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

by George-Warren, Holly

  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.”

  By late October the Box Tops were bound for New York to promote their debut album, issued by Mala/Bell. The front cover featured a blurry, sunlit photo of the band wearing their Lansky’s duds, with Alex’s face nearly impossible to discern. Penn and Uttal titled the LP The Letter/Neon Rainbow (the latter song was their sophomore single, about to be issued), which featured a dozen tracks selected by Dan Penn. “Neon Rainbow,” also written by Wayne Carson, was a soft ballad, with keyboards and acoustic guitar prominent in the mix. Alex later referred to the song as the band’s psychedelic number, due more to its obtuse lyrics than its sonics.

  Also on the LP was the single’s flip side, “Everything I Am,” a gospel-tinged ballad written by Penn and Oldham. Spooner’s piano carries the song, and Alex contributed an almost reverential vocal, reminiscent in style to Elvis Presley’s approach to hymns. Three of the album’s numbers were covers of previous hits: Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” James and Bobby Purify’s “I’m Your Puppet,” and—continuing the transportation theme—Dionne Warwick’s “Trains and Boats and Planes,” a Bacharach-David song. Alex confidently pulled off his interpretations of each, particularly on “Pale” and “Puppet.”

  Only a few of the album’s songs were added to the Box Tops’ live set list, since “the recordings were so manipulated by that American Studios production [via strings and horns] that it was difficult to reproduce in a live situation,” according to Alex. An exception was the bluesy “She Knows How” (another Carson song). “She knows how to kiss me like I wanna be kissed . . . / when it comes to lovin’, she knows how,” Alex emoted, no doubt thinking of Kokie, Suzi, and his increasing number of on-the-road conquests. Bobby Womack, who played guitar on some of the tracks, contributed two numbers: the soulful “People Make the World” and guitar-and-B-3 organ-fueled “Gonna Find Somebody,” another lovelorn number.

  Though Alex appreciated the talents of the Memphis Boys and was thrilled to have an album out, he was embarrassed about the overdubs, particularly a few hokey sound effects, as well as some of Dan’s song choices and the fact that his fellow Box Tops barely played on the LP. “I didn’t go for that material that related more to middle age than teenage,” he said twenty years after the debut’s release. “And since they kicked our little band out of the studio and brought in all the studio players, I was pretty unhappy with what was going on. But I was so young I really wasn’t in any position to complain at that time.”

  Those thoughts weren’t on his mind, though, when the band traveled to New York to promote the album. Among several TV appearances, the most outrageous was a special Halloween edition of Disc-O-Teen, on Newark’s Channel 47. It was hosted by John Zacherle, whose TV persona, “Zacherley,” a debonair vampire from Transylvania, had become a sensation when he commandeered Philadelphia’s late-night Chiller Theater, showing B horror flicks. On the super-low-budget Disc-O-Teen, black and white teenagers disguised as hobos, witches, and cowpokes danced to “The Letter” while the band—each looking about fourteen years old—mugged for the camera. Afterward, the Tops discovered that Northern girls dug Southern boys when their car was mobbed by screaming fans. Gary remembers: “As we were pulling away from the studio, a bunch of girls were chasing us, and some service guys standing around saw this. They hated it so much that they threw their milkshakes at our car as we drove away. They were yelling at us, calling us queers.”

  Though Alex enjoyed the fringe benefits of being a pop star, with girls flocking to meet him and spend the night at his hotel, he still occasionally longed for those back home. While in New York he tried calling his old girlfriend Louise, only to be informed by her father that she was in Manhattan with her mother on a shopping spree. “The phone rang at our hotel, and my mother answered,” Louise recalls. “It was Alex. She handed me the phone and he said he was
driving around in a limo with the Beach Boys in New York City. ‘Come on down and we’ll meet you in the lobby!’ he said. With Alex on the phone, I told my mother that was the plan. She didn’t miss a beat—‘No! I was not going to do that!’ I told Alex and hung up.”

  The Box Tops were booked to play two shows at Manhattan’s Cheetah club, originally slated as a double bill with Procol Harum, but the Brits canceled, leaving the Memphians to fill the room for a Sunday matinee and a Saturday night. The band refused to appear in matching outfits, with Alex wearing a dark turtleneck. “We discovered Greenwich Village,” Danny recalls, “and that’s where all the Carnaby Street clothes were. It was like, ‘Wow! The hell with these band uniforms—let’s dress like the Beatles!’”

  When the boys hit the stage, the Broadway nightspot was packed with young black, white, and Hispanic fans, and the energized singer displayed his best showmanship to date. The group had been rehearsing its harmonies, and all joined in on several numbers. They worked the crowd into such a frenzy that one enamored young African-American girl jumped onstage and go-go-danced right next to Alex.

  Their next appearance was on Fred Weintraub’s Live at the Bitter End, which aired on New York’s WOR-TV on October 29. By now Alex looked like a seasoned (if underage) pro, hanging on the mic stand and earnestly growling the lyrics. The Box Tops, back in matching suits, played well; Alex, wearing an open safari-style jacket and a turtleneck, had clearly moved into his front-man role. With a casual familiarity, Weintraub hollered, “Alex, get over here,” to introduce the band’s second segment, in which they performed a live version of “The Letter,” visibly getting more attention from the previously bored-looking audience. Alex looked straight into the camera and in a husky voice solemnly thanked fans for giving the band the #1 song in the country. The Box Tops ended the program lip-synching “our new single,” “Neon Rainbow.” A few days later, another TV appearance, on Clay Cole’s Diskotek, found the band on New York’s WPIX, Channel 11, alongside Dionne Warwick and the Grass Roots.