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

by George-Warren, Holly

  When Alex returned home, he had back-to-back Panther Burns gigs, playing at the Well on a Friday night, then traveling to New Orleans to perform at Jimmy’s on Saturday. At the show was a teenage fan who’d met Alex when he first came to town with the Cramps. George Reinecke was a fledgling guitarist who would develop into a terrific player, though his right arm was shortened and his hand deformed and missing fingers. (His mother had taken thalidomide during pregnancy.) The son of a linguistics professor at the University of New Orleans, Reinecke recalls, “From the minute I saw the Panther Burns I knew this was the band I was going to be in,” and eventually he would join. One aficionado said of his playing with the group: “What an astounding guitarist! This guy does it all, from Scotty Moore–style rockabilly rave-ups to B.B. King blues, Duane Eddy twang-fests, Djangoesque jazz, Ventures surf, Van Halen shredding, and much more . . . just amazing.”

  That night at Jimmy’s, though, George said, he “had taken some kind of pharmaceutical that somebody gave me, and I had a drink on top of it and I was totally wrecked. Ross Johnson spent the whole rest of the night carrying me around, keeping me from falling down. Alex and I had become friends, and he invited me over to where they were staying the next day, so I hung out with Panther Burns.”

  Alex was eating his share of fried chicken and junk food, washing it down with beer and whiskey, and putting on weight. “Alex delighted in wearing pajamas onstage and not bathing as often as he once did, because when I first met him he was clean Gene,” says Ross. “I had rarely seen Alex not manifest that ladykiller thing, but there are periods when people would say, ‘He’s so bloated’ and ‘Is he going to eat that whole bag of Tostitos? Oh, he’s opening a second one!’”

  Putting sobriety on the back burner, Alex continued to seek out offbeat places to drink. “Alex always had this knack for finding these little dives, whether it was white dives like the Sunflower Club or black dives like Green’s Lounge and Disco Bush,” says Gordon Alexander, who sometimes accompanied him, “because he really liked to go in and see real people [rather than scenesters]. He took me to this place in a bad neighborhood, and I thought I was going to get killed, but everybody in there was cool. Alex got up and played a couple of songs with the Fieldstones, who were onstage. He had this other place that was a bad redneck club, but he seemed to love that element of danger, and we started going down there and hanging out.”

  In December Panther Burns entered the Phillips recording studio to cut their debut album for Rough Trade, with Stan Kesler engineering and Jim Dickinson playing piano and mixing. When they submitted the tapes, Geoff Travis rejected the LP as not sounding as raw as the live band. Will Rigby remembers Ron Miller telling him, “The recordings were rejected as being ‘too good.’” Rough Trade did eventually release one track, “Bourgeois Blues,” on a promotional audiocassette in 1981. That song, in which Falco also recites a few lines of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl,” had become the group’s signature.

  Around the time of the sessions, twenty-three-year-old guitarist Jim Duckworth saw “the Burns” for the first time. About two months after Alex’s thirtieth birthday, Duckworth came to his attention one night at the Well when he moved from drums to guitar for the Randy Band, at the behest of their drunken singer. “[T]his girl comes up to the stage and she said, ‘Alex thinks you’re great.’ This is how he communicated—he sent a female up to me—‘Alex thinks you’re a great drummer and a great guitar player.’ That’s when I started hanging out with him,” says Duckworth.

  “We would drink and listen to music together, and he told me to come see this band the Modifiers he was playing bass for. . . . They were doing Blue Cheer and Frank Zappa’s ‘Son of Mr. Green Genes.’ I said, ‘I know all of those tunes,’ and he said, ‘Well, come on!’ And so after that, whenever they had a gig, I was in the band. That band was weird. They had their [regular] guitar players, and they’d get their rhythm section hours before the show. Milford [Thompson], the singer, had just started singing, and he ended up becoming something of a legend in Memphis for putting on pretty extravagant shows, but at that time they were pretty quiet. The Modifiers [eventually] went out to Los Angeles and hooked up with John Densmore of the Doors.”

  In February 1981 the Well transformed into the Antenna Club “when Frank and Jackie Durand sold the club to [hairdresser] Jimmy Barker and his partner Phillip Durham,” according to Ross Johnson. The Antenna—as its name implied—began attracting loud bands from out of town; over the next decade or so, fledgling groups ranging from R.E.M. to Red Hot Chili Peppers to Green Day would kick out the jams on its funky stage. The Antenna’s decrepit quarters, now decorated with TV screens and black and red paint and dashes of glitter, primarily provided a home and a place to play for “a lot of [local] weirdos,” according to Memphis Flyer scribe John Floyd, who cowrote a documentary about the club. “Weirdos have always been wildly important in Memphis music.”

  At a couple of shows in April and May, Alex played bass in a new pop-punk band Gail Clifton had put together called Gail and the Joy Boys, with Duckworth on guitar.

  In May, during a wretched Panther Burns show at the Antenna Club, Ross was fired. “Steve McGehee had just come on board as Durham’s partner at the Antenna,” says Ross. “Barker’s last night as club owner there saw me engaging in a beer-can fight with the band, as I was, uh, a bit perturbed regarding my dismissal—for more than adequate cause, [like] boozing, ‘badder’ playing, jealousy—the Lesa issue, probably; typical stuff for the band and me in particular. Later that evening I physically ejected Tav from a booth in Murphy’s, the bar across from the Antenna. Good times.”

  Jim Duckworth stepped in for Panther Burns’ second Rough Trade recording session, this time at Ardent, in June. Jim and Alex decided to trade off on guitar and drums on the live-in-the-studio album, with Tav on vocals and Ron Miller on bass. In addition to Miller, Alex invited Memphis guitarist/bassist Ron Easley to the recordings, which did not please Miller. Alex had met Easley at the Antenna and been impressed with his playing. “The club had a really long bar, and I was sitting here and Alex was over there, and we just sort of glared at each other for about six months, never saying a word,” Easley recalls. “If one of my bands was playing there, he would show up and find out what we were up to.”

  “Behind the Magnolia Curtain was . . . recorded in one and two takes within about six hours,” according to Falco:

  There was the presence of the marching drum band from Tate County, Mississippi, whose members were stalwarts in Napoleon Strickland’s Como Fife and Drum Band. The Drum Corps appeared on four tracks, marching around studio B of Ardent, and were recorded simultaneously with Panther Burns—all of us playing and thrashing at once. We were bon vivants of the swamps living it up on ample doses of fried chicken and short pints of bourbon whiskey. . . . The battle cry raised by lead guitarist Alex Chilton as we waded into each new number was, ‘Forget it! We’ll fix it in the mix! I’m right behind you, man.’ Except there was no real mixing, as much as there was a dumping of the 16-track material onto 1/2 inch . . . reels for assembling a master acetate disc. Nor was there any production or anyone really in charge of production, as I remember.

  The result was a muddy-sounding but exhilarating stew of bold blues by Muddy Waters, Junior Wells, Lead Belly, Jimmy Reed, W. C. Handy, and North Mississippian R. L. Burnside, as well as obscure rockabilly by Benny Joy, the Rock ’n’ Roll Trio, and Roy Orbison, along with a tango (“Brazil”). Falco’s reverb-drenched vocals dominate, back by rambunctious guitars and upright bass, with the whole mess propelled by a skittish rhythm, thanks to off-kilter drumming—empowered on some tracks by Jessie Mae and Sid Hemphill and their fellow drum corps members. In a critique entitled “Real Noise for Lost Souls,” a double review in NME of Magnolia Curtain and hardcore pioneers Black Flag’s debut LP, Barney Hoskyns called it “pure sick noise.”

  “Bourgeois Blues” is the most demented of the lot, a mesmerism of squirting, squa
wling fuzztone and a thundercloud of Silvertone, a dense battery of sound that Falco’s voice can only pierce in little flurries of echo pitched against the great dry acoustic hollows of drums and bass and the electric storm concentrate curdling in the guitar amps. . . . Last words for [instrumental] “Snake Drive.” It is the proto-libidinal drive of every notable guitar figure in the annals of rock ’n’ roll, only further heightened by the drumming of the Tate County, Mississippi, Drum Corps, after which no other form of rock ’n’ roll drumming need be considered.

  Not long after the recording session, another Big Star acolyte turned up in Memphis, this time via Greyhound bus. In July twenty-one-year-old Steve Wynn, a singer-songwriter-guitarist, traveled from his home in California to find Alex. “I found out quickly he was happy to talk about anything except his music and Big Star,” says Wynn. “He talked a lot about women and relationships and sex and authors and Wilhelm Reich. I bought him all the beer and cigarettes he wanted, but he’d usually just sit and nurse one beer.”

  When they learned that Jerry Lee Lewis was critically ill and in intensive care, Alex said, “‘Let’s go to the hospital and pay homage,’” Steve recalls, “so we bought a six-pack of beer, sat outside the hospital in his car, and talked about Jerry Lee Lewis.” Alex invited Wynn to stay at his house that night. “I walked in, looked at the gold record for ‘Cry Like a Baby,’ and just freaked out,” says Wynn. “The next morning he made me breakfast and I thought, ‘Oh my god, Alex Chilton is making me grits, this is the greatest thing ever.’”

  By the end of the week, Wynn fretted that he was running out of money, and Alex said, “‘You don’t have to stay here, do you?’ That was the end of that. It wasn’t like, Get the hell out of here, but it was kind of like, he was no longer amused by me.” Back in California, Wynn started the band Dream Syndicate, a seminal force in L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene that would include the Bangles and Green on Red.

  To make money, Alex got a job driving a cab. Though he now had six records in the stores, he hadn’t seen a dime in revenue from any of them. Alex had, however, recently heard from Bruce Eaton, now working on Wall Street. He’d contacted promoter Ruth Polsky to see if she’d be interested in booking a tour for Alex and bringing him back to New York. When she agreed, Bruce, assuming the Philly Nuggets would back him up, got in touch with Alex, who said yes to the tour but told Eaton that he’d be bringing his own band—Duckworth on guitar and Easley on bass. “Also, he didn’t want to play guitar,” says Eaton, “he wanted to go back to his days as a ‘Stick Man’ with a mic stand like in the Box Tops.” He asked Bruce to handle rhythm guitar and find a drummer. Feeling unqualified as a guitarist, though he had a vintage Silvertone, Eaton nonetheless reached out to twenty-four-year-old drummer Jim Sclavunos. Even prior to his membership in Lydia Lunch’s Teenage Jesus and the Jerks and Eight-Eyed Spy, Sclavunos had been a regular at CB’s since his teens and was friendly with Terry Ork and Charles Ball but had never met Alex. He agreed to play drums, and Bruce gave him a set list that included numerous Big Star songs.

  In addition to Duckworth and Easley, Alex booked a Memphis keyboardist who owned a van, and got the band together for a rehearsal. “The keyboard player was an unconstructed rocker kind of guy and he’s playing really note-y, but he had a van to drive us to New York,” Duckworth recalls. “Then Alex and he got into a fistfight, and our transportation was gone, so Chilton had to rent a vehicle.”

  With Ron—or “Double 0,” as the band called him—behind the wheel, the Memphians made it to New York the day before a Mudd Club gig, with little time for rehearsal. Bruce and Jim met them at the Gramercy Park Hotel, only to discover that “the set list had gone from twenty songs to fifteen to twelve, and by the time it was time for the shows, it was eight songs,” Eaton recalls. “Bruce had been doing this whole buildup about Big Star numbers, and he had them on his list of things he wanted me to learn,” says Sclavunos. “Alex was like, ‘Nah-ahahahhah, we’re not doing any Big Star songs. This is the set list. . . . ’ Most of what was in the set I had not heard until the day before the show.”

  Onstage at the Mudd Club, Alex took on a new lounge-lizard persona: a kind of hybrid of Tav Falco, Jerry Lee Lewis, Mitch Ryder, and Dean Martin. Bruce found the show dreadful, and except for a slide guitar part he pulled off on “Girl After Girl,” he was mortified by his own amateurish playing. He decided to leave the tour. “Alex was at the low point of his life and career,” according to Eaton. “He just was not in a great place.” Bruce found Alex Friday morning outside the Gramercy Park on his way back from buying cigarettes and informed him he was quitting: “Alex was gracious—even telling me that he thought I added ‘a certain something.’ . . . I held my ground and added, ‘Having me up there is a total fraud.’ Alex looked at me with a little smile on his face and said, somewhat cryptically, ‘Well, it’s all a fraud.’”

  That night at Maxwell’s in Hoboken went fairly well. Glenn Morrow, then guitarist-vocalist in the Individuals, who wrote for New York Rocker under the pen name Greg McLean, gave the performance a mixed review, while analyzing Alex’s “career moves”:

  Sometimes you have to respect a guy for not trying. Alex Chilton, the laziest man in rock & roll, is back. At least he was for one week in September when he shuffled through a series of dates in the Metropolitan area. . . . He has left the beautiful boo-hooing loser behind. The new Alex is a self-avowed swine tramp, throwing dime store pearls at the strangely doting crowd. . . . Alex Chilton’s back as a stick singer with a three-piece band to back him up. Does this mean he’s gone back to his Box Tops roots? Not exactly. Besides abandoning the guitar and his heartbroken stance, he’s abandoned his white soul inflections and his glorious falsetto for a half-spoken midrange. Occasionally, he’ll trail off into one of his better-known registers just to show you he’s still got it but doesn’t want to use it. . . .

  Alex doesn’t want no sympathy, doesn’t want you to like him, he wants to annoy, and ultimately he comes off as pretty funny. Trash humor is what Chilton’s all about, whether it’s singing “Chances Are” in a mock lounge croon, or the bizarre waltz beat Porter Wagoner tune “The Rubber Room,” in which Alex stretched his voice out of shape with hillbilly gurgling and rockabilly hiccups. On “Tramp” he delivered some Otis Redding soul maneuvers with the greatest lack of care. . . .

  Like a Memphis version of Rock ’n Roll Animal, in fact, Chilton reminded me a bit of Lou Reed, circa 1975, slightly paunchy in plain t-shirt and jeans mixing banality with the occasional glimmer of greatness. . . . I can’t say I was exactly moved, but he did make me laugh, and there was one inspired moment during “Tramp” where Chilton started pumping through his old soul moves, whipping the band into a frenzy. I shivered once and saw the spectre of that 16-year-old kid who growled his way to the top of the charts so many years ago. . . . To be so fucking talented, a great songwriter who doesn’t seem to be writing anymore, a gifted guitar player who chooses just to sing, a singer who chooses to warble off-key. It doesn’t take much to sit in the corner laughing while the bull trashes the china shop. Come on, Alex, ain’t it about time you took the bull by the horns?

  The Maxwell’s set was repeated at Manhattan’s trendy Peppermint Lounge on Saturday night, September 19, a few hours after Simon and Garfunkel played a free concert in Central Park to a half-million people. Amid a crowd hollering at him, Alex was engaged and friendly, with diverse vocal styles—rockabilly whoops to jazzy croons to raspy blues—and introduced Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” by saying, “This is one you’ve never heard me do before, but I think you’re gonna like it.” At the Pep, the band was tight, and the rhythm section locked in. Before impersonating a berserk Porter Wagoner, Alex requested that the soundman turn up the reverb as high as it would go; during the song’s “psycho” climax, Alex fell over backward into the drums as though he’d lost it. “He seemed to be drunk, but he wasn’t,” according to Sclavunos. “It was almost like he was doing Johnny Thund
ers, like this is supposed to be a drug-addled wreck of a man.” A critic for Musician magazine was not amused, filing a scathing review that declared Alex at the nadir of his career.

  The band headed out of town for other East Coast shows, including a stop in Philadelphia. “The boys in the band, Jim Duckworth and Ron, kept him pretty merry during that tour,” Sclavunos recalls. “I think he was excited about the band. . . . He seemed quite jolly and at ease, but also a bit uncertain about himself. There was sort of an air of uncertainty about his stage persona. He seemed sometimes to be opting for clown, and other times he seemed very confident and swaggering. He wasn’t really looking at his peak on that tour, quite overweight and even a bit slovenly. He was dressing poorly; it wasn’t far removed from a pair of pajama bottoms or sweat pants. It was a super-relaxed look, and it was not becoming. He just wasn’t attracting any ladies with the look he was working.”

  An exception was Lesa. When the band played the 9:30 Club, recently opened at 930 F St. NW, in downtown Washington, D.C., Lesa and a boyfriend plus Marcia and Gail Clifton, who were in town visiting, attended the show. Afterward Lesa ditched her beau and went back to Alex’s hotel with him. “We had a really sweet night together,” Lesa recalls. The next morning they made plans for Lesa to visit him in Memphis once he returned from touring.

  But first, after a couple of canceled gigs, the group headed back to New York, where there was talk of Alex, backed by the band, doing a lucrative Box Tops gig at an oldies show at Madison Square Garden. Such package shows of ’60s acts had been picking up steam. When Roy Mack heard about it, though, he claimed ownership of the name and authority over any Box Tops performances. “We were all lined up to do it, and Chilton was definitely up for it,” according to Sclavunos, “and then word came that we couldn’t do it because somebody else, some ex-manager, owned the name.”