A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (26 page)

The first part of the equation could prove tricky. “
Alex would do things and not worry about whether they were really clear to the audience if they had a meaning to him,” according to Chris. “And he was doing this kind of Elvis thing in [Chuck Berry’s] ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’ but I think Rockwell thought maybe he had
forgotten the words—but he didn’t forget the words; it was supposed to be funny. We were doing generally more romantic songs, and this was still a time when he realized that he and Lesa were not going to be together, and it was pretty rough.”

“
Love . . . makes people grow through their relationships—or sink,” Alex said on the topic. “You can always catch people through sex if you can’t get them any other way.” Even as he made new conquests in New York, Alex would pour his heart out about Lesa to Chris. “
I remember him telling me, ‘Chris, there is no such thing as love,’” Stamey says.

Alex later had fond memories of the Ocean Club show and Rockwell’s critique, which resulted in his staying in New York for much of 1977, the year punk broke. “
The first night the place was packed,” Alex recalled, “people just hanging on the rafters to see the gig, ’cause these people had heard the Big Star records and there was already a bit of a cult being generated about them. The first night was great, the second night was kind of okay, but I don’t think the audience was getting quite what they wanted. They were expecting the Big Star thing, and instead they were getting wild and crazy drunk Alex.”

Ball and Ork had already booked another prime gig: opening for Talking Heads at CBGB March 3–5, two sets each night. Alex didn’t need much encouragement, as he told Bernard Kugel, publisher of a short-lived Big Star fanzine. “
It’s real easy to run through New York, skim it, get all the glimpses you want. Everybody loves me here; it’s incredible. In Memphis everybody thinks I’m a jerk. Come up here, get respect, girls wanna sleep with me.” He’d only brought with him a few changes of clothing, including a Big Star T, his Stratocaster, a few copies of
Radio City
, and a fan letter from Yugoslavia. And it took him a while to reacclimate to urban living. “I don’t think [New York is] a pleasant place,” he complained. “It’s loud, there aren’t any trees or grass, and the people are crass.”

The CB’s shows went well, although most in the jammed room were fans of the Talking Heads. Alex’s trio added more Big Star songs to the sets, even trying a quiet ballad from
#1 Record
, “Watch the Sunrise.” The song did not go over well with the crowd, but they responded when Alex started playing the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run,” to his bandmates’ surprise. “
The CBGB scene was not overawed,” Chris recalls, “but Alex soon found his way and was accepted, once his natural bohemian, rebellious instincts came to the fore in our shows.” He added more aggressive, rocking songs to the set, including Big Star songs drawn from all three LPs, as well as a punky version of “The Letter,” and the response improved.

Charles Ball had brought along photographer David Godlis to document the
gigs. A New Yorker who’d returned to town following photography school in Boston, Godlis knew Alex Chilton’s name from the Box Tops but wasn’t aware of Big Star. When the two struck up a conversation, Godlis was thrilled to discover that Alex was friendly with William Eggleston. Though Eggleston’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art the previous year had been panned by the critics, it had broken ground as MoMA’s first color-photography show. Godlis, like many other young photographers, was thrilled by Eggleston’s point of view and his daring technique and subject matter.

“[
Alex] was really friendly,” Godlis recalls, “and we hit it off pretty quick, and I figured out Alex knew a lot about photography. I used a very slow shutter speed—either you hit or miss it. I think that’s what fascinated Alex. I was shooting without a flash and shooting in a way that made it difficult to get pictures. And he egged me on in that direction. I was attempting to take pictures with available light, either indoors or outdoors—like people lit up by streetlamps outdoors, or indoors by the light from a cigarette machine.” Together, the pair would collaborate on some of Alex’s favorite portraits.

CBGB soon became Alex’s second home, with Godlis usually present. “
He liked being part of this whole community,” Chris recalls. “I could drink free at CBGB’s,” Alex said. “
The Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads were all coming out of that scene and were already too big to get close to or be friends with. But Richard Hell was omnipresent, [Television guitarist] Richard Lloyd was all over the place. The Dead Boys lived right across the street; I enjoyed their company. The night Devo played audition night at CBGB’s was a hoot; they blew everybody away and sounded better than they’ve ever sounded since.”

Alex sometimes went home with lovely blond singer Deer France, who worked the door and occasionally the soundboard at CB’s (and would later perform with John Cale). “
His main concern was the girls at CB’s,” said Charles. “They really liked him.” Hilly Kristal booked Alex for his first run of CB’s headlining dates in mid-March. Things were looking up. Terry Ork agreed to rent an apartment for Alex at Thirty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. Karin Berg took Alex and Chris out to dinner and offered to fund a demo-recording session, which she hoped would lead to a deal with Elektra. Once settled into his sparsely furnished pad, Alex wrote an optimistic pop-rocker, “Shakin’ the World (from 34th and Lex).”

Alex soon met Stephanie Chernikowski, a Texas-born photographer whose Bowery loft was near CBGB. She was assigned to shoot Alex’s portrait to accompany Christgau’s “Voice Choice” of his March 17–19 CB’s gigs (“Keep this
genu-wine rock-and-roll genius in New York,” Christgau wrote in the March 14
Village
Voice
). A petite woman who’d gone to college with Janis Joplin, Stephanie bonded with Alex, who gave her a copy of
Radio City
and told her about his broken romance with Lesa. “
He was so sweet,” Chernikowski recalls, “and he really liked girls, so we hit it off. He turned me on to a lot of bands he liked.” They walked around Alex’s new neighborhood, filled with cheap Indian restaurants, and she photographed him sitting in a diner and hanging out on the street. The pair became close friends.

The CBGB headlining shows went well, with opening acts that also drew a crowd. One night it was the New Jersey–based combo the Feelies, whom Ork had begun managing, and Alex particularly liked Saturday’s opener, the Dead Boys, a punk band from Cleveland who flaunted Nazi imagery and had just signed with Sire. In Alex’s mind it was on weekend nights, when “bridge-and-tunnel tourists” came to CBGB rather than New York hipsters, that there were fewer expectations and more appreciation for his “suburban-apartment rock,” as he told Bernie Kugel, using a phrase he credited to his Memphis pal Ross Johnson. “
The new outfit plays bright, bouncy and clever rock music,” wrote Mitchell Cohen in a review of the shows in
Phonograph Record
. He applauded the trio’s approach to the Big Star material, which

sounded even tighter and snappier than their recorded versions, and the newer songs showed the intelligence, humor and economy that have always been found in Chilton’s compositions. . . . Alex Chilton, a veteran of the rock wars, has returned with a presentation and material attuned to today’s pop-hungry audience. . . . With proper exposure, he should capitalize on the mid-’60s pop renaissance that’s burgeoning in local scenes around America. It’s only fair that he assume a starring role: After all, if it wasn’t for pop enthusiasts like Chilton in the first place, there’d be no such music worth reviving.

Soon the phrase “power pop” would enter the rock & roll lexicon (though it had originally been coined by Pete Townshend in the ’60s), with Big Star being hailed as its leading proponent. In Memphis, New York, and the Midwest, particularly, bands were forming to emulate the Big Star sound, while their albums became a sort of “Holy Grail,” as R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck would later call them. Big Star tunes and more polished pop songs proliferated when Alex’s group returned to the Ocean Club on April 19.

Earlier in the month, Alex had gone into the studio to produce a Chris Stamey single for Ork: a pair of the North Carolinian’s songs, “The Summer Sun” and “Where the Fun Is.” Chris treasured his first recording experience with Alex, at the Trod Nossel studio, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where Ork had a deal for cheap studio time, at $5 an hour. “‘
Summer Sun’ got some attention, but the B-side was the one,” says Chris of the
3rd
-inspired track. “Alex was looking to have both structured and random events, like opening up the record to magic, or letting God walk in the room when you’re making a record. It was a very interesting approach.” Alex played drums and supplied backing vocals, percussion, and some guitar parts.

Amping up the retro-rock aspect of Alex’s sound was a Farfisa organ added to the group, thanks to a Trenton, New Jersey–based Big Star and Beach Boys fan named Fran Kowalski. A friend had contacted Alex on the fledgling keyboardist/vocalist’s behalf and set up a meeting between the two. “
I went to Alex’s apartment, and I was ready to knock on the door and I thought, ‘If anything should happen where somehow we play together, from the second you knock on this guy’s door, he’s no longer your hero,’” Fran remembers. “We had a great time, a good conversation. We sat around and listened to records, a British release of
Beatles ’65
, Julie London, Robin Gibb.

“I asked Alex, ‘As far as music goes, what kind of category do you think you should be in?’” he recalls. “And Alex just looked at me and laughed and said, ‘Classical.’ Before the visit was over, he asked me if I would be interested in playing in his band, and a little while later he gave me a call. I came up to Manhattan and I went to the rehearsal studio, and I guess I did pretty well. On my way out, I said, ‘I’m sure you’ve got more people you want to hear,’ and he said, ‘No, no, that’s it, I’m all done—you’re it!’”

The expanded combo got a couple of brief rehearsals in before their first gig as a quartet at CBGB on a Thursday night. The band “worked up a song to celebrate me joining the band,” says Fran. “It was Alex’s idea. I had an electric piano that I brought with me, but the primary instrument he wanted was a little Farfisa organ, and I played that more than anything else. We worked up a version of ‘Chopsticks’ with the Farfisa, and it was a manic, almost ‘Helter Skelter’–ish version. It was interesting because it didn’t flow; it was four and a half measures per phrase, which was very odd. It was a neat thing to do.”

For the Ocean Club encore, the band had played an off-the-cuff version of Jonathan Richman’s “Government Center,” which became part of the CB’s set list. So did former Zombie Colin Blumstone’s “
I Don’t Believe in Miracles,” which,
Chris says, “had to do with the way Alex was feeling about Lesa. A lot of times his choice of material would speak to something that was going on in his life. It was an amazing ballad, and Alex could stun everybody by hitting those high notes.”

The CBGB show was a bit unhinged; the players were thrown off by incorporating the keyboards into the sound. “
I never liked the four-piece as much as I did the trio,” says music writer Parke Puterbaugh, a huge Big Star fan who rarely missed a Chilton gig that year. “Alex had so much talent on the guitar, and I thought the trio format really served him well, with a very muscular, full-bodied set. When he was on with that group, they were awesome. The keyboards sounded kind of cheesy to me, with a roller-rink sound to it. Alex had a way of undercutting himself, like not wanting things to be too perfect and so deliberately messing them up. At the first gig with Fran Kowalski, he veered badly off course and lost his way on a song or didn’t know it that well and hit some horrible chord—and Alex looked delighted. It just made him happy.”

One night at a Max’s gig, Fran noticed a sixty-something balding man in the audience. Sidney Chilton was in New York on business, and Alex was not glad to see him. When Fran struck up a conversation with him, Sid began criticizing Alex’s performance that night. “
He said that Alex didn’t adhere to classic song structure, or something like that,” Fran recalls. “He seemed like a very distinguished guy, but it was kind of a harsh generational criticism from somebody who played a lot of beautiful music. . . . [Alex and I] had a long conversation one night, and [he] talked about his inability to get along with his dad, who he thought gave him a hard time and made it difficult for him, growing up, to adjust to the male role. He asked me about my relationship with my father, and he said, ‘My mom taught me to always speak good of the dead—my dad is dead, good.’”

The band was now booked three to six times a month, usually at CB’s and Max’s and an occasional out-of-town show at the few clubs catering to punk: Boston’s Rat and Philadelphia’s Hot Club. With ticket prices around $4 and the band earning a percentage of the door, each member usually took home $15 to $25. “
There were some nights when there was nothing,” Fran recalls. “One in particular—very low attendance, hardly anybody showed up, and Alex said, ‘We’re going to do this in a Communist way, because Fran paid for a trip into New York, so he’s getting all the money.’” Evenings like that would be offset by shows that really clicked. Fran remembers one Saturday at CB’s, with Alex wearing his Ocean Club gig promo T, when the band was called back for four encores. Alex phoned the keyboardist the next day, jubilant, saying, “We just
had such a great show, I wanted to call you and thank you! After last night, we have arrived!” For the most part Alex remained pleased with the band. “
Sometimes we have a difference of opinion about musical stuff with our drummer,” Alex said. “But still, he’s better than most anyone else around.” Alex and Chris frequently recorded the sets so they could listen later and pick which four songs sounded best for their upcoming demo sessions.

While Alex had come to depend on Karin Berg’s expense-account dinners at Phebe’s on the Bowery, her constant presence at gigs could be unnerving when he was drunk or the band had an off night. But overall, Karin seemed smitten with him. Meanwhile, Terry Ork had run out of cash to pay for Alex’s apartment, even though Alex had a roommate to help with the $500 rent. Finally Alex could no longer pay his half.