The last few tracks were cut at the Madison studio, including a new, lusher version of the Rock City number, “Try Again,” and a brief sort of coda, entitled “ST 100/6,” which Chris primarily recorded on his own. The title was “a mythical album number,” said Chris, who joked that if Ardent didn’t release their album in a timely manner, they’d go directly to Stax to issue it, or else bootleg it, and use that number. “We were always threatening to bolt from Ardent to Stax,” Alex said, “and when John Fry was in the room, we’d say, ‘Oh, what about ‘ST 100/6’? and he’d say, ‘What’s that?’ and we’d go, ‘Oh, nothing . . .’”
In the middle of the night, Andy let himself in to Studio B and recorded vocals and piano on a demo of a tune he’d written, “The India Song.” “I was depressed and very into Joni Mitchell when I wrote it,” Andy said. “It was a lame imitation of ‘Carey.’” When Alex heard it, he loved the song and insisted they record it for the album, with his vocals double-tracked alongside Andy’s.
With twelve songs completed, Chris, often accompanied by Alex and Andy, would pull all-nighters two or three times a week at Ardent. “We agonized over everything, doing gobs of overdubs, each over and over again, trying to get the sound just right,” said Andy. For “Don’t Lie to Me” Norton motorcycles were taken into the brand-new studio, with their oil dripping all over the floor.
For the final phase of recording, John brought his know-how to the mixing sessions, which Alex would credit as being the album’s secret weapon. “John Fry was a genius in his way of mixdowns,” he said. “We didn’t put things on tape much differently than was the standard method of doing things, but he just had so much finesse and great ears, and he was just a great, meticulous mixdown engineer and . . . producer. I don’t know what you’d call it. But he’s the one responsible for making those records sound so fucking great.”
Chris was by John’s side throughout. “Chris, who’d stay late at night and engineer the overdubs, would be the one who’d be sitting right there during mixing,” says John. “Maybe somebody else would drop in for an hour, get bored, and leave. But he was the one who wanted to be right there all the way through the project.”
Chris didn’t stop there. During the mastering of the tapes, he kept in touch with Stax’s Larry Nix, the mastering engineer, and eventually showed up at the McLemore studio to supervise Nix’s work. “We had to really work to get that energy onto the vinyl,” Nix told Big Star biographer Rob Jovanovic. “We had to supply three different [pressing] plants and two sets [of masters], and it took a while to do that.” After the long, tedious process, John compared the masters with the original tapes before signing off. In the meantime, Chris showed up and wanted to commemorate the masters’ completion by etching into the run-out grooves (where the recording number is marked) some cryptic messages and images of stars. “I wrote the number into the master,” Nix recalls, “and then [Chris] took the tool and dropped it in the middle of the lacquer! And the master was gone! It was the last side I had to do. . . . I ran him out of there and down the hall.” The master had to be redone.
Chris ultimately etched the philosophy “The more you learn, the less you know” into the run-out grooves of the vinyl. He also included some unsavory “improper language,” according to John, on the inner circle, to be covered by the paper label. “It was seen by a female employee in the plating department of one of the plants,” said John. “She complained, there was a big stink, and I had to send an apology.”
The band had plenty of artistic friends to help with the album cover art and publicity materials. “I knew everyone in the band well except Jody,” Michael O’Brien says. “I was flattered they asked me to make their photographs. I knew we were friends, but their asking validated me in my new profession. I drove back to Memphis from Knoxville and spent the weekend photographing the band. I had just become proficient with the camera and black-and-white film. We did several sessions over the weekend, mostly in and around Alex’s house and at Ardent Studios’ new location on Madison Avenue. All four had connected to the camera. They were serious, confident, and had strong feelings about how good they were. This was a wonderful time for the band. They were just finishing the album. They knew it was good, and having some photographs taken was a kind of celebration.
“Alex and Chris couldn’t have been more different. Chris was neat, meticulous, even buttoned the top button of his collar. Alex was loose, relaxed, a little on the sloppy side. But they were very much alike in their strong sense of self. I believe they were effective together, their strengths complementing one another.”
Michael had good subjects. The guys looked like a band, a gang, yet each with his own style: Alex wore flared jeans and tight proto-glam sweaters, Chris stuck to mid-’60s preppy, Andy went for a kind of biker-rocker look, and Jody wore facets of all three. The four were rock-star lean, and except for Chris had hair to their shoulders. All were attractive and charismatic, and blue-eyed Jody could pass for a teen idol.
For the album-cover image Carole conferred with Alex, both enamored of the neon stars outside Joe’s Liquor Store on Poplar. They also wanted to give a nod to the band’s name. John Fry knew the owner of the Big Star grocery chain, who okayed their use of the name but didn’t want the group to use the logo, a five-pointed star with the words BIG STAR spelled out inside. The band needed an artist to devise its own logo. One of the Memphis College of Art’s professors, sculptor Ron Pekar, had lived in the house on Court Street where Alex and Suzi had an apartment. He and Alex had become friendly, and Alex had bought some of his neon sculptures. Ron agreed to create a neon sculpture for the band; his version had BIG spelled out in yellow neon tubes, surrounded by a glowing white five-pointed neon star. Carole photographed the eye-catching structure mounted on a black backdrop. Voila! the perfect cover, conveying mystery, artfulness, and electrified pop (which would come to signify “power pop”).
For songwriting credits, Chris very much wanted to emulate the Beatles, listing Bell/Chilton as author of the tracks. But Andy got sole credit for “The India Song,” and when Chris called Tom Eubanks to ask him to relinquish his cowriting credit (but not his copyright) to “My Life Is Right,” he didn’t get far. Tom told Jovanovic, “I said, ‘Chris, I came up with the idea. . . . So if you don’t want to put my name on it, don’t use the song.’” Carole Manning and Cenotaph were listed as the album’s cover designer; John Fry was cited as executive producer, the sole production credit listed. As John recalls, “Somebody said, ‘What about your credit?’ and I said, ‘Put John Fry, Engineer.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, that won’t do. That sounds ordinary, and we want something that sounds better than that—we want it to be Executive Producer.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’”
Once John had the test pressing, he and Chris summoned the band and their friends to Studio A for a listening session. With the state-of-the-art speakers blasting the layers of textured guitars and shimmering harmonies, a rush of excitement swept over everyone in the room. Alex sat very quietly, listening intently to the songs; he squirmed at some of the lyrics and wasn’t sure about the sound of his vocals. Yet he knew that the words he’d written were honest. Years later Alex had an epiphany: “Looking back at #1 Record, I realized something about my own personal development. I had quit school at sixteen to be in the Box Tops. So here I was, traveling across the country, surrounded by all these businessmen and older influences. I had left my own peer group completely, and in a way, I never really advanced past that. [In Big Star] I was twenty-one . . . but I was writing like I was sixteen or seventeen. So what I was writing about on that first Big Star album was just going back and trying to catch myself up.”
CHAPTER 13
#1 Record
After spending what Alex recalled as “three nights a week for a year” on the album, the band members awaited its planned release in September of ’72.
Chris and Andy had finished their sophomore year at Southwestern, turning in copies of musi
c they’d recorded and footage they’d shot for class assignments. By the time the masters shipped to the pressing plants in mid-June, their friendship was frayed. Chris’s “compulsiveness about [#1 Record] is one thing that ultimately drove us apart,” Andy remembered about the breach. “He became so intolerant and demanding that I just couldn’t handle him anymore. I was too far the other way; I just wanted to raise hell and party.”
In Alex, Andy found a partner in crime, carousing in bars like Trader Dick’s and the recently opened T.G.I. Friday’s, the first outpost of the New York City nitery. Though Alex and Andy were involved in relationships, it didn’t stop them from chatting up cute eighteen-year-olds, bowled over by the musicians’ charisma and bravado.
Andy’s girlfriend, Linda Schaeffer, had been Vera’s close friend since their days at Miss Hutchison’s, and the two decided to apply to college in Denver, where they hoped to transfer from Memphis State. Vera was still crazy about Alex but wanted to make a life for herself. “Vera was not in the background,” Bob Schiffer recalls. “She was equal. Alex was always attracted to strong women.” Since their time in New York, Vera had known that monogamy was not for Alex. “He said he didn’t want to get married again,” says Vera. “It was pretty much understood that there was not going to be any wedding. And, of course, at my age and my experience, marriage wasn’t something I really dreamed about at that point. It never seemed to come up or to be an issue.”
Alex liked to drop by Ardent and flirt with Diane Davis Wall, the studio’s office manager and the daughter of longtime Memphis session player Watson Davis. The beautiful brunette had married Gentrys drummer Larry Wall, had a child, and had recently been divorced. One Ardent employee remembered that nearly all the guys who worked at Ardent had a crush on Diane, who had large, luminous eyes and could converse with anyone about music.
Diane had functioned as a sort of nurse-cum-referee during the most stressful Big Star sessions. “They were so volatile, especially Chris and Andy,” she remembers. “Even though my father was a jazz musician, he never cursed at home, so I had to get used to this constant cursing. [One time] Chris takes his guitar and smashes it against the plate glass, breaks the glass, cuts himself. . . . I’m hysterical. They take him to the doctor, and he got stitched up. So then, after that, we got so used to their tantrums that I kept a little medical kit in one of my file drawers. I would be typing a contract and hear a crash, bang, and one of them comes up, and there’s screaming, yelling, cussing. Blood is dripping all over the desk, and I’d say, ‘Get away from my contract,’ and I’d just reach over, get out the tape and scissors and supplies, and throw them on the desk. . . . We were constantly bandaging them; there was so much breaking glass, crashing, breaking instruments . . .”
“They were all kids—eighteen to twenty-one years old—doing stupid things and maybe having petty jealousies,” Richard Rosebrough theorizes about those fraught moments. “I can remember one occasion where Andy lost it . . . but Alex just laughed and said, ‘He’s acting like a child—now he’s off pouting somewhere.’ I don’t know exactly what the problems were in Big Star—maybe there was a little jealousy, or maybe a little power play to be the leader of the band.”
One day as Richard sat waiting for his appointment at his psychiatrist, he ran into two Ardent employees there, on their way out of the office: “Then when I came out, Chris Bell is seated, waiting to go in. It’s a mindfuck. It was crazy. A lot of crazy situations, competition to make the record company go, people vying for control. A lot of us really had some serious psychological problems from time to time, and being poor little rich kids, it was almost considered cool in our group to be labeled a little crazy. One day I realized we were all going to doctors. . . . We were young and immature and really not ready to take responsibility for our actions and take control of our destiny. Chris was moody a lot of the time. You never really knew what he was thinking or what was going on. He drank a lot. We were all drinking . . . taking downs.”
By the summer of ’72, Chris had started relying on various barbiturates to chill out; getting prescriptions for Valium, tranquilizers, and downers of all types was easy in the town where Elvis’s notorious physician, Dr. Nick, thrived. Occasionally Chris picked Alex up for a game of tennis; on the court there was no hiding the pair’s competitiveness, as each thought he was the better player (their friends agreed that Alex could outplay Chris). John Fry and Chris, who were very close friends, also spent time together at John’s home, and John sometimes piloted them to the Caribbean in his plane.
Alex occasionally jammed with local blues-rock guitarist Robert Johnson, who’d been touring with Isaac Hayes, alongside bassist Roland Robinson and drummer Jerry Norris. “I was the only white guy in the band,” says Johnson, who hung out at Alex’s when in town. “We’d get stoned in Alex’s bedroom and listen to some T. Rex records I’d brought back from London. Jerry and Roland came over and the four of us rehearsed together at Alex’s for three or four days. We were playing acid rock—a cross between Cream, Mountain, and Curtis Mayfield. Alex liked playing with these really great black musicians.” Johnson recalls that one day Chris Bell stopped by and got huffy when he discovered his Big Star partner jamming with another band.
To promote #1 Record, Big Star needed to book concerts to coincide with the album’s release. John bought the band a P.A. system and some high-end amplifiers—Hiwatts, the kind favored by Pete Townshend. “Ardent had the notion that ‘Well, we need to set these guys up so they can tour [and] promote the album,’” Andy recalled. “We got ourselves all ready to play.” They also hired an old friend of Chris and Andy’s from MUS, John Dando, an electronics whiz, to serve as their equipment manager on the road. Jody got a new drum kit, an oversized Ludwig. Yet Chris, in particular, seemed reluctant to accept bookings he deemed unworthy of the band’s stature. “We thought we were the Beatles and weren’t playing live anymore,” Alex joked.
After former Icewater drummer Steve Rhea finished college in Dallas in May, John Fry hired him as Ardent’s promo man to help get airplay for the label’s releases. In school, Rhea had worked at the campus radio station. “Chris persuaded John that I needed to be aboard, because we were all going to be a success,” Steve remembered. “If I couldn’t be in the band, I needed to be there, and he would like to have somebody focusing on Big Star all the time.”
• • •
The decision was made to issue a Big Star single prior to the album’s release. For the A-side, they chose “When My Baby’s Beside Me”; the flip side was “In the Street,” but rather than use the same track as on the album, Chris wanted a different version, to make the 45 special. They returned to the studio to recut the song live, this time with beefed-up drums: Richard Rosebrough and Jody each playing a kit simultaneously. “This was just one of those ‘Why don’t we’ ideas,” Richard says. As Terry Manning recalls, “Chris was trying to do everything at once, all live—trying to get away from deep production.”
John had also signed to the label another act recording at Ardent: Tulsa’s Cargoe. Consisting of bassist Max Wisley, keyboardist Bill Phillips, guitarist Tommy Richards, and drummer Tim Benton, the band centered its sound on close-harmony singing (all four were vocalists) but played a more Southern-style pop-rock, with frequent soloing and a heavier keyboard sound than Big Star’s. The group’s upbeat “Feel Alright”—a recut version of a song originally recorded for Dan Penn’s financially strapped Beautiful Sounds label—became the debut Ardent release that spring and began getting national radio airplay, with Cargoe’s self-titled album soon following. Around its release, the group performed a concert at Ardent, engineered by Terry and broadcast in stereo by WMC, aka FM100, Memphis’s hot FM station.
“That live recording was one of the very earliest FM simultaneous broadcasts—simulcasts—in stereo,” says Max Wisley. “FM was still in its infancy then.” Gradually, FM stations were gaining listeners regionally as underground rock and album tracks beca
me the preferred music of the counterculture (as had been the case for years in San Francisco and New York). In addition, Terry and Carole Manning had shot a promotional 16 mm film of the band performing “Feel Alright.” All this attention on Cargoe undoubtedly angered Chris, who had wanted Big Star’s record out first and didn’t like Ardent focusing on another group. He and Terry Manning had been good friends for years but started getting into heated arguments around this time, including a fistfight in the Ardent parking lot.
“As for a relationship among the members of the two bands, none really developed,” according to Cargoe chronicler Frank Gutch. “We really didn’t talk a lot with Big Star,” Max Wisley told him. “They . . . came off like snotty rich kids, . . . better than everybody. . . . I’d hear weird stories about how somebody would be recording in one of the studios and get everything set just right and then Alex would come in at night and change all the mixing settings. They’d come in the next morning and find he’d changed everything on the board.” There was some interaction, though. Cargoe keyboardist Bill Phillips played piano on the live version of “In the Street,” released on 45. (Years later Alex would sometimes cover “Feel Alright” during his solo performances.) The band, who’d been among Tulsa’s first hippies, had settled communally into a Midtown house, and Suzi Chilton, with son Timothee in tow, moved in to live with drummer Tim Benton.
Cargoe was the first rock band to be distributed by Stax in the new agreement signed with Ardent. A special section on the Memphis music scene in the June 3, 1972, Billboard featured a story on Stax’s expansion into rock and country, genres outside the R&B and soul singles market it was known for. The article’s focus was on Isaac Hayes’s many successes, such as winning a Best Song Oscar for his “Theme from Shaft,” and included plugs for upcoming releases, including the Cargoe LP, with a photo of the band. Big Star was not mentioned.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 16