A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (42 page)

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In New Orleans he’d become friendly with one of his childhood idols. The Kinks’ Ray Davies had been living off and on in the city, and they’d originally met in 2000. After Davies was shot in the leg during a robbery attempt, Alex helped out while he recuperated, lending him a guitar as well as the cottage on Esplanade where Alex had lived. During one visit, Alex gave Davies a Big Star album and asked him to write an album’s worth of songs for Alex to record. Though Davies said he’d consider it, nothing came of the idea. “
He was very polite,” says Davies. “We didn’t talk about music very much, just talked in general terms. He said he’d recorded a Kinks song, but he didn’t mention which one. I told him next time you’re in England, look me up.”

Just after
In Space
’s release, Alex’s life turned upside down when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. He gave his beat-up Volvo station wagon (which had replaced the Isuzu, destroyed by vandals) to Peggy O’Neill and her husband, Dan Rose, who lived down the street from Alex. They fled to
Memphis, but Alex wanted to sit it out, unwilling to leave his precious home. The floodwaters never reached the inside of his house, but after five days of living under terrifying conditions, he decided to get out. He flagged down a helicopter, which first took him to the Superdome. He managed to catch a van to the airport and flew to Houston. His old friend Pat Rainer, who’d been his travel agent for years, helped with his arrangements. When Alex had gone missing in the aftermath of Katrina, people from all over the country had been sick with worry. A network of concerned friends had tried to locate him, the efforts led by his former girlfriend Lisa McGaughran, with whom he’d stayed in touch.

After a brief visit in Memphis, during which he spent time with his sister, Cecelia, Alex rented a room in a house in McComb, Mississippi, his mother’s hometown, only two hours from New Orleans. There he got his first cell phone. Alex returned to New Orleans as soon as officials allowed it, hiking around the stricken city to survey the damage.

•   •   •

As Alex had said when he left Memphis for New Orleans in 1982, what he wanted most in life was to find happiness. That became more important to him than music, success, or anything else, and he finally found it two years after Katrina. He’d built a community of friends in New Orleans, most of whom played music. In 1998 he’d produced a young garage band called the Royal Pendletons and frequently hung out with its members. Following Katrina, Pendletons guitarist Matty Uhlman split with his wife, Laura Kersting, a classical flutist and librarian born in New York, on March 24, 1970. She had relocated to Philadelphia, and there she and Alex fell in love. She returned to New Orleans with Alex soon after. Friends who bumped into the couple said Alex looked “giddy” with happiness. He’d given up smoking pot and had started painting watercolors. On a trip to visit his uncle Jack Chilton in Coronado, California, in August 2009, Alex and Laura married.

They had just returned from a trip to London, where, after a well-regarded Big Star show, Alex had called Ray Davies. Ray invited him over to the Kinks’ legendary Konk Studio. There Alex recorded two of his favorite songs, accompanied by his longtime idol. “
It was very impromptu,” says Ray. “Very casual. I just loved to hear him talk about his days on the road. I played guitar, and he sang ‘’Till the End of the Day’ and ‘Set Me Free.’ It was just the two of us in the studio—it was a really great experience with him.”

It would turn out to be Alex’s last vocal recording. Four months after performing with Big Star at Masonic Hall in Brooklyn and the Box Tops at a casino
in Niagara Falls, in November 2009, Alex began experiencing shortness of breath and chills. On March 17, 2010, he phoned Laura in distress, and she raced home from work to rush him to the hospital. Collapsed on the seat, Alex uttered his last words, “Run the red light!” before slipping—forever—into unconsciousness. He was fifty-nine.

Ten years before, he’d said, “
Being fifty is a very different thing. I find myself being very alone in the world, and it’s something I never even considered. All of a sudden, I just realized, ‘Wow, I am sitting here, and who do I really call a friend?’ I can’t think of anybody. Is there a girl in the world that is in my future?” The answer was yes. Alex Chilton died a satisfied man. With his wife, Laura, he’d found his heart’s desire—something he’d chased throughout a life filled with music.

For decades, Alex had confounded fans and critics with his frequent dismissals of what they considered his most brilliant work—the songs he wrote and recorded in the ’70s with Big Star. Distancing himself from that tortured past, he told Bruce Eaton in 2007, “
Big Star was one thing. I was something else.” Yet, near the end of his life, Alex accepted that period of his career, along with his stint in the Box Tops, with equanimity. A few years before his death, while spending time with Ray Davies in New Orleans, Alex told the songwriter, whose band had first inspired him as a teen: “
Playing songs is ageless—the songs never seem to get old. You can sing a song that you wrote twenty or thirty years ago and it’s like the first time you played it. It makes you feel young. . . .”

Alex’s happiness showed at his final Big Star and Box Tops performances; after each concert, he socialized with friends, and in upstate New York, following the casino performance, he even joined a Buffalo bar band at the Sportsmen’s Tavern for an off-the-cuff “Alligator Man.”

Alex’s last public appearance, on January 24, 2010, was at a Doctors Without Borders benefit in New Orleans, backed by a makeshift rhythm section. Fittingly, Alex refused to rehearse beforehand, teaching songs to his backup band onstage—calling out chords for early rock & roll and R&B numbers, some of which he’d first played in Paul Jobe’s backhouse with the Moondogs in 1965.

Many times and in many ways, Alex had tried to destroy his musical past. But he was a tireless journeyman, and to his surprise, he found a path where he could embrace it all and carry it with him, peacefully, until the end.

The first time I met Alex Chilton, I threw up in his sink. Since he was tight with Lux Interior, who vomited regularly from onstage, I think Alex didn’t mind too much. I hoped that he was too occupied with his paramour in the other room at the time to notice. My friend Melinda and I had been the recipients of Alex’s kindness that summer night in New Orleans in 1982: first, when we happened to bump into him—just off work and clad in a standard-issue dishwasher shirt. On the streets of the French Quarter, he recognized Melinda from four years earlier, when she and her then-boyfriend had lived in Memphis. Her musician beau, a Big Star fan, had been drawn to the city due to Alex’s work there. Then they each moved separately to New York, and that’s where I got to know Melinda.

We were now driving around the country, à la Kerouac and Cassady, and because we’d been listening to Big Star and
Like Flies on Sherbert
on the Honda Civic’s tape player, meeting Alex seemed like an extraordinary event. After the requisite exchange of birth date info, we apparently passed muster, because he enthusiastically showed us the bars of the Quarter, where he made cocktail recommendations, though he wasn’t drinking a drop. I remember lots of cigarettes, and maybe a joint, some good stories about the history of certain watering holes, and also Alex’s anticipation about his then-crush Annabelle’s getting off work. When she joined us, they kindly accompanied us back to our car, which was parked along Canal Street, a very long walk. That trip turned out to be in vain: Our car had been towed. By then, it was 2 or 3 a.m., we’d spent all our money (there were no ubiquitous ATMs yet), and our belongings and extra cash were at Melinda’s brother’s house in Slidell. So, gentleman that he was, Alex Chilton welcomed us to crash on his couch—which we sheepishly did.

The next morning we slipped out to find a pay phone, as Alex didn’t have a telephone. In our haste to meet Melinda’s sister-in-law and get some cash to retrieve our car, we didn’t get a chance—or maybe we were simply too embarrassed—to say goodbye.

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Fast-forward two-plus years. I had by then joined an all-girl band called Clambake, named for an Elvis movie, with an indie-label deal to cut an EP. Alex had started gigging again, and since I’d once met him and he had produced the aforementioned Lux Interior’s band, the Cramps, as well as his own work, we wanted him as our producer. After the Chilton trio’s performance at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, my first time seeing Alex live (and digging it), I clomped down the rickety steps to the “dressing room” located next to kegs and cases of beer. When I began to introduce myself, Alex said, “I remember, October 10th . . . ,” citing my birthday. Without hearing a sample of our music, he agreed to be our producer for $500 and a lamb-chop dinner. We made plans for a recording date in April 1985.

I don’t remember a whole lot about our sessions, which took place at Murray Hill Studio, in Manhattan’s east thirties. I mainly recall the Chaka Khan gold records hanging on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me that Alex had once had his own framed gold records. As a kid, I’d bought a Box Tops 45, though not one of the million-sellers—instead, “Sweet Cream Ladies.” I can’t remember if I ever mentioned that to Alex, though I imagine he would have laughed—or held his nose.

•   •   •

As a producer, Alex was, as most groups he worked with have recalled, laissez-faire; he didn’t make too many suggestions. It was my first time in the studio (I played rhythm guitar on a Fender Mustang), and I had no idea what to expect. Later, in another band, when I worked with a more hands-on producer, I realized just how great it was having Alex there—he seemed genuinely enthused about our music, even though he was laid-back about it. He didn’t make us feel like amateurs who didn’t know what we were doing. Instead, his mellow “vibe” helped us feel relaxed and comfortable enough to sing and play fairly well, without having the jitters screw up our natural approach. His main contribution was mixing the four songs we cut. Sadly our record never came out; we went on tour, playing the same circuit as the Chilton trio, had a fight, and broke up.

Before that happened, though, Clambake performed with Alex’s trio at Folk City’s Big Combo series; avant-folkie R. Stevie Moore was also on the “three
bands for three bucks” bill. Later Moore quipped about that night, “I heard him remark to the packed audience something to the effect of ‘What the hell was that first guy?’ He knew bad music when he heard it.”(In Alex’s book, it was, often enough, the badder, the better.) At load-in that evening, I realized I had forgotten my fuzz pedal, but Alex let me borrow his ’73 Buick LeSabre with the missing driver’s-side window to pick it up from our rehearsal space. He could be a generous guy.

That year, 1985, marked the beginning of a sporadic friendship between us. When I got serious as a music writer, Alex generously accepted my request in 1992 to interview him for
Option—
my
first music profile in a national magazine. When we talked for the article, I’d just cowritten my first book, and Alex was interested in that—a volume on the creative process based on interviews with seventy-five musicians. I’d also assisted Ben Fong-Torres on his biography of Gram Parsons and had had no idea that Alex had been a GP fan since the ’60s. I gave him both books, and to my surprise, he contacted me later that year. Would I be interested in writing a book with him about his life on the road in the ’60s with the Box Tops? Before I could say “Yes!” he told me, “I’ve already got a title for it—
I Slept with Charlie Manson.
” That caught my attention, and I hoped it would also intrigue my literary agent and a publisher. Alas, the book never happened: In June, Alex’s brother Howard died suddenly, and the following year Alex began playing with Big Star again. I visited Alex in New Orleans, but he’d gotten too busy with other things to spend the kind of time necessary to write a book.

We never discussed the project again, though we did stay in touch. In March 1998 Alex graciously invited my husband, Robert, and me, along with our two-month-old son, Jack, into his beloved cottage in Tremé. We were giddy new parents, and he was proud to show off his own “baby.” Before we left, he gave Jack a strand of Zulu beads.

By 2004, the last time I had a lengthy conversation with Alex, I’d seen his trio numerous times, as well as the reconfigured Big Star and reunited Box Tops. One of the most special shows was the night the lights went out at the Knitting Factory in February ’97, when Alex played for about eighty of us gathered around him in the darkness—a kind of campfire singalong in Lower Manhattan. As I write, the performance has just been released as
Electricity by Candlelight
, and listening to it again, sixteen years later, is an emotional experience. Alex’s generosity and joy in playing an impromptu selection of songs he loved illustrates perfectly who he was as a musician—and music fan. When I hear my
younger self hollering out “Waltz Across Texas” (an unheeded request), I think of all those other times I watched Alex perform my favorite songs—and even better yet, those I’d never heard before—as well as chats that led to my discovery of a cool book or record.

Alex, we never got to write that book together, but I hope this one will do. There may be some tales here you’d have preferred were left untold, but I did my best to tell your story, convey the brilliance of your artistry, and describe the complexities of your life and times. Your singular voice, the songs you wrote, the guitar lines you played, the life you lived, enriched us all.

As you once aspired to be, you truly became “a self-made man.”