Soon after, however, teaser advertisements featuring the Big Star LP cover’s neon star, with spare text, began appearing in Billboard and other trades. Gigs were finally booked, too, though Chris remained reluctant about the September and October dates being set up. Alex looked forward to playing some shows with the band, as did Jody and Andy. But “Chris was too high and mighty to bother with gigs,” Alex said. “In many ways, Chris was a snobby person who would disdain a lot of things kind of frivolously that maybe on reflection he wouldn’t disdain at all. I think gigging was sort of like that.”
The first pressing of #1 Record in September would amount to approximately four thousand copies—much fewer than the members of Big Star had hoped for, expecting their debut to live up to its title. “For Chris it was 100 percent certainty that this thing was going to take off,” Steve Rhea remembered. Yet the modest pressing was typical of debut albums of the era, according to Sire Records cofounder Seymour Stein. “Some of the larger independent labels that had independent distribution might have shipped a greater quantity to drive up billing and make themselves look good,” says Stein. “I’m referring to companies like Paramount Records, ABC, etc., that were owned by larger entities and would have wanted things to appear better than they were.”
The “FM Action” column of the August 26 issue of Billboard plugged the forthcoming album, recommending all its tracks to programmers, but mentioned just a pair of FM stations, in Memphis and Austin, that planned to play it. The issue’s “New Radio Action: Billboard Pick Singles” feature also recommended “When My Baby’s Beside Me.” Ardent/Stax placed a full-page color advertisement for the album in the issue. The following week Billboard ran another full-page ad, next to a similar spot for Cargoe. “FM Action” reported that two more stations in New Orleans and Georgia had added #1 Record to their playlists. The September 9 issue featured an album review that crowed:
Each and every cut on this album has the inherent potential to become a blockbuster single. The ramifications are positively awesome. Led by ex–Box Topper Alex Chilton, their sound is full of attractive contrasts and just below the surface subtleties. If favorites must be chosen, then let’s mention “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” “Don’t Lie to Me,” and “The Ballad of El Goodo.”
Chris bristled at the idea of Alex’s getting credit for his band but realized it was necessary for publicity’s sake. Steve Rhea worked the phones at Ardent, calling some fifty radio stations a day to encourage them to add Big Star to their playlists, and by mid-September multiple stations in thirty-four states had done so. Yet “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and #1 Record failed to chart, while Cargoe’s “Feel Alright” made it into the lower rungs of the Cash Box and Record World Hot 100 surveys.
Halfway across the country, in Minneapolis, music fan (and future artist manager and label executive) Peter Jesperson recalls his discovery of #1 Record, after being hipped to it by a record-collecting penpal in London. He happened upon it in the discount, or cut-out, bin downtown at Music City. “All of a sudden there’s the big neon star—the cover caught me right away,” Peter recalls. “It was laminated and looked like an import. They must have had a dozen, and it was ninety-nine cents. I grabbed one for my friend in London, and at first it didn’t occur to me to buy one for myself. But in the checkout line I kept looking at it, thinking, ‘What a great-looking cover.’” He went back and plucked out another copy and went home and played it. “I remember gripping the arms of my chair and going, ‘Oh, my God,’ when I got to track four, ‘Thirteen.’ It just hit me right where I live. That song opened the floodgates, and I just went absolutely bonkers over the band. I turned everyone I knew on to the record, but it was very hard to find. Those copies at Music City disappeared, and you couldn’t order it. People tried to special-order it and were unsuccessful.”
Because Stax used a system of independent distributors familiar with its typical fare—R&B, funk, and soul—there were missteps in the shipment of a white pop-rock band to record stores featuring such music. By mid-September, when Cash Box published another rave review—“an important album that should go to the top with proper handling”—it was becoming clear that the LP’s intial distribution had been botched. Steve Rhea would hear from radio programmers reluctant to play the record since it didn’t seem to be selling—which of course it couldn’t without vinyl in the stores. When Chris heard this, he became furious, blaming the situation on John Fry, with the result that their relationship became frayed.
“We were not a big company,” Terry Manning explains. “Just a few people with a very small staff in a small town in the South distributed by a bigger record company, Stax, a black music company. . . . No one involved had a lot of business acumen relating to the pop or rock music business. We were trying to go up against Columbia, Warner Bros., RCA—big names with big money and big staff, with lots of resources behind them. Yes, it can be done, and sometimes—occasionally—small labels have turned into big labels. This, sadly, was not one of those cases.”
Such was the situation when Big Star set out on their first “tour”—a handful of performances in the South, including two tourist towns in the Ozarks, Eureka Springs and Mountain View, Arkansas. The second show, held in an outdoor amphitheater, attracted fewer than fifty people. With the Hiwatt amps and Alex’s Marshall blasting the two guitars and bass, Chris’s vocals could barely be heard over the roar when Big Star opened with “In the Street.” The bad sound and lack of stage monitors gave Chris stage fright when he couldn’t hear himself sing. Alex, with years of experience in the Box Tops playing under similar conditions, wasn’t fazed.
Along with the songs from #1 Record, the band played a couple of new Bell tunes—the yearning “There Was a Light” and downcast “I Got Kinda Lost.” Covers included Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That,” as well as the Fab Four’s version of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Alex held back onstage; rather than act as front man, as he had in the Box Tops, he didn’t say much to the audience. Andy occasionally introduced the songs.
The band then traveled to New Orleans to perform at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning in City Park, as part of Political Rally ’72. New Orleans FM station WRNO had been playing tracks from #1 Record, and the band stopped by for an on-air interview the day before the gig. The free concert drew a crowd, and Alex later fondly recalled the event as being energized. Jody broke his bass drum head during the very first song. “I guess I was overexcited,” he remembers. “Then I had to scramble to replace it.”
Since Big Star was the first band onstage, they were filmed for local TV news and photographed for the front page of the September 25 Times-Picayune, with the headline A DAY OF POLITICS & MUSIC. The paper reported that “members of the rock band Big Star play their brand of music Sunday for a crowd gathered at Political Rally ’72 in City Park. Candidates joined the entertainers on the program, proving that politics and music do mix.”
Chris hated the gigs. “I was disgusted with some of the places they booked us into,” he later complained of such venues as an old movie theater in small-town Mississippi. “There were terrible arguments in the band, and it began to get very political and less musical.” College campuses did not prove to be much of an improvement. An outing to the University of Georgia in Athens was a bust. Bob Schiffer booked his pals into the University of Tennessee for the campus homecoming festivities, to perform atop the University Center. Though no one had heard of Big Star, Schiffer promoted the show by spreading the word that the band included the Box Tops’ lead singer, plus two former Knoxville students. When the band arrived in John Dando’s Volkswagen van, Bob discovered that Chris, an introvert as a UT freshman, was noticeably gloomy. “Chris was a very troubled person,” says Bob. “He was going through a lot, and he was very quiet about it. Alex was much more demonstrative of his feelings, while Chris would hold his back. That led to a lot of tension.”
The strains on
the band only increased. Chris heard rumors about Stax’s business practices that he found disturbing. “Chris complained about them,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “and was eventually told, ‘Well, look, son, in this business sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.’ Chris had high morals, and he was the one in the group who ended up becoming very spiritual. Chris went that way, he wore the cross, and he made moral judgments, thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Let’s face it, you get smack-dab in the middle of the music business, it’s ugly.”
Back in Memphis, the band still met occasionally at the Chiltons’ home to work on material, finishing several new songs. But arguments broke out, with one particularly vicious altercation between Andy and Chris. When Andy didn’t get his part right, Chris ridiculed him to the point that Andy slugged him, then stormed out. As blood poured from Chris’s nose, he grabbed Andy’s newly purchased Gibson Thunderbird bass and smashed it, breaking off the neck. Later, Andy got revenge: Coming across Chris’s Yamaha acoustic guitar, he stabbed holes in it with a screwdriver, later attributing such hurtful acts to the fact that “we were a very emotional band.”
“There were problems with friendships,” Richard Rosebrough remembers. “When you’re close with people and there are a lot of people involved—you hang out with this guy, then you hang out with that guy, and that guy hangs out with somebody else—jealousies start to crop up. There started being competition between Alex and Christopher . . . on musical and personal levels.”
Though Chris held a grudge against Ardent for the distribution fiasco, Alex took it in stride and wanted to continue his relationship with John’s label and studio. “Ardent had a big promotion staff, and they did great things,” Alex explained. John had brought on board his old friend John King to boost the PR. King’s energy and enthusiasm for Big Star helped some with morale, and he devised new promotional angles, including getting the album into the hands of a growing number of rock critics, who were responding favorably. Robert Christgau wrote a positive review in the Village Voice, focusing on Alex:
Alex Chilton’s voice is changing. When he was a teenage Box Top, his deep, soulful, bullfrog whopper was the biggest freak of nature since Stevie Winwood sang “I’m a Man,” but now that he’s formed his own group he gets to be an adolescent, complete with adenoidal quiver. Appropriately, the music tends toward the teen as well, but provides brand new thrills. . . . B+
In Memphis, however, Big Star’s music was not catching on and, according to Alex, got limited AM and FM airplay locally. “Led Zeppelin and all those bands that went into those ten-minute-long solos . . . were the big things around,” Alex recalled. “The early seventies were a trough if you grew up in the sixties liking the Beatles and that artful pop style. Our band and the Raspberries were about the only ones who had that sound going for them.” The Raspberries, a Cleveland-based group led by vocalist and songwriter Eric Carmen, scored a smash AM radio hit that year with “Go All the Way,” from its debut LP released by Capitol (featuring a scratch-’n’-sniff sticker of a raspberry on the cover).
When it became clear that #1 Record was a commercial flop, Chris began to slip over the edge, the lack of success “driving him mad,” according to Terry. “Depression can come on very strongly at a time of loss,” says Chris’s brother, David Bell. “He had put such an enormous amount of effort into the band that the album’s failure was a crushing blow.” Chris tried to talk Alex and the others into leaving Ardent and looking for a different studio and label. “He was taking some drugs—downers—around then, which make some people a little paranoid,” Alex said. “Somehow he got it into his head that we and all these other people were working against him, which wasn’t true at all. I remember Chris coming to me and saying that he was having trouble with John, and for that reason he wanted to split from Ardent and go somewhere else and do something else. Chris kind of presented it to me in a way that if we would follow him away from the record company that we would stay together. Chris had a way of being so cryptic and mysterious at times that I didn’t get the point of what he was talking about. . . . I was more interested in staying where we were. I hadn’t really learned much about the recording studio . . . and I was very much interested in doing that.”
The record’s failure, “along with the emotional turmoil going on in his love life at the time, just broke him down,” said Andy, “and he became what we would now call ‘clinically depressed.’” Some of those closest to Chris thought he was a closeted gay man who may have fallen in love with John Fry or Alex at a time and place when such relationships would have been forbidden. In any case, Chris clearly felt anguished enough that by the end of October he decided to quit Big Star.
In November, after another violent argument at Ardent, Chris stormed out of the studio and began attacking John’s black Mercedes parked out back. “He and Fry had a personal relationship that was pretty close,” Alex reflected later. “There was some bad feeling between them [because] he was leaving.” Accounts vary about whether Chris repeatedly kicked the car or used an ax or hammer on it. One witness recalled that Chris smashed a Coke bottle and carved PIG with the broken glass onto its hood. Worse damage, though, came that night, when he returned to Ardent, let himself into the studio, found the #1 Record tape, and began erasing it. “I got a call from Richard Rosebrough, who was down at the studio,” John recalls, “and he said, ‘Chris is back up here and he’s erasing the multitrack tapes for #1 Record.’” After Richard stopped him, Chris, distraught, fled, then “apparently took a bunch of pills of some kind and wound up in the hospital,” according to John. “It was a sad day.” After the suicide attempt, which may have also included slashing his wrists, Chris was committed to the psychiatric ward of Memphis Baptist Hospital, then spent two more months recuperating at Mid-South Hospital.
As Alex saw it at the time, Chris’s departure spelled the end of Big Star. “Chris was gone and he had been the leader of the band,” Alex said. “There was Chris’s band, but there wasn’t any Chris. Well, okay, the band is folding.”
CHAPTER 14
You Get What You Deserve
Though he wouldn’t admit it at the time, Alex was disappointed when Chris quit Big Star. He had come to rely on Chris’s astute suggestions and critiques; the two seemed to bring out the best in each other as songwriters.
Alex respected Chris’s skills as a writer, producer, vocalist, and guitarist, as he emphasized some fifteen years later: “Chris Bell was somebody whose music I dug. I learned a lot from playing with him and learned a lot about recording. It was a time in my life when I made progress. Big Star was some sort of ultimate guitar band. We spent a lot of time recording . . . and tried to get good sounds out of our guitars. I don’t think that people will make a guitar band sound better than we made our band sound.”
Alex, Andy, and Jody continued to play music individually and sometimes together; with Chris’s departure, Alex looked toward Andy as a collaborator who could help him finish songs. He mainly wanted help on lyrics, later saying he’d preferred working on the music rather than the words. Or perhaps Alex was avoiding making his feelings known, which he tended to do in his lyrics. “If you’re writing anything decent, it’s in you, it’s your spirit coming out,” Alex said twenty years later. “If it’s not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it’s not a good song done with any conviction.” In 1973 Alex instead produced some songs he said were “written by committee.”
The remaining members of Big Star liked the new material, some of which had benefited from Chris’s contributions before his breakdown and suicide attempt, so they decided to cut demos at Ardent. “We had played the songs quite a bit in practice sessions, studio jams, and the like,” said Andy. “Some writing occurred with the three or four of us in Alex’s bedroom.” When Alex, Jody, and Andy returned to Ardent, they asked John to engineer a basic recording of four songs.
“We were all getting kind of sick of the conventional method o
f recording—close-miking everything, laying down thirty tracks before you settle on one, then millions of overdubs to get the final song,” Andy recalled, referring to the long, drawn-out #1 Record sessions. “Plus we were really interested in mono. So we got Fry to engineer a session in Studio B in mono, basically using one old big Neumann microphone in the middle of the room, with the whole band at once. . . . The goal was to do them all in one take. I think we came pretty close. They sounded great. They were hot, fresh, full of enthusiasm, and the mono sound Fry came up with was amazing.”
Two of four songs cut this way, “I Got Kinda Lost” and “There Was a Light,” had been primarily written by Chris, while another pair, “Back of a Car” and “O My Soul” had been composed by Alex, Andy, and Chris. For “Back of a Car,” which sounded of a piece with #1 Record, Alex later remembered, “Chris came up with the main melody line over the chords I was playing. We threw the first things that we could think of into that and just left it that way. . . . I think the words were mostly Andy’s, and my chord changes.”
As for the more raw “O My Soul,” Alex attributed some of the writing to Chris: “Most of the lyrics after the first bit are his, but I don’t care for those words. I mean, ‘You’re really a nice girl . . .’ Fuck! I would never say that! I’d be more inclined to say, ‘You’re really a rotten person, but I like you anyway.’”
Soon after Alex’s twenty-second birthday, he, Andy, and Jody decided to tackle a Memphis gig as a three-piece version of Big Star. They’d already agreed to the booking, opening for Houston R&B act Archie Bell and the Drells, before Chris quit. Lafayette’s Music Room had become the major rock club in Memphis since opening in 1972. Named for a longtime bartender at the Memphis Country Club, it had a good sound system, with an expansive raised stage and a balcony for more seating. According to former Box Tops drummer Thomas Boggs, who managed the club, “It was so popular we didn’t really have to advertise. Everything was just word of mouth. And we were paying some of these acts $2,000 a week, which was enormous back then. There was no other place like it.”
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 17