Big Star played its first gig without its founder in early January 1973. Lafayette’s was unusually quiet that night, with most of the sparse audience there to see Archie Bell and the Drells. Jody recalls, “We’d finish a song, and there might be one person clapping.” “We weren’t popular in our own environment at all,” Alex later explained. “All these fledgling kinds of heavy-metal outfits and blues-playing outfits—that’s what people wanted to hear. Me having been in the Box Tops was sort of a disgrace [among hard-rock fans] at the time, too.”
Alex, Andy, and Jody kicked off the set with their single, “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” just as they had during their brief “tour.” Without Chris’s guitar the tunes were more stripped-down, and Jody admirably handled harmony vocals (except on “Ballad of El Goodo,” which he warbled off-key). Andy, sounding a bit dispirited, introduced the songs as being from their LP “that came out about three months ago.” The energy began to build, though, when the band moved from #1 Record tracks to the new tunes they’d recently demoed, “Back of a Car” and “I Got Kinda Lost,” as well as a batch of covers. What began a bit subdued turned into a raggedly glorious set, illustrating the players’ growing confidence onstage.
They performed again the following night, with Jody singing lead on “Way Out West,” a new song Andy wrote about his girlfriend, Linda Schaeffer, who’d moved to Colorado (along with Vera Ellis) to attend college. Andy had decided not to sing at all, so Alex took on “The India Song.” In the middle of the set, Alex fingerpicked “Thirteen” while Jody played maracas and Andy strummed the rhythm on acoustic guitar. The new “O My Soul” rocked, with a funky chucka-chucka guitar part and Alex boldly singing in his tenor: “I can’t get a license to drive in my car / But I don’t really need it if I’m a Big Star.”
Some of the lyrics to that song and “She’s a Mover” were partially inspired by Alex’s new love, Diane Davis Wall. Alex began the lyrics to “O My Soul” on a napkin and “left it at my apartment one night,” Diane says. She recalls they’d had a long discussion about spirituality while eating slices of an apple pie she’d just baked. “He had been brought up an atheist, and I was raised Catholic. We could get into these deep discussions about the soul and its meaning. We would talk for hours about what a soul was and, if it was intangible, what it meant. He was fascinated by the soul. The napkin thing was Alex being melodramatic and leaving lyrics as poetry.” Diane inspired “She’s a Mover,” Alex told her, because “we were always dancing to T. Rex.”
Other lyrics to Alex’s new songs were clearly influenced by Vera’s departure. The pair stayed in touch, and he occasionally wrote her. “We never did have any big breakup or anything like that,” says Vera. “But Alex became involved with other people. . . . It was just something that kind of drifted away. When I went to college in Colorado, he started going out with someone else, and when I came back in town, he started going out with me instead of going out with her, and it was a big deal to her, but I was just kind of in and out of town.” Juggling relationships with Diane and Vera, both Libras, over the next six months would result later that year in what many consider Alex’s most perfect pop song.
Great news came in February, when Rolling Stone ran a five-hundred-word rave review of the “exceptionally good” #1 Record, written by Bud Scoppa, Alex’s acquaintance from the Village nearly two years earlier. As with several other reviews, Alex was singled out. Scoppa compared the band to Badfinger and the Raspberries, reporting that “Big Star shows more depth and consistency than either of those. A closer parallel is Todd Rundgren, who’s equally adept at evoking the Beatles, California rock, and 1965, but even Rundgren hasn’t made a whole album as impressive as this one.” The album’s strengths were described at length:
The first side is dominated by rock & roll while the second becomes increasingly reflective and acoustic as it winds down. In both styles, the guitar sound is sharp-edged and full; even the prettiest tunes have tension and subtle energy to them, and the rockers reverberate with power. The rock & roll tracks can be seen as a succession of imaginative guitar and vocal ideas, but . . . it’s on the slower songs that the influences are more noticeable. The oddly titled “Ballad of El Goodo,” with modal harmonies and a great McGuinn-style vocal by Chilton, may be the best song here. . . . And Chilton’s unaffected vocal style comes across to best advantage on the quietest tunes. . . . #1 Record is one of the sleepers of 1972.
The timing for such positive national press was perfect, since #1 Record was slated to be reissued in March 1973. Stax’s Al Bell had made a deal with Columbia Records president Clive Davis to distribute Stax’s releases, including the Ardent issues, and John Fry assumed that such a powerhouse company could finally get Big Star into record stores across the country. The trades weighed in with more praise after the reissue, with Record World proclaiming, “This is one of the best albums of the year, featuring the lead vocals of ex–Box Top member Alex Chilton. Rockers and ballads are exceptional. . . . Released several months ago to great reviews, this album deserves the major new push it is now being given.”
Alex continued making new demos at Ardent, including “Life Is White,” “You Get What You Deserve,” and “What’s Going Ahn.” With the future of Big Star in doubt, he thought he might try another solo album, though he still lacked confidence that it would go anywhere. Sung with a soft tenderness as in “Thirteen,” the demo for “What’s Going Ahn” documents a fully realized composition, with lead guitar breaks and other details played on acoustic guitar. “In those days I was very meticulous and strict and deliberate about the musical structures we were doing,” Alex later told Bruce Eaton, who described the demos as having “a purity and vulnerability that make an immediate and deep connection with the listener, leaving one to ponder what Chilton’s future as a folk singer might have been had he not agreed to join Big Star.”
Alex also started jamming with drummer Richard Rosebrough, now a full-time engineer at Ardent, and bassist Danny Jones, Vera’s former neighbor, who’d moved into the Chiltons’ garage apartment after his marriage broke up. “A wildness gurgled through Memphis” in 1973, according to Bluff City chronicler Robert Gordon. Alex, Andy, and Richard, as well as other Ardent personnel, enjoyed whiling away the hours at Trader Dick’s, Huey’s, and Friday’s—all crawling distance from Ardent. Nearby Overton Square was “the most popular Memphis party district since the heyday of Beale Street,” wrote The Commercial Appeal’s John Beifus.
Friday’s, with its English pub atmosphere, had expanded in size, with people still lined up down the street to get in. Trader Dick’s became known as “Quaalude City,” where “hard-partying hedonists hunted for Quaaludes,” wrote Beifus. Alex, like many of his pals, soon became a fan of the drug. “Around ’73, I began taking Quaaludes and things like that and drinking more,” he told Cub Koda, “so I guess around ’73 I began sliding into alcoholism.”
“Alex really loved his cocktails,” said John King, “especially if someone else was buying. He loved it that I had a company credit card. We’d get really drunk at Ardent, and then Fry would come in the next morning and we’d be huddled under the drum blankets.” Richard remembers similar episodes: “We often went . . . to Trader Dick’s . . . and we’d get drunk and drugged out and go into the studio at two in the morning and record.”
One night when Alex and Richard returned to Ardent, Alex sauntered into the control room to operate the board while Richard played drums on “She’s a Mover.” With Alex’s talkback and a cowbell starting the track, Richard played a swingin’ bouncy beat. “That was the very first session I ever engineered,” Alex told Bruce Eaton. “I set Rich up out in the studio and I don’t know how many mics I gave him but however many mics I was running on the drums, I . . . did the most extravagant amount of compression one can do on a set of drums. It was not the normal way people did things at all.”
At one point Alex asked Richard, “What’s this Dolby fucker do?” referring t
o the state-of-the-art sound-enhancement system John Fry had installed at Ardent. Hence, “Dolby Fuckers” became the name Richard jotted down on the tape box. Alex was pleased with the results and taught the song to Danny Jones, who joined him at Ardent for another middle-of-the-night session to add bass to the recording. “Alex was a perfectionist at everything he did,” according to Danny, “but the very last thing he wanted to come across as was a perfectionist. What did Van Gogh say? ‘Avoid the obvious,’ and he left it at that. Chilton would probably say the same thing. He wanted it to be so spontaneous and so free and loose. That’s why he came up with some really cool recording techniques. That’s just what he lived and breathed: You don’t want to overproduce anything. Alex ran the board, and everything was one take—Alex wouldn’t do more than one take. His stuff was already down, and I was playing bass, and we’d already rehearsed it, so what’s the use of doing it twice?”
Alex was so happy with that track that he made plans for a formal session, with John Fry engineering, to cut “What’s Going Ahn” with Richard and Danny, now jokingly referred to as the Dolby Fuckers. Danny and Richard had heard Alex’s acoustic demo and arrived at Ardent ready to go. “We cut that at Studio A,” Richard remembers. “John Fry did not engineer too many live sessions, so it was a blessed event.” After opening the song sparely on acoustic guitar, Alex sings forlornly about saying goodbye to a lover, “I like love but I don’t know, all these girls come and go / Always nothing left to say.”
Alex would continue to work on the lyrics, changing one line from “I’ve forgot everything” to “I’ve resigned everyone” to “I’ve foresaked everyone / ever since I was young.” Later criticizing “What’s Going Ahn” as “too earnest” and a “terrible” song, Alex said, “I was gettin’ really intense, wonderin’ just why I was so unhappy. I’d learned to write all these confused nonsensical lyrics from Chris and Andy.” In “You Get What You Deserve,” he wrote, “Too bad, such a drag / So much pain down the drain.” Was Alex still looking back at his brother Reid’s death? He never said.
Not all the lyrics of his new songs were so personal, however. Another late-night studio session with Richard led to “Mod Lang,” an abbreviation for “Modern Languages,” a department at Memphis State. “All the words were stolen from blues songs,” Alex said of the lyrics. “We took one line from each song—‘I Can’t Be Satisfied,’ the Muddy Waters song, and ‘(Baby) What You Want Me to Do’ from Jimmy Reed.” Alex laughed at the memory. “I’d cut a track and I didn’t have [lyrics] for it, so I just stole a line from every old blues song I know.”
On the “Mod Lang” recording, Alex employed his dirtiest guitar sound with a brief but potent lead during the break. Again he brought in Danny Jones to successfully add the bass lines. After this session, the loose trio of Jones, Rosebrough, and Chilton played a one-off gig to a drunken crowd on the small stage at Friday’s. Alex enjoyed working with Danny, a Jackson, Mississippi, native, so much that he later produced an Ardent session with Jones’s hometown band, cutting an improvisational number called “Toe Jam.”
While Alex was pursuing music with others, John King was brainstorming a means of getting Big Star back on track, as well as helping Stax promote their new rock releases. In addition to distributing Ardent’s LPs, Stax had signed a British rock band called Skin Alley, as well as a group formed by Larry Raspberry, on the scene since the Gentrys, including a stint in Alamo with Richard Rosebrough. While corresponding with rock critics about Big Star’s LP, King had become friendly with several of them, particularly a Connecticut teen named Jon Tiven, who founded a fanzine called New Haven Rock Press. After Tiven penned an exuberant review of #1 Record in Boston’s Fusion, King flew him to Memphis to meet the band, as well as to a Gavin radio convention on the West Coast, where Ardent was promoting Big Star. In the February 1973 issue of Phonograph Record magazine, Martin Cerf wrote of the Tiven–Big Star lovefest, in a glowing review of the single “When My Baby’s Beside Me”: “Word has it within four days of receipt, DJ copies [of #1 Record] the nation over were showin’ up in bargain bins everywhere . . . sealed. In fact, only one bothered to listen, Jon Tiven, and he quacked in Fusion that ‘Big Star are the greatest thing since Count Five, the Yardbirds,’ and so on.”
To build on the press, King, together with Tiven and writer/rock historian Greg Shaw, who ran his own L.A.-based fanzine, Bomp, among other ventures, decided to organize a Rock Writers Convention, to be held in Memphis on Memorial Day weekend. Ostensibly the summit’s mission was to organize a union for rock scribes, so they could earn better pay and get more respect as journalists. Stax agreed to foot the bill, which amounted to $40,000 (over $200,000 in today’s dollars) to fly in more than one hundred rock critics from across the U.S. and U.K., put them up at the Holiday Inn, wine and dine them, bus them to Memphis landmarks like Graceland, and, on the final night, knock them out with a showcase at Lafayette’s Music Room, featuring Skin Alley, Larry Raspberry and the High-Steppers, and Big Star. As writers from California (Shaw, Gene Sculatti, and Cameron Crowe), the New York City area (Richard Meltzer, Andy Shernoff, Gary Kenton, Pete Tomlinson, Lenny Kaye, and Nick Tosches), upstate New York (Billy Altman), Austin (Chet Flippo), Detroit (most of Creem’s staff, including Lester Bangs and Jaan Uhelszki), and the U.K. (Simon Frith, Ben Edmonds, and Pete Frame) signed on, King persuaded Alex, Andy, and Jody to play a gig.
“The big push was behind this English band called Skin Alley,” Jody recalls, “but as John King was making these calls, and as the writers were our audience, [they] would ask if Big Star was going to play. So John came to us and said, ‘Hey, would you mind playing?’” Soon after, the threesome began rehearsing and planning their set based on their January gig at Lafayette’s.
Whatever the stated purpose of the gathering, most of those in attendance saw the First Annual National Association of Rock Writers Convention as a free ride to party with their friends in the town where rock & roll was born. The thirsty scribes began arriving in Memphis for the convention’s start on Friday, May 25. Though some of the journalists missed the Lafayette’s show on Saturday night to join a renegade field trip to a Mississippi roadhouse where Charlie Feathers was playing, enough turned out that the room was packed.
By the time Big Star took the stage, around midnight, the audience was well lubricated. One of the most sloshed, Richard Meltzer, an incendiary writer in word and deed, jumped onstage to introduce the band: “Puke on your momma’s pussy!” he screamed into the mic. “BIG STAR!” After that auspicious beginning, the boys ambled to the stage and plugged in, Alex and Andy twirling the dials on their amps to get the sound right. Feedback shrieked. More twiddling followed. The audience became restless. Finally, Alex, who’d recently had his hair cut short, attacked the chucka-chucka riff to “Feel.” Stripped down and spare, the song was a powerful start, and the attendees jumped from their seats, crowded onto the dance floor, and by the fourth song, were boogying down. “All the rock writers started dancing, and Richard [Meltzer] took his pants off on the dance floor while Big Star was playing, so he danced in his tighty whities for a while,” recalls Arkansas native Ross Johnson, then a fledgling rock writer and drummer. “I had seen Big Star perform before, and they had never had this kind of reception. They were never adored as with this handpicked perfect audience.”
“The sound was much more driving than on [#1] Record,” another Arkansan Metal Mike Saunders wrote in his live review for Phonograph Record magazine, “very close to the chunkiness of the ’60s Kinks. Jody Stephens was an excellent [Mick] Avoryish drummer on stage, Andy Hummel used a chungy, treble-heavy bass sound, and combined with Chilton’s incomparable guitar style, it made for an exceptionally tight, self-contained group sound.” Saunders (who’d later form L.A. hardcore band the Angry Samoans) was particularly impressed by Alex’s punky attitude and instrumental prowess, calling him
the greatest rhythm guitarist I’ve ever seen in the Beatles/Badfinger genre of English ligh
tweight pop, and maybe one of the best ever in any rock style. He plays a Stratocaster with tremolo attachment, plus heavy reverb from his amp. In between picking the top strings to get a shimmering sound, he’ll drive out treble power chords that do for Badfinger stuff what Jimmy Page did for “You Really Got Me.” All the while working the tremolo! His guitar style and the group’s sound didn’t come off on [#1] Record. Onstage it did, and it was superb. “Feel,” “In the Street,” “My Life Is Right,” “Don’t Lie to Me,” “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” among others, rocked out ten times as hard as on the record. Supplemented by Chilton’s moves—very wiry and captivating—and looks—straight 1966—it was perfect.
In the middle of the set, Andy and Jody departed the stage and Alex strapped on his Martin for a brief acoustic interlude, including “Thirteen,” “Motel Blues,” and “The Ballad of El Goodo,” of which Saunders declared, “I’ll swear up and down until I die [it] should’ve been Big Star’s single, could’ve been a hit, too.”
When Andy and Jody returned, Big Star broke out their new songs, “She’s a Mover,” “O My Soul,” “Way Out West,” and “Life Is White,” interspersed with their favorite covers by the Kinks, Todd Rundgren, T. Rex, and Chuck Berry. When the band dashed offstage, the room reverberated with stomping floorboards, applause, and rebel yells; Big Star returned and pulled out all the stops. Alex looked at Jody and Andy, telling them he wanted to do a song they’d never tried before, and to the audience, “This is a song you may remember. . . .” Over the din he shouted to Andy, “A minor, F, G . . .” and, in as gravelly a voice as he could muster: “Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane . . .” The place erupted. This was the first time Alex had unleashed his debut hit since leaving the Box Tops in 1970.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 18