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

by George-Warren, Holly

  As the school year came to an end that May, Alex couldn’t be bothered with final exams; after all, in the past, he’d “never had to crack a book to get straight A’s at school,” Alex recalled. “I never had to study at all. I was like a sponge and just absorbed everything I needed.” Now, however, he failed his classes, and his Central High report card informed him he would have to repeat tenth grade. His parents berated him about this bad news, and his stormy moods darkened. “We worried before shows,” says Russ Caccamisi, “‘Is he gonna be pissed?’ He was a very moody guy. But he was never moody onstage; he was always ‘on’ when he was on the stage.”

  One Saturday night Alex got into a drunken altercation with a cashier at a Krystal hamburger joint on Cleveland Avenue; workers called the cops, Alex mouthed off to the police, and they hauled him off to jail. Not wanting his parents to know what had happened, he phoned his friend Day Smith to bail him out, but she had a minor car accident en route. Finally, Alex was released to his father on Sunday afternoon. (Eventually the “drunk and disorderly” charges were dropped.) Too late the Chiltons realized that Alex needed disciplining and tried grounding him, to no avail. As soon as their backs were turned, he was out the door, or his buddies were slipping in.

  Though Alex had gigs coming up with the Devilles, the band was unraveling. “The guitar player and the bass player, who were kind of worldly wise to the recording industry, said, ‘Look, man, [‘The Letter’ will] never come out. Don’t hold your breath,’” Alex told Cub Koda in 1992. Guitarist Richard Malone quit the group in late May, when his father, a Navy man, was transferred to San Diego. Bassist Russ Caccamisi would be turning eighteen in October and had to register for the draft. An only child whose father had died years before, Russ had started playing on sessions at American and in Muscle Shoals. He wanted to make music his life, but his mother, worried that her son would be sent to Vietnam, implored him to apply to college. So Russ gave notice that his Devilles days were numbered. “The Devilles were trying to keep it together, but we kept losing members,” said Alex. “I was just drifting.”

  Alex’s relationship with Kokie was falling apart as well. That summer she began spending time with older guys, including the notorious Tiller brothers, who strong-armed for gangsters and drug dealers. (She would eventually marry one of the Tillers and die young of a drug overdose.) Alex’s “drifting” soon turned into something more violent; his aggression turned inward, toward himself. Whether it was Kokie’s leaving him, or his band disintegrating, or his flunking tenth grade, or “The Letter” going nowhere, or his anger and drinking slipping out of control, it all must have become too much for Alex.

  “Somewhere around that time frame,” Paul Jobe recalls, “Alex tried to commit suicide. He cut his wrists, but then he started freaking out because, I guess, he realized what he’d done. His father took him to the hospital, and they sewed him up. I don’t know the motivating factor, what caused him to do it, but he didn’t want anybody to know. I happened to come over a day or two after that, and both of his wrists were bandaged up. I asked him about it, and he told me.”

  Paul kept Alex’s secret, and no one outside his family discovered how desperate Alex had become. Within the family the incident seems never to have been spoken of again—until a decade later.

  And then, suddenly, news arrived from Chips Moman and Dan Penn. Larry Uttal, who ran New York–based Bell Records, had stopped by American Recording Studios to hear new tracks by Bell artists James and Bobby Purify. The duo had hit it big with 1966’s “I’m Your Puppet.” “He came around, and I played ‘The Letter’ for him,” Dan recalls of his meeting with Uttal, who immediately wanted to release it on Bell: Eager for the single to be issued, Penn “told Larry Uttal, ‘You pay whatever we spent, and it’s yours.’” American’s co-owner Don Crews remembers, “I think he paid us $900 for the master; it was a lease deal.” According to Roben Jones, “Dan had thought in terms of placing one master, and now they were, in effect, officially signed to the label. American Studios would be, for all practical purposes, the Southern division of Bell Records until the three-year deal with the label ended in early 1970.”

  Atlantic Records A&R chief Jerry Wexler, who’d organized recordings at American by Wilson Pickett and others, had fronted $5,000 to Chips Moman to upgrade the studio and had expected first dibs on any musical discoveries. Much to his consternation, he did not get “The Letter.”

  Before Uttal would release “The Letter” on Bell, he wanted two things: a B-side, and a new name for the Devilles, which had been taken by another group. “Our manager [Roy Mack], I believe, came up with the name the Box Tops,” remembered Alex, who disliked it at once. “I think he wanted to have a name that had something to do with the song, so he originally came up with . . . the Mailboxes! But he thought that had a dirty, somewhat blue connotation to it. So he toyed around with it a bit and came up with the Box Tops, because you send in a box top through the mail in a letter.”

  Russ Caccamisi recalls sitting at the kitchen table at the Chiltons’ one Saturday morning, eating a bowl of cornflakes with Alex and John Evans: “We were talking about the band name,” Russ says. “I remember Howard [Chilton] coming in to get a bowl of cereal, and he opened the cereal box and said, ‘Hey, your first album could be The Box Tops Tear Off!’ As he tore the top off this cereal box, we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah!’” (That album title would be put on hold for nearly thirty years, by which time Alex had grown to like the name the Box Tops.)

  The flip side to the single was not quite a group effort. Bell needed a track quickly, and with the band membership in disarray, Dan booked the American house band, a group of stellar players Chips had assembled. It included former session players from Sam Phillips’s studio and Royal Studio, run by Willie Mitchell: guitarist Reggie Young, drummer Gene Chrisman, pianist Bobby Wood, organist Bobby Emmons, and bassists Mike Leech and Tommy Cogbill. This core unit would eventually play on approximately 122 hits recorded at American between 1967 and 1972.

  For the B-side Dan turned to a song he and Spooner Oldham had written, a jaunty number called “Happy Times.” When the newly christened Box Tops showed up at the studio, all that was needed from them was Alex’s lead vocals and their in-unison background shouts, “Time!” accented by a trumpet blast. “I went in again on a Saturday afternoon and sang to a pre-recorded backing track,” Alex recalled. “I didn’t care much about it, but I was just doing what I was told.” Studio bands playing on the recordings of established groups was not uncommon in 1967, having been the practice for such bands as the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and, of course, the Monkees. “Nobody was happy about it,” Russ remembers, “but nobody gave a shit about the flip side. It was a dreadful song, but you had to have something on the back.”

  The rest of the Devilles had previously signed a contract with Roy Mack, and for their Devilles singles, with Chips’s Youngstown label; when Sidney Chilton met with Mack to negotiate Alex’s deal, he demanded that his son get twice the salary the rest of the group earned. “My dad said, ‘Well, in the circles I run in, in the Musicians Union, the band members get one share and the leader gets a double share,’” Alex remembered. “And he negotiated a double share for me.” “We weren’t too happy about that,” says Danny Smythe. “But we wanted the record to come out, so there wasn’t much we could do. We did whatever they said we had to do.” The band signed a production deal with American Studios, which inked a contract for the Box Tops with Bell Records’ Larry Uttal, specifying Alex as the group’s singer.

  To kick off publicity for “The Letter” in Memphis, Chips and Roy Mack quickly got the Box Tops booked on their buddy George Klein’s popular Talent Party television program on WHPQ, Channel 13, an ABC station. The program had originally been called Dance Party, but by Klein’s tenure, desegregation had motivated the producers to prohibit teenage couples from dancing: Management “was scared there would be a black and white couple, and it could cause a sit
uation,” George Klein, aka GK, remembers.

  In lieu of teen couples, Klein hired vivacious eighteen-year-old girls to dance alongside local and touring artists who performed on the show. These miniskirt-clad go-go girls, known as the Q-ties, gained their own following; one, Cybill Shepherd, went on to become a model and actress (debuting in The Last Picture Show). Chips Moman gave Klein the finished tape of “The Letter” to air on the program, and the Box Tops lip-synched their performance. “They didn’t even know what lip-synching was,” says George. The boys considered their appearance a goof, with Danny Smythe wearing a vintage aviator’s cap with goggles. “We went on there and just played around,” Danny recalls. “I was playing air drums. It was a joke to be pantomiming, so what the hell?”

  Though things looked bright for the Box Tops’ future, Russ left the band in late June to enroll at Mississippi State. The month before, the band had replaced Richard Malone with nineteen-year-old guitarist Gary Talley, who hailed from a musical family. By the time Talley joined, the band had started rehearsing at the Chiltons’ in the art gallery space. “Alex’s house was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen,” says Danny. “I lived out in the ’burbs and was totally white-bread. His front door was never locked, open to anybody who wanted to walk in. Every wall, from top to bottom, was covered with oil paintings.” Exhibitions were becoming less frequent, however, and Mary Evelyn eventually closed it down after another private gallery burned and the owner was held responsible for the lost art. Mary Evelyn couldn’t afford the insurance coverage to protect herself from such a catastrophe.

  Alex wanted a familiar face in the Box Tops to replace Russ, and he remembered Bill Cunningham, a longtime bassist and keyboardist in various garage bands, including the Jynx. Alex felt comfortable around Bill, whose family lived in Alex’s old Sherwood Forest neighborhood. Bill had been immersed in rock & roll for his whole life: His father, Buddy Cunningham, had been a Sun Records artist (billed as Buddy Blake), though he’d cut only a few sides, and his brother B.B. had played in bands, most recently touring with Ronny and the Daytonas and an offshoot of that group called the Hombres (soon to score their hit “Let It All Hang Out”).

  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 we
ek 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.

  CHAPTER 7

  On the Road

  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.”