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

by George-Warren, Holly

  For the title of the album—filled with what Ardent’s optimists predicted were hits—the band chose Radio City. Like #1 Record, it was a hopeful reference to the LP’s future. And Big Star, #1 Record, Radio City all worked together. “You would tag things with ‘city,’” Jody recalls. “If you’re in a rock & roll band—‘rock city.’ If something bad happened, it was ‘drag city.’ We all thought this was a radio-friendly album, so—Radio City.” Carole Manning and Alex wanted a cover image as striking as the previous record’s, so they contacted the Chiltons’ longtime friend William Eggleston, whose often disturbing color photographs documented Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. His provocative body of work was beginning to draw attention from arbiters of fine-art photography who had previously shunned color images. The following year he would be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and publish 14 Pictures, a portfolio of dye-transfer prints. Eggleston was a regular at Overton Square, often accompanied by his youthful paramour, Marcia Hare, and friends like Mississippian Vernon Richards, who assisted him in capturing raucous nightlife scenes with his camera.

  The band visited Bill’s studio, and for the front cover Alex selected “the light on the ceiling pic,” according to Andy. “We all loved it, and I thought it fit perfectly with the sort of avant-garde nature of the LP.” That photograph has become one of Eggleston’s most iconic images. Entitled Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973 but better known as Red Ceiling, it depicts a room in a house belonging to a debauched dentist. The focal point, a vivid red ceiling, pops due to Eggleston’s use of the dye-transfer printing process, a technique then more associated with commercial advertising than with fine-art photography.

  “When you look at a dye-transfer print it’s like it’s red blood that is wet on the wall,” Eggleston has said. “It shocks you every time.” The bare lightbulb and exposed wires convey eroticism, further alluded to by the Zodiac sex positions poster partially showing at the edge of the image. Perfect for the cover of an album that oozed sex and bloodletting, Eggleston’s photograph eventually would be exhibited throughout the world, including shows in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and the Met. “I wanted the design for Radio City to resemble the classic look of Bill’s photos as they were displayed in his home, with white mats and silver frames,” said Carole Manning. “So I kept the design as simple as possible. We had the slicks laminated with a gloss to duplicate the English [LP cover] look.”

  “We drank a lot, stayed out all night, and took all manner of drugs,” said Andy about carousing with Eggleston and company. “We wound up at the TGI Friday’s on Overton Square one Monday night, which was Rock and Roll Night. It was a major hell-raising scene. A DJ would play old 45s, and just everyone came and stuffed the place. That was the back cover.”

  The candid shot depicts Jody, Andy, and Alex decked out in their nighttime finery, surrounded by partiers, clearly enjoying themselves. With a gleeful smirk Alex points right at the camera, an image that vividly captures his nocturnal M.O. Gail Elise Clifton, an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress who worked at the Overton Square nightspot Godfather’s, met Alex one night after being introduced to him by their mutual friend, Clifford Hill. She took him home to her apartment down the street. Gail remembers that a few days afterward, Alex “pointed at me and introduced me to Andy and Carole as another ‘September Gurl.’” Gail and Alex’s liaison was short-lived; she’d recently had a fling with Todd Rundgren following his Memphis concert and was still carrying a torch for him when she slept with Alex. “He had a temper tantrum when I didn’t know who he was, that he’d been in the Box Tops,” says Gail. “He got down and beat his hands on the floor.”

  • • •

  John Fry and Alex reconvened to sequence the album, which ran just over thirty-six minutes (a common running time in ’73, excluding two-disc concept LPs). The songs fell into roughly the order in which they were finished; thus “September Gurls,” which certainly sounded like a hit, was buried on the second side near the end, followed by “Morpha Too” and “I’m in Love with a Girl.” “There might be a sort of chronological thing to the sequencing,” Alex told Eaton. “‘September Gurls’ was one of the later tunes I composed. I think probably at the end several of us sat down and said, ‘This will be the running order,’ and we saved some of the weird, offbeat stuff for towards the end just so as not to put people off too early.”

  As the mixing and sequencing wrapped in the fall, Andy registered for his senior year of college. Since #1 Record had already slipped into obscurity, he was cynical about prospects for Radio City. “I began to become more than a little disillusioned,” Andy said. “Plus, I was getting very nervous about finishing school and getting on with life instead of continuing with what was more and more becoming a loser activity. Also Alex was getting frustrated looking for material to fill out the LP and began venturing into more radical solo-type stuff like ‘Morpha Too,’ ‘I’m in Love with a Girl,’ ‘Mod Lang.’ By the time they were mixing the LP, I was pretty well out of the picture.”

  John King began planning promotional activities for Radio City to parlay Big Star’s previous good press into advance praise for the new album. He secured a two-night stand at Max’s Kansas City in New York for December 17 and 18 (a Monday and Tuesday), with CBS offering promotional support, and began booking commercials on the city’s prestigious WNEW FM radio station. During a meeting at Ardent with John King and John Fry to discuss an early-1974 tour, to commence around the record’s February release, a conflicted Andy stormed out, refusing to commit to the idea. “I rather impatiently and ungracefully told him he needed to just make up his mind about what he wanted to do,” said Fry. “He told me I was a fool.” Finally Andy agreed to play the Max’s dates but announced that he would quit afterward. “I could either finish college and go lead a more or less normal life,” said Andy, “or I could drop out and go on tour with a band I’d been in for several years that had yet to make a red cent. Tough choice! I was tired of being broke.”

  When Radio City was mastered, on December 3, the band’s future once again seemed in doubt. This time, though, Alex had put enough of himself into the project that he didn’t want to see the group disappear before the record had a chance. Looking for Andy’s replacement, he stopped in at various clubs to check out bands’ bass players and discovered John Lightman. Chatting afterward, Alex asked Lightman his birth date, and when he realized that John was a Scorpio, Alex offered him a spot in Big Star.

  For the New York gigs John King reserved two suites for the band at the Plaza Hotel, boosting morale and giving the appearance that Big Star were, actually, big stars. John Dando and John King accompanied them to New York, and the party began en route. Alex, Jody, and Andy flew in the day of the first gig at Max’s, and Alex invited Bob Schiffer, Keith Sykes, and Karin Berg to the show. Monday night, attended by CBS brass, was planned as a press event, and Billy Altman and Nick Tosches were among the numerous music critics at the bar.

  Feeling sleep-deprived and nervous about their lack of rehearsal, Big Star started tentatively, with Alex going onstage first, alone with his acoustic, for “El Goodo” and “Thirteen.” “Chilton’s aura of fragility was perfect for those songs,” wrote Billboard critic Sam Sutherland, “one an anthem of self-realization, the second a bittersweet but loving re-creation of true teen love that is parenthetically a eulogy for the innocent vitality of rock in the early ’60s.”

  When Andy and Jody joined Alex, the band plugged in and played a mix of songs from both albums, as well as obscure T. Rex, Todd Rundgren, and Kinks covers, to rapturous applause. Throughout the set John King would check in with critics, buying them drinks and making sure they liked what they heard. The next night, attendance was sparse, with some journalists returning, as well as a few fans, but Big Star attacked their two sets with more energy and focus than they had during Monday’s show.

  In a review that ran in Zoo World, Jon Tiven described the band’s appearance:

  Al
ex is the littlest guy in the group, and onstage it’s even more obvious. But not in the Steve Marriott ‘I’m 5'2", obnoxious, brassy, and I’m going to sing my baa-aa-aa-aals a-a-aw-aw-awf’ way of being small, but in a rather humble, friendly, and (although I hate to put it this way) cute manner. Andy’s the typical unconcerned bassist, off to the side staring at his fingers in a very John Entwistlian way, knowing that the audience should be focusing their attention upon the lead singer. Then there’s Jody, staring off into space, occasionally cracking a smile, while he flares away solidly at his drum kit. They’re all good-looking in different ways, so girls, it’s time once again to bring the instamatics out of the closet and worm your way up to the front row.

  At one point Andy’s bass amp went on the fritz, which Alex blamed on John Dando, embarrassing him from the stage. “Alex could be pretty cruel with things that he would say,” Dando recalls, “and we had a pretty sharp exchange at Max’s Kansas City. He said something pretty rotten to me over the microphone, and I fired something back at him. I remember people said, ‘You can’t say that to him, he’s Alex Chilton.’ And I said, ‘The hell I can’t!’”

  Fueled by a few rounds of drinks, the band encored with “The Letter,” which impressed Tiven: “Alex handles the guitar parts onstage with perfection. He’s relaxed, assured of his ability, and ready to make use of it, shooting from the hip every time.” Alex approached it with more irony each time he performed it.

  After two sets, which alternated with a comedy routine by actor Ed Begley Jr., the band’s party continued at the hotel. “I went to Max’s, and Alex said, ‘Why don’t you stay with us tonight?’” recalls Bob Schiffer. “I ended up staying with them at the Plaza. We were living like the Beatles there. It was a beautiful night with light snow, and you’d look out at Central Park, and it was glorious. They thought they were going to make it then. Except for Andy, who was a worrier and was already contemplating a second life in terms of school.” Keith Sykes, also joining the party at the Plaza, remembers, “Alex was really up about the new record.”

  Celebrating with a suiteful of friends, the band ordered up bottles of booze from room service. “Stax didn’t have any control over us—we’d just turn in receipts,” says Dando. “We were on our own and were just running wild. We had carte blanche. There was just an outrageous bill.”

  Still sore about his altercation with Alex, John Dando quit as equipment manager after the band returned to Memphis, and the expensive trip did not go over well at Stax or Ardent. Steve Rhea decided he’d had enough and left his job as Ardent’s marketing man. But everyone’s mood improved the week before Alex’s twenty-third birthday when Billboard ran its positive review of the Max’s show, in which Sutherland singled out Alex as “composer of the band’s best material.” Sutherland cheered Big Star on, promising “strong new material on the way” and stating that “as a trio, the departure of the band’s second guitarist and writer has provided a new coherence to the act, which centers logically around Alex Chilton. . . . The set was a triumph, covering some exciting bases with the new tunes.”

  In time for Radio City’s impending release, hundreds of music writers, disc jockeys, and music industry people received a unique Christmas card, courtesy of John King and Carole Manning. It featured on the front three sinister-looking rascals, one wearing a star on his sweater, threatening, “Please play our records—or we’ll burn your tree.” When the card was opened, it revealed a charred stick with branches.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sister Lovers

  The year 1974 began promisingly for Alex: Over the holidays, he’d gotten involved with the ravishing eighteen-year-old Lesa Aldridge, home from Sarah Lawrence after attending as a freshman. The two had briefly met the year before, when she dated Andy Hummel, but Alex had been too caught up in his back-and-forth relationships with Vera and Diane to act on his attraction to the flirtatious blonde (though she may have inspired lyrics he was writing).

  Just before Lesa left for college, she’d spotted Alex at a Midtown watering hole, Yosemite Sam’s. That night he was wrangling a messed-up female friend. But something about Alex tugged deeply at Lesa. “That was it,” she says. “Time stood still, like in a movie, and light shown down on us. But he didn’t see me. He was too busy with this girl who was ODing or something.” Lesa’s pal Karen Chatham was also attracted to Alex, and when she offered her help, he was rude. Afterward, Lesa and Karen went to the home of William Eggleston, Lesa’s second cousin. “Later that night Karen was crying over Alex,” says Lesa, and as she consoled her friend on a couch, Eggleston photographed the pair. (The striking image would eventually be featured in magazines and on museum walls.)

  Lesa’s socially and politically liberal parents, William Aldridge, a Presbyterian theologian and dean of the Memphis Theological Seminary, and Elizabeth, Eggleston’s first cousin, who hailed from Sumner, Mississippi—Elizabeth Aldridge came from old money, “aristocrats of the Delta,” as Rosa Eggleston liked to call them—were permissive with their five children. Their second daughter, Lesa, was born in Mississippi on May 28, 1955—a Gemini Goat, according to the Chinese astrology Alex had begun studying (he was a Capricorn Tiger). “Apparently it’s a terrible combination,” Lesa later said. Her astrological sign characterized her as “a lusty bitch,” Alex told her.

  Lesa’s looks—high cheekbones, an upturned nose, wide-set eyes, and flowing honey-colored hair—were marred only by her discolored teeth, a result of her mother having taken tetracycline while pregnant. “Lesa didn’t want her teeth fixed,” says Gail Elise Clifton, soon to become her friend and later her bandmate. “I was like, ‘That is punk.’ Your mother’s a millionaire, you got charcoal-colored teeth, you don’t even want to get them fixed. I loved her for that.”

  The Aldridges had moved back to Memphis in 1972 (Lesa completed her senior year at Central High), having left in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Bill Aldridge marched with King during the sanitation workers’ strike leading up to King’s murder. His conservative church, outraged by his pro–civil rights stance and progressive politics, planned to fire him, so he took a position in Princeton, New Jersey. There the family embraced the counterculture. “Lesa’s mother was extremely liberal,” says Amy Gassner, who spent time at the Aldridges and, when younger, had Lesa as a babysitter. “She sort of had a free-love philosophy. We just adored her! All of us teenagers migrated to their house—I lost my virginity there!” “You really had to do a lot to rebel at my house,” Lesa says.

  • • •

  Petite, high-spirited, and keenly intelligent, Lesa glowed in Alex’s presence. Though Alex and Karen had started dating while Lesa was at Sarah Lawrence, he soon made his intentions known to Aldridge. “They’d been hanging out together,” says Lesa, “but I wouldn’t say it was like I stole him from Karen. It was obvious that he liked me—the way I had when I’d seen him that night. There was definitely a spark.”

  Their first date was to an Arthur Murray dance class. “Alex had gotten a coupon for a free lesson, and he picked me up in his little white convertible with red seats and we waltzed for an hour,” Lesa recalls. “I was classy and intelligent and I think he liked that about me. I was no run-of-the-mill kind of gal.” She did not return to college, spending her time with Alex, who often stayed over at the Aldridge home.

  Smitten, the two liked to watch old James Dean movies. Lesa had bought an acoustic guitar with money she’d earned babysitting, and Alex showed her a few chords and encouraged her to write songs. “A lot of what we did together was based around music,” Lesa says. “I don’t think I’ve known anything quite as fine as when he was being sweet and dear to me. My heart just skipped a beat.” She realized soon after they met, though, that “the most beautiful man” could also be jealous and insecure, dark emotions that would grow over time.

  Lesa’s sister Holliday, a high school senior, began dating Jody, who eventually moved into the Aldridge house. “Her par
ents were pretty remarkable,” says Jody. “They changed my life in terms of reassurance and giving me support and encouragement. I had such incredible respect for them. Elizabeth was a really smart lady who was very individualistic with her own thoughts about cultural things and women’s roles, and a definite sense of direction for herself.”

  • • •

  Shortly after meeting Lesa, Alex also started spending time with twenty-five-year-old John Lightman, the bassist whom he’d hired for Big Star the previous November. Born on October 31, 1949, John played a jazz-tinged style with impeccable timing, perfect for the three-piece Big Star. His well-to-do East Memphis family owned the Malco movie theater chain and Park Bowling Lanes. He’d been to several colleges but primarily worked around town as a musician and at the family bowling alley. (One of John’s three brothers, Alan Lightman, is the physicist and best-selling author of Einstein’s Dreams and other books.)

  To teach John the Big Star songs, Alex tried to pick up a copy of #1 Record at Ardent, but the album had all but disappeared. Even Poplar Tunes no longer stocked it. Finally, when John visited the Chilton home on Montgomery, Alex gave him one of the family’s copies and also played him Radio City. “When I was learning the songs, Alex wanted me to invent new bass lines, more suited to a three-piece format,” John recalls. Alex also encouraged him to improvise as they started rehearsing with Jody at Ardent for an upcoming gig at Lafayette’s.

  “Alex would introduce me to people as his new best friend,” says John. When one acquaintance asked Alex about the quality of John’s playing, he said, “I like him so much, it’s hard for me to judge.” But when John mentioned to people that he’d joined Big Star, he got troubling feedback: “Everybody was like, ‘We need to warn the new guy.’ Everybody that I would talk to would get this look on their face like, ‘Oh, man, you’re going to need a shrink, becoming a part of that band!’”