A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (6 page)

Another frequent visitor to the Chilton home was a thirty-year-old portrait painter who’d moved from California to Jackson, Mississippi, after meeting
influential art patrons the McDavids, who then introduced him to the McCartys and the Chiltons. The youthful-looking Bill Buffett quickly became a successful society portraitist in Jackson, primarily painting the daughters and wives of the city’s upper crust. On his first visit to Memphis, Bill headed to the Chiltons’ to discuss exhibiting his paintings in the gallery. Mary Evelyn invited him to stay over—on a chaise longue in Alex’s room, where he spent the next few nights.

“
Alex had a big four-poster bed with posts that looked like cannons,” Bill recalls. “We hit it right off, because we both loved music, black music in particular. He had a great record collection.” Then and on subsequent visits, the two spent hours listening to albums, though Alex would sometimes slip out at night to ramble about the neighborhood. With his increasing cigarette habit, his track-running days were behind him, though he continued to trek for miles around Midtown. “He was a fleet runner, and he’d go all over Memphis on foot,” says Bill. “He had big, strong thighs, like [the figures] on a Greek vase. He was a night person even then. He’d go out and run all the way up Poplar Avenue for miles and visit with somebody and shoot the breeze and kick things around and then come running back home around eleven thirty or midnight and get up and go to school the next day.”

•   •   •

During the summer of ’65 Alex fell for the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and on November 17 he and Paul saw the group at the Mid-South Coliseum, during their second U.S. tour. “
We stayed up all night listening to the new Stones album over and over,” Paul recalls. “I remember Alex also talking about how he thought Brian Wilson was a genius.” Alex soon caught a Beach Boys concert in Memphis; three years later, he’d be touring with them. When Bob Dylan’s first electric hit, “Like a Rolling Stone,” climbed the pop charts that July, the Moondogs added it to their repertoire.

At some point that year, Alex also discovered marijuana, probably turned on by Howard, visiting from college. Though not prevalent in Memphis at the time, pot could be procured over the counter at a handmade-sandal shop a few blocks from Beale Street. Older musicians in town were known to have connections as well. Alex managed to scrounge the occasional joint, and weed would become nearly a lifelong companion. “
Alex was the person who got me into pot,” Paul Jobe relates. “We’d go down to his parents’ basement and smoke.”

Alex continued to make the rounds at teen parties. At one of them he ran into Chris Bell and Bill Cunningham, whose band, the Jynx, was performing. Inspired by the Kinks, the combo covered the band’s material, as well as Beatles
tunes, and a tipsy Alex got up and sang a song with them. Impressed, Bill and Chris invited Alex to their next rehearsal to prepare for cutting a demo. He played with them for a few weeks, but when it came time to record at Roland Janes’s Sonic Studio, Alex didn’t show. Nevertheless, like other garage bands in town, the Jynx made a professional-sounding recording thanks to Janes’s expertise.

The finished product was used as an audition tape for DJ George Klein’s Saturday-afternoon television show,
Talent Party
, where local groups would lip-sync along with their recorded tracks. Klein had made a deal with Janes: Janes would record the teen bands inexpensively and tip Klein off to the most talented. “
He had the kids come by on Saturday morning, and for $12 he would cut one or two sides on them,” says Klein. “What was really cool is that he would sweeten up the recording to make it sound a little bit better than it actually did.”

It seemed every teenager in Memphis wanted to play music, including Carole Ruleman, who’d been studying piano and wanted to switch to guitar. Alex accompanied her to a music store on Union Avenue to buy her first acoustic. Though Alex was still a novice on the instrument, he tried to show her a few things. His efforts led to an argument one day when the two sat on the staircase in Alex’s home. “
He was trying really hard to pick out a song, and he couldn’t play at all,” she remembered. “We were listening to a record playing upstairs, and he said something like ‘This is where the chord change comes,’ and I said, ‘No, that’s a modulation. I know ’cause I’ve taken piano and been in the choir.’ His face got red and he said, ‘You’re wrong! I know this is a change because my father is a professional musician!’”

On February 10, 1966, Alex invited Carole to go with him to see Bob Dylan at Ellis Auditorium. Her sister drove the fifteen-year-olds to the show. At the five-thousand-seat venue, which wasn’t even half full, Dylan performed solo acoustic for the first half and electric with the Hawks during the second. Alex was floored by the performance, which he and Carole saw from the cheap seats high up in the balcony.

As Alex became more rebellious, some of his friends’ parents began putting a stop to his “bad influence” on their kids. By tenth grade Calvin Turley had been sent to the Webb boarding school, Dale Tuttle was enrolled at Christian Brothers High, and Paul Jobe had transferred to the tony Memphis University School (MUS). Carole Ruleman, meanwhile, had started dating MUS student Chris Bell; Alex’s face had broken out with acne, and Carole didn’t want to kiss a boy with pimples. Louise Leffler’s mother made her end her relationship with Alex.
“
Alex and I were amorous for a while,” says Louise. “I was a virgin, and he may have been, too. My mother thought the relationship was getting out of hand. I think she freaked and realized she couldn’t control me. I couldn’t control me, either. But nothing ever happened at that time ’cause she broke it up. At that age he was ready to have a sexual relationship. I think he went to Central High and found whatever he wanted, but I was a late bloomer.” At one point Louise tried to rekindle things with Alex, but he literally pushed her away. “By that time he could be really cruel,” she remembers with sadness. “It was a very bad scene.”

Alex had completely stopped caring about school, and his grades showed it. He began arguing with his father over his poor performance, and one day he decided to run away from home. With a bottle of whiskey and not much else, he caught a bus to Jackson and found his way to Bill Buffett. “
I was renting a tiny, two-room house, and he just showed up,” Bill remembers. “I didn’t drink much, but he had this bottle, and we drank some of it and got pretty lit and went for a walk. We walked through a cemetery and jumped over gravestones and started stripping off our clothes and acting like a couple of fools.” Afterward the two happened upon an empty fire station, where Alex helped himself to ham sandwiches from the kitchen and donned one of the firemen’s hats. Bill had to talk him into leaving it there.

The next day, when she got home from school, Adele Brown discovered a still-drunk Alex sitting on her steps. He tried to talk her into running away with him. “
I kind of had a crush on him, so part of me thought that was great and exciting, though I thought he was getting a little too wild,” Adele remembers. “He ended up hanging around Jackson for a week or so. My mom adored Alex. She always tried to mother him.” Her parents notified the Chiltons that he was there and safe. Bill Buffett recalls Alex returning a couple more times, and on one occasion, after Bill had rented a larger house, some of Buffett’s young female friends stopped by after school. “I remember Alex sitting in the branches of an enormous mimosa tree in the front yard, up there strumming a guitar,” according to Bill. “Of course, they thought he was pretty cute.”

During the fall of ’66, “one of the guys got it in his head that we were gonna play the Central High talent show,” Alex remembered of the Moondogs’ first performance at his own school. Allotted two songs, the Moondogs chose Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” recorded at Stax in 1965, and “Sunny,” a huge hit the summer of ’66 by Nashville-born Bobby Hebb. Paul Jobe’s brother Edward, a junior at Central, had to fill in for Paul on drums, since Paul now went to MUS and Central allowed only current students to participate. Alex had
perfected a soulful vocal style that worked for both numbers. Onstage he projected confidence and sang with bravado and grit.

“We lost out to some girl singing some schmaltzy kinda something,” Alex remembered. But in the audience that night was Jimmy Newman, a musician pal of John Evans and Danny Smythe, members of a popular Memphis combo, the Devilles, who’d just lost their lead singer. The group had put out the word they were looking for a new vocalist, one who sounded black. When Jimmy heard Alex Chilton, he leaned over and said to a friend, “Hey, the Devilles should get this guy!”

“
The first time I ever saw Alex, he was smoking a cigarette and looked like a little punk,” Gary Talley remembers about his fifteen-year-old future bandmate. The nineteen-year-old guitarist had also been in the audience for the Moondogs’ performance at the Central High talent show. When he heard Alex sing, it reminded him of Eric Burdon of the Animals, “definitely a soulful kind of sound,” he recalls. Afterward he spotted Alex puffing on a Camel outside the school.

Like Alex, Gary would in 1966 join the Devilles, one of the hottest garage bands in Memphis. The group had formed in late 1963, but after three years, the only original member was drummer Danny Smythe. Vocalist Ronnie Jordan joined in 1964; an attractive teen with a big voice and a forceful personality, he quickly moved from backup singer to front man. It didn’t hurt that his uncle was Roy McElwain, professionally known as Roy Mack, a popular DJ and later program director at WMPS, who began managing the group. By 1965, as the Devilles’ lineup continued to evolve, the band appeared on such TV shows as Ted Mack’s
Original Amateur Hour
and George Klein’s
Talent Party
. The Devilles signed with booking agent Bill Chapman, who put them on as the opening act for three Yardbirds concerts during the group’s first U.S. tour, in 1965. Alex had seen their September 10 shows, and while impressed by the Yardbirds, he didn’t care for the Devilles.

By the fall of ’66, the group, now calling themselves Ronnie and the Devilles, played constantly around Memphis, as well as in Mississippi and Arkansas, and had cut some records at Chips Moman’s American Recording Studios, home of local garage band the Gentrys’ 1965 smash “Keep On Dancing.” Their first single was an original, “Oh Love,” which Devilles bassist and cowriter Russ Caccamisi describes as “sort of a Herman’s-Hermits-meets-a-Southern-accent.” It was
backed by a version (with lyrics and vocals added) of a 1960s instrumental, “Last Date,” by Nashville session keyboardist Floyd Cramer. Another 45 was a soggy 1959 cover of the Thomas Wayne ballad “Tragedy.” Alex considered both covers “kinda schmaltzy.” Those, plus another original, “Cindy’s Carousel,” came out on Moman’s independent Youngstown label; when Mack added the singles to the WMPS playlist, they became quite popular.

But the group’s behavior at the sessions had not sat well with Moman. “
Ronnie was incredibly arrogant,” according to Russ, “to the bandmates and quite often to the crowd. He was an asshole in the studio. Chips hated working with him.” The last straw came in October 1966, when the group got into a fight at a frat party in Oxford, Mississippi: Ronnie quit, leaving the rest of the group—Smythe, Caccamisi, and guitarist Richard Malone—high and dry. Mack had cosigned a loan so the Devilles could buy a PA system, and he threatened to take it back and sell it if they didn’t reorganize the group within thirty days. First onboard was guitarist/keyboardist John Evans, who’d played with Russ in an earlier combo called the Chantelles, coincidentally a favorite local band of Alex’s. The search began for an R&B-styled front man. First they approached Evans’s former bandmate Jimmy Newman, lead singer for the In Crowd, a band that also included guitarist Gary Talley. Newman turned them down, but after seeing Alex at the Central High talent show, he called Evans and recommended his discovery, saying, “He sounds
black as hell!”

When Evans rang up Alex, he tried to entice him to audition by mentioning, “We’ve got ‘Sunny’ worked up!” Alex agreed to come, but when Evans gave him Danny Smythe’s address for the tryout, Alex surprised the nineteen-year-old by saying, “Can you pick me up? I’m only fifteen, so I don’t have my license yet.” The next day John and Russ borrowed Mrs. Caccamisi’s Impala and drove to North Montgomery to collect Alex.

When they knocked on the Chiltons’ door, a slight young man with acne-spotted cheeks and long brown bangs and hair covering his ears opened it. Barefoot and dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a faded black T-shirt, Alex grabbed a denim jacket and wrapped a scarf around his neck, saying, “I’m ready to go!” and followed them down the steps. Alex Chilton looked nothing like the rest of the short-haired Devilles, whose normal attire was Gant shirts, pressed pants, and Bass Weejuns. “
There was a dress code without having a dress code, and [what Alex wore] was not acceptable in those days,” John Evans recalls. “A blue jean jacket—no one wore those except farmers, blue-collar workers, or trailer park people.”

The boys set up their equipment in Danny’s family room. Alex made no pretense about liking their band or what he considered their schlocky material. “
I didn’t care for [the Devilles],” he later said. “They had made a few records, and I didn’t like them. They were pretty lame, really bad ballads that might’ve had some country appeal. But they were one of the big bands around town that made some money.” “
We were as much wooing Alex as we were auditioning him,” Russ remembers, “because we had three gigs booked, starting in a few weeks. We told him, ‘We’re gonna recast this thing and come up with a whole new set of songs, whatever you want to sing.’” Alex lit a cigarette and told them he’d give it a shot. When he opened his mouth and sang Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” Russ says, “he killed it! And he killed ‘Sunny.’ We worked up five or six songs that we all knew.” When they promised him a steady stream of paying gigs, Alex later recalled that he thought, “Wow! The Memphis big time! I can make $100 every weekend! You could support a family on $100 a week in 1966.” He broke the news to the Moondogs that he was moving on to the Devilles.

•   •   •

Alex had been in tenth grade at Central High for only a few months, but except for making some new pals, including a sultry eleventh-grader, Kokie Bechtold, he was miserable at school. “It was full of these
enormous macho guys, and I was constantly in fear of my life,” he recalled. “I was just hanging around, drinking, smoking grass, meeting girls, and looking forward to a very uncertain future.” Another eleventh-grader he befriended was Pat Rainer, renowned as local president of the Beatles Fan Club. When the Fab Four performed in Memphis in August 1966, Alex and Pat were there. She awarded the group the key to the city, though the Ku Klux Klan led demonstrations outside the Mid-South Coliseum and someone threw a firecracker onstage. John Lennon’s infamous statement earlier that year about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus had not gone over well in Memphis.

Pat, like Alex, hung out with the few hipsters at Central High. “
There was probably a group of ten or twelve of us,” Pat says. “The guys had longer hair, and the girls had straight hair and bangs and wore short skirts. We were ostracized. I hated that place—it was like being in a fucking prison.” Alex told Bruce Eaton in 2007, “All that year of ’66 and ’67 I was in tenth grade I was just demoralized about school. I just more or less slept through about every class and failed every subject royally. Vietnam was going on and ROTC—I wasn’t going with the program somehow.”

After flunking some classes at Miss Hutchison’s, Carole Ruleman had
transferred to Central, where she and another music fan, Dixie Thompson, hung out with Alex. “
There were cliques, and we didn’t fit into them,” Dixie remembers. “We were regarded as weirdos. Alex was failing and had to go to the principal’s office because of his grades.” Though he palled around with Pat, Dixie, and Carole, Alex’s attentions were focused on Kokie Bechtold.

Adopted as an infant by a Central Gardens family, Kokie was just as pretty as his previous girlfriends, Carole and Louise, and wore her dark hair in a trendy pageboy parted on the side. Kokie also had a wild streak; she’d already discovered pot, much to Alex’s delight. Soon she was sneaking into Alex’s room at night, or he was slipping out to meet her. It wasn’t long into their romance that Alex lost his virginity. He would fondly remember his time with Kokie—“
I was getting laid, and she was the first one, and that was pretty cool”—and a decade later still compare other girlfriends to her.

At home Alex’s increasingly dark moods and aggression began to cause problems and concern. In December, when Howard returned from college, he and Alex got into a fight over who had the most Christmas spirit, according to Dale Tuttle. Alex shoved the chubby, somewhat effete Howard, who fell and broke his arm. The Devilles had discovered that Alex had “
an explosive temper,” says Danny Smythe. “He could really get bent out of shape about something, but we just kind of treated it like a joke.”

The venues where the Devilles performed were much larger than any stage on which he’d previously appeared, but he adapted quickly, occasionally getting stoned before going onstage. To differentiate themselves from their previous incarnation, Russ, Danny, John, and Richard wanted to rename the group the New Devilles. Alex wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “
We told Alex, ‘When we open the show, you introduce us as the New Devilles.’ He didn’t want to do that, but we convinced him to,” says Russ, “so he walked up to the microphone, looked right at me, pulled the mic close to his mouth, and said, ‘Hello, everybody, we’re the
NEW
Devilles.’” That was the last time that name was ever used. And it marked the beginning of Alex’s onstage sarcasm.

From the outset Alex took to the stage like a natural. “He was a great front man, a great performer, very active and mobile,” Russ says. “He had a strut to his walk when he was onstage. He would pick out the three or four girls who were closest to the front and perform for them, and everybody else was superfluous. He later told me, ‘I’ll pick the three or four that are diggin’ on me the most, and I’ll work them, and everybody else gets the show for free.’”

By early April ’67, Roy Mack had determined that the band was ready to return to American with their new lead singer. “Let’s see how you sound on a recording,” he told Alex before booking time with Chips Moman. Georgia native Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman had hitchhiked to Memphis as a fifteen-year-old guitar prodigy and connected with rockabilly pioneers Johnny and Dorsey Burnette (“Train Kept a-Rollin’”), with whom he played lead on a tour to California. He then took over guitar duties for former child star Brenda Lee, followed by a stint with teen idol Ricky Nelson, replacing James Burton (who would go on to play with Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons). After some ups and downs Chips returned to Memphis and began working with Jim Stewart, for whom he discovered the defunct movie theater on McLemore that became Stax Records’ home. There he worked as house producer on the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night” and other recordings. Following the success of “Gee Whiz,” Chips fell out with Stewart over money and eventually founded American Recording Studios, taking on a new business partner, Don Crews. A boxlike, one-story brick building painted white, the studio was located at 827 Thomas Street, at the corner of Chelsea. American was one of only a few businesses in a run-down, primarily black neighborhood in North Memphis.

Moman was nicknamed Chips “
due to his talent for gambling,” according to Jim Dickinson, a session keyboardist at American in 1965: “He was a curly-haired country boy. He had a conspicuous jailhouse homemade tattoo on his right forearm, a pair of dice showing snake eyes and the slogan ‘Born to Loose’ [sic]. Chips was wiry and moved like a cat. He had a winning, good-natured grin and flashing blue eyes. He could hypnotize a roomful of musicians in two minutes flat.”

Chips, as talented a songwriter as he was a guitarist and producer, had a new collaborator at American. He’d befriended Dan Penn during a Wilson Pickett session at FAME Recording Studios, three hours away in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. As a teenager, Penn, born Daniel Pennington in Vernon, Alabama, wrote his first hit, “Is a Bluebird Blue,” which scored on the country charts for Conway Twitty. Dan’s real love, however, was rhythm & blues, and blessed with a deep soulful voice, he’d fronted an R&B-tinged band, the Pallbearers, before turning his focus to songwriting. Dan had been engineering sessions at FAME and wanted to get into producing. Chips encouraged him to relocate to Memphis, where they could write together and Dan could produce sides at American. He and Chips wrote “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” a smash for Aretha
Franklin, and Dan and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, another Alabaman who started at FAME, cowrote “Dark End of the Street” and “I’m Your Puppet,” both soul classics. Chips and Dan also hit it off with songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson when he arrived at the studio from Springfield, Missouri, in the fall of ’66 to make a recording and pitch his songs.

“
Everything I ever knew about R&B music,” says Wayne, “I learned from Dan Penn.” The son of Western music bandleader Shorty Thompson, Wayne—who later dropped his surname—wrote one particular track thanks to a short story his father had penned. “I had three numbers on my little demo tape,” Wayne remembers. “The first song was called ‘White Velvet Gloves,’ the second song I don’t remember, and the third one had a phrase from my dad’s story: ‘ticket for an aeroplane.’ It was called ‘The Letter.’”

Chips passed along Wayne’s tape to the Devilles with the message “Learn one of these three songs and come back into the studio on Saturday and we’ll record it and see how it goes.” He’d decided to turn the group over to Dan Penn for his first-ever production job. “
I wanted to produce a hit record, and that was in my mind day and night,” says Dan. “I’d told Chips, ‘You’re a great producer, but I want to cut my own record, and I don’t even want you there. Find me somebody to cut around here.’” Enter the Devilles.

Though Russ Caccamisi remembers running through “The Letter” at American without having rehearsed it, Alex recalled the band listening to the tape at Danny’s and choosing “The Letter” over the two other numbers. “
We worked out the chords to ‘The Letter,’” said Alex, “and used the same opening guitar lick that was on the original demo—just voice and guitar.” After a cursory rehearsal on Friday night, Alex took off to meet Kokie. The lovebirds stayed out until sunrise, drinking, smoking, and, according to what he later told one friend, making love under a tree in an out-of-the-way cemetery. Alex managed to get home and catch a few hours’ sleep before meeting the band at American on Saturday morning. In addition to being sleep deprived, he felt a cold coming on, bringing with it a sore throat and a raspy voice. “
I was a little hungover,” said Alex, “been out in the dewy grass in my bare feet all night, and certainly wasn’t in the best shape I could have been in.”