The first night at the Brewery, perhaps with a case of the munchies, Alex started snacking onstage in the middle of the set. “The house hors d’oeuvre was fried mushrooms, and Alex was eating the fried mushrooms onstage while he was trying to play,” says Dando, “and he couldn’t sing because his mouth was so full. . . . That was just the way he was. He really didn’t care much about getting to an audience—he was just playing for himself. He wanted to be very loose onstage—he didn’t want to appear to be a rehearsed, polished sort of act. And Alex loved free food. He’d take advantage of any free food he could find.”
Big Star’s opening night, unfortunately, was sparsely attended. People talked during Alex’s acoustic set, and when the band played their rockers, Lesa was one of the few to hit the dance floor. Having Lesa there helped, John Lightman recalls: “She was just really cool, creative, intelligent, and fun to be around, as real and natural a person as you’ll ever find. No pretenses, you could relate to her right away, just a salt of the earth person. Alex was kind of jealous of her and envious of her getting any attention, though. She was usually hyper, but then on that trip she had a bout of depression and told me, ‘Sometimes it’s just too hard to even make yourself eat.’ ‘Good lord,’ I thought, ‘where did this depression come from?’ because the day before she had not been like that.” As Alex’s mood began to darken, so did Lesa’s.
Dave DiMartino, then music director for Michigan State radio station WBRS and rock writer for the college paper (who later became a music writer for Creem and other publications), found the Big Star sets awe-inspiring: “Most of the night’s repertoire was devoted to the more upbeat songs from Radio City, and I was fascinated by the covers the band played, which included a batch of Kinks—‘You Really Got Me,’ ‘Sitting in the Midday Sun’—plus T. Rex’s ’Jeepster,’ Lou Reed’s ‘Candy Says’ and ‘Sweet Jane,’ and Berlin’s ‘The Bed.’ You have to put yourself back in time to really get the extraordinary oddness of the band covering these songs in that pre-punk era—that Chilton was attracted to these largely nonhits I think in retrospect was quite telling.”
To spread the news, DiMartino wrote a rave review and also set up a radio interview with Alex. “It was horrible,” Dave recalls. “Not that he wasn’t a nice guy. But he genuinely had very little to say. Though I would do my best to offer up open-ended questions, he’d largely respond with one- or two-word responses, like, ‘Yeah, maybe,’ ‘I don’t know,’ ‘It could be,’ ‘Yeah, you may be right.’ Admittedly I wasn’t the world’s greatest interviewer at the time, but I’d done enough—and have done many more since—to realize the man simply wasn’t that interested in talking about himself or his band. Ironically, he, a CBS Records promo guy, and I then drove over to the Brewery and had a much more engaging conversation. I do remember being stunned and extremely impressed that he said one of his favorite albums was Robin’s Reign [the 1970 solo debut] by Robin Gibb. Cool dude.”
The same day DiMartino’s rave review ran, the Brewery manager fired the band for not drawing a crowd. Because of the article, “the nervous club owners, expecting a big crowd, hired the band back for two more nights,” Dave recalls. “Not that it made much of a difference.”
Lesa flew home after the East Lansing run; on a day off the band drove to London, Ontario, stopping at Niagara Falls for a little sightseeing. Then they moved on to Cleveland to play the Agora Ballroom, home base of the Raspberries. Alex had spent much time in Cleveland with the Box Tops, but the Big Star gig was canceled due to lack of ticket sales.
The next day the group traveled to Cincinnati for a double bill with Hi recording artist Ann Peebles, backed up by Alex’s friends guitarist Robert Johnson, bassist Roland Robinson, and drummer Jerry Norris, with whom he’d jammed back in the early ’70s. “There was absolutely nobody in the club,” Dando recalls. “Not one single person. So Robert Johnson just got up and started playing his guitar a little bit, and we just were sitting around like old-home week, telling stories for a couple of hours. It was the most bizarre thing. There had been no publicity, no advertising, nothing. But we got paid, I think.”
Everyone was eager to return to Memphis. “I don’t know why we did that tour,” says John Lightman. “It didn’t make any sense at all. Alex would just flat-out refuse to do interviews. People would ask him, but Alex would say, ‘Just write whatever you’re gonna write—you’re not going to get anything from me.’ He would be rude to them. Maybe [Ardent] thought we would bond [as a band]. Alex and I were friends, and we would have been, band or no band, but Alex and Jody never talked about anything.”
Back in Memphis, Alex was discouraged about Big Star’s live sound and decided that adding a fourth member would help. He’d enjoyed having Robert Johnson play with them in Cincinnati, but Johnson was moving to London. “Alex began having insecurities about his guitar playing,” says John Lightman, “and was having trouble carrying both lead and rhythm duties, transitioning from one to the other. He said to me, more than once, that he used to be a good guitar player. I never took that sort of talk seriously, though, because Alex was very knowledgeable about what to play and what not to play. He had impeccable taste in musical styles, and was often a riveting player.”
Before Alex could start auditioning guitarists, Big Star performed at a twelve-hour music festival at the Overton Park bandshell, where Elvis had wowed Cecelia and Reid Chilton back in the mid-’50s. Sponsored by Southwestern at Memphis College and the River City Review, the Sunday, May 19, free concert featured numerous local bands. Big Star played a late-afternoon set, with Alex inquiring, “Do you want a soft one or do you wanna boogie?” after the opener, “Baby Strange,” seemed to scare away half the sparse crowd. Among those attending was Kent Benjamin, who’d driven up from Mississippi with several college friends. “Big Star was like the black sheep on the bill,” recalls Kent, who’d later develop a friendship with Alex. “When the band before them finished, it was like somebody pulled the plug in a bathtub, and all the people drained out into the park. But we were happy because it meant we could sit wherever we wanted to. There was hardly anybody there, and we sat with six empty rows in front of us and six rows behind us so we could smoke a joint without people smelling it. That speaks to Big Star’s status in that town.”
A park ordinance also prohibited those in the audience from dancing, which was announced before Big Star started, but Alex joked, “Let us boogie!” Kent and his friends loved it. “Big Star just totally blew us away,” he says. “Here’s a band playing great three-minute pop songs, and they don’t look like anybody else—they look like us. They just schlepped up onstage, wearing rumpled clothes, like they’d had them on for three days. They were kind of snotty, kind of arrogant, kind of punk, years before there were punk bands, and that was all Alex. They were just awesome, and after we saw the show, I bought Radio City at Pop Tunes in downtown Memphis and took it back home.” For Alex, though, their performance convinced him that he needed to find a second guitarist for their upcoming gigs.
Meanwhile, Alex’s songwriting had increased. “He was always writing stuff down, song ideas,” Lesa recalls. “He was writing a lot.” For her nineteenth birthday, the following week, Alex gave her a book by one of his favorite authors, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, inscribed to her “sois sage [behave yourself], love, Alex.” “He took me to lunch at Trader Dick’s and gave it to me,” says Lesa. “Then he took me home, so I spent my birthday reading it. It was not a great birthday, actually.” He also handed her several sheets of yellow legal paper on which he’d neatly written the names of fellow Gemini authors, musicians, and actors.
Two days later Alex woke her up and told her she was coming with him to Ardent to record. “You have to sing a song,” he told her. “It was just the two of us,” says Lesa. “I think that was the first time.” The next few months would see the couple spend nearly as much time together at Ardent as they did in Midtown barrooms.
CHAPTER 17
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Just after midnight one morning in the summer of ’74, Alex and Lesa jumped into the backseat of Andy Hummel’s Jeep to catch a ride home after partying at Overton Square. En route, with Linda Schaeffer following the wheel, a police car behind them flashed its lights, and instead of stopping, Linda floored it, and with the cops in pursuit, she finally pulled into the Chilton driveway on Montgomery. When Alex got out of the car and headed toward the front door, the police grabbed him. Alex refused to “cooperate,” mouthing off, so one of the cops started beating him with a billy club. Lesa screamed and jumped on the officer’s back, trying to stop him. During the melee Mary Evelyn ran down the front steps and saw the police still hitting her son, his head bleeding.
“Instead of coming after Linda or me, who were in the front seat, they went after Alex,” according to Andy. “He was kind of an innocent bystander, but he resisted, naturally, and they beat the hell out of him. His mother was . . . screaming something about him getting hit in the head, about the same thing happening to him that happened to his brother.”
“It was so horrible,” Lesa remembers. “The police really hurt him. We took him to the hospital, and he had to get stitches. His mother was beside herself. No charges were filed, but his parents looked into it. I had to write down my memory of what happened, and Alex told me that my description was the most articulate of anyone’s.”
In June John Fry wrote a letter to Stax’s Al Bell and Jim Stewart, officially terminating Ardent’s agreement with the label. Stax, which was under investigation by the IRS, could no longer make payments to its creditors, including Union Planters Bank. Terry and Carole Manning urged John to stick with Stax, but when John refused, the couple left and started running their own Stax subsidiary, Privilege, out of Stax’s offices.
“We at Ardent had grown disgruntled,” says John. “After beating your head against the wall for a certain length of time, you discover that it hurts and you don’t want to do it anymore. You had to be there to appreciate the organization, or lack of it, that Stax had. And I’m not trying to be bitter about it or anything else, but it was just unbelievable. At that time . . . there was a little friction between Terry and myself, because it was his opinion that we ought to stick with Stax to the bitter end. I said, ‘I can’t take it anymore, so you go your way and I’ll go mine,’ and that was where we left it.”
Stax owed Ardent $3,000 for studio rental costs; Larry Nix, Stax’s ace engineer, would eventually go to work for Ardent, moving his mastering facilities there. In the meantime, Stax owned the masters to both Big Star recordings. The best Fry could do was retrieve copies of the Radio City album and ship them out to fans who wrote Ardent trying to buy it. “I have a file about three inches thick of letters that came in,” John said in 1975. “The records were on the market, they were being written about in the trade and consumer music press. The letters came in from anywhere you could imagine, every place in the United States, foreign countries, Puerto Rico. Basically, they said, ‘I desperately want to buy this record and I’ve been to every store and I can’t buy it and they can’t order it.’ That, to me, just summed up the distribution situation. . . . We usually would send them the record for free. I think we may have distributed more that way than we actually sold. I’ve often wondered what factor I should multiply by to come up with what we should have sold. In other words, if I’ve got one person who went to all that trouble, if the product had been available and on display in a store, how many more would have bought it? Should I multiply the number by 100 or 1,000 or what?”
With no money coming in and his savings running low, Alex began to worry when it became clear Radio City was basically dead. “It wasn’t crushing my soul, but it wasn’t good,” he said about the situation. “I was betting a lot on having a successful rock band.” Big Star got a few more bookings in the area for the summer, and Alex continued putting out feelers for a new guitarist. But morale among the band’s members, as well as everyone at Ardent, was low. “The halls of Ardent had stacks of the Radio City album piled up,” John Lightman recalls, and it was uncertain “how they were going to be distributed. It all felt panicky to me. There was a small circle of people, with Fry being the center, which seemed to me to be very purposefully closed off to anyone else.”
Alex asked John Fry for the occasional handout, as well as the use of his black Mercedes. During one of his fights with Lesa, she rammed the Mercedes, while Alex was driving it, with her father’s Peugeot. “John would let Alex drive his Mercedes around, sometimes just drugged out of his mind on downers,” John Lightman recalls. “Fry was like the daddy, with people vying for his attention, and they would get mad at each other when he would give one any attention. I wasn’t making any money, so every now and then I would say, ‘I need some money to live on,’ and John Fry would write me a check for a couple hundred dollars. He’d say, ‘Don’t quit your day job.’ Alex would ask for money, and he would give Alex anything he wanted anytime.”
Fry also permitted Alex to continue recording in the studio whenever it wasn’t occupied. As he’d done with Richard Rosebrough and Danny Jones before the making of Radio City, Alex stopped by in the wee hours with Lesa to cut demos of his new songs. Lesa had recently chopped off her hair into a short, curly mop and often wore Alex’s white Oxford shirts or a T-shirt over her cutoff blue jeans. The couple had become inseparable, regardless of their heated arguments. Alex showed her how to engineer, which was relatively simple for recording acoustic demos. “Alex even taught me how to cut the tape with a razor and splice it,” Lesa recalls. They had been listening to Lou Reed’s very dark Berlin, released the previous year, which was reflected in some of the material Alex was writing—as well as his penchant for getting wasted. “We loved Lou Reed and Nico, and Alex and I started singing his songs together,” says Lesa. A favorite was “I’ll Be Your Mirror,” from the first Velvet Underground album.
“In ’74, I had the key to Ardent,” said Alex, “so I could go in and record things late at night and just do anything I wanted. I can remember one time bringing a girl in there with me who was quite drunk and had a glass of gin and tonic in her hand, and she got really pissed off at me and threw it at me—only I stepped aside, and there was the recording console. There was gin and tonic in all the faders.” (Sometimes, when he told the story, Alex said it was a bottle of gin.) The next day Fry and several staffers had to take the console apart to clean it out. Alex accepted the blame, and presumably, Fry added the expense to Alex’s tab—consisting of studio costs and handouts.
The new songs Alex was writing veered from sweet to scathing. One afternoon Lesa woke up and found a tape player he’d left next to her bed with a beautiful tune he’d composed for her while she slept. A note said “It’s all cued up for you, baby.” The fingerpicked “Blue Moon” sounded like a cross between “I’ll Be Your Mirror” and a lullaby: “Let me be your one light, if you like a true heart.” “I played it and I loved it,” says Lesa. “It was a validation of his love for me—he loved me every bit as much as I loved him. You can’t write that kind of a song for someone if you don’t.” The song’s companion piece, “Lovely Day” (“Woke up in the middle of the day / Sun streamin’ in”), was accompanied by Alex’s fingerpicked arpeggios.
Alex came up with a Christmas song, written at the Aldridge home, by thumbing through a Presbyterian hymnal. The stately “Jesus Christ” was partially a response to his former partner Chris Bell’s increasing attachment to Christianity—after becoming born again, Bell wrote “Better Save Yourself” and began speaking in tongues. Alex very briefly explored Chris’s Christian beliefs: “It has to do with those mindless head-up-my-ass frustrations [seeking out Christianity] for about ten minutes.” He would downplay the song’s religious elements when discussing it. “It’s just another tune I wrote,” Alex said, adding that he’d always wanted to write a Christmas number.
Another new song—one of the few, Alex said, “with a beginning, a mid
dle, and an end”—the bleak “Big Black Car” was inspired partially by John Fry’s automobile, as well as Alex’s increasing barbiturate intake and his tumultuous relationship with Lesa. On the demo his vocals are despairing and detached: “Nothin’ can hurt me, nothin’ can touch me, why should I care.”
A near opposite approach, the brief “Take Care,” sounds like an English folk waltz, with Alex emoting, “Take care not to hurt yourself, beware of the need for help.” A companion to “Take Care,” “Nighttime,” also strummed on a chiming acoustic, describes being under Lesa’s sway: “When I set my eyes on you, you look like a kitty / And when you’re in a mood, oh, you look so pretty.” (The tone changed, though, when Alex later added the line “Let me out of here, I hate it here.”) Completing the triad is “Thank You Friends,” which begins sincerely, then segues into cynicism: “Thank you friends / for making this all so probable.”
In the spirit of Berlin, Lesa and Alex cooked up a song together describing their drug of choice: “Downs.” “He encouraged me, and I wrote most of the lyrics,” says Lesa. With witty wordplay, including “cool downs, rub downs, lie downs, any downs at all,” it also expresses their M.O.: “I’m flustered and erratic,” Alex sings, “’cept when I lie with you / naked on a sudden love.”
Since the first night he had coaxed Lesa into singing in the studio, Alex had been patiently guiding her, showing her guitar lines and helping instill confidence in her soft, girlish vocalizing. One night on his tape recorder, they recorded an old Louvin Brothers song, “If I Could Only Win Your Love.” The tape captured a giggling Lesa, with a wispy voice, asking Alex to “sing the first line with me.” Their voices harmonize sweetly, and as Alex plays guitar, Lesa gains the self-assurance to sing some of the lines solo. It’s a tender moment.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 22