Ork had been part of the Andy Warhol contingent that hung out at Max’s until he got caught counterfeiting some Warhol silkscreens. (He returned to Max’s but not to Andy’s table.) An expert on the French New Wave, particularly Godard, Ork became co-owner of Cinemabilia, a shop on Thirteenth Street and Fifth Avenue that sold books and movie stills. One of its employees, Richard Hell, a writer and poet, had formed Television with his friend Tom Verlaine while working at the shop. Terry Ork began managing Television and started Ork Records in 1975 to release the group’s debut single, “Little Johnny Jewel.” Ork Records’ second release was by Richard Hell and his new band, the Voidoids, an EP called “Blank Generation,” in 1976.
By then records were beginning to proliferate from the bands kicking off the scene at Hilly Kristal’s CBGB in 1974, beginning with Television. Between Kristal’s dump on the Bowery and Max’s Kansas City, “punk,” in a variety of flavors—played by the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads, among others—was getting picked up by major labels. The Ramones came out on Sire in the spring of ’76, and Television (minus Hell) signed a deal with Karin Berg at Elektra, which would release its debut LP, Marquee Moon, the next year.
Earlier in ’76 Jon Tiven, no longer with Chess, had shopped Alex’s tapes to labels without generating any interest. At a Jonathan Richman concert in New York, though, he had run into Terry Ork’s partner, Charles Ball, a Sarah Lawrence classmate, when Alex’s name came up. Tiven recalls: “I said I was in Memphis doing this stuff with Alex Chilton, and he said, ‘Does it have anything to do with the punk rock thing? Because I’m doing this punk rock label with Terry Ork.’ I said, ‘He might work with that,’ so I made him up a cassette, and that’s all he needed to hear.” Soon falling under Alex’s spell, Ball, a boyish-looking audiophile and intellectual (a “Mensa mind,” said one friend), became his manager. Just a month younger than Alex, the effete Ball lived with his girlfriend Joanne on St. Mark’s Place, where they carved out room for an office.
Entitled Singer Not the Song, the seven-inch Chilton EP became Ork’s third release and Alex’s solo debut, graced with his portrait, shot by Eggleston. Side A (labeled “frontside”) opened with the recut version of “Free Again” and the Stones title track. The “backside” featured the abbreviated, up-tempo “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It,” the poppy “All of the Time,” and a chaotic snippet of “Summertime Blues” clocking in at less than a minute. As a punk-era EP, it worked, with a loose, raw feel, dirty sound, and emotive vocals tattooed with attitude. The songwriting credit on the sleeve for “Free Again” was Chilton/Tiven, which angered Alex. For “Take Me Home” it was a four-way split between Alex, two musicians from the Procape, and Graflund, which made Danny mad; after all, when Dan Penn had heard his line “Take me home and make me like it,” he’d offered Danny second writer’s share just for that. Now he got only a quarter. After Graflund complained, Alex rearranged the credit on future releases (as well as eliminating Tiven’s name from the song Alex wrote in 1970).
To promote the record’s release, Alex would head to New York a month after his twenty-sixth birthday. Terry Ork offered a bed in his Chinatown loft on East Broadway and promised to put together his backing band. Coincidentally Chris Stamey, whose North Carolina combo Sneakers had recently issued their own Big Star–influenced EP, had met Ork, who’d expressed interest in issuing a second Sneakers record. The twenty-two-year-old Stamey had just moved to New York with his girlfriend, Jamie Sims, and Ork contacted him: Would he put together a rhythm section for Alex’s Manhattan showcase?
Delighted, Chris found drummer Lloyd Fonoroff, who played in a Fairport Convention cover band recommended by Trouser Press editors. Stamey then phoned Alex in Memphis. “He seemed a little reserved and laconic,” Chris recalls. “He told me he’d wanted a girl bassist, and I told him, ‘There’s this woman Tina Weymouth [of Talking Heads], but I’m not sure how quick of a study she’d be.’ Then he asked me when I was born [December 6, 1954] and was glad to learn I’m a Sagittarius. I got the job as bassist over the phone, though he’d never heard me play. I told him I knew a drummer, and he said, ‘Fine.’”
The pair’s first meeting was a few weeks later at a party thrown by Terry Ork at his loft, which Richard Hell described in his memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: “At one end of it Terry had partitioned off a sort of living room, with a mattress or two in it and some rickety chairs and a little black and white TV. The other end of the loft was all open space, decorated by lobby cards for Bertolucci’s The Conformist, a pair of white jockey shorts hanging from a nail, and a photo-poster of a full-frontal-nude Iggy Pop.”
When Chris arrived, “I was trying to figure out who he was—who was Alex?” he recalls. “Then I figured out it was the guy who was asleep on the sofa.” Alex and Chris hit it off immediately, and within a week or so, perhaps due to Ork’s propensity for socializing (“the most gregarious guy I’d ever known,” according to Hell), as well as his taste for heroin and young men (in Hell’s words, “privy to local narcotics supplies” and “a connoisseur of boys”), Alex spent most of his nights at Chris and Jamie’s place uptown, bedding down on a cot. “He had a drinking problem and was very depressed,” Ork said of Alex. “He would make humorous, sardonic comments about my homosexuality. I had suspicions that he’d had a broken romance.”
Around fellow Southerners Chris and Jamie, though, Alex was charming and friendly. “He was kind of beguiling and guileless at the same time,” Jamie remembers. “It was very general, but it was almost a coquettish quality. I watched a lot of people get infatuated with Alex. He had that effect on everybody. He really was one of the few truly charismatic people. He just had a very gentle demeanor—it was partly a Southern manners thing and partly a personal thing, where he’d make people feel that he’s not discounting them. He seemed very open.”
Ork had set up Alex’s debut performance with Mickey Ruskin, who’d sold Max’s and was now operating the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club on then-desolate Chambers Street. The bar-restaurant put on occasional gigs by Patti Smith and other former Max’s artists, with David Bowie and Iggy Pop among those in attendance. Prior to Alex’s two-night stand on Monday and Tuesday, February 21 and 22, the trio got together to work up their sets, mainly consisting of Big Star songs, tracks from The Singer Not the Song, a couple of new originals, and a few covers. Chris greatly admired 3rd, considering it as “opening a door to where modern classical music was,” but he was not a fan of the new EP. “It was shocking how poor the guitar playing was and how crazy it was with all the phasers and everything,” says Chris. “Then I realized that Alex had hurt his hand and Jon [Tiven] played the guitar parts. The guitar playing wasn’t bad, but it was kind of yuck. Alex’s guitar voicings on the Big Star records were really different and carefully arranged, almost like a classical guitar piece. When Alex would play these songs, the chords would be voiced very specifically, and there would be little moving parts, so even without the bass and drums, it really worked with the vocal and was a complete composition.”
Ork invited the music press to the Ocean Club for Alex’s solo gig, and a buzz began to develop, thanks to critics like the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, a longtime fan of Alex’s work. On opening night Alex was nervous, and the combination of his Memphis drawl and insider jokes resulted in some of his humorous comments going over the audience’s head. But once the band locked in, they played a tight set for the packed house, with a sober Alex singing well. The second evening, having overcelebrated the opening night’s success, Alex was looser, the set a bit ramshackle but spirited. John Rockwell, the New York Times’s chief music critic, reviewed that show, in an article auspiciously entitled ALEX CHILTON, ROCK LEGEND, BACK. Though the critic pointed out that the trio’s sound “was hardly very polished, Mr. Chilton’s voice cracked often, he had difficulty staying in tune and ensemble precision was rather raw,” the review was laudatory: “This was still most exciting rock-and-roll, with Mr. Chilto
n’s blend of mid-60’s British pop buoyancy and New York punk energy undiminished.” Rockwell recommended that Alex “gets himself organized and moves back here, . . . He could become an instant star on the local underground circuit. All it will take on his part is determination; he’s got the talent already.”
The first part of the equation could prove tricky. “Alex would do things and not worry about whether they were really clear to the audience if they had a meaning to him,” according to Chris. “And he was doing this kind of Elvis thing in [Chuck Berry’s] ‘Memphis, Tennessee,’ but I think Rockwell thought maybe he had forgotten the words—but he didn’t forget the words; it was supposed to be funny. We were doing generally more romantic songs, and this was still a time when he realized that he and Lesa were not going to be together, and it was pretty rough.”
“Love . . . makes people grow through their relationships—or sink,” Alex said on the topic. “You can always catch people through sex if you can’t get them any other way.” Even as he made new conquests in New York, Alex would pour his heart out about Lesa to Chris. “I remember him telling me, ‘Chris, there is no such thing as love,’” Stamey says.
Alex later had fond memories of the Ocean Club show and Rockwell’s critique, which resulted in his staying in New York for much of 1977, the year punk broke. “The first night the place was packed,” Alex recalled, “people just hanging on the rafters to see the gig, ’cause these people had heard the Big Star records and there was already a bit of a cult being generated about them. The first night was great, the second night was kind of okay, but I don’t think the audience was getting quite what they wanted. They were expecting the Big Star thing, and instead they were getting wild and crazy drunk Alex.”
Ball and Ork had already booked another prime gig: opening for Talking Heads at CBGB March 3–5, two sets each night. Alex didn’t need much encouragement, as he told Bernard Kugel, publisher of a short-lived Big Star fanzine. “It’s real easy to run through New York, skim it, get all the glimpses you want. Everybody loves me here; it’s incredible. In Memphis everybody thinks I’m a jerk. Come up here, get respect, girls wanna sleep with me.” He’d only brought with him a few changes of clothing, including a Big Star T, his Stratocaster, a few copies of Radio City, and a fan letter from Yugoslavia. And it took him a while to reacclimate to urban living. “I don’t think [New York is] a pleasant place,” he complained. “It’s loud, there aren’t any trees or grass, and the people are crass.”
The CB’s shows went well, although most in the jammed room were fans of the Talking Heads. Alex’s trio added more Big Star songs to the sets, even trying a quiet ballad from #1 Record, “Watch the Sunrise.” The song did not go over well with the crowd, but they responded when Alex started playing the Ventures’ “Walk Don’t Run,” to his bandmates’ surprise. “The CBGB scene was not overawed,” Chris recalls, “but Alex soon found his way and was accepted, once his natural bohemian, rebellious instincts came to the fore in our shows.” He added more aggressive, rocking songs to the set, including Big Star songs drawn from all three LPs, as well as a punky version of “The Letter,” and the response improved.
Charles Ball had brought along photographer David Godlis to document the gigs. A New Yorker who’d returned to town following photography school in Boston, Godlis knew Alex Chilton’s name from the Box Tops but wasn’t aware of Big Star. When the two struck up a conversation, Godlis was thrilled to discover that Alex was friendly with William Eggleston. Though Eggleston’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art the previous year had been panned by the critics, it had broken ground as MoMA’s first color-photography show. Godlis, like many other young photographers, was thrilled by Eggleston’s point of view and his daring technique and subject matter.
“[Alex] was really friendly,” Godlis recalls, “and we hit it off pretty quick, and I figured out Alex knew a lot about photography. I used a very slow shutter speed—either you hit or miss it. I think that’s what fascinated Alex. I was shooting without a flash and shooting in a way that made it difficult to get pictures. And he egged me on in that direction. I was attempting to take pictures with available light, either indoors or outdoors—like people lit up by streetlamps outdoors, or indoors by the light from a cigarette machine.” Together, the pair would collaborate on some of Alex’s favorite portraits.
CBGB soon became Alex’s second home, with Godlis usually present. “He liked being part of this whole community,” Chris recalls. “I could drink free at CBGB’s,” Alex said. “The Ramones, Blondie, and the Talking Heads were all coming out of that scene and were already too big to get close to or be friends with. But Richard Hell was omnipresent, [Television guitarist] Richard Lloyd was all over the place. The Dead Boys lived right across the street; I enjoyed their company. The night Devo played audition night at CBGB’s was a hoot; they blew everybody away and sounded better than they’ve ever sounded since.”
Alex sometimes went home with lovely blond singer Deer France, who worked the door and occasionally the soundboard at CB’s (and would later perform with John Cale). “His main concern was the girls at CB’s,” said Charles. “They really liked him.” Hilly Kristal booked Alex for his first run of CB’s headlining dates in mid-March. Things were looking up. Terry Ork agreed to rent an apartment for Alex at Thirty-fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. Karin Berg took Alex and Chris out to dinner and offered to fund a demo-recording session, which she hoped would lead to a deal with Elektra. Once settled into his sparsely furnished pad, Alex wrote an optimistic pop-rocker, “Shakin’ the World (from 34th and Lex).”
Alex soon met Stephanie Chernikowski, a Texas-born photographer whose Bowery loft was near CBGB. She was assigned to shoot Alex’s portrait to accompany Christgau’s “Voice Choice” of his March 17–19 CB’s gigs (“Keep this genu-wine rock-and-roll genius in New York,” Christgau wrote in the March 14 Village Voice). A petite woman who’d gone to college with Janis Joplin, Stephanie bonded with Alex, who gave her a copy of Radio City and told her about his broken romance with Lesa. “He was so sweet,” Chernikowski recalls, “and he really liked girls, so we hit it off. He turned me on to a lot of bands he liked.” They walked around Alex’s new neighborhood, filled with cheap Indian restaurants, and she photographed him sitting in a diner and hanging out on the street. The pair became close friends.
The CBGB headlining shows went well, with opening acts that also drew a crowd. One night it was the New Jersey–based combo the Feelies, whom Ork had begun managing, and Alex particularly liked Saturday’s opener, the Dead Boys, a punk band from Cleveland who flaunted Nazi imagery and had just signed with Sire. In Alex’s mind it was on weekend nights, when “bridge-and-tunnel tourists” came to CBGB rather than New York hipsters, that there were fewer expectations and more appreciation for his “suburban-apartment rock,” as he told Bernie Kugel, using a phrase he credited to his Memphis pal Ross Johnson. “The new outfit plays bright, bouncy and clever rock music,” wrote Mitchell Cohen in a review of the shows in Phonograph Record. He applauded the trio’s approach to the Big Star material, which
sounded even tighter and snappier than their recorded versions, and the newer songs showed the intelligence, humor and economy that have always been found in Chilton’s compositions. . . . Alex Chilton, a veteran of the rock wars, has returned with a presentation and material attuned to today’s pop-hungry audience. . . . With proper exposure, he should capitalize on the mid-’60s pop renaissance that’s burgeoning in local scenes around America. It’s only fair that he assume a starring role: After all, if it wasn’t for pop enthusiasts like Chilton in the first place, there’d be no such music worth reviving.
Soon the phrase “power pop” would enter the rock & roll lexicon (though it had originally been coined by Pete Townshend in the ’60s), with Big Star being hailed as its leading proponent. In Memphis, New York, and the Midwest, particularly, bands were forming to emulate the Big Star sound, while their albums became a sort o
f “Holy Grail,” as R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck would later call them. Big Star tunes and more polished pop songs proliferated when Alex’s group returned to the Ocean Club on April 19.
Earlier in the month, Alex had gone into the studio to produce a Chris Stamey single for Ork: a pair of the North Carolinian’s songs, “The Summer Sun” and “Where the Fun Is.” Chris treasured his first recording experience with Alex, at the Trod Nossel studio, in Wallingford, Connecticut, where Ork had a deal for cheap studio time, at $5 an hour. “‘Summer Sun’ got some attention, but the B-side was the one,” says Chris of the 3rd-inspired track. “Alex was looking to have both structured and random events, like opening up the record to magic, or letting God walk in the room when you’re making a record. It was a very interesting approach.” Alex played drums and supplied backing vocals, percussion, and some guitar parts.
Amping up the retro-rock aspect of Alex’s sound was a Farfisa organ added to the group, thanks to a Trenton, New Jersey–based Big Star and Beach Boys fan named Fran Kowalski. A friend had contacted Alex on the fledgling keyboardist/vocalist’s behalf and set up a meeting between the two. “I went to Alex’s apartment, and I was ready to knock on the door and I thought, ‘If anything should happen where somehow we play together, from the second you knock on this guy’s door, he’s no longer your hero,’” Fran remembers. “We had a great time, a good conversation. We sat around and listened to records, a British release of Beatles ’65, Julie London, Robin Gibb.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 27