A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (8 page)

Within weeks after Bill joined, “The Letter” (backed with “Happy Times”) was released by Bell’s Mala subsidiary, primarily home to the label’s soul artists. George Klein and other Memphis DJs immediately put “The Letter” into heavy rotation. “
It had a great feel to it,” says GK. “Alex’s voice was very commercial sounding, plus it was a short record, so radio stations loved it. Stations hated playing those long records, because they interrupted the commercial parts of your show.” Mack booked the band for a high-profile appearance at the
Memphis Fairgrounds, and Poplar Tunes put up a special window display for the record, with signs touting the local hitmakers, the Box Tops. Mack pulled some strings and got other regional stations to add the record to their playlists as well. “
We were driving through Tennessee, and our manager, unbeknownst to us, had arranged with a Knoxville disc jockey friend to play ‘The Letter’ on the air just as we were passing through,” Bill Cunningham recalls. “Five days later we came back through town, and they were playing it every thirty minutes. So the manager calls his friend and tells him not to overdo it . . . and the DJ says, ‘No, no, this thing’s broken big. It’s a huge hit!’”

When the record became a smash in Birmingham, Alabama, all hell broke loose. The Box Tops flew for the first time, on tiny Southern Airlines, to perform a sold-out concert there. Afterward, at the Holiday Inn, where they spent the night, they got their first taste of pop-star life when groupies and fans converged for the evening. Fueled by the buzz, Bell shipped three hundred thousand copies of “The Letter” during the first week in August. It charted with a bullet that week on
Billboard
at #81. By the following week it had jumped more than twenty spots, to #58. “We’ve got a massive hit coming,” Uttal called down to Penn. “Make an album—
quick!
”

American Recording Studios was either booked up or the equipment was broken—no one can remember which. “
Dan got pissed off,” John Evans recalls. “He wanted to do what he wanted to do, so he went to the nearest phone and called Rick Hall at FAME in Muscle Shoals, and we drove down there. We’d met at American at 7 p.m., so we got to Muscle Shoals really late at night and recorded til the wee hours. . . . I remember that was the first night I ever drank coffee to stay up.”

As a veteran engineer at FAME, Dan had the run of the place and started working up some songs. Gary Talley had just been hospitalized for migraine headaches, so FAME session guitarist Eddie Hinton subbed for him. Russ hadn’t left for school yet, so he sat in on bass. Either nervous or tired or jumpy, the Box Tops could not work in the studio as quickly and efficiently as Dan had hoped. Of the several songs the group tried, the only one that clicked was the John D. Loudermilk composition “Break My Mind,” which opened with a twangy guitar lick expertly played by Hinton. Later overdubbing a
“whoosh-bang”
gimmicky outro, Dan added a corny flourish to the bluesy number’s ending. He also decided he’d had it with the Box Tops playing in the studio: “Cutting ‘Break My Mind’ was like pulling teeth,” he remembered forty-five years later.

“
Dan was just very frustrated with the band,” Alex said. “He wasn’t pleased
with the outcome of that session, so the next thing I knew, the manager said, ‘Well, Dan’s gonna bring in the studio band for the rest of the album.’ So I went in [to American] and did the album with the studio band, singing live on the floor with the band.”

Though a newcomer to the studio, Alex behaved professionally and worked hard. He was backed by the city’s crème de la crème, the Memphis Boys. A member of Bill Black’s Combo when they’d toured with the Beatles in 1964, guitarist Reggie Young inspired Alex, as he finally learned to play the instrument he’d had for three years. Bassist Tommy Cogbill and organist Bobby Emmons had also performed with Black, as well as legendary instrumentalist Ace Cannon. “
Tommy was a great guy and a brilliant musician,” according to Jim Dickinson. “He was really a jazz guitarist, but also the best electric bass player in Memphis. Reggie Young was so spectacularly good on rock & roll guitar that Tommy was almost always stuck playing the Fender bass.”

“
My dad had played some gigs with the bass player Tommy Cogbill,” Alex said. “He talked about him a lot, but I really didn’t know anybody else that was there.” Mike Leech, drummer Gene Chrisman, and pianist Bobby Wood made up the rest of the group, which Dickinson once called “the greatest of all Southern rhythm sections.” In addition, guitarist/singer-songwriter Bobby Womack had recently taken up residence in Memphis and played on Box Tops sessions, as did songwriter and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, who, in Muscle Shoals, had contributed the organ to Percy Sledge’s “When a Man Loves a Woman” and Aretha Franklin’s “I Never Loved a Man.”

Live, the Box Tops began to pull their sound together, adding to their typical set of Wilson Pickett, Motown, and British Invasion covers—such tunes as “Summer in the City” by the Lovin’ Spoonful, Major Lance’s “Monkey Time,” and “No Good to Cry” by Connecticut band the Wildweeds (featuring future NRBQ guitarist Al Anderson). The band made a stop at the Hullabaloo Club in Jackson, Mississippi, where Alex’s old friends Adele Brown and Bill Buffett were front and center at the packed venue. Bill remembers Alex taking charge onstage: “
I was right up close, and he was in the middle of a number, and he had to back away from the mic and yell at one of the other musicians, ‘Harmony!’ The group was kind of rough, but Alex sounded terrific.” Adele and Bill—with a pair of high school girls in tow—went backstage to say hello, and Alex greeted them warmly. “
I remember thinking, ‘This is so wild!’” says Adele. “The record was a huge hit. We were all just stunned and so excited. I think the band was kind of
stunned, too. They were already getting ready to leave for a big national tour. I said to Alex, ‘This is unbelievable!’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I can’t believe it, either.’”

That fall, Alex returned for less than a week of his second shot at tenth grade, then dropped out. “
Sometime in August it was pretty clear that ‘The Letter’ was going to be a big hit,” said Alex, “and my parents, being the permissive liberal types, said, ‘Well, he didn’t do so well in school last year, maybe a year off will do the kid good.’ They were cool with me touring with a rock band—
no problem
! . . . Obviously, there’s certain things I regret about not finishing high school.” (Years later he would get his GED.)

“The Letter” hurtled up the charts, and Roy Mack began hatching plans to put the band on the road, playing farther afield on package shows and at one-off concerts. Other TV programs wanted the group as well. As the band’s debut single became a fixture on the Hot 100, Alex climbed onto a treadmill of endless public appearances befitting a pop star.

In mid-August 1967, for their first concert outside the South, the Box Tops arrived in Philadelphia to perform atop a hotdog stand at the city’s fairgrounds. Expecting a black R&B group, the concert’s promoter scoffed at the group’s unlikely appearance, until Alex growled an a cappella
“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane . . .”

The matching suits that Roy Mack had purchased at Beale Street’s Lansky Bros. (where Elvis and bluesmen bought their flashy duds) underscored the boys’ youthfulness. The other members had started growing out their hair; only Alex had the tousled, bangs-in-the-eyes look. On the bill with them were Jay and the Techniques, an interracial R&B band from nearby Allentown, Pennsylvania, who had just hit the Top 10 with “Apple, Peaches, Pumpkin Pie.” Also playing was local garage band the Soul Survivors, composed of New Yorkers and Philadelphians, whose “Expressway to Your Heart” was racing up the charts. All three newcomers would share the bill in far-flung places over the next few years.

For the Box Tops, more exciting than the concert was the opportunity to appear on
The Discophonic Scene
, a TV program on Philadelphia’s Channel 10, WCAU, hosted by DJ Jerry Blavat, who had started spinning “The Letter” on his radio show. “
I liked the Box Tops, because they had a Southern black sound,” says Blavat. “At that time, the charts and radio were dominated by the English sound, which was not my cup of tea. My playlist consisted of Motown, the Four Seasons, R&B, and street-corner harmony.”

Accompanying the Box Tops to Philly were Buddy Alfonso and his wife, Linda. In his early twenties and inexperienced as a road manager, Alfonso had worked for a Memphis booking agent. The Chiltons had approached Bill Buffett
to see if he’d accompany the group on their travels, but the artist was planning to relocate to Missouri, where his girlfriend was starting college. So Mack hired Buddy as road manager and leased a light blue Plymouth station wagon for the band’s road trips. Alfonso “was supposed to stay alert to
keeping me a little bit in line,” Alex later said, “but there’s nothing you can do with a kid who’s away from home and got enough money to do whatever he wants to do. I had a good deal of freedom.”

The radio and TV exposure in Philadelphia helped bring more national attention to the band—and increased record sales. On the way back to Memphis, as the boys took turns driving the wagon, “The Letter” poured out of their car radio from Pennsylvania to Tennessee. “We still kinda
thought it was a regional hit,” says Gary. “We had no idea it was even being played in other parts of the country or that it was going up the charts.” By the time they got home, it had jumped into the Top 15 on both
Billboard
and
Cash Box
.

They weren’t in town long before flying to Texas to play the Fort Worth Teen Fair, held at the Amon G. Carter Jr. Exhibits Hall at the Will Rogers Memorial Center, home to livestock shows and rodeos. Running from August 26 through September 4, the music event was the Lonestar version of a rock festival, featuring garage bands and national acts, including the Grass Roots, the Seeds, and from Los Angeles, an edgy group, the Doors, whose “Light My Fire” had lodged at #1 for three weeks in June.

Not only would the Box Tops be exposed for the first time to a “heavy” band, but the Southern bandmates would be introduced to the counterculture, beginning with their arrival at the Dallas–Fort Worth Airport. Sent to meet them was a long-haired crew helping out with the festival. “
I’d never met any hippies before,” says Gary. “There weren’t any hippies in Memphis, except for one guy who had long hair who would get hassled and beat up all the time. We were still pretty straight, and it was like, holy smoke, light shows and dope and women.”

The Box Tops were slotted to follow the Doors, and when the Angelenos’ equipment didn’t arrive in time, the band turned to the Memphians for help. “They called us into the production office,” Gary recalls, “and the Doors were in there, and their manager [Bill Siddons] said, ‘Can our guys use your guitars?’” The Box Tops felt like a teenybopper group compared to the Doors, who had attitude and an album of self-penned songs. “We felt so silly because we played after the Doors,” says Gary, “and we were still wearing these matching outfits, and we knew ‘this ain’t the way things are going,’ you know? We were just blown away by all these bands where the musicians were older and tighter. It
was embarrassing, because we were just a bunch of kids who had gotten together and gotten lucky with a record. ‘The Letter’ was about the only song we knew besides cover tunes, because there wasn’t an album out yet. We really stunk there at first, and the most distinctive thing about the band was Alex’s voice. But we still got a lot of attention onstage, with all the screaming girls.”

“Our manager had said, ‘We aren’t gonna have any of this hippie, psychedelic, flower power stuff,’” Alex later told Cub Koda. “‘We’re gonna be nice! Y’all are gonna dress alike; y’all gonna have uniforms,’ which was like the unhippest thing imaginable in 1967.” Though the rest of the Tops donned a matching suit and tie, Alex wore his double-breasted tan jacket open, with no tie and his Oxford shirt unbuttoned at the top. With the sweltering heat and hot lights, the jacket soon ended up on the floor.

Later, comparing “Light My Fire” to “The Letter,” Alex said, “That shows the cultural divide developing [then]. We were on the Top 40 side of things, and these other bands seemed
important
.” Alex would, in fact, add a little “quote” from the Doors song “The End” to the Box Tops’ version of a Vanilla Fudge song on their sophomore album.

Morrison made a bad impression on the clean-cut Gary: “
He had a fifth of booze in his hand, and he was leaning against a wall, gulping it. He was drunk on his ass every time I saw him.” Danny remembers being impressed by the band’s performance, though: “
Jim Morrison turned around and hugged one of the amps and started hunching back and forth like he was having sex with it, and it blew my mind. The girls were going nuts over the Doors.” At the Holiday Inn, where all the bands stayed and partied together, Morrison kept to himself and didn’t interact with others, though keyboardist “Ray Manzarek actually called one of our rooms,” according to Gary, “and said he really liked our record. I’ll always remember that, because we thought the Doors were so cool.”

Among the hippies partying with the Box Tops at the Holiday Inn was a twenty-year-old, green-eyed redhead named Suzi Greene. “She looked kinda like Judy Carne, with bright green eyes and a pixie haircut,” Gary remembers of the petite Texan, who lived on a commune outside town with her former boyfriend, Marc Benno, a guitarist. “
Suzi was a sweetheart,” Benno recalls, “a really artistic, cool girl. She had a look about her that was very desirable, sexy—just really a knockout. She went to all the rock shows—everybody knew Suzi.”

“
Suzi was part of the hippie commune in charge of showing us a good time,” Gary says. “They were around all the time. She was really pretty. She didn’t wear any shoes, and she had on an ankle bracelet; I guess she was the first
hippie girl I ever met. I liked her and stayed up all night talking to her. Then the next night, Alex stayed up all night
not
talking to her.” Alex had just met his future wife.

In mid-September “The Letter” soared to #1, where it would stay for a month, knocking another Southerner’s debut single, Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billy Joe,” off the top spot. “I remember we were on the road, and in Virginia,” says Gary. “Buddy Alfonso was on the phone with our manager, and he got off the phone and said, ‘Hey, guys, ‘The Letter’ is #1 on the charts!’ We just couldn’t believe it. Like, this is crazy, this just couldn’t be true!”

“The Letter” also entered the R&B survey, where it remained for nearly three months, reaching #30. As the song blared from still-segregated black stations, pop radio, and jukeboxes in soda shops, bars, and roadhouses, it also became a favorite on Armed Forces Radio, where the song’s message about racing home resonated with servicemen fighting in Southeast Asia. Marine armorer Chris Paul, stationed at Camp Pendleton in the fall of ’67, recalls the record being in heavy rotation on Wolfman Jack’s program on the Border Radio station XERB out of Tijuana (“50,000 watts of soul power, baby”). “
This was my backdrop to ‘The Letter,’” the former Marine says. “The Box Tops were part of a select group of white acts—including Procol Harum and later Dusty Springfield—to get airplay on that station,” Paul recalls. “‘Give me a ticket for an aeroplane’ became the mantra for Marines getting discharged from the Corps, and I can’t remember any other lyric enjoying that much popularity until I got to Vietnam in ’68, where it was that song and the Animals’ ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place.’” Some twenty years later, when “The Letter” was the focus of an
Entertainment Tonight
segment, Alex concurred: “It gives you a feeling of immediacy and movement. I think a lot of people were in Vietnam and that was their fondest dream—a ticket to get out and back home.”

In England a promo video of the Box Tops performing “The Letter” would soon be featured on the prestigious BBC music program
Top of the Pops
, alongside the Animals and Bobbie Gentry. “The Letter” hit #5 there, staying on the charts for three months.

The Box Tops’ first stop as chart-toppers was Atlanta, where they played a venue called the Stingray Club, visited a black radio station (where, again, they surprised the DJ with their youth and skin color), and appeared on TV on the regional teen music show
The Village Square.
Though homespun and low-budget, the program was broadcast in more than fifty markets. Alex got stoned before the show and didn’t even bother trying to lip-synch “The Letter”; instead, he
stared off into space, then laughed, showing what he thought of the set, with its ridiculous-looking cardboard post-office-window prop. At the point where the jet plane takes off on the record, Alex sauntered away from his mic to the PO window and handed a “letter” from his pocket to the DJ host peering from behind it. Mumbling something about taking “the letter” with him everywhere he goes, Alex then pulled out a gag correspondence that unfurled to about three feet in length.

While in Atlanta they met more female fans; one of whom later was featured in the documentary
Groupie
, in which she claimed a member of the Box Tops was the first of her rock star conquests. The band also signed their new booking agent, the large and jocular Rick Taylor, part of the nationally known Arnold Agency, based in Atlanta. The alliance was covered in a
Billboard
news brief, reporting that the bookers were “arranging an extended tour for the Box Tops, covering one-nighters, college and promotion dates, and TV appearances”—nearly nonstop touring for the next two-plus years.

The first stop was Cleveland, where the Box Tops were booked to appear on
Upbeat
, a teen show that originated on Cleveland’s WEWS-TV, Channel 5. Started in 1964, the groundbreaking program featured as many as fourteen artists during its hour-long time slot on Saturdays at 5 p.m. The show featured touring acts ranging from the Cowsills to Johnny Cash, the Velvet Underground to James Brown, as well as locals like Eric Carmen (whose band the Raspberries would begin its string of hits around the time of Big Star’s formation).

Syndicated in more than one hundred markets,
Upbeat
helped promote acts’ records nationally. “
We would tape it on Saturday afternoon, rehearsal started at nine, took a break at noon, came back at one thirty and shot the show and hopefully it was done by five o’clock when you had to see it,” recalled Dave Spero, son of the program’s creator, Ray Spero. “The videotape of each one-hour
Upbeat
episode would be copied nine times, sent to a station in each of the top ten markets, played, and then that station would send it to a station in the next lower market size, shipped or ‘bicycled’ from market to market. An artist like Tommy James and the Shondells, they put out a song like ‘Mony Mony,’ well, all of a sudden they’re on in ten cities. Next week they’re on in ten more. They could follow the show with live performances and get hit records, which a lot of them really give
Upbeat
credit for.” In the days before MTV, shows like
Upbeat
promoted records to an eager audience of teenagers.

For the Box Tops’ first appearance on
Upbeat
, on September 23, they lip-synched “The Letter” much more professionally than they had on
The Village
Square
, having been warned by Roy Mack of the show’s importance. The producers arranged for a special gimmick just for them: “They told us to act like we were in
a giant cereal bowl,” Danny Smythe recalls. “Then they superimposed a bowl and a milk pitcher for everybody at home to see.” Over the next two and a half years, the Box Tops would appear on
Upbeat
twenty times.

After a series of one-nighters, the group’s first mini-tour was with Alex’s heroes, the Beach Boys, making seven or eight stops. As much as Alex could laugh off regional TV shows, playing for massive audiences of Beach Boys fans terrified him. “
I remember the first gig we worked with [the Beach Boys] was Indianapolis,” Alex said. “[We went] right [from] the dressing room, didn’t have time to even scope out the hall or anything, then right out onstage, and there’s 15,000 people there. Just closed my eyes and sang the song, you know? Got through it okay, but that was quite a moment in my life, the biggest gig I had ever done.”

As “The Letter” stayed firmly at #1 during the first half of October, the Box Tops were finding their way as performers, learning from pros like the Beach Boys, who’d taken the young group under their wing. Brian Wilson, a big fan of “The Letter” and Alex’s vocal style, had stopped touring three years earlier, but Dennis and Carl Wilson, as well as Al Jardine, befriended the sixteen-year-old fledgling pop star. “
The Beach Boys liked us, partly because we were shitty enough that we didn’t blow them off the stage,” Alex said, adding proudly, “and also because I think Brian had been caught by the record of ‘The Letter’ and turned the rest of ’em on to it.”