Lightman and Hummel didn’t return, but Richard continued on drums. Another Shoe studio regular, bassist Ken Woodley, who’d also played with Chris Bell, was invited, along with keyboardist David Beaver, with Rick and Tommy contributing on various instruments and vocals over the course of three more sessions.
In this more controlled environment, “Alex couldn’t really find what he was supposed to do,” says Tiven. “It was like seeing a drunk man who’d just gotten sober.” They recut a bouncy version of “Take Me Home” as well as the Stones’ “Singer Not the Song,” one of Tiven’s cover choices, in which Alex’s vocals sounded too low for his range. One of the best songs, Alex and Lesa’s “All of the Time,” found him singing “I’m going to the drugstore to pick up a scrip” in an effective, keening tenor, complemented by Rick and Tommy’s background vocals. The same approach was attempted on Tiven’s “Close My Eyes.”
Though Alex was subdued, unusual methods were employed for some of the tracks. “During the backing vocals for ‘All of the Time,’” Rick Clark recalls, “someone said, ‘Let’s turn out the lights and all lay on our backs with our heads facing each other and our legs splayed out like a flower, and look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers.’” Rick also contributed an off-the-cuff piano part for one of three versions of “Take Me Home.” At times “there was a playfulness and a sense of humor true to the spirit of rock that I saw in Alex that I certainly identified with very personally,” Rick says. For Tiven, though, Alex’s refusal to sound anything like Big Star was a big disappointment.
“In the last session we did with Alex,” Tiven says, “I have a very vivid memory of Alex turning to me and saying, ‘Jon, do you think I have brain damage?’ And he was dead serious. I said, ‘Alex, I don’t think I’ve known you long enough to make a kind of evaluation like that, I just don’t know.’ After that, I never looked at Alex the same. We finished the sessions, Richard and I mixed them, and I went back to New York to try to sell them to a record company.”
“Most of the people around Ardent decided that I was going off the deep end and was getting a little too crazy to be dealt with,” Alex said about that period. “The music I was making was pretty crazy, too. I was getting very destructive in a lot of ways then, and I was trying to capture that on recordings.”
On December 19, nine days before Alex’s twenty-fifth birthday, Stax Records, which had been forced into bankruptcy, was shuttered. John Fry, nervous about his own future, put Ardent up for sale. “I made a deal to sell the studio to some people,” says Fry. “I was completely out of the business for about six months, and then they went broke, so I got back in.”
As Americans began celebrating the country’s Bicentennial, Alex felt more and more depressed. He’d gotten occasional middle-of-the-night calls from Brian Wilson, then a reclusive mental case in L.A., asking him to sing “Shortnin’ Bread” on a recording. “He was telling me I had the perfect voice for it,” Alex remembered. Another call for a session came from budget label Pickwick, which specialized in rerecording hits from the ’60s (and where Lou Reed started his career as a songwriter in 1964). Alex cut vocals for “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” to new backing tracks for $1,000.
For the most part, though, Alex slept until the afternoon and spent his nights at Midtown bars and friends’ apartments. Now broke, he’d lost his rental house. Occasionally he sat in with Big Star acolyte Stephen Burns’s new band, the Scruffs. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, he usually headed to the Procape Gardens, a Midtown cocktail lounge that featured folk music, where vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Sid Selvidge held court.
Alex sometimes saw Danny Graflund, who had started running a Midtown dive, Ray’s Lounge. Danny detected that Alex was more contemplative than he had been previously. “Alex was always thinking—always. There’s a group of people in Memphis that I don’t think people realize when they get hurt, how deeply they hurt. So they get a persona. They become where you can’t hurt ’em, because they can’t be close. They keep the group very small, and if you get into this group, it makes life real easy not to have all these people around that can hurt you. That’s one of the reasons Alex is always thinking. He’s trying to watch out—for something. But with me, maybe he found someone he trusted.”
At the Procape Alex debuted another new song, inspired by his latest altercation with Lesa. He’d introduced her to Bernard Patrick, a good-looking drummer; sparks flew, and they had a fling. Jim Dickinson’s wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, who hung out at the Procape with her husband and saw the situation unfold, thought that Alex “introduced them to each other and orchestrated the situation and used it as an excuse to sever their ties.”
Whatever the case, the result was “My Rival,” a song Alex would play frequently over the next few years. A catchy tune with lyrics like “I’m gonna stab him and shoot him on arrival/He stole my girl away.” It was slight compared to the songs on 3rd, yet Alex considered it a breakthrough. “‘My Rival’ I thought was good,” he said. “The whole way through, I knew what the words said and I knew what it meant. Before that, I’d write things that were an ethereal, nebulous string of words that really didn’t mean anything. Somehow, when I wrote that tune, it was the first song I had ever written that I was sure of what it was. I knew exactly what it was worth. It was like, ‘Now I know how to write.’ I knew I could do it again and again from then on.”
At the same time Alex focused on playing distorted guitar, looking for new ways to attack the instrument. “Alex was at a juncture,” Sid Selvidge recalled. “He’d had a real bad experience with the Big Star stuff and was trying to distance himself from his acceptable past, I felt, because what he would do at the Procape would chase people off. They didn’t understand it. His whole concept was, If I were a thirteen-year-old right now, and I were just learning my instrument, how would I play guitar? People don’t realize what an accomplished guitar player Alex is, his versatility. He’s a consummate guitarist. So from that level of sophistication, he was trying to play without knowing all that he knows. He was trying to play note for note what somebody who doesn’t play the guitar would play like. That’s a pretty convoluted concept, but that was his idea. And it fits perfectly into rock & roll. This was popular music to him—from where he came at it and got his hits in the first place.”
Those early singles with the Box Tops were still remembered by Barry Lyons at tiny Amherst Records, which specialized in releasing LPs by ’60s stars like Jackie DeShannon. Based in Buffalo, New York, Lyons tracked down Alex in Memphis and sent him a plane ticket to fly north and discuss the possibility of cutting a record. He drove Alex to Toronto to jam with Bob Segarini, a like-minded musician from California who, since ’68, had been on several major labels, releasing albums with different bands including Family Tree (during which he collaborated with Harry Nilsson), Roxy, the Wackers, and most recently the Dudes, all with little or no commercial success. Lyons’s idea was to put together a pop-rock supergroup composed of Segarini, Alex, and possibly such players as former Raspberries bassist Wally Bryson and guitarist Nils Lofgren. Alex got together with the Dudes, but after they didn’t click musically, they instead got wasted.
Back in Memphis, Alex reunited with Lesa. Despite her dalliance with Bernard and Alex’s own flings, the two couldn’t stay apart for long. “It was love/hate, love/hate, fight, make up, fight,” Pat Rainer recalls. “It was just youth and hormones and artistic mayhem and madness.” “When it was the two of us alone, things were good,” Lesa says, “but when we went out, that’s when everything went wrong.”
Lesa and Alex’s happiest times together were when they played music. Alex continued to encourage her to sing and write songs. That spring they formed a trio with Karen Chatham. Their repertoire was inspired by a Carter Family record that Danny Graflund had played for Alex, who became A.P. to Lesa and Beth’s Maybelle and Sara. They worked up a batch of old-timey country-folk songs from the
1920s and ’30s, along with a diverse batch of contemporary covers. The girls’ breathy vocals could sound enchanting or drift off key; it was just the kind of musical amateurism Alex was looking for. At a concert at Southwestern at Memphis, he introduced their trio as Gangrene and the Scurvy Girls. Backed by Alex on twelve-string guitar, each gal got a solo turn; Lesa sang a sweet version of the Velvet Underground’s “After Hours.” The group harmonized on the Carters’ “Fifty Miles of Elbow Room,” “Fresh Wound” by the Bonzo Dog Band, Lou Reed’s “Crazy Feeling,” a yodeled “Annie Oakley,” and after several false starts, looking for the right key, the Louvins’ “If I Could Only Win Your Love.” The group fizzled following another argument and subsequent split between Lesa and Alex.
In late May, just a few days after Lesa’s twenty-first birthday, her father, Bill Aldridge, died suddenly of an aneurysm at age forty-six. The tragedy sent the family into a tailspin, and Elizabeth Aldridge left Memphis to visit relatives in Europe. Lesa moved to New York to stay with a cousin in the Village and got a job as a cashier at Max’s Kansas City. Alex moved in with twenty-one-year-old singer-songwriter Tommy Hoehn, who offered him a place to stay, rent-free, and the two occasionally worked on songs together when they weren’t partying. “Alex was as down as you can get,” Tommy remembered, “and we lived together in a bit of a haze.”
“I was very frustrated about a lot of things,” Alex said. “I was into a cycle: I was frustrated, so I would drink more. Drinking made my situation worse, of course, which would frustrate me even more. The music business is a funny place to be, as you can start out with certain intentions and quickly get bogged down in quicksand, and I’ve seen my share. But there were a number of reasons why I was drinking. I’d grown up where both parents drank a lot, so my role models were very alcoholic. I also had troubles in my career and in love, and all those things combined to send me off on a journey into escapism.”
Bootlegged tapes of 3rd were beginning to circulate in Memphis and elsewhere, and fans of Big Star were either baffled or enthralled by it. Andy Hummel, who got a test pressing, was among the latter: “I thought it was one of the great LP’s of all time,” Andy later recalled. “Alex was very self-destructive but absolutely brilliant . . . He had an innate musical genius that, combined with this compulsion to be different and new, resulted in some truly great music. If you add to that the totally insane, intense emotional relationship he and Lesa were having at the time—well, intense emotion is always conducive to producing art.”
Alex saw the record as just one more failure, and by that summer he’d gradually sunk into utter despair. “I remember walking into my den, and Alex was sitting on the floor crying,” Tommy Hoehn recalled. “I said, ‘What’s wrong, Alex?’ And he said, ‘It’s the lowest I’ve ever been in my life.’ And it was. Most people thought Sister Lovers [3rd] was garbage; they thought it was crap. He was a drunk and a drug addict and he couldn’t get arrested in the city.” Alex had continued to pop Nembutals, Seconals, Tuinals, Quaaludes, whatever was available.
One night, after attending a Doug Sahm concert with friends, Alex went barhopping. Completely wasted on booze and pills, he got a ride to his parents’ house, where he stumbled upstairs to the bathroom, got in the tub, and—just as he had ten years earlier—took a razor to his wrists. Somehow the Chiltons woke up and rushed into the room, fearing they were losing another son in the bath. Sidney raced Alex to the same hospital where Chris Bell had been taken when he tried to kill himself four years before. After being stitched up, Alex was admitted to the psychiatric ward. A week later, following barbiturate withdrawal, he decided that he was through with pills. He checked himself out against medical advice and went home to Montgomery Street. There, his mother tried to nurse him back to health.
When Tommy Hoehn stopped by to see him, he joked around, calling Alex “Frankenstein” due to the bandages wrapped around his wrists. Another friend offered to drive him to the Procape one night. Mary Chilton blocked the door: “I want you to know that my son is in a very fragile condition, and I’m holding you personally responsible if anything happens to him.”
CHAPTER 19
Shakin’ the World
It was ultimately Wilhelm Reich who helped lift Alex out of his depression. Alex had always listened to his brother Howard’s counsel when it came to literary, philosophical, and political matters. A PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Indiana, Howard, along with Alex’s philosophy professor at Memphis State, had opened up the psychoanalytic world to him. While recuperating, Alex began reading Reich’s signature 1933 work, Character Analysis. “I began sorting things out,” Alex later said. “Character Analysis helped me understand myself and people around me. . . . That book put the whole Freudian psychoanalysis into really succinct terms, and from then on, I kind of knew what I was doing and where I wanted to go. All those psychoanalysts are obsessed with sex, but he had the best theory of sanity.”
“It’s a great description of early psychoanalytic theory,” Alex told journalist Jonathan Valaria in 2000. “I took a lot of that to heart. In the book, Reich basically described how he would go about treating a patient, and somehow through that I developed a method of looking skeptically at a person, and prodding certain areas about what was mysterious about the person. I’m not into mysteries at all. Although some people you love, you can’t figure them out as well as you want. And so between the character analytic technique and astrology, I managed to deal with most of the mysteries in front of me.”
Cutting out the pills also helped Alex gain clarity. “In 1976 I decided to quit taking drugs and did,” he recalled. “At that point I hadn’t even realized it—because I’d been taking all these drugs—I had a drinking problem, too. I was just drinking to take the edge off the drugs. I was not taking drugs anymore, except for smoking pot, and my life got a little more under control in some ways. But I still drank a lot . . . and sank further into dipsomania for the rest of . . . ’76. Just hanging around, no money, staying at my parents’. . . . Going around town, sitting in with bands a lot, getting onstage, fooling around, having fun.”
He frequently performed “My Rival” at the Procape and was filmed by Bill Eggleston while singing it one night. Of the song he later said, “I was getting to the point of being obsessed with various things like guns and phallic symbols like that. Any kind of power I could feel, I was really trying to feel it as strongly as I could. But ‘My Rival’ is really more of an emotional outburst than a serious statement of anything. I’ve never used a gun—I felt like it for a few years, though.”
Alex seemed to relish the low life. Chilton family friend Vernon Richards, often out on the town with Eggleston, remembered Alex “at a big art-type function at the Orpheum Theatre, and everybody that came wore either a tux or dressy things, and Alex showed up looking like he had slept next to the Dumpster around the corner. And he was proud of that. He wanted everybody in Memphis to think he was eccentric.”
Lesa had returned from New York, and though Alex reconnected with her, he continued to make conquests of the young women he met at Midtown hangouts. He didn’t consider his buddies’ girlfriends off-limits, and several friendships became fractured as a result. Alex had become an adherent of Reich’s theories on the health benefits (physical and psychological) of orgasm, as espoused in his controversial 1936 book, The Sexual Revolution: “I got into [Reich’s] orgone energy life force stuff,” Alex said. “Not that I aim an orgone gun at clouds to make rain or stick my cock into an orgone box to soak up the life force rays or anything,” he added, referring to Reich’s invention that led to the psychoanalyst’s imprisonment in 1956.
Though Alex wasn’t cutting his own songs, he occasionally participated in others’ projects. Memphis bandleader John Byrd paid him to sing on a couple of recordings, and he provided earnest vocals on the Southern-fried “Friend at a Very Good Time” and high spirits on “Earth Man Blues,” a chugglin’ harmonica-drenched pop-rock tune: �
�Hit me, Byrd,” he chortles during the guitar solo on “Earth Man Blues,” “We gotta head for the door!”—which probably reflected Alex’s motivation: get paid to play, then on your way. The John Byrd Band single would be released the following year on the local Power Play label.
Alex occasionally sat in with people behind the drum kit, which he’d sometimes played during latter-day Big Star sets while Jody sang lead on “Way Out West.” Alex also had collaborated on a new song with former roommate Tommy Hoehn, “She Might Look My Way,” much in the vein of #1 Record–era Big Star; both would cut versions of the song. Alex continued writing, adding a few more numbers to his repertoire, including “Little Fishy,” in which he compares his girlfriend to a fish (referencing a tuna commercial), and “Windows Hotel,” about a Memphis Hyatt love nest. “I think I realized how to go about writing some lyrics and writing a tune, and actually being able to put down succinctly what I wanted to say, in the most economical terms,” Alex said about his process that year. “I began to realize how to do that, and as soon as I did, then I said to myself, ‘Well, okay, what kind of a song do I want to write?’ I realized I didn’t want to write about things like I’d been writing about, suffering and what have you.”
In late 1976 the sessions with Jon Tiven during the fall of ’75 resurfaced in an out-of-the-blue phone call from New York. “Ork Records called me up and said that Tiven had sold them this master on me,” Alex said, “and they were going to put it out, and would I like to come up and do a gig? I said sure.”
Alex considered the recordings as just “a lot of fucking around and being fucked up and partying,” but he liked the idea of five songs being released on a seven-inch EP. Since 1968 albums had overtaken singles as the primary medium for releasing and listening to rock. But with the emergence of an underground scene in New York City, the seven-inch single was becoming a means for a small group of people who adhered to the DIY way of getting music out, without dealing with a major label. Singles were cheap to manufacture; small, independent record shops stocked them; and new magazines like Trouser Press, New York Rocker, and Rock Scene would review them. Photographer Robert Mapplethorpe had paid for his pal Patti Smith to release her debut single, “Piss Factory”/“Hey Joe,” before she signed a record deal with Clive Davis’s Arista Records in 1975. A prime player in this emerging scene was Terry Ork, a jocular, bearded man with several aliases, including William Drake, Terry Drake, and Noah Forde.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 26