A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (4 page)

By 1960 close friends of the Chiltons from Mississippi intervened with a plan for lifting the family out of the deadening depression that had settled over them in Sherwood Forest. It involved leaving the suburbs behind for a mixed neighborhood in Midtown Memphis, from which many whites had fled over the past few years. “
I was off to college, and the next thing I know, they’re buying this two-story house downtown,” recalls Cecelia. “All of a sudden it’s not the Bridge Club or the Garden Club; it’s artists and musicians. Everybody’s life changed.”

Music and art filled the Chiltons’ elegant new home in Midtown Memphis, where the family moved in 1960. “It was a big old house, almost like a castle,” Alex remembered, “that we bought for a song.”

The 4,400-square-foot limestone manse had been built around 1907 by the wealthy Schorr family, Germans who cofounded Memphis’s Tennessee Brewery in 1885. By 1960, 145 North Montgomery Street was considered part of “the inner city,” according to Alex. “That was a
pretty wild neighborhood, with a lot of slum kids hangin’ around,” he remembered, “a real breeding ground for a lot of things.” Montgomery was close to commercial strips chockablock with businesses and bars. The Chiltons’ house was on a short, leafy block with a large synagogue across the street, which sometimes sponsored teenage sock hops. Next door sat a stately mansion, owned for generations by a prominent Memphis family. On the other side, the large home had been divided into offices, including, for a time, a suicide-prevention crisis center. “
We joked about how comforting it was to have it so handy,” Cecelia remembered with a laugh.

From the beginning the plan was for Mary Evelyn to open an art gallery in the spacious home’s downstairs rooms. Ceramicists Pup and Lee McCarty, about ten years younger than the Chiltons, were making a name for themselves in tiny Merigold, Mississippi, as arty potters who dug clay from the backyard of William Faulkner’s Oxford home, Rowan Oak, and molded it into designs inspired by the Mississippi River Delta landscape. Lee had first met the Chiltons when he boarded with Mary Evelyn’s mother in his youth. Now, along with another friend from Mississippi, the McCartys and Chiltons pooled their resources to turn the parlor floor of the house into a gallery exhibiting the couple’s pottery and ceramics, along with contemporary art and other regional artisans’ work.

They covered the walls and stained-glass windows with pegboard for hanging the art, painted everything white, including the ceiling crossbeams and oak woodwork, and replaced the vintage ceiling fixtures with contemporary lighting. Just behind the kitchen the Chiltons turned their backyard into a concrete courtyard and strategically placed McCarty ceramics throughout. The McCartys traveled to Mexico annually and brought home artwork and handcrafted objects to exhibit and sell at the gallery.

Mary Chilton Galleries got its first press coverage in November 1962: “Dozens of men and women were coming out . . . carrying large paintings, pottery, statues, and other art objects,” the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
reported about a joint exhibition: a one-man show by a maker of mobiles and stabiles from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and “Own-Your-Own-Art,” featuring a hodgepodge of affordable pieces. The article reported such unbelievable bargains as a Picasso woodcut for $18.50 and an original Cézanne etching for $26, along with jewelry designed by Elsa Freund of Eureka Springs, Arkansas ($6.50), and ceramic pots made by Memphian Dodie Mann ($5).

While Mary Evelyn concentrated on her art gallery, Sidney returned to his old love—jazz. “Around 1961
Daddy started playing music again,” Cecelia remembers. Its location, in Midtown Memphis, made the Chilton home an easy stopover for jazz musicians going to and from a gig. “
When I was ten, it was party time around my parents’ house,” Alex said. “I remember countless nights of going to sleep with, like, sixteen jazz musicians playing downstairs.” Some days, as Alex returned home from school and walked up the wide stone front steps, he could hear jazz wafting out. Sidney “and some friends would be jamming,” Alex remembered. “My dad played piano and he had an electric guitar player, bass, fiddle, and a drummer.” Alex told
Times-Picayune
reporter Keith Spera, “Five o’clock came, and two or three musicians were over at the house drinking heavily and playing and listening to records. That was every day.”

Each summer, with the family in tow, the Chiltons would travel to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for gatherings Sidney organized to socialize with other musicians and their families. “It was probably only a couple of years or so after Reid died when Sidney started having these
summer get-togethers for musician friends from Jackson and Ole Miss,” Adele Brown Tyler recalls.

The Browns adored the Chiltons but worried about Mary Evelyn and Sidney’s consumption of alcohol. Over the years the Browns had become more conventional: Army, a member of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, would found
the city orchestra; Iris gave up her job to be a full-time homemaker. At the Chiltons’ evening gatherings, Mary Evelyn would welcome her guests holding a bourbon and OJ in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Though Sidney had heart disease, he continued to sip bourbon and smoke heavily throughout the festivities. (It wasn’t until around the time that he had triple-bypass surgery in the ’70s that he quit smoking and drinking.) In 1997 Alex, during an onstage interview at Jazzfest in New Orleans, referred to his late parents as alcoholics and remembered their salons as including “a lot of crazy people all the time. I knew they were crazy. They didn’t know they were crazy.”

The Browns had also expressed concern about the scant parental supervision on the Chiltons’ part as early as their time in the suburbs, but now, it seemed, Alex’s parents left him to fend for himself entirely, imposing no restrictions or demands of any kind on him. “I got the feeling that
he kind of raised himself,” Adele says, “and I did, too, to some degree, because I was also a much later child. Our parents had both started ten years earlier having kids, and we were at the tail end, and maybe they’d run out of energy or something.”

Free of homework or any household chores, Alex listened to music. The Chiltons’ hi-fi sat next to a stack of vinyl that kept growing; just as he had absorbed his brother Reid’s Coasters 45, Alex devoured Sidney’s jazz discs, as he later described:

I became a fan of his Glenn Miller records first, and then I went on to Ray Charles and Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck. . . . I was listening to a lot of records from his collection. He’d be listening to something and be fascinated with some element of a piece of music, and he would talk to me about it and describe the way it was put together. He shared what he liked with me. I might not have really understood it very well, but a lot of it stuck with me. . . . I became a big fan of Chet Baker, and that was when I first really wanted to sing. He first inspired me to sing when I was about 7.

Sidney occasionally mentored Alex in jazz piano. “
He’d come home from work and play something and talk to me about theory and chord structures,” Alex remembered, “and when I did start playing more earnestly, I remembered a lot of things he said, and I could piece together diminished scales. It was brilliant left-hand stuff. He showed me a couple of simple, good jazzy bluesy accompaniments to generally use.”

Sidney’s impromptu soirees drew other music and art lovers to the Chilton home. Among them was a well-heeled pair of newlyweds—Memphis’s answer to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. William Eggleston, born into a wealthy Mississippi family in 1939 (the year Reid Chilton was born), had been raised on a cotton plantation, attended the Webb boarding school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and became enamored with the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eggleston would later revolutionize fine-art photography with his saturated-color images and “democratization” of subject matter, including his shot of a bloodred ceiling that would grace a future Big Star LP cover. Bill and his wife, Rosa, also a child of “old money,” were drifting from place to place when they first met the Chiltons.

“
We didn’t have a place to stay, and the Chiltons kind of adopted us,” recalls Rosa. “We were thinking about driving back to Mississippi, and Mary said, ‘Oh, spend the night here!’ We had this rapport going on. They did not seem like parents. The age gap was nonexistent.” Rosa remembers Mary Evelyn as “not really a very talkative person. She was a good listener and a very sweet person.” On afternoons in the Chiltons’ small kitchen, Mary Evelyn taught Rosa how to whip up homemade mayonnaise and to make espresso using an Italian coffee pot.

Sidney and Mary Evelyn “were some of my closest friends,” Bill Eggleston told Robert Gordon for his musical portrait of the Bluff City,
It Came from Memphis
. “They were two of the most important people in Memphis from that time, the Kennedy era. Mary held what you might call a salon, and things happened in the house. . . . I don’t know who else would have fostered what they did.” The young couple stayed with the Chiltons a few nights, then rented an apartment nearby, close to Overton Park. Eventually the Chiltons offered part of the backyard carriage house (or, in Memphis parlance, “backhouse”), originally the servants’ quarters, to Bill Eggleston to use as a darkroom.

When the Egglestons dropped by the Chiltons’, the classically trained Bill performed his favorite Baroque pieces on the Chickering. Howard, who played tuba in the Messick High orchestra, became friendly with the Egglestons, and occasionally Howard and Bill played music together. Bill showed young Alex a few things, too. “
Eggleston was a fixture around our house for a few years,” Alex later said. “He played Baroque keyboards and gave me a taste for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, as did Howard.”

Years later Cecelia Chilton told Rosa that Bill reminded her parents of Reid, though Sidney and Mary Evelyn never mentioned their deceased son to the Egglestons. No photographs of him adorned the house, either. By moving to
Midtown, the Chiltons had hoped to put more than just distance between the tragedy of Reid’s death and their lives. Though Reid wasn’t discussed at home, over the years Alex would bring up his older brother’s death to friends, one of whom remembered, “
When he told me that, he had a look on his face I had never seen before or since.”

Along with the Egglestons and McCartys, Mary Evelyn’s Aunt Em occasionally stayed with the Chiltons for months at a time. So did Mary Evelyn’s old friend Peter Lindamood, who rented an apartment above the carriage house. With an oversized head and fey mannerisms, “
he was real eccentric and delightful,” said Cecelia, recalling special family dinners where “Peter would help decorate the table and take pinking shears and make place mats out of construction paper and put ribbons around.” Alex’s good friend Calvin Turley remembered him as having “peach hair” and holding court at the kitchen table: “
He would just pontificate about various things, but specifically he would try to get Alex and anybody else who was around, such as myself, to learn a new vocabulary word every day.” Adele Brown Tyler found Lindamood a character, with seemingly nowhere to go but the Chiltons’: “
By the time he showed up in Memphis and lived out in their garage apartment, he seemed pretty down and out.”

In addition to becoming a haven for jazz and modern art, the Chilton home was a repository of progressive social and political thought. “A lot of the hipper people of their generation were around all the time,” according to Alex. “
There was lots of music in the house and jazz musicians coming over—black and white. The color line was and is fairly strong [in Memphis], and my parents’ social world was pretty much white people—but it was not uncommon for black people to be in the house.” In a city where the
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling of 1954 was largely ignored or circumvented by school boards and local officials, Sidney Chilton supported James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, his alma mater, in 1962. “In terms of social issues,
my father was the most unbigoted person that you could find,” according to Cecelia. As in Mississippi, Memphis still had segregated drinking fountains and public bathrooms, as well as schools.

Alex’s childhood pal Dale Tuttle, now a prominent Memphis attorney, recalls, “
Sidney was rooting for the Army and the tanks to desegregate [the University of Mississippi]. They were liberal people back then, when there were many, many conservatives. . . . The Chiltons were definitely among the vanguard of the progressives.” Alex recalled that his father “really seemed to admire Franklin Roosevelt and was a staunch Democrat”; Sidney later became active in the Memphis chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

All four Chilton kids attended Memphis public schools, and in 1961, when Alex was in fourth grade, thirteen black children were permitted for the first time to attend the all-white elementary schools, as a sort of compromise in lieu of large-scale desegregation. Even this tiny ripple of it was enough to cause some white families to pull their children from the schools. Only one black student of the original thirteen would attend Bellevue Junior High, where Alex matriculated in 1964. Most had returned to black schools after being bullied and ostracized by their white classmates. Alex’s ninth-grade class at Central High included just two African Americans.

Bill Eggleston fondly recalled that the Chilton parties, held in the evening as well as on Sunday afternoons, were filled with Memphis’ minority of social and political liberals, including doctors, lawyers, and musicians, as “
a gathering of mutual friends, quite smart people.” Pup and Lee McCarty frequently attended, and Rosa Eggleston sensed that the two couples were very close: “
Lee was a fun person to be around, very much an upbeat person, with a good sense of humor and a good observer of people. Pup was extremely lively. If she walked into a room at a party, she would stand out. She was very attractive—she caught your eye.”

When the Browns visited from Jackson, it was clear their old friends had moved far left of center, both politically and socially. “
Alex’s mother, compared to other people’s moms, had a dramatic, bohemian, artistic flair about her. She wore dramatic kinds of clothing,” recalls Adele Brown Tyler. As for Alex, “He was definitely one of those boys—the kind I had crushes on—who were a little nerdy, kind of intellectual looking, skinny, lanky, artistic. As I remember him, he was already just like he always stayed the rest of his life.”

Dale Tuttle, whose own family was conservative and well-to-do, was a frequent visitor to the Chilton home and loved the freedom that came with being there: “
They were laid-back parents, free spirits, and they let Alex do what he wanted.” Years later, Alex put it this way: “Neither one of them pressured me to do
anything.
They were
permissive, and the liberality of their state of mind fed into it.”