As Radio City’s release date approached, all concerned hoped it would fare better than Big Star’s debut. The PR department at Stax was still pushing the story that the label was thriving as it ventured into music other than R&B. A January 13 article in Memphis’s Commercial Appeal, STAX EXPANDS WITH POP, C&W, GOSPEL, stated that numerous personnel had been hired to help with the label’s new releases in other genres, and quoted Stax cofounder Jim Stewart as saying, “You have to always be creative and look into the future. There is no way to stand on what you have done in the past.” The reality, though, was that to expand and increase its staff, release an increasing number of albums, and renew its contract with megastar Isaac Hayes, the label had had to take out large bank loans. In addition, since CBS had begun distributing Stax, its releases had not reached the market as they should. Columbia Record executives did not like the terms Al Bell and Clive Davis negotiated, and as a result, rather than distributing Stax’s product, CBS began warehousing the company’s releases, pressed in ever-larger quantities by Stax. Basically, CBS could put a stranglehold on Stax, not selling the thousands of records the Memphis label had financed.
“The distribution never worked,” according to Stax historian Robert Gordon. “It never engaged. There was a vision between Al Bell and Clive Davis that could have made it work, but it was a tango only they could do. Clive’s firing totally scotched any chance of the Stax-CBS deal.”
John Fry had grown to regret that he’d signed with Stax and realized that things had only gotten worse since CBS entered the picture: “You know how it is when new people come in, and there’s been this power struggle, they decide, ‘Well, if we didn’t like the guy, maybe we don’t like his deals.’ So then you get all the nonsense from the companies, and the whole thing just never did work for Stax, and if it’s not working for Stax, it’s not working for itty-bitty Ardent, and there you go. It wasn’t just awful for us. It basically took Stax off the playing field.”
In February Ardent issued a press release and artist biography to accompany the copies of Radio City it sent to hundreds of press and radio contacts, which explained the fate of its predecessor:
A month after release, Stax Records, Ardent’s distributor, reshuffled its entire operation in order to join forces with Columbia Records. #1 Record died in the shuffle. The album was re-released in March, but by this time Chris Bell had become disillusioned and left the group, leaving a threesome unable to perform at such a critical time. . . . Big Star reorganized itself and decided to continue as a trio.
Not mentioned, of course, was the fact that when Columbia Records executives first saw Radio City’s cover, some demanded that the Eggleston photo be replaced, due to its “pornographic” imagery, that is, the fragment of the sex poster seen on the red wall. John Fry went to bat for the cover, and Columbia backed down.
As it was, the ongoing problems between Stax and Columbia resulted in very spotty distribution once again. Big Star fan Peter Jesperson, then working at Minneapolis’s major indie record store Oar Folkjokeopus, recalls that the shop couldn’t get shipments of Radio City and had to resort to buying copies in a chain store that had a handful. Other fans found the record in the discount bins or through mail-order several months after its release. Due to Ardent/Stax’s cost-cutting measures, print advertising for Radio City was at a minimum. And rather than issue a single to elicit AM radio play, the label execs waited to see if LP tracks were picked up by FM stations. Ardent eventually released two 45s.
Regardless, there was celebration in Midtown for Radio City’s February 1974 release, and more good reviews poured in. In the Village Voice Robert Christgau called the album “brilliant, addictive, definitively semi-popular, and all Alex Chilton. . . . The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards, the guitar solos sound like screwball readymade pastiches, and the lyrics sound like love is strange. . . . Can an album be catchy and twisted at the same time?” Jon Tiven raved about Radio City in Fusion and Zoo World (“the album of the year is upon us”); in Phonograph Record Bud Scoppa described it as a “spellbinder, an ever-deepening work that is at once funny, sad, and frightening.” The trades all weighed in positively as well.
To take advantage of the buzz, on March 13, Big Star flew to New York to play a live concert on WLIR, in Hempstead, Long Island, followed by a string of gigs at Max’s Kansas City. With John Dando again working as their equipment manager, the group drove straight from LaGuardia to Hempstead’s Ultra-Sonic studios for a quick rehearsal before the radio broadcast. The band ran through mostly Radio City songs, with Alex improvising guitar leads on “O My Soul” and “She’s a Mover.” After the rehearsal the guys wanted to leave for lunch, but the radio producer didn’t want to risk their being late for the live broadcast.
When DJ Jim Cameron asked Alex on air about the new record, quoting Tiven’s Zoo World pronouncement, a cranky Alex, who was tired and hungry after a long day of traveling and rehearsal, retorted, “Yeah, that’s, uh, nice—I hope it sells,” later mumbling that the first record was nowhere to be found. Cameron then pushed on, asking him what it was like touring with the Box Tops as a teen. “Pretty scummy,” said Alex, “about as scummy as now.” When the DJ then wondered if Big Star’s Anglo-tinged pop was “anachronistic,” Alex paused to weigh the question, this time answering with sincerity: “I haven’t decided yet—it just sounds melodious to my ears.”
Though the band felt underrehearsed and nervous, they performed a tight and energetic set, opening with “September Gurls.” Alex played muscular guitar, filling the space with his chordal leads, and his vocals were strong. He made the occasional quip in his song intros, introducing “O My Soul” as “our religious number.” Jody, who was second up with “Way Out West,” remembers, “When Big Star got onstage, a lot of the energy came from being nervous. It was always kind of a scary, neurotic experience—I think it’s evident on the live broadcast,” a tape of which later circulated as a bootleg before being released on CD eighteen years later. The rhythm section took a break midset for Alex’s solo acoustic numbers. He introduced “Thirteen” as an “anachronistic” tune since it “was written about when I was thirteen.” His version of Loudon Wainwright’s “Motel Blues” was one of his best solo performances yet, and “El Goodo” and “I’m in Love with a Girl” were also inspired. When the band returned, they finished the broadcast with “In the Street,” followed by the moody “You Get What You Deserve” and “Daisy Glaze” and uptempo “Back of a Car” and “She’s a Mover.” Exhausted, Alex stretched to hit the high notes.
The first stop on the drive to Manhattan was a liquor store, where Alex bought a bottle of booze, which he proceeded to polish off. This time, to cut costs, the band was booked at the budget Gramercy Park Hotel, a faded old beauty fallen into disrepair, which Alex nicknamed the Gram Parsons Hotel. That night Alex and John Lightman, who shared a room, took a taxi to see blues songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon perform at a Village club. John Dando and Jody split a room, and while they were out, it was burglarized, and Dando’s expensive new portable radio was stolen. With the police investigating in the next room, a drunken Alex tried to get their attention by making a racket, attempting to dislodge the TV and throw it out the window, à la Led Zeppelin. Since it was bolted to the stand, he only managed to tear down the curtains, and the cops left without noticing his antics. “I thought he was going to get a hernia,” Lightman remembers. “I was exhausted and collapsed on the bed, lying there on my back looking at him rant and rave, running around the room trying to be a bad boy.”
Alex’s tirade may have been due to his frustration over what he felt was a subpar radio performance and his concern that the Max’s shows could be disastrous. For a band that hadn’t played live very often, the stretch of gigs at Max’s Kansas City would be a test for Big Star: two sets for each of five nights, from Thursday, March 14, to Monday, March 18. Sharing the bill was the Butts Band, consisting of former Doors guitarist
Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore, along with a British vocalist and musicians. They had a blues-rock sound similar to Rare Earth’s, and had just released their self-titled debut album. Still reeling from Jim Morrison’s death in 1971, followed by two final Doors LPs that flopped, the self-deprecating Krieger said that the “Butts Band equaled a bunch of losers desperate for a gig.”
Alex was nursing a hangover and missing Lesa. He felt the irony of sharing a bill with Krieger and Densmore; it had been seven years since the Box Tops and the Doors played together in Texas, where he’d met Suzi. As Big Star awaited a sound check in the downstairs restaurant, a writer began pestering Alex for an interview; then in walked a perfect target for his wrath: David Clayton-Thomas, the six-and-a-half-foot-tall lead singer of Blood, Sweat and Tears. “Alex says, loudly, ‘Oh, there’s that motherfucker David Clayton-Thomas,’ so that he can hear him as he’s walking past us,” John Lightman recalls. “[Clayton-Thomas] turns and looks directly at me. He stops and he’s about to fight, and he thinks that I said it because Alex is sitting near me. I give him the deer-in-the-headlights look and the shrug of the shoulders, so he just kind of holds up the finger and flashes it to the whole table in general and keeps walking.”
By showtime, Alex’s foul mood did not bode well for Big Star’s opening set before a full house. Along with curious Doors fans flocking to Max’s on opening night were those who’d read the rave reviews of Big Star’s albums. Plenty of rock writers showed up as well, just as they had the previous December. “Big Star had a buzz going immediately,” recalls Binky Philips, lead guitarist of New York band the Planets, who went to Max’s en masse to catch the show. “We got a table directly in front of Alex. The band came on, and it was evident that Alex was having an, uh, taciturn night. The music never gelled. Alex remained very ambivalent throughout the show. The other members seemed kind of confused and maybe even a little resentful, like, ‘Alex, this is Max’s, why are you barely phoning it in?’ But the audience seemed not to care. I had never seen a band gain a worshipful cult as quickly.”
Philips left after the show, but the Planets’ African-American vocalist, John Taylor, went backstage to meet Big Star. The gregarious Taylor was wearing a pacifier dangling from a cord around his neck—a quirky adornment he’d devised as an attention-getter and homage to his guitar player’s name (Binky).
Taylor spontaneously invited Big Star to the Planets’ rehearsal space the next day, and, perhaps hoping they could get a bit of practice in, Jody, Alex, and John made their way to the cramped place on Friday afternoon. “Just as we finished tuning up, the B Stars walked into our tiny, crude space,” Philips says. “We played five songs—probably an Eddie Cochran cover and some originals. Jody stood the whole time, kind of rocking back on his heels. Alex crouched down into a sort of upright fetal position in the corner of the room furthest from the amps and drums. He seemed miserable the whole time, never met my eyes, and looked like he might’ve had a bad, bad headache. The Planets back then were simply violent with our volume. I don’t know how any of us could stand it. We took a break. Alex stood up, smiled weakly, and said a polite little ‘Cool.’ I was stepping out to hit the bathroom down the hall. Suddenly, Jody was by my side, grabbing my right arm. ‘That is what my band should sound like!’ he growled, jerking his thumb back into our noise room. He was genuinely, deeply pissed off. I was just nonplussed. No idea what to say. I felt bad for the guy.”
That night Jon Tiven took the train from the Bronx, where he attended Sarah Lawrence College, to see Big Star, and afterward Alex asked him to join them onstage the following night. “Alex said, ‘I really need a second guitar player. Why don’t you bring your guitar and play?’” Tiven recalls. “So I slept on his floor at the Gramercy Park, took the train back to Sarah Lawrence, grabbed my guitar, and came back the next night and played guitar at Max’s Kansas City. There were all these press people, plus Clive Davis, and Bruce Harris from Epic Records, in the audience. It was intimidating, and this was my stage debut. I came up and did ‘Mod Lang’ and ‘Baby Strange’ with my Gibson Melody Maker.”
The band flew back to Memphis to prepare for their upcoming tour. Alex brought back pacifiers for himself and Lesa as souvenirs, and the two began wearing them on strings around their necks. One night at Trader Dick’s, Lesa was sucking on hers when captured by Bill Eggleston’s video camera. The footage would eventually become part of the photographer’s film Stranded in Canton.
The last week in March, Big Star set out for a three-week jaunt through the Northeast, Ohio, and Michigan. Aiding John Dando as crew was Alex’s old friend Paul Jobe. First stop: Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Big Star was opening for U.K. heroes Badfinger. The Beatles’ protégés had just hit the States after a tour of Japan. They hadn’t scored a hit since 1972’s “Baby Blue” and had recently signed a new contract with Warner Bros. (The deal would have disastrous results; the following year, the label falsely accused the group of spending funds held in escrow and in retaliation pulled Badfinger’s LP from stores; in despair, vocalist-guitarist Pete Ham hanged himself.)
The morning after Big Star arrived in Cambridge, John Dando discovered that the band’s Ryder van had vanished from the hotel lot. “Dando had locked everything up and checked it twice,” says Paul, “but according to the police, that was a very popular van, and so that’s why the thieves went after it. They broke the glass out and hot-wired it, and from what I was told, it was found later somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike and burned out or something.” Inside the van were Alex’s Stratocaster, Martin acoustic, and twelve-string guitars, amplifiers, and John Lightman’s bass, a rare and valuable model. Alex didn’t express any anger toward the crew, says Paul, “though John was trying to blame us for it, and we told him, ‘Hey, these things happen.’ We could have brought everything from the van into the hotel room, but it was too much. It was crazy.” Dando notified the Cambridge venue, the Performance Center, which scrounged up some instruments for the band, as the MC that night told the packed house. One of those who came to the rescue and lent equipment was Billy Squier, a twenty-three-year-old Boston guitarist sixteen years from his first hit.
At 8 p.m. on Sunday, March 31, Big Star opened the show with “In the Street.” The band was flustered, getting used to the borrowed equipment and trying to keep the instruments in tune, and Alex had a hard time hitting the high notes. At the song’s end he quickly segued to “Baby Strange,” one of five covers in the eleven-song set. As in “Strange,” the lyrics of Velvet Underground’s “Candy Says” (about which Alex told the audience, “We don’t know it really well”) alluded to S&M; both fairly obscure tracks, “Strange” was the flip side to the T. Rex hit “Telegram Sam,” and Lou Reed’s song was on the 1969 self-titled Velvet Underground LP. Alex snarled “Mod Lang,” afterward saying, “That’s what I like about ‘Mod Lang,’ you can never tell if you’re in tune or not.” He cut his solo acoustic numbers short, prefacing them in a forlorn drawl, “I lost three guitars last night. I had seven, but I don’t have any of the other four here.” “Motel Blues” was followed by a rushed “Thirteen,” with Alex urging his band back to the stage: “Let’s do some more electric songs.” Following a bedraggled “September Gurls,” Big Star closed their forty-minute segment with a pair of Kinks covers, “Come On Now” and a spirited “’Till the End of the Day.”
The band, depressed about their lackluster show, watched Badfinger’s high-energy performance, and then, fired up, kicked ass on their second set. “I remember the first set as being really bad,” says Jody, “and the second being one of the best the band ever did as a three-piece.” “The first set was awful because none of us were comfortable,” John Lightman concurs. “We took a break and we didn’t even want to meet each other’s eyes, because we all knew how bad we just sucked. Then we had another show to do, and everybody just had the attitude of ‘What the hell, we may as well just blow it out, what have we got to lose?’ Unfortunately, only a few people remained in
the audience—Dando, Paul, and a couple of others—but by their account, that was the best show Big Star ever did. The first set was like a horrible rehearsal, then the next one was just perfect.”
The following day Alex and Jody, homesick for the Aldridge sisters, flew back to Memphis, picked up new instruments, saw their paramours, then returned to meet up with the band. Many of the bookings were in university towns, the first at Utica College in central New York. John King had befriended the Utica FM station’s managing director, Tony Yoken, who loved Big Star and played tracks from Radio City on WOUR, the area’s major album rock outlet. The station frequently broadcast live concerts from Utica College, and after Yoken and DJ Jim Lapiana saw Big Star at Max’s, courtesy of John King, they booked the band to play a show there to be streamed on WOUR.
Alex, still smarting from the bad set in Cambridge and displeased with the WLIR show in Long Island, threw a fit when he discovered that the college gym, with its bad acoustics, was the site of the live broadcast before an audience of students. “In the dressing room prior to the concert, Alex was being uncooperative,” Yoken told Rob Jovanovic. “He wouldn’t speak to me or the other radio DJs. He’d been drinking quite a bit, and he went totally ballistic. . . . For about 20 minutes, it seemed, he was hollering that he would not go onstage to play. Somehow he calmed down enough to be coaxed out onstage.”
Big Star’s next date was the Yellow Ballroom in Syracuse. The band played well that night, Paul Jobe remembers. “They put a lot into it. Jody is just an excellent drummer, and John really had a great ear for bass. He was a big Jack Bruce fan. Alex sounded really good. When he wasn’t too wasted, he sounded great.” Alex was upbeat, since he’d soon be seeing Lesa, who was flying to Michigan for Big Star’s week of shows at the East Lansing club the Brewery beginning on Tuesday, April 9. “I don’t think Dando or Jody particularly liked it, but it was cool with me,” says Paul. “And Alex loved it, especially since she brought some pot with her.”
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 21