A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man

by George-Warren, Holly

  Working with the Cramps inspired Alex to go for a “trashy” sound, he said, which Dickinson heartily endorsed. Rather than cut pop-style songs, as he had for Elektra, Alex leaned toward some country obscurities he’d been playing in New York: “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena” was the Carter Family’s 1930s take on a minstrel song, while a more recent number, “Alligator Man,” had been a hit by Cajun artist Jimmy C. Newman in 1961. Alex also selected a few rock & roll nuggets: the Bell Notes’ 1959 hit, “I’ve Had It,” with Dickinson doing the lead vocal, and Troy Shondell’s “Girl After Girl,” from 1961. With Alex singing and playing guitar alongside Lee Baker, they cut “Boogie Shoes,” a then-little-heard B-side of a single by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, which Alex had discovered when Timothee was continuously listening to the A-side, “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty,” a huge hit in 1976. (Though Alex hadn’t seen much of Timothee while in New York, he’d spent time with him since his return.) Over three nights of recording, Alex also cut a few originals: “Hook or Crook,” “My Rival,” and “Come On Baby.” The last, a song of teenage lust, would get transformed in the studio, with new lyrics, becoming the lusty “Rock Hard.” The title track also had a previous incarnation: “We used to do the song ‘Like Flies on Sherbert,’” Chris Stamey remembers, “but it was called ‘Baby You’re Okay,’ and that was a song Ronnie Spector did—the same chords and everything. Alex rewrote the lyrics.”

  Off-the-cuff takes, including false starts, sometimes with Alex breaking into laughter while warbling, were the goal. Equipment buzzes, feedback, distortion, and high-pitched electronic noises made their way onto tracks—intentionally or accidentally. Jim attacked a doghouse bass with a broomstick and pounded on a toy piano and a cheesy synth as if they were a baby grand and a Hammond B-3. “Sherbert was pretty crazy,” Richard Rosebrough recalls. “But it was less strained than 3rd because all of the Big Star stuff had broken off and was history at that point.”

  • • •

  When Lesa returned from Europe, she accompanied Alex to a session one night, singing the childlike nursery rhyme “2+2 Is 4” and a slowed-down version of “Bangkok,” emphasizing the second syllable of the title. Alex also cut the keyboard-and-drum-machine-fueled “Baby Doll,” inspired by the 1956 Elia Kazan film starring Carroll Baker. (For that track, Lesa simulated an orgasm—à la Jane Birkin on “Je T’aime,” but the overdub wasn’t included on the final mix, though Jim used it years later on a Tommy Hoehn recording.) As on 3rd, Alex recorded numerous songs and various versions—eventually he cut around twenty tracks total—planning to choose among them when sequencing the album. The mixing would not be completed for over a year, with a tug of war between Alex and Jim over the mixes.

  “So much of it was recorded at Phillips through dubious equipment that it really needed a little fixing in the mixing, and it didn’t get it,” said Jim. Alex, still smarting from his experience with 3rd, refused to relinquish control of the tapes. Though he agreed that Phillips’s facilities made it sound as if they were “recording in a cardboard box,” Alex wanted to mix the tapes himself at Ardent. He would finally complete the mixing and rerecord some of the songs in August ’79. “Baby Doll,” like Lesa’s contributions, would not make the cut, but the title inspired the album cover, photographed by Bill Eggleston: a bedraggled doll collection posed on the hood of a Cadillac Deville. By then the title had been changed to the more polite Like Flies on Sherbert. The title’s misspelling of “sherbet” came from Mary Lindsay Dickinson, who spelled it incorrectly when submitting the text for the sleeve layouts. Everyone decided the mistake just felt right.

  Some of the craziness during the Sherbert sessions was documented by a kind of guerrilla video-production company called Televista, founded by a pair of Arkansas-born musicologists who’d become Memphis provocateurs, Randall Lyon and Gus Nelson, aided and abetted by Pat Rainer. Alex knew Randall and Pat well; soon he and Nelson would become running buddies. The Televista crew were running their cameras the night that Alex and Jim dug out artifacts from Sam Phillips’s former clients, still stored in his third-floor office. Alex donned Jerry Lee Lewis’s white blazer while Jim traipsed around in an oversized cape previously worn by Isaac Hayes.

  Drinking and partying in the studio were constant. “Alex was morally at a point of drunken debauchery and wanting to go lower,” said Rosebrough. “I don’t really know what was going on in his mind.” One of those debauched nights occurred at the Procape while Alex performed alongside Jim Lancaster, puffing on his tuba. Alex got a surprise when the daughter of an esteemed historian suddenly made a move for Alex’s fly. She “blew Alex right there onstage while he was singing and playing guitar,” says Lancaster. “He turned red in the face a little bit, then he came, and that was it.”

  Alex returned to New York City the spring of ’78 to fulfill his promise to produce Chris Stamey’s friends from the H-Bombs, bunking at Stephanie’s loft on the Bowery. Mitch Easter and Peter Holsapple, who’d driven from North Carolina to record, picked him up every day for the trip to Trod Nossel in Connecticut. “The sessions were about five days,” says Peter, who began the project in awe of working with Alex but soon became disillusioned. “Alex spent a lot of time sleeping in the car and sometimes at the studio behind the board as well,” Peter recalls. “It didn’t strike me as what you call ‘active’ production. He was pretty hung over. It was my first experience being produced, and I wasn’t sure how to take criticism from my idol. Alex tried to get me to free up more with what I was playing. That wasn’t what I’d expected to hear from the guy who made the articulate and pristine Radio City. It was hard to follow his instructions, and I didn’t want to give up that much of what I’d heard in my own head for the songs. So we came away from nearly a week there with eight unfinished tracks—four of mine, four of Mitch’s—and no clue of what to do next.” Stamey recalls Alex coaxing a dramatic vocal from Holsapple by demonstrating how Peter Lorre would have done it.

  Peter’s “Big Black Truck” and “Death Garage,” cut at Trod Nossel, would be completed in North Carolina and issued on Chris Stamey’s Car label in 1978. Another Car release, says Stamey, came via a suggestion from Alex: “I remember Alex coming over and saying that Chris Bell had this song called ‘I Am the Cosmos’ and he thought it was kind of hilarious, because the self-absorbed dejected lyrics were so typical of Chris. I remember him reciting it dramatically, and he would just laugh. But Alex was promoting Chris—he clearly thought the song was great.” Stamey contacted Bell, who played him the recording over the phone, with lyrics like “I am the cosmos / I am the wind / But that won’t get you back again,” and sonics much in the vein of #1 Record. Arrangements were made, and Stamey released the first-ever Chris Bell 45, with “Cosmos” backed by “You and Your Sister,” featuring Alex’s background vocals. Several publications would review “Cosmos” and “Bangkok” in tandem, typically preferring “Cosmos” and emphasizing how much Bell sounded like Big Star and how Chilton had clearly abandoned that style.

  In April the North Carolina contingent—Holsapple, Easter, and drummer Will Rigby (who’d met Alex during a 1977 visit to New York)—decided to make a pilgrimage to Memphis to find Chris Bell, visit Alex, and possibly relocate there to start a new band. Their first stop was the Chilton home, where Alex warmly invited them in, played some of his favorite records (including, over and over, Wreckless Eric’s U.K. single, “Semaphore Signals”), then showed them around town. “Alex was really nice,” Will recalls. “For him to hang out with us as much as he did was way beyond the call of duty, because we were just nobodies from Bumfuck.”

  The next day the visitors set out in search of Chris Bell, who Alex said was managing a branch of his family’s fast-food chain, Danver’s. “We found the Danver’s in the middle of the day,” says Will, “and we walk in and say, ‘Is Chris Bell here?’ He comes out wearing his shirt and tie and his paper hat and sits with us at a table for a couple of minutes and says, ‘I can’t re
ally talk now—I’ll meet you at the Bombay Bicycle Club [in Midtown] after work.’ We met him that night and were trying to make conversation, but the comment I remember from him was ‘I don’t know, rock & roll just kind of went dead for me.’”

  They invited Chris to accompany them to listen to Alex’s playback sessions for Flies, and, Will says, “[it was] so crystal clear to me how reluctant he was to go to Sam Phillips’s studio” because of the strain between Chris and Alex: “We get to the studio and the vibe is bad. Alex was again cordial to us, but Chris Bell was really ill at ease. . . . [He] was sitting very primly by the door [in the anteroom], obviously wanting to escape as quickly as possible—and in fact, he did leave before we did.” (Years later, Rigby would write and record a song about Bell called “Paper Hat.”)

  • • •

  Neither Alex, Chris, or anyone else from Ardent knew at the time that California-based Fantasy Records, which had bought the Stax inventory of master recordings at the company’s 1976 bankruptcy auction, had just made a deal with EMI. The U.K.’s largest record company would issue #1 Record and Radio City in England for the first time, as a double album. Coincidentally, John Fry had just inked a contract with the British label Aura to finally release twelve songs from Alex’s 1975 recordings, to be issued as Big Star: The Third Album. Shortly thereafter, the indie label PVC would release a different version of the LP in America (with fourteen tracks). Jim Dickinson made suggestions about the sequencing, but basically the reissue labels chose the songs they deemed most commercial. Alex was not informed about the selected tracks, nor about the upcoming releases.

  He did know, however, about a new Japanese LP called Alex Chilton: One Day in New York, which Charles Ball, in collaboration with Jon Tiven, had licensed to the Asian label Trio. One side comprised the tracks from Alex’s 1977 Ork EP (with Tiven getting cowriting credit on all tracks); the other featured a live set billed as “Alex Chilton and the Cossacks,” recorded at CBGB with Chris’s four-track and mixed by Alex.

  During the annual Memphis in May outdoor fest, Alex, unannounced, jumped onstage to front his pals Mud Boy and the Neutrons. As Robert Gordon described the scene in It Came from Memphis, “their impromptu set, including a menacing run-through of Chilton’s hit, ‘The Letter,’ introduced punk rock to Memphis at large,” with Alex “wound up tight like a heart attack, stomping the stage.” Gail Clifton recalls that “people booed him. I remember him getting off the stage and feeling bad for him. Maybe he felt bad—I think he did.”

  The following week Alex got together with Richard Rosebrough and Chris Thomson, a roommate of Gus Nelson and Randall Lyon’s from Arkansas, to do a little busking at the Mid-America pedestrian mall, a shopping district on Main Street. Richard’s snare drum “sounded like a gunshot,” said Alex, who placed his brown felt hat on the ground for tips. “I kind of liked that,” Alex said later of the combo he named the Yard Dogs (and which would occasionally include Ross Johnson).

  Though most pedestrians were puzzled by the off-kilter combo playing blues and rockabilly riffs on acoustic guitar and drums, the combo won big fans in Lesa Aldridge and Gail Clifton. “My favorite era of Alex was the Yard Dogs,” says Gail. “They were my favorite band and influenced me more than any other. Richard Rosebrough once told me, ‘My snare was bouncing off the buildings downtown so loud that the cops came one day.’ Lesa and I were their only little groupies—she didn’t know that I had slept with Alex when she was out of town. So we would go down to where they were busking and just scream our heads off—‘Yard Dogs!’”

  Alex had helped Gail put her words to music for the Malverns, and Lesa and Gail’s sister Marcia (now dating Lesa’s former beau drummer Bernard Patrick) had started talking about forming a band. Soon Gail would join what would be Memphis’s first all-gal punk band. Alex helped come up with their name: the Klitz. A few months later, when they decided they needed a bassist, they enlisted Amy Gassner, who’d just returned to Memphis after living in San Francisco. Amy had harbored a crush on Alex since meeting him years earlier when hanging out at the Aldridge home.

  Peter Holsapple and his girlfriend Melinda Pendleton moved to Memphis that summer, and between working long hours at a T-shirt silk-screening company, he sought to make a record at Phillips. Alex reintroduced him to Richard Rosebrough, whom he’d met at the studio in April when Richard had taken Peter aside and said of the Sherbert sessions, “This will either change the face of pop music as we know it—or fail miserably.”

  Richard got Peter reasonably priced studio time in off-hours, and he cut several songs, with Richard on drums. One night they stopped by the Chilton home, where Alex was sitting around with an acoustic guitar. “He was playing something by the Seekers, and it was just beautiful,” Peter recalls. “I was astonished, because it didn’t seem like that was what he was up to at the time. I think he really delights in confounding people.” A few nights later Alex dropped by the studio and cut a few tunes with Peter, including a ditty Alex called “Tennis Bum,” a “Woolly Bully” soundalike and clearly an ode to Chris Bell. “Martial Law” was Alex’s response to the curfew imposed in Memphis after a fire department and police strike in August. Two days later, fed up with scraping by in Memphis, Peter moved to New York. Around this time, when Mary Lindsay Dickinson saw Alex with his mother en route to Goldsmith’s department store, Alex told her, “I have three records out, and my mother still has to buy me shirts.”

  With the release of Big Star’s albums in Britain and subsequent rave reviews, talk turned to a possible Big Star reunion. The U.K. music papers were abuzz with such gossip, some reporting that the members had agreed to play together until—depending on which paper you read—either Alex or Chris backed out. In reality, Jody happened to be traveling in Europe then, and Andy was busy in Fort Worth, where he worked as an engineer designing aircraft for Lockheed. After complaining that EMI hadn’t even bothered to send him the LP, Alex told Sounds, “It wouldn’t be a bad idea temporarily to play some dates and see how good we could get together. At first I didn’t feel like I should get together with Chris and Jody, but after a while I started thinking about it, and Chris was coming around here asking me to play . . . but as soon as I say yes, Chris has just disappeared. We’re both ready to do it, but I’m not sure he can get along with me. . . . I don’t have much money, so if EMI wants to back a tour, that’s good, but otherwise it’d be whatever I can scrape together on my own.”

  When a U.K. tour didn’t materialize, Alex traveled to New York for a pair of shows over Labor Day weekend, September 1 and 2, 1978, at Max’s Kansas City with Chris Stamey and, on drums, Will Rigby. Chris was now vocalist and guitarist of his own band, the dB’s, which Will had moved to Manhattan to join, along with North Carolina bassist Gene Holder. (Holsapple would eventually join as well, adding to the band’s repertoire the songs he’d just recorded in Memphis.) Alex arrived the day of the performance, so there was no rehearsal or even a sound check. But on some songs the trio locked in and played two lively though uneven sets each night. One of the most amusing segues was when they played Sleepy John Estes’s “President Kennedy,” followed by the Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No,” with Alex quipping at the end, “Okay, that’s enough of the Kennedys.”

  Big Star fan Doug Hagedorn tracked down Alex on the phone, and the two discussed bringing him to Austin to participate in a Big Star reunion gig in early November at Austin punk club Raul’s. Jody, who had just returned to Memphis, had agreed to participate, but when Andy Hummel begged off, Doug brought in bassist Mark Eby, another Big Star acolyte, from Oklahoma. Alex arrived a few nights before the gig and hung out with Stephanie Chernikowski, in town from New York. He also became acquainted with a couple of University of Texas students and music fans, Donna Rose and Susan Bunn; the four, who bonded over their mutual admiration for Brian Eno, spent an evening drinking at—and getting ejected from—a kicker bar before going with Alex to KUT Radio to appear on Neil Ruttenberg’s late-night show,
“Rock of Ages.”

  Sounding as if he (and Neil) had crashed a pajama party, Alex entertained the gals, who joined in singing Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas” (a recording he said he’d finally found after three years of searching), “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and “Lorena” and clapped along with the Cramps’ “The Way I Walk.” Tipsy, Alex at one point excused himself to go to the bathroom. When asked why Big Star broke up, he slurred, “Chris Bell is a homosexual,” to which the DJ replied, “An omnisexual?” and Alex said, “Yeah, omni, an omnisexual.” There was much chat about Big Star (“that band changed a lot of people’s heads”), his forthcoming record (“I’m releasing it all by myself”), the Box Tops (“I am the man who sang ‘The Letter’”), and Memphis—“the home of rock & roll,” Alex said proudly.

  At one point in the broadcast, playing the churlish punk, Alex performed a song so distasteful that Jim Dickinson had erased the tape after Alex recorded it at Phillips: “Riding Through the Reich,” sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” featured lyrics that Alex said were found among the papers of mass murderer Frederick Cowan, a white supremacist who collected Nazi memorabilia and shot and killed coworkers in New Rochelle, New York, in 1977: “Riding through the Reich, in a big Mercedes-Benz / Killing lots of kikes, making lots of friends.” The radio station’s switchboard went crazy as he sang it and “another Nazi number,” “Lili Marlene,” with the girls harmonizing.

  “Who needs money when you have love?” Alex asked as they signed off at 2 a.m.

  Alex also made an appearance early one morning in the American Studies classroom of Professor Jerry Dean at the University of Texas, where he performed three of his most provocative songs—“Rock Hard,” “Riding Through the Reich” (before which he apologized in case he should offend anyone), and a twangy version of “Lorena.” Alex was subdued, thoughtful, and earnest while questioned by Dean about his career, punk rock, and the independent music scene. On the success of “The Letter”: “It was just the same old trip that rock & roll’s always been, of white people trying to sound like black people, it always works. I don’t know that we were trying to sound black, but it succeeded.” On punk: “The punk thing was right where I wanted to go, because these were people who were going crazy, and it seemed to be real rebellion against . . . [what] the seventies have represented, like the late fifties with the payola scandals, without the scandals. The corporations have control over what the radio plays, they make hit records out of trash, . . . and the punk scene represented to me the backlash against the corporate milquetoast that’s been served up to the public.” On music journalism: “The rock press has always been the best part of the system. They’ll accept anything if it’s good, and they’ll write about it and they’ll tell their friends. I still think that most records are really sold by word of mouth, people telling their friends about it, and playing the record.”