For the sequencing, Jim recalled that Alex wanted the album “to begin with ‘Thank You Friends.’ It was supposed to end with ‘Take Care.’ ‘Take Care’ is for Alex an optimistic statement, a statement of love for Lesa—a direct statement to her.”
As he listened to song after song, Jim realized that “the record was about deteriorating relationships. The band had fallen apart, Alex and Lesa were going through this soap opera that was their relationship, John and Alex were not getting along.” Over the years, as he continued to contemplate the album, he theorized that it was also about Midtown Memphis. “Every song has a geographical location,” Jim says. “I can picture various parts of Midtown: Alex’s mama’s house, Lafayette’s Music Room, Ardent, the Aldridge sisters’ house.”
The way John Fry saw it, the album “had its moments, but generally speaking, if you just sit and listen to that thing, it will not put a smile on your face. But it’s a great record in the sense that if you want a snapshot of what was going on primarily with Alex at that time, it really does that. He’d had this whole series of professional experiences [that] would tend to make you disillusioned and depressed and everything else.”
The album remained shrouded in uncertainty. Was it a Big Star album or an Alex Chilton solo project? The Ardent recording boxes were marked either “Al & Jody,” or “Alex Chilton”; the latter was the name on the mastering card. As for the album title, that had not yet been determined. Toward the end of the recording sessions, Jim had jotted down “Beale Street Green,” a line from “Dream Lover,” a song he later called the soul of the record. He and Alex had both been dismayed at the “urban renewal” of Beale Street, resulting in hundred-year-old buildings being razed, with grass-covered vacant lots left in their place. Jim remembered Alex liking Beale Street Green as a possible title. Early on Alex had joked with Jody about calling themselves Sister Lovers. Jim’s only memory of that being a title option was an idea that the album cover be created as a gatefold, with one side featuring an Eggleston portrait of Lesa and the other a photo of Holliday, “so the two girls kissed when you closed the album.”
“I’m not sure we were calling ourselves Big Star anymore at all,” Alex said later. “We never got to the point of naming ourselves in any final way.” “Sister Lovers” was how Alex and Jody were introduced by the DJ on the Southwestern campus station WLYX when they appeared there in February ’75, accompanied by three friends. The broadcast “was way over the top in terms of self-indulgence, which usually comes after you take a lot of pills,” says Jody. They were joined by Pat Rainer, who’d contributed her robust whistling to the “Whole Lotta Shakin’” recording; Randy Romano, a backup singer for various groups, who harmonized on “Shakin’”; and Beth Chapman—a kind of cheering section–cum–chorus. In an overly saccharine greeting Alex emoted, “I can’t tell you how pleased we are,” before kicking off shambling versions of “Femme Fatale” (with off-key harmonies) and “O Dana,” stumbling over the lyrics and between-song chatter. Alex plucked a blues lick on his electric guitar, saying, “We’re gonna do a song I wrote with Danny Graflund,” then laughing and slurring lines like “licking the sewer,” “getting beaten with a chain,” and “Blondie, you’re the dredge / but take me home and make me like it.” As always, Alex’s cover choices demonstrated his eclectic taste: Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” not well-known at the time, with the ad-libbed spoken lines “I took my last 35 mg of Valium before coming here . . . / Thinking about my green sweater / and I got my green MG out of the shop today”; and the Bonzo Dog Band’s “Death Cab for Cutie.” The set concluded with “my Christmas song—‘Jesus CHRIST,’” followed by Pat and company’s testifying “Hallelujah,” “Amen.” (Rumors circulated that Alex had taken Valium before the broadcast to come down from acid he’d ingested earlier—though he later claimed his last acid trip was in 1974.)
Afterward Jody decided he wanted out. “That scene was disturbing enough for me to quit the band after that,” he said. “My relationship with Alex had suffered all the way through that third album. [The radio station scene] was pretty mild compared to what went on in the studio and outside the studio—but I had gotten to the end of my rope.” Twenty years later, when someone sent Jody a tape of the show, he threw it away.
After the album was mastered by Larry Nix, on February 13, 1975, Ardent pressed up a few hundred copies of a “white label” version. Jim and John selected the disc’s fourteen songs from among the nineteen recorded: “Stroke It Noel,” “Downs,” “Femme Fatale,” “Thank You Friends,” “Holocaust,” “Jesus Christ,” “Blue Moon,” “Kizza Me,” “Sometimes” (Jody’s song, later renamed “For You”), “O Dana,” “Nighttime,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “Kanga Roo,” and “Take Care.” For marketing purposes the record was labeled Big Star 3rd.
“The shopping of it was a nightmare,” according to Jim. One of the targeted A&R executives was Alex’s old friend Karin Berg, who’d worked her way into the music business and was now signing artists for Elektra. “Karin Berg accused me of destroying Alex’s career,” Jim remembered. His former boss Jerry Wexler’s response was just as negative: “Baby, listening to this record made me feel very uncomfortable.”
“I had the sense that a lot of people at these conventional record companies were going to find some of the music a bit unconventional for their taste,” John recalls, “and that turned out to be the case. John King and Dickinson and I went to every A&R guy at every record company in the country, and they looked at us like we were crazy. No one would touch it.”
“I tell my victims: I can only make ’em, I can’t sell ’em,” Jim once joked. “But I guess [the album] was too far in front of itself. I got my break in the business from Bill Justis [of “Raunchy” fame], and he used to say, ‘Dickinson, your problem is, you’re eleven years in front of everybody else.’ Why he thought eleven, I don’t know. But I guess we were, in that case. I was surprised people didn’t think it was good. I thought it was great. The sound of it alone—even if you didn’t recognize the songs or the performance. Just the sound of the fuckin’ thing compared to what was on the market at the time.”
In 1974 and ’75 the big sounds coming out of the South were Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. On the West Coast the mellow country-pop of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt was gaining steam. Nationally Elton John and Paul McCartney and Wings sold millions of records, and disco was beginning to catch fire, while prog rock still got plenty of FM airplay. Clearly this album didn’t fit into any of those niches. As Jim Dickinson famously quipped, “The best songs don’t get recorded, the best recordings don’t get released, and the best releases don’t get played.”
Throughout the making of 3rd (the name Alex later used when referring to the LP), Alex had continued to listen to and play a variety of music with various people—including Chris Bell. In 1974 Chris had started recording again at Shoe, a tiny Memphis studio known as “the poor man’s Ardent.” On a trip to Europe with his brother David (who bankrolled Chris’s musical endeavors), he cut four new songs at a studio in France where Elton John had recorded. They were joined by Richard Rosebrough, who played drums on the tracks. Chris then connected with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, working at George Martin’s AIR Studios, in London. There Emerick mixed Chris’s “I Am the Cosmos,” and to Chris’s great delight he met Paul McCartney, who stopped by the studio. When Chris returned to Memphis, he asked Alex to join him at Ardent and overdub background vocals on his “You and Your Sister.” Former Box Top Bill Cunningham, now playing classical music, wrote its string arrangements and performed upright bass on the song.
Richard Rosebrough witnessed the Chilton-Bell session. “After the split between those two guys, eventually they made up and decided they were still going to be friends—although they would be distant friends,” says Rosebrough. “Alex came down to the studio and sang a background part, and it was like two angels holding Jesus. Alex was in the control
room for the playback; I saw the look in Alex’s eyes—his heart just melted. He thought that was just beautiful, and he was so sweet with Chris [like], ‘I feel so bad that all this has gone down between us—listen to this beautiful voice, and it’s like an angel.’ You can tell that it got to him. He appreciated it for exactly what it was.”
Though he and Alex clicked in the studio, Chris still dreamed of re-creating Big Star—without Alex. He wrote Fry a note, suggesting they rerecord #1 Record with new players, and he unsuccessfully tried to entice Jody, Richard Rosebrough, and others to join him in Europe to tour as a reconstituted Big Star. He also told U.K. journalists that Alex’s behavior was the reason he quit the band.
• • •
As the 3rd sessions had gotten under way in ’74, Alex had agreed to produce a couple of fellow partiers who worked at an Overton Square nightspot. Vocalist Scott Adams and guitarist Michael Elliot had written a half-dozen originals, and Alex recruited John Lightman on bass and Richard Rosebrough on drums for sessions at Ardent. Engineering the tracks, Alex overdubbed lead guitar on the loose-limbed “Torso Tourinado” and backing vocals on “Games,” while Jim Dickinson contributed piano to “Mojo Man” and “Sunshine Sam.” With a surplus of attitude and a disregard for staying on key, the protopunk Adams sounded akin to Richard Hell, then forming Television in New York with Tom Verlaine.
After the 3rd sessions, in early ’75, Alex and sidekick Danny Graflund recorded “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It” on Alex’s home recorder. Graflund used the song’s title as a pickup line in bars, and Alex loved it. Alex played guitar while Danny sang; then Alex added it to his own repertoire, tweaking the lyrics (“You call me a slut / in front of your family”) each time he sang it. Late one night, Alex slipped into Ardent to cut the song, playing all the instruments himself. He also tracked a couple different versions of “The Walking Dead,” perhaps inspired by Night of the Living Dead. His process seemed closer to the more chaotic 3rd sessions than to any of his previous studio work. His first attempts to utilize what he had learned from Jim Dickinson were clumsy. Sounding unhinged and singing off-key, Alex howled the lyrics to “Dead,” his accent ranging from faux Elvis to British Invasion Mod. The ptomaine stew included spiky, disjointed guitar lines, meandering piano, and arrhythmic drumming with an overabundance of cymbals. Another, more haunting take featured a long, moody guitar intro, with the vocals buried in the mix. A glacier-paced “Take Me Home” was backed by a cheesy drum machine, chaotic riffing on both piano and organ, and, on an extended vamp, an assortment of wacky sound effects.
“‘This is gonna be mine, so I’m gonna be the one who fucks it up’” is how Dickinson described Alex’s early studio endeavors: “It’s beyond self-destruction. It’s a kind of creativity. Unfortunately it’s the art object that suffers. Alex doesn’t see it that way. Alex is performance-oriented. He thinks of himself as a producer, and he understands some of production. But not all of it.”
By mid-1975, around the time Fry and Dickinson were striking out in getting distribution for 3rd, Alex’s three-year contract with Ardent expired, and he began discussions with John regarding its renewal. “Fry and I sort of fell out about our contract,” Alex recalled. “[It] called for a pretty hefty bit [of money] in front to keep the contract active, and I was sort of counting on that money, and he didn’t want to do it that way. He wanted to put me on a weekly salary of some sort, rather than come across with a lump sum. I said that wasn’t acceptable, and he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to give you a lump sum,’ so we fell out of the contract. At that point he stopped doing anything about trying to sell the [3rd] record.”
Alex had stayed in touch with music writer Jon Tiven, whom he’d last seen at Max’s in March ’74. Tiven, twenty, was now working for a latter-day version of Chess Records; its founders had sold the label to a company that moved operations from Chicago to New York and Los Angeles. “Alex . . . sent me some tapes of what he’d been working on,” recalls Tiven, “‘Take Me Home and Make Me Like It’ and ‘Walking Dead,’ and I said, ‘Oh, there’s some interesting lyrics here.’ It was just chaos—a drum machine with some garbagey-sounding instruments and him intoning over the top. I said, ‘Alex, I don’t know if you can find an audience for that.’ Alex was heading in a direction further and further from what people liked about him. I said, ‘Alex, do you have anything else I could play for somebody?’ and he sent me a copy of the record he had made with Terry Manning [in ’69–’70]. I played that for this guy Bob Feiden, who had a mad crush on Alex. He was working at Arista Records [as VP of A&R East Coast, beginning in ’74, when the label was founded by Clive Davis from the ashes of Bell Records], and he said, ‘Alex has come a long way, but I still don’t think he’s where he needs to be for us to sign him.’ I was feeling bad for Alex, because I knew he was going through some shit.”
Further discussions resulted in plans for Tiven to fly to Memphis on Monday, September 29, and produce Alex at Ardent. When Alex and Lesa picked him up at the airport, Jon was shocked by their appearance. “They look like they’ve just come out of a concentration camp,” Tiven recalls. “They both have razor-cut hairdos, and Alex has got his arm in a sling. I was expecting him to play guitar on the sessions, and I said, ‘What happened?’ and he said, ‘Well, Lesa and I had a fight last night, and I went to hit her in the head and I hit the wall.’” That was just the first of several disturbing incidents.
Alex had made plans to meet with a Mercury Records A&R executive visiting from New York and invited along Tiven and a new pal, Rick Clark, and his friend Tommy Hoehn. Alex had become friendly with several Memphis musicians, most a few years younger, who were Big Star fans. Rick had worked at Poplar Tunes, and he and Hoehn had started cutting demos at Shoe. Rick had his own primitive rehearsal studio in his bedroom, where late-night jams often occurred. The dinner with the A&R man amounted to little more than free drinks, as Rick recalls.
From the restaurant, Rick, Tommy, Jon, and Alex headed to Rick’s bedroom studio to run through songs planned for the recording sessions. Rick set up two mics and turned on his tape deck to record the proceedings. With Tommy and Jon on guitars and Rick behind the drum kit, Alex began singing. After stumbling through a few Stones numbers, his mood changed, really catching fire when one of the guitarists played the opening riff to the Kinks’ “Lola.” “It was a total rock & roll love letter moment of abandon,” says Rick. “We had spontaneously tumbled into this chaotic channeling of a song we all loved.” “I’m anxious to hear the tape of that one!” Alex said once they finished. They also tried a Tiven original, “(Every Time I) Close My Eyes,” and a pretty new song Alex and Lesa had written, “All of the Time.”
Tiven asked Tommy and Rick to join them at the Ardent sessions, beginning that Friday, October 3. Former Big Star bassist John Lightman was also invited, and Andy Hummel showed up and played organ. With Richard Rosebrough on drums, they worked up the basic tracks for an altered version of Alex’s six-year-old song “Free Again,” a sarcastic-sounding “Jesus Christ,” a drowsy attempt at the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired,” and a chaotic take on Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”
“Alex was using a different vocal personality than I’d ever experienced, not much singing,” says Tiven. “He was like a clown entertainer. I thought, ‘This is going to be very strange,’ and it devolved very quickly when he started singing ‘Jesus Christ’ with a German accent.” Some of the goofing around was similar to Alex’s “Sugar Sugar” session with Terry Manning back in ’69–’70, but Tiven was not amused.
At a party with Dickinson in Mississippi, Danny Graflund heard that Alex planned to cut “Take Me Home” at the session, and barreled back to town with a pair of blitzed-out women. He arrived at Ardent and talked the guard into letting him in. The women could barely stand; one angered Rosebrough, the session’s engineer, when she started messing with the control board.
Then, during an extended jam at the song’s end, Graflun
d hollered into the microphone, “If you was Mott the Hoople, I’d come out there and pee all over you. Who gives a shit!” “I was in the studio playing drums,” recalls Rosebrough. “Alex would stand in the control room with a microphone and sing while running the board. I saw Graflund in there, at the back wall, and I could see by looking at his back—what is he doing? I could see this spot on the wall getting larger and larger. He was peeing on the back wall. We finished that song, I put my sticks down, and I threw them out. ‘You can’t pee on the wall! I have to use this room tomorrow!’”
Alex found the whole thing hysterically funny; Tiven, Lightman, and Rick Clark were disgusted. “We tried to get everybody out, but there were these two girls, and one of them was missing,” Tiven recalls. “I found her unconscious on the bathroom floor, so I picked her up. I had a little talk with Richard, saying, ‘Let’s meet here tomorrow, and we’ll do rough mixes of these takes.’ So we got together that Saturday and had lots of discussions about Alex, and basically Richard was just shaking his head, and his heart was broken that this guy who he was so friendly with had gone off the deep end. We figured that was the end of it. We decided that he and I and Alex and John Fry would get together on Monday and just close the deal, and I’d leave town on Tuesday. So we got together in John’s office, and Alex is sitting there like, ‘I promise to be good if you give me another chance.’ He was very straight ahead that day. He was trying to be the ‘good Alex,’ and John was trying to find a way for me to continue and finish recording the album. John said, ‘Look, I don’t mind this continuing, but you’ve got to have disciplined sessions and you’ve got to just do the music and none of this partying stuff.’ Alex said, ‘I’ll be a good boy; I really want to make this work.’ So I said, ‘If we’re going to continue, let’s be really disciplined. No night sessions—let’s do afternoon sessions.’”
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 25