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

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A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 15

by George-Warren, Holly


  Alex showed up that night and dug Icewater’s sound, a mix of originals and Led Zeppelin, James Gang, and Terry Reid covers. A few days later he bumped into Chris at Ardent. Alex had his twelve-string guitar with him, and when he played a new song, the bucolic fingerpicked “Watch the Sunrise,” Chris recorded it. Impressed with the results, he invited Alex for a beer. Since their December meeting in New York, Chris and Alex had each checked out the other’s work and liked what he heard. They now put their heads together: Would Alex consider moving back to Memphis and starting a new group with Chris, Andy, and Jody? One that would include all-original songs, collaborations between Alex and Chris? They could be like Lennon and McCartney, with production whiz John Fry playing the role of George Martin. Though he’d sworn off playing in bands, Alex found Chris’s invitation intriguing, thinking it could be worth a try. He’d admired Chris’s guitar playing as far back as the Jynx days.

  The first test was writing a song together, and Chris and Alex reconvened at the Chilton home a few days later. As the two hung out in his bedroom, guitars in hand, Alex helped Chris finish a couple of songs he’d started for his Rock City recordings. “I remember he . . . had this song that later became ‘Feel,’” Alex recalled. “He had the A section—he had the music all planned out, but he only had the lyric ‘Woman what have you been doin’ / the love that you’ve been stealin’ is giving me a feeling,’ and that’s all he had. And then he had this other music bit in there, and he started playing that, and I just chimed in with the line ‘Feel like I’m dying, I don’t want to live again’ and then came up with ‘You just ain’t been tryin’, it’s getting very near the end.’ . . . That’s pretty much the way it went. I’d turn up with something I had, and he would make a change or two or give me a line or two or three.”

  The pair also finished Chris’s moody “Try Again,” then drove over to Ardent to cut it, with Chris later recording “Feel” and adding both to Rock City’s would-be album, See Seven States. “Basically the format of [Chris’s] groups and the format of those [Rock City] recordings was sort of like what [the new band] became in some ways,” said Alex. “So we just picked it up from there, and I just kind of tried to fit in.”

  The timing turned out to be perfect. When Alex flew back to New York, Gordon Alexander contacted him to say he was returning from San Francisco and needed his apartment. Alex moved upstairs with Keith Sykes for a while before packing up and heading back to Memphis. The two still enjoyed playing guitar together, and with his confidence boosted, Alex suggested doing some gigs before his departure. “We played a few things in little clubs,” Keith remembers. Alex had written a song called “Vera Lynn,” which he recorded on Keith’s Teac machine, and Keith showed him a bluesy riff using a D chord inspired by a Blind Willie McTell song, resulting in another new song, as yet untitled.

  Chris, who stayed in touch, let Alex know that Rock City was a bust. Tom Eubanks had shopped See Seven States to no avail, and the pair discontinued their collaboration. In the meantime John Fry had made a deal with Stax Records. “[Label president] Al Bell said that Stax wanted a rock band and asked if we would be interested in activating the Ardent Records label,” John recalls of the deal with Stax, with whom he already had a three-year association. “He would let us sign whatever artists we wanted and do all of the creative. They would do the marketing, promotion, and distribution.” Chris’s new band with Alex, Andy, and Jody would be Ardent’s first signing.

  “About the summer of ’71, I came back to Memphis, and we started getting together and playing and running down some of the tunes we would record,” Alex said. “I had met Andy a time or two, and I’d never met Jody before. We just got together and started playing, and I had ‘Thirteen’ and a couple more [songs], and we learned those, and Chris had a few, and we learned those. I’d always been a fan of Chris’s stuff. But basically what I did was join Chris’s band.”

  “Alex and I respected each other,” said Chris, “and although we didn’t aim for a [specific] sound, we did have some plans for an image and what kind of music we liked. We both had different tastes in music, but we respected each other’s tastes.” “It was pretty close [to what I wanted to do],” Alex agreed. “It was a democratic group, kind of a compromise. Chris was really into British pop music. I was always a big fan of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, all the mid-sixties stuff. So getting together with him, the concept of the group was to make music like mid-sixties music, and so the songs we were writing and the music we were trying to play . . . that’s what we were sort of aspiring to. Our band loved the Beatles, and the Byrds sort of fell into our category of things we really dug, and that’s what we wanted to sound like.”

  The band frequently gathered at the Chiltons’ and set up in the former art gallery downstairs, which, in addition to the Chickering piano, had room for their equipment: Jody’s blue pearl Ludwig drum kit, the Fender Twin and Super Reverb amplifiers, a black Kustom bass amp; Chris’s red Gibson 330 and Fender Strat; Alex’s Les Paul, Strat, and acoustic guitars; and Andy’s Fender Precision bass. Once the songs began to gel, the still-unnamed group gathered at a makeshift rehearsal/demo studio John had set up in a frame building adjacent to Ardent. Over the next four months “we’d just show up at practice and learn the songs,” says Jody. “It was always a joy to work them up. . . . The songs were so inspiring.”

  “Chris and Alex were a good match,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “hanging out, drinking beers and smoking joints together and trading off ideas in the studio. They complemented one another. And being in the confines of Ardent made it all work, because it was a permissive environment.”

  “Chris was a very driven, creative guy,” Andy Hummel said, “even when I knew him in high school. He had a very clear vision in his head of what music ought to sound like. Alex was bursting with tunes and ideas, too. Ardent’s relaxed atmosphere was really conducive to creating music. Nobody was trying to turn you into something you didn’t want to be, which was very encouraging to Alex. He was really upbeat then.”

  Alex and Chris’s songwriting collaboration continued at Ardent as it had at the earlier writing sessions. “Chris would show up with something that he’d almost finished, and I would just start chiming out whatever was in my head,” said Alex. “If he liked something of what I was chiming, then we’d throw that in to finish the thing off. Basically it was the same with me. I’d show up with a tune pretty much finished, and he might make a change or two. He was a very determined worker, and so was I.”

  By early fall they were ready to record. Alex had joined Vera at Memphis State, where he took philosophy (his favorite) and English, but most of his time revolved around the new band. He and Andy were eager to learn more about engineering as well. Andy took the class from John, who remembers Alex as a quick study who wasn’t a student but just absorbed engineering by observing what was going on around him—similar to how he had watched his father at the piano and learned from him. “Alex had a lot of curiosity, and he became quite adept at being able to get things up and running in the studio,” according to John.

  “I didn’t know much about recording then, but I knew enough about music theory from my dad,” Alex said. “I think my knowledge of music theory was superior to anyone else’s in the band. I was probably the only guy in the band who knew what a diminished chord was. Put me in a recording studio, and I can fool around and make fairly innovative music.”

  “I went by the studio one night when the whole band had finally formed,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “and they were doing a full-tilt band tracking session. They were like little kids out in the studio. Joints were passing behind the sound walls, and John Fry was in the control room engineering. They really had a pretty unique sound.”

  Others sometimes stopped by during late-night sessions. Ardent engineer Terry Manning had recently married Carole Ruleman, Chris and Alex’s old friend, and she’d been hired by John to create Ardent’s graphics and adverti
sing layouts. An Anglophile like her husband, Carole started a design company called Cenotaph, named after a place she discovered on a London street map. Vera recorded some Tammy Wynette–style songs with Alex and Grant Weisbrot, who had taken a Greyhound down from New York. Alex also cut a couple of Weisbrot’s off-key songs. “We were doing our own thing in the studio,” says Vera. “They were having fun with it, because they were playing around with echoes and overdubbing and using every trick in the book to make my voice sound better.”

  One night Vera, Alex, and Chris stepped outside Ardent to smoke a joint in the evening air. They started pondering various names for the band. Across the street facing them was a Sweden Kream drive-in, where they sometimes picked up burgers and fries, and next to it a supermarket, part of a Southern chain. “There was the Big Star grocery store,” Vera remembers, “and they just tried that name out, and it sounded good, and they decided that’s what it was going to be.” As Alex later recalled, “Chris and I were smoking a joint outside the studio, trying to think of a name, and he looked across the street and said, ‘Big Star,’ and I said [snaps fingers], ‘That’s it.’”

  When they told Andy and Jody, “I remember feeling really uncomfortable—like we were jinxing ourselves,” says Jody. “It was so pretentious.” That night, though, they all agreed it sounded cool, though they laughed at their audacity—all but Chris. He knew that the name captured what they would become.

  Chris felt strongly about the songs’ arrangements and production as they entered the studio. “It was pretty much Chris’s vision,” says Jody. “Alex obviously played a major role, and we all felt like we had an equal share in this thing. To an extent it was a democracy, but it was Chris’s vision, and we all deferred to that.”

  “Chris was really into recording,” Alex said. “He didn’t want the rest of us fooling around in the studio. That was his business. John would record the basic tracks with the whole band playing live and then just sort of left it to us after that. We had three, four, five sessions with John recording the basic tracks.” Two Rock City tracks, “Feel” and “My Life Is Right” (which Chris cowrote with Tom Eubanks), were adapted, with new parts added. Veterans of the Box Tops sessions Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson had already overdubbed horn parts on “Feel,” which would kick off the album.

  Also among the initial tunes they recorded was one Alex had worked up in New York, now called “The Ballad of El Goodo”; Andy came up with the title while “sort of mocking the tune,” according to Alex. The lyrics were partially inspired by Alex’s brother Howard’s attempts to be classified as a conscientious objector. In the song’s beautiful melody line, Alex spelled out his thoughts on the draft: “They’ll zip you up and dress you down, stand you in a row / But you know you don’t have to, you can just say no.” (Alex on the song: “The music is really good; the lyrics are a little strained in the verses, but the choruses kick ass.”)

  Joining him on three-part harmonies for the choruses are Terry and Chris, inspired by Beach Boys vocals. Alex’s closing guitar riff is a nod to a Doc Watson lick; the chiming, layered guitars throughout add a textured underpinning, with phaser shifting at the end giving an unexpected bit of metal to the mostly acoustic number.

  “I can remember first working up ‘Ballad of El Goodo,’” Jody says, “and it just blew my mind. Chris shaped ‘Ballad of El Goodo’ to an extent, with the background vocals and the interplay between guitars . . . the arrangements as far as the sound of Chris’s guitar and the sound of Alex’s guitar, the guitar tones and how they worked within a song, and how they played off each other. I started working on how drum fills would build through the song. There’s a certain majesty to the chorus, and the introduction to the chorus really captured what I was feeling; then the turnaround and the opportunity to do a fill and make some sort of statement, building a little suspense or anticipation. I can still hear Chris saying, ‘Play louder, hit harder,’ and that’s probably why I hit real hard now.”

  When parts were not played properly during recording, Chris demanded they be redone, sometimes resulting in numerous takes; he was particularly hard on Andy, who already felt insecure about his bass playing. As the guys sometimes struggled to work out their parts, fights broke out. By comparison, Alex and Chris usually got along fine during songwriting sessions and rehearsals and in the studio. Chris really liked Alex’s vocals and guitar playing, as well as his writing. Alex was particularly impressed by Chris’s approach to arranging vocal harmonies. “Chris and I did all the harmony vocals, and he had a brilliant mind that worked in a sort of contrapuntal way,” Alex said. “It wasn’t based so much on ‘Oh, you’re singing the root. I should be singing the third above.’ He would just sing along with the line I was singing. He was a brilliant, instinctual maker of counterpoint.”

  Another of Alex’s New York songs, “Thirteen,” was also expanded by Chris when cut at Ardent. Sung in a voice even more vulnerable than that he used on “El Goodo,” Alex’s yearning ballad paints a portrait of teenage first love, with lyrics that could have been inspired by his junior high days spent with Louise Leffler.

  The overlapping acoustic guitars create a textured interplay, and Chris’s instrumental bridge transforms “Thirteen” from a simple folk song into more complicated balladry. Again Alex’s vocals sound fragile alongside the fingerpicked guitar. “That’s one of my almost-good songs,” Alex said. “I don’t know where it came from, but I made up this wild bit of guitar in fifteen minutes. You don’t hear many twenty-year-olds doing that.” He disparaged the lyrics—“I’m good for a verse before I lay an egg”—and disliked his vocals: “I was still trying to find my voice.”

  Alex’s “Give Me Another Chance” was in a similar vein, with a spare opening that gradually builds, adding instrumentation, including a Mellotron-created strings section and Terry’s electric piano. When Alex sang in his highest register, Chris told him, “It really sounds like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s good. I didn’t think you’d be able to sing that high.” Years later Alex scoffed at the song: “A lot of the time I was groping toward writing good songs. . . . But those maudlin ballads . . . they’re not good for anyone except for nursing their depression.”

  Terry Manning disagrees: “I think ‘Give Me Another Chance’ and ‘Thirteen’ represent the real Alex Chilton. I love his soft side, just the sweetness and the purity that seem to be there. I remember telling him how much I loved ‘Give Me Another Chance,’ that it’s maybe my favorite of all the Big Star songs, and he just looked really embarrassed when I mentioned it and said, ‘Well, I never really cared for that.’ Didn’t even want to hear about it.”

  Alex wrote some rockers, too. “In the Street” kicks off with the Blind Willie McTell lick Keith Sykes taught him “as the main riff,” said Alex. “We recorded the track, and then the words were written the night before the session.” Chris Bell took the lead vocals, using his Robert Plant–style tenor, with Alex harmonizing on the chorus. The lyrics perfectly capture a teenager’s interior life—“not a thing to do but talk to you / . . . wish we had a joint so bad”—and it’s one early original that Alex never belittled, calling it “probably my greatest success”; in years to come, it became one of his most lucrative copyrights. With Alex’s Les Paul interweaving with Chris’s 330, “In the Street” rocks hard, peppered with unusual percussion breaks.

  Another rocker Alex contributed, “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” was among his favorites on the debut, along with “Feel,” and again illustrated the creative partnership between Alex on lead vocals and Chris on harmony and lead guitar (including wah-wah pedal). “It’s straightforward,” Alex said of the song, “nothing pretentious about it. It has a rhythmic thrust about it—it’s strong all the way around.” The most acerbic track, Chris’s aggressive “Don’t Lie to Me,” features near-shrieking vocals, the intensity enhanced by some out-there overdubs, including oscillators and racing motorcycle engines.

  F
or their cinematography class at Southwestern, Andy and Chris, the latter a big fan of Antonioni’s Blow-Up, brought in a movie camera to film vignettes starring their bandmates to accompany “Thirteen” and “Ballad of El Goodo.” For the latter, they captured Alex on 16 mm bopping down the avenue to the local draft board, his hair to his shoulders, his scarf draped around his neck, wearing a blazer, a ribbed sweater, and flared cords. He makes it to the elevator, then apparently decides to split and skips down the steps. They also filmed Big Star at Ardent and rehearsing at the Chilton house. Other scenes intended to accompany “Thirteen” include footage of carefree high school students strolling along a Memphis sidewalk.

  The basic tracks for nine songs were complete by Thanksgiving, just in time for Ardent’s move to a newly constructed, designed-to-spec brick facility at 2000 Madison Avenue in Midtown. John Fry’s spacious “Disneyland of a studio” had two recording rooms, along with state-of-the-art equipment, including a new sixteen-track recorder. The original studio’s electronics were moved into Studio B; the new equipment was installed in the spacious Studio A. The building also had large offices for John, a receptionist area, a lounge, and rooms for graphics and storage. Once settled in, the boys in Big Star, awarded their own keys, got back to work on overdubs—Chris as usual taking the lead—pouring everything into late-night marathon sessions. By now they’d decided to entitle their debut #1 Record: “We weren’t big stars,” Alex said, “and to call it #1 Record before it was released was a joke. But, sure, we thought it could become a big record. It was kind of like Charlie Chan’s number-one son, and it was our first album.”

 

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