most of the mysteries in front of me.”

Cutting out the pills also helped Alex gain clarity. “In 1976
I decided to quit taking drugs and did,” he recalled. “At that point I hadn’t even realized it—because I’d been taking all these drugs—I had a drinking problem, too. I was just drinking to take the edge off the drugs. I was not taking drugs anymore, except for smoking pot, and my life got a little more under control in some ways. But I still drank a lot . . .
and sank further into dipsomania for the rest of . . . ’76.
Just hanging around, no money, staying at my parents’. . . . Going around town, sitting in with bands a lot, getting onstage, fooling around, having fun.”

He frequently performed “My Rival” at the Procape and was filmed by Bill Eggleston while singing it one night. Of the song he later said, “
I was getting to the point of being obsessed with various things like guns and phallic symbols like that. Any kind of power I could feel, I was really trying to feel it as strongly as I could. But ‘My Rival’ is really more of an emotional outburst than a serious statement of anything. I’ve never used a gun—I felt like it for a few years, though.”

Alex seemed to relish the low life. Chilton family friend Vernon Richards, often out on the town with Eggleston, remembered Alex “
at a big art-type function at the Orpheum Theatre, and everybody that came wore either a tux or dressy things, and Alex showed up looking like he had slept next to the Dumpster around the corner. And he was proud of that. He wanted everybody in Memphis to think he was eccentric.”

Lesa had returned from New York, and though Alex reconnected with her, he continued to make conquests of the young women he met at Midtown hangouts. He didn’t consider his buddies’ girlfriends off-limits, and several friendships became fractured as a result. Alex had become an adherent of Reich’s theories on the health benefits (physical and psychological) of orgasm, as espoused in his controversial 1936 book,
The Sexual Revolution
: “I got into [Reich’s]
orgone energy life force stuff,” Alex said. “Not that I aim an orgone gun at clouds to make rain or stick my cock into an orgone box to soak up the life force rays or anything,” he added, referring to Reich’s invention that led to the psychoanalyst’s imprisonment in 1956.

Though Alex wasn’t cutting his own songs, he occasionally participated in others’ projects. Memphis bandleader John Byrd paid him to sing on a couple of recordings, and he provided earnest vocals on the Southern-fried “Friend at a Very Good Time” and high spirits on “Earth Man Blues,” a chugglin’ harmonica-drenched pop-rock tune: “
Hit me, Byrd
,” he chortles during the guitar solo on “Earth Man Blues,” “We gotta head for the door!”—which probably reflected Alex’s motivation: get paid to play, then on your way. The John Byrd Band single would be released the following year on the local Power Play label.

Alex occasionally sat in with people behind the drum kit, which he’d sometimes played during latter-day Big Star sets while Jody sang lead on “Way Out West.” Alex also had collaborated on a new song with former roommate Tommy Hoehn, “She Might Look My Way,” much in the vein of
#1 Record
–era Big Star;
both would cut versions of the song. Alex continued writing, adding a few more numbers to his repertoire, including “Little Fishy,” in which he compares his girlfriend to a fish (referencing a tuna commercial), and “Windows Hotel,” about a Memphis Hyatt love nest. “
I think I realized how to go about writing some lyrics and writing a tune, and actually being able to put down succinctly what I wanted to say, in the most economical terms,” Alex said about his process that year. “I began to realize how to do that, and as soon as I did, then I said to myself, ‘Well, okay, what kind of a song do I want to write?’ I realized I didn’t want to write about things like I’d been writing about, suffering and what have you.”

In late 1976 the sessions with Jon Tiven during the fall of ’75 resurfaced in an out-of-the-blue phone call from New York. “Ork Records called me up and said that Tiven had sold them this master on me,” Alex said, “and they were going to put it out, and would I like to come up and do a gig? I said sure.”

Alex considered the recordings as just “a lot of fucking around and being fucked up and partying,” but he liked the idea of five songs being released on a seven-inch EP. Since 1968 albums had overtaken singles as the primary medium for releasing and listening to rock. But with the emergence of an underground scene in New York City, the seven-inch single was becoming a means for a small group of people who adhered to the DIY way of getting music out, without dealing with a major label. Singles were cheap to manufacture; small, independent record shops stocked them; and new magazines like
Trouser Press
, New York Rocker,
and
Rock Scene
would review them. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe had paid for his pal Patti Smith to release her debut single, “Piss Factory”/“Hey Joe,” before she signed a record deal with Clive Davis’s Arista Records in 1975. A prime player in this emerging scene was Terry Ork, a jocular, bearded man with several aliases, including William Drake, Terry Drake, and Noah Forde.

Ork had been part of the Andy Warhol contingent that hung out at Max’s until he got caught counterfeiting some Warhol silkscreens. (He returned to Max’s but not to Andy’s table.) An expert on the French New Wave, particularly Godard, Ork became co-owner of Cinemabilia, a shop on Thirteenth Street and Fifth Avenue that sold books and movie stills. One of its employees, Richard Hell, a writer and poet, had formed Television with his friend Tom Verlaine while working at the shop. Terry Ork began managing Television and started Ork Records in 1975 to release the group’s debut single, “Little Johnny Jewel.” Ork Records’ second release was by Richard Hell and his new band, the Voidoids, an EP called “Blank Generation,” in 1976.

By then records were beginning to proliferate from the bands kicking off the scene at Hilly Kristal’s CBGB in 1974, beginning with Television. Between Kristal’s dump on the Bowery and Max’s Kansas City, “punk,” in a variety of flavors—played by the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, among others—was getting picked up by major labels.
The Ramones
came out on Sire in the spring of ’76, and Television (minus Hell) signed a deal with Karin Berg at Elektra, which would release its debut LP,
Marquee Moon
, the next year.

Earlier in ’76 Jon Tiven, no longer with Chess, had shopped Alex’s tapes to labels without generating any interest. At a Jonathan Richman concert in New York, though, he had run into Terry Ork’s partner, Charles Ball, a Sarah Lawrence classmate, when Alex’s name came up. Tiven recalls: “
I said I was in Memphis doing this stuff with Alex Chilton, and he said, ‘Does it have anything to do with the punk rock thing? Because I’m doing this punk rock label with Terry Ork.’ I said, ‘He might work with that,’ so I made him up a cassette, and that’s all he needed to hear.” Soon falling under Alex’s spell, Ball, a boyish-looking audiophile and intellectual (a “Mensa mind,” said one friend), became his manager. Just a month younger than Alex, the effete Ball lived with his girlfriend Joanne on St. Mark’s Place, where they carved out room for an office.

Entitled
Singer Not the Song
, the seven-inch Chilton EP became Ork’s third release and Alex’s solo debut, graced with his portrait, shot by Eggleston. Side A (labeled “frontside”) opened with the recut version of “Free Again” and the Stones title track. The “backside” featured the abbreviated, up-tempo “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It,” the poppy “All of the Time,” and a chaotic snippet of “Summertime Blues” clocking in at less than a minute. As a punk-era EP, it worked, with a loose, raw feel, dirty sound, and emotive vocals tattooed with attitude. The songwriting credit on the sleeve for “Free Again” was Chilton/Tiven, which angered Alex. For “Take Me Home” it was a four-way split between Alex, two musicians from the Procape, and Graflund, which made Danny mad; after all, when Dan Penn had heard his line
“Take me home and make me like it,”
he’d offered Danny second writer’s share just for that. Now he got only a quarter. After Graflund complained, Alex rearranged the credit on future releases (as well as eliminating Tiven’s name from the song Alex wrote in 1970).

To promote the record’s release, Alex would head to New York a month after his twenty-sixth birthday. Terry Ork offered a bed in his Chinatown loft on East Broadway and promised to put together his backing band. Coincidentally Chris Stamey, whose North Carolina combo Sneakers had recently issued their own Big Star–influenced EP, had met Ork, who’d
expressed interest in issuing a
second Sneakers record. The twenty-two-year-old Stamey had just moved to New York with his girlfriend, Jamie Sims, and Ork contacted him: Would he put together a rhythm section for Alex’s Manhattan showcase?

Delighted, Chris found drummer Lloyd Fonoroff, who played in a Fairport Convention cover band recommended by
Trouser Press
editors. Stamey then phoned Alex in Memphis. “
He seemed a little reserved and laconic,” Chris recalls. “He told me he’d wanted a girl bassist, and I told him, ‘There’s this woman Tina Weymouth [of Talking Heads], but I’m not sure how quick of a study she’d be.’ Then he asked me when I was born [December 6, 1954] and was glad to learn I’m a Sagittarius. I got the job as bassist over the phone, though he’d never heard me play. I told him I knew a drummer, and he said, ‘Fine.’”

T
he pair’s first meeting was a few weeks later at a party thrown by Terry Ork at his loft, which Richard Hell described in his memoir,
I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
: “At one end of it Terry had partitioned off a sort of living room, with a mattress or two in it and some rickety chairs and a little black and white TV. The other end of the loft was all open space, decorated by lobby cards for Bertolucci’s
The Conformist
, a pair of white jockey shorts hanging from a nail, and a photo-poster of a full-frontal-nude Iggy Pop.”

When Chris arrived, “
I was trying to figure out who he was—who was Alex?” he recalls. “Then I figured out it was the guy who was asleep on the sofa.” Alex and Chris hit it off immediately, and within a week or so, perhaps due to Ork’s propensity for socializing (“
the most gregarious guy I’d ever known,” according to Hell), as well as his taste for heroin and young men (in Hell’s words, “privy to local narcotics supplies” and “a connoisseur of boys”), Alex spent most of his nights at Chris and Jamie’s place uptown, bedding down on a cot. “
He had a drinking problem and was very depressed,” Ork said of Alex. “He would make humorous, sardonic comments about my homosexuality. I had suspicions that he’d had a broken romance.”

Around fellow Southerners Chris and Jamie, though, Alex was charming and friendly. “
He was kind of beguiling and guileless at the same time,” Jamie remembers. “It was very general, but it was almost a coquettish quality. I watched a lot of people get infatuated with Alex. He had that effect on everybody. He really was one of the few truly charismatic people. He just had a very gentle demeanor—it was partly a Southern manners thing and partly a personal thing, where he’d make people feel that he’s not discounting them. He seemed very open.”

Ork had set up Alex’s debut performance with Mickey Ruskin, who’d sold
Max’s and was now operating the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on then-desolate Chambers Street. The bar-restaurant put on occasional gigs by Patti Smith and other former Max’s artists, with David Bowie and Iggy Pop among those in attendance. Prior to Alex’s two-night stand on Monday and Tuesday, February 21 and 22, the trio got together to work up their sets, mainly consisting of Big Star songs, tracks from
The Singer Not the Song
, a couple of new originals, and a few covers. Chris greatly admired
3rd
, considering it as “
opening a door to where modern classical music was,” but he was not a fan of the new EP. “It was shocking how poor the guitar playing was and how crazy it was with all the phasers and everything,” says Chris. “Then I realized that Alex had hurt his hand and Jon [Tiven] played the guitar parts. The guitar playing wasn’t bad, but it was kind of
yuck
. Alex’s guitar voicings on the Big Star records were really different and carefully arranged, almost like a classical guitar piece. When Alex would play these songs, the chords would be voiced very specifically, and there would be little moving parts, so even without the bass and drums, it really worked with the vocal and was a complete composition.”

Ork invited the music press to the Ocean Club for Alex’s solo gig, and a buzz began to develop, thanks to critics like the
Village Voice
’s Robert Christgau, a longtime fan of Alex’s work. On opening night Alex was nervous, and the combination of his Memphis drawl and insider jokes resulted in some of his humorous comments going over the audience’s head. But once the band locked in, they played a tight set for the packed house, with a sober Alex singing well. The second evening, having overcelebrated the opening night’s success, Alex was looser, the set a bit ramshackle but spirited. John Rockwell, the
New York Times’s
chief music critic, reviewed that show, in an article auspiciously entitled
ALEX CHILTON, ROCK LEGEND, BACK
. Though the critic pointed out that the trio’s sound “
was hardly very polished, Mr. Chilton’s voice cracked often, he had difficulty staying in tune and ensemble precision was rather raw,” the review was laudatory: “This was still most exciting rock-and-roll, with Mr. Chilton’s blend of mid-60’s British pop buoyancy and New York punk energy undiminished.” Rockwell recommended that Alex “gets himself organized and moves back here, . . . He could become an instant star on the local underground circuit. All it will take on his part is determination; he’s got the talent already.”