A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (37 page)

To help promote the New Rose disc, the trio flew to Europe in early October for a brisk six-cities-in-six-days tour to Paris, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Munich, and London. During his first-ever visit to Paris, Alex bonded with Patrick Mathé, who offered him another deal on his Fan Club imprint, to issue Alex’s early solo recordings on a two-disc set called
Lost Decade
. One would comprise Alex’s favorite productions of that era, including tracks he produced for Grady Whitebread and Danny Jones’s combo Toe Jam. Alex filled the other disc with his punk-era tunes, “Bangkok,” “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” “The Walking Dead,” and “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It.” The flip side featured unreleased tracks from the 1969–70 Ardent recordings with Terry Manning, “Free Again” (for which he recut the vocals) and three bluesy tracks, “I Can Dig It,” “Just to See You,” and “Come On Honey,” the last of which he’d add to the trio’s set list.

In Paris the band played a smoking set at the punky Rex Club, which Mathé recorded, later releasing a high-spirited version of “September Gurls” and a cover of Lou Christie’s “I’m Gonna Make You Mine.” In Rotterdam the band’s show was broadcast on the radio, and Alex told an interviewer that he’d been on a songwriting “hot streak. I played two new songs tonight which I wrote last week, ‘Mercy Upon You’ . . . and ‘No Sex,’ which is the rockingest thing that I’ve written for a long time.” The latter was a topical statement on the AIDS crisis, a sort of black humor pop-rocker.

The press lined up to interview Alex in London, where the trio arrived after a grueling twenty-two-hour trip from Munich. Journalist Martin Aston asked Alex if he missed drinking. “‘No! It only makes things harder. I just don’t like the way it makes me feel anymore, I guess. I’m still going, I’ve got a lot to learn and a lot of things I wanna do from here.’” Aston’s rave review of
Feudalist Tarts
in
Melody Maker
concluded with kudos for the disc’s last cut: “The real surprise is the closing ‘Paradise.’ It’s the happiest Chilton’s ever sounded, a celebration of life that’s probably a tad ironic, but the melody is purest summer and the ’50s guitar and Chilton’s coy vocal is pure joy. It’s two minutes and 23 seconds and it’s perfect.” (Three years later, Alex would disparage “Paradise.”)

On October 16 the band did a show at London’s Mean Fiddler, which Simon Witter critiqued for
NME
: “Chilton’s relationship with his Telecaster . . . made tonight one of ’85’s musical delights. Chilton made his guitar speak a language
I’ve heard nowhere else. Not dexterously revamped Southern state musical clichés, but an awesomely fluid fusion of rock’s heritage. Chilton comes from so many angles, and makes it look so easy, that you can’t help laughing. His fingers fly about, precisely bending stray notes, tremeloing chords and dancing rings around the given rhythms. Joyous genius.”

Following the gig Alex gave a comprehensive interview to Epic Soundtracks, a drummer, singer, songwriter, and pianist who, at fifteen, started the punk band Swell Maps with his brother Nikki Sudden. A longtime and very knowledgeable Big Star fan, Epic spoke to Alex at length for U.K. fanzine
What a Nice Way to Turn Seventeen
, covering his childhood, the Box Tops, Big Star, and his musical endeavors since. Epic observed, “Seeing you play, you seem to really love to be onstage, singing for people.” Alex agreed, saying, “Well, it sure beats workin’! That’s what we’re doin’—travelin’ around and playin’ and makin’ records. I just hope one catches on and sells pretty well, and we make some money, and then retire!” Alex basically spelled out the next twenty-five years of his life—though he didn’t realize his one that “sells pretty well” would be recorded by others.

Back in the States, Big Time applied marketing muscle, hoping to build on the momentum spurred by the good press. The label began pushing the record to college and alternative radio stations, as well as a spot on
The Cutting Edge
, a Sunday-night program on the still-new MTV, hosted by Peter Zaremba, lead singer of longtime New York City band the Fleshtones.

Filmed on location in New Orleans, in his neighborhood and at a cemetery, Alex looked thin but healthy, sporting Ray-Bans and very short hair, as he laconically spoke into the camera:

I used to live upriver in Memphis, and Memphis . . . hasn’t got a lot of the things that New Orleans has. I feel . . . freer here. . . . There’s . . . great music here in New Orleans and . . . great musicians, and I’ve learned . . . from a lot of the jazz players that I’ve met here, and learned . . . about the history of rock and roll music. There’s a lot of music here that I’ve never heard before.

The four-minute segment featured Alex strolling and playing acoustic guitar, borrowed from his friend Melinda Pendleton, since he didn’t own one.

The Cutting Edge
, sponsored by I.R.S. Records (the Fleshtones’ label), primarily featured U.S. indie bands—many of whom had been inspired by Big Star to
start playing music. In fact,
3rd
had just been reissued by PVC and retitled
Sister Lovers
. Big Star remained a frequent topic during the increasing number of interviews Alex gave in support of
Feudalist Tarts
. “It’s hard for me to figure out what that album’s supposed to be,” he told a journalist for
Option
magazine. “I was still groping for a style, trying to find the thing I really wanted to do. I was kind of a lost young adult. . . . I was into heavy melodrama at the time.”

Melodrama resurfaced in Alex’s life when he reconnected with Annabelle Lenderink. She and George Reinecke had returned from England to New Orleans, where they split up for good. By Alex’s thirty-fifth birthday, he had reunited with Annabelle. It was a highly charged relationship, though, filled with dramatic fights, breakups, and reconciliations. Annabelle had moved into a small place with a courtyard in the French Quarter, which she artistically transformed into a charming abode. Alex spent much of his time there. But with the new year came an arduous touring schedule, though Annabelle occasionally joined him on the road. He also returned to Ardent in February 1986 to cut an EP, this time with three original songs: the catchy but dark “No Sex” (
“junky blood is gonna get ya . . . fuck me and die”
), the autobiographical, sardonic blues “Underclass” (which name checks his ’73 Buick), and “Wild Kingdom,” a jazzy paean to nature. In addition to the core trio, Alex again hired Jim Spake on both tenor and baritone sax, with Rene contributing horn arrangements. Out of his $3,000 advance, Alex paid $2,600 for the studio and musicians, pocketing only $400.

For the cover Annabelle (using the pen name Anna Lee Van Cleef) photographed Alex, rakishly handsome and scowling, leaning on a car. The twelve-inch EP came out soon after, receiving fewer notices than the mini-LP but for the most part positive reviews—again chosen by the
Village Voice
’s Pazz & Jop poll as best single of the year. In the
Los Angeles Times
Kristine McKenna said, “In modest increments cult-pop legend Alex Chilton is edging his way back into the music business. After years of silence, this is his second release in less than 12 months, and a strange one it is—but then, Chilton’s raging eccentricity always has been one of his central charms. . . . Great songs, Alex, so when you gonna do a full-length album?”

If he’d answered, he would have said, “When the record company pays for it.” His next recording was a single track, cut at the Nightshade studio in New Orleans, where he played all the instruments and sang a favorite Troggs number, “A Girl Like You,” for a promotional release in Europe. This time he had a $500 budget, and after studio costs, he netted $130.

As booking fees increased somewhat from the previous year, touring provided Alex’s primary income in 1986. (He would gross about $25,000 performing with the trio in America.) Beginning on February 12, they played seventy one-nighters, logging more than 27,000 miles around the country. Gigs paid anywhere from $200 to $1,500, with most shows in the $400–$500 range. No matter how small the income, he paid Doug a minimum of $100 per performance, with Alex and Rene splitting the remainder. His performance earnings had increased to the point where the trio could sometimes afford motels rather than crashing at friends’. On the road Alex tried to eat as healthily as he could, seeking out health-food stores where he could buy carrot juice and the like. “Alex smoked like crazy,” Rene recalls, “but he was always taking vitamins and worried about what he was eating.”

On those lengthy drives from state to state, a sort of protocol was established, according to Rene. “There would be
long periods of silence and then a few minutes of scintillating conversation,” he recalls. “Everybody would be talking about something, and then silence again.” Rene saved the day when he replaced the speaker of the broken car radio so that they could tune in to tiny local stations—a favorite pastime of Alex’s—as they drove through various regions of the country. (Alex loved listening to the car radio, and Memphis painter Lamas Sorrento recalls the time his vehicle was next to Alex’s at a light, where he heard Alex singing along with the radio through the open window.)

“Man, that car was something else,” says Rene. “I remember playing gigs, and other bands would be in their tour bus, and we’d pull up in that thing. My amp and the guitars and the trap case for the drums and a couple of the drums would fit in the trunk. For a long time Alex’s guitar didn’t have a case, and he would stick it in the trunk loose. We’d have the bass drum and Alex’s amp in half of the backseat, next to the passenger. We’d take it all inside wherever we spent the night, because we didn’t have a lock on the trunk—the lock had been popped out.”

Alex almost always avoided doing sound checks, and if the soundman was unqualified, he might get cursed out in front of a packed house. At other times Alex politely requested “more reverb on the vocals.” Fans would yell for Big Star songs, and occasionally Alex would accept—or even ask for—requests. He favored songs from the new recordings but almost always played a few from his past. He taught Doug and Rene a handful of Big Star songs, including “September Gurls,” “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” and “In the Street,” but urged them not to listen to the original recordings to duplicate what they heard.

Alex knew people all over the country, who would show up backstage. Frequently someone gushing or acting pretentious, or even an old friend who’d fallen out of favor, would get the Alex “treatment.” His mood was capricious. “That’s an aspect of Alex that’s
the not fun part,” says Rene. “It could be hilarious to be on the inside with Alex when he would dress somebody down or he’d abuse somebody who he perceived as invading his little trip, or was worthy of his contempt. We’d travel around and I’d meet all these people who used to be on the inside and weren’t any longer, and I’d see the way he dealt with them—but what I didn’t realize was that one day it would be me.”

During nonstop touring in 1986, Alex made two discoveries: that he could make quick cash as the Box Tops vocalist on an oldies package tour, and that traipsing through Europe could be grueling. The easy money—$5,000—came from five U.S. dates, singing five Box Tops hits, backed by a pickup band. “Anytime I can make more money than Ronald Reagan, just by playing five songs a day, I will!” he quipped.

The two-month tour in Europe was organized by an English booking agency that assigned Alex a road manager from Newcastle. The trio traveled through “every country that wasn’t behind the Iron Curtain,” says Rene. Near the end of the tour, the road manager lost his briefcase holding all the band’s earnings and passports. Then he fled, leaving the band stranded without equipment or a van. The trio managed to get replacement passports and finish the last week in Holland by traveling on trains and renting equipment. After sixty days abroad, they returned home with hardly any money.

The worst fallout from the tour was a breach in Alex and Rene’s four-year friendship. “We had been
playing forever, and we were on the road for a month and a half in the U.S. and then went straight, without a break, to Europe,” says Rene. “On the tour Alex and I had had it out a couple of times. He was just kind of sick of me, I guess. He was capable of a fair amount of paranoia, or just having been burned in the past, he thinks it’s happening again. He was a sensitive person who didn’t like being hurt, and he felt like he’d been hurt a lot, and he wasn’t interested in exposing himself to that again. If he thought you were going to do that, it would really bother him. The more he would think about it, the more it would bother him. Because once you’re on the inside, it’s just a matter of time before you’re on the outside. [A mutual friend] would say that Alex was a guy who was so good at finding the cool thing about you—and drinking it in. Then he’d want to get to know everything about you until he identified the one thing that was wrong with you, and then he would focus on that—and that
would become the total representation of you. So that he could then cut you off. I think it’s a certain kind of defense mechanism, that if he felt people were getting too close, then he would shut them out.”

Gigging with the trio continued, but by then it had become clear that a wedge had grown between Alex and Rene. “The last American tour we did after that,” says Rene, “we were in Boston, and it was just so strange being around each other. At one point he said, ‘I’m watching you,’ and I said, ‘I know you are; believe me, I can see it. I’m not sure what you’re watching for, but I can see you watching me.’ It was never a musical thing. It was an interpersonal thing. Then I was going to play a jazz gig with Doug and was staying at his house in Memphis, and he said, ‘Rene, I’ve got to tell you, we played an Alex gig last week with Ron [Easley] playing bass, and I don’t feel right you not knowing about this.’ I was like, ‘
What
?’ My heart sank. He said, ‘Yeah, maybe you should call up Alex and see what’s going on.’ So I did and said, ‘Should I expect to hear from you about any more dates?’ And he said, ‘I wouldn’t count on that.’”

By mid-October Alex was using other Memphis-based bassists, including Ron Easley and John McClure. One night he checked out Ron’s band, Durand Mysterion, and noticed a talented young female guitarist performing in the combo. Native Memphian Lisa McGaughran, twenty-six, had crossed paths with Alex since 1984, when she reported on the Panther Burns/Clash gigs for a
Memphis Flyer
cover story. Alex had also noted the Vanderbilt grad’s eclectic radio show on Memphis’s free-form WEVL. He telephoned her, and the two hit it off when he visited her apartment; she watched nervously as he thumbed through her extensive record collection, waiting for criticism that didn’t come. For the past two years Lisa had played bass and sung with Panther Burns, and Alex was impressed that her musicality had started at an early age: She had begun studying piano as a child, including ragtime, and learned acoustic guitar as a teen. Lisa also played in an all-gal band, the Hellcats, alongside Lorette Velvette, who performed in Panther Burns and was Tav’s girlfriend. Before long Lisa was singing “If I Could Only Win Your Love” with Alex’s encouragement at his mother’s home, where they spent Thanksgiving together. “
He turned thirty-six a couple of months after I began hanging out with him,” says Lisa. “He was busy starting a period of intensive recording and mixing. Panther Burns recorded
The World We Knew
in December, and Alex did this moody sort of atmospheric production. I sang backing vocals.”