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

by George-Warren, Holly

  Gigging with the trio continued, but by then it had become clear that a wedge had grown between Alex and Rene. “The last American tour we did after that,” says Rene, “we were in Boston, and it was just so strange being around each other. At one point he said, ‘I’m watching you,’ and I said, ‘I know you are; believe me, I can see it. I’m not sure what you’re watching for, but I can see you watching me.’ It was never a musical thing. It was an interpersonal thing. Then I was going to play a jazz gig with Doug and was staying at his house in Memphis, and he said, ‘Rene, I’ve got to tell you, we played an Alex gig last week with Ron [Easley] playing bass, and I don’t feel right you not knowing about this.’ I was like, ‘What?’ My heart sank. He said, ‘Yeah, maybe you should call up Alex and see what’s going on.’ So I did and said, ‘Should I expect to hear from you about any more dates?’ And he said, ‘I wouldn’t count on that.’”

  By mid-October Alex was using other Memphis-based bassists, including Ron Easley and John McClure. One night he checked out Ron’s band, Durand Mysterion, and noticed a talented young female guitarist performing in the combo. Native Memphian Lisa McGaughran, twenty-six, had crossed paths with Alex since 1984, when she reported on the Panther Burns/Clash gigs for a Memphis Flyer cover story. Alex had also noted the Vanderbilt grad’s eclectic radio show on Memphis’s free-form WEVL. He telephoned her, and the two hit it off when he visited her apartment; she watched nervously as he thumbed through her extensive record collection, waiting for criticism that didn’t come. For the past two years Lisa had played bass and sung with Panther Burns, and Alex was impressed that her musicality had started at an early age: She had begun studying piano as a child, including ragtime, and learned acoustic guitar as a teen. Lisa also played in an all-gal band, the Hellcats, alongside Lorette Velvette, who performed in Panther Burns and was Tav’s girlfriend. Before long Lisa was singing “If I Could Only Win Your Love” with Alex’s encouragement at his mother’s home, where they spent Thanksgiving together. “He turned thirty-six a couple of months after I began hanging out with him,” says Lisa. “He was busy starting a period of intensive recording and mixing. Panther Burns recorded The World We Knew in December, and Alex did this moody sort of atmospheric production. I sang backing vocals.”

  Alex was eager to record his own LP, which got under way at Ardent in early 1987; the bulk of the recording occurred in February. Alex rehired brassmen Jim Spake, Fred Ford, and Nokie Taylor, plus Wayne Jackson, a member of the Memphis Horns who’d performed on Box Tops recordings. He also booked Doug, Ron, bassist Sam Shoup, and Rene (though the bassist no longer played live with Alex). He asked George Reinecke to bring some gear from New Orleans, so he and Rene rode the train up to Memphis together. Setting aside their differences, Rene contributed bass or keyboards to eight of the album’s twelve tracks.

  New Rose and Big Time collectively paid Alex $21,000 to finance the project. Alex would spend close to $22,000 for studio costs alone, reaching into his own pockets for musician fees: union scale for six of the players, less for those with smaller roles.

  Entitled High Priest, Alex called it “more of a conceived album” than usual. It contained twelve tracks—four originals and eight covers—that effectively documented Alex’s musical history. The 1957 instrumental “Raunchy,” by Bill Justis and Sid Manker, looked back to his childhood, when his father hired Manker to teach him guitar. The soulful “Nobody’s Fool” was a nod to its author, Dan Penn. Goffin/King’s “Let Me Get Close to You” referenced ’60s pop, and he asked his new girlfriend Lisa to play piano on it. “Alex really liked Carole King’s piano style, and he thought it would be good to have a woman doing the part,” says Reinecke. The album featured a couple of the risqué R&B tunes that Alex loved, “Take It Off” and “Make a Little Love,” and the blues number “Trouble Don’t Last.” One of his live staples, “Volare,” which Dean Martin took to #12 in 1958, featured Rene on Hammond B-3. (Though some critics would carp about Alex’s inclusion of “Volare” in his repertoire, he anticipated the lounge-music craze by about a decade.)

  Alex’s originals also ran the gamut of his interests. Pop music’s first-ever song about a Tibetan Buddhist leader, “Dalai Lama,” boasted such witty lyrics as “30,000 monks at his direction / Practicing things like astral projection.” “Don’t Be a Drag” and “Forbidden Love” were soulful rockers, while “Thing for You,” which Alex said was the best song he ever wrote, had a catchy pop hook. Alex discovered the emotional heart of the album, “Come By Here,” on an obscure gospel disc by Alvis Armstrong, choir director of the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. The last track to be recorded, in March, it featured simple instrumentation, with Ron on bass and Doug on drums. Playing a churchy piano, Alex sang (and overdubbed) the swelling vocal harmonies, which soar joyfully on such inspirational lines as “When life’s got you down, and you don’t know what to do / All you got to say is, Come by here, Lord.”

  Alex invited Lisa and her bandmate Lorette to sing harmonies on “Make a Little Love,” Wayne Jackson sang them on “Thing for You,” and Rene added vocals to “Take It Off.” Jim Dickinson played piano on “Trouble Don’t Last.” With most of the tracking done in one or two takes, Alex was satisfied with loose performances and refused to fuss over vocals or horn parts to make them perfect. “Recording is to hear something happen that may never happen again,” Alex said, “to catch a performance—minds working together in a way that you can’t write out or describe.”

  While Alex and the gang worked on High Priest, the Replacements were at Ardent, too, in Studio A, cutting their second Sire album, Pleased to Meet Me, with Jim Dickinson producing. One of the songs they recorded had been inspired by Paul Westerberg’s first meeting with Alex in 1984: “Alex Chilton” would tip off a generation of Replacements fans to the band (“I never travel far / without a little Big Star”) and the man (“Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton when he comes ’round”) who had inspired them. Alex didn’t know about the track at the time and wouldn’t hear it until later, when the ’Mats manager Peter Jesperson played it for him; he remembered Alex bracing himself before listening but then seeming relieved at what he heard. When asked about it numerous times over the years, Alex always said he liked it—that it was a “positive” song. (A lesser-known band, Mobile, Alabama’s Will [Kimbrough] and the Bushmen, had earlier recorded a tribute titled “Dear Alex.”)

  That spring the Replacements and Alex’s trio, with Ron Easley on bass, played a short tour of Florida. Alex still enjoyed seeing the Minneapolis band perform—the more raucous and drunken, the better. The gigs didn’t pay as well as usual but were intended as a means for Alex’s music to reach a wider audience.

  In addition to the Replacements, another group had focused attention on Big Star—and brought a major windfall to Alex as well. Emerging from L.A.’s Paisley Underground scene, the Bangles, a talented, videogenic female quartet, specialized in Beatlesque harmonies and bouncy guitar rock. They had broken big with the Prince-penned smash “Manic Monday”; along with several other hits, it appeared on their second album, the platinum Different Light—which also included their cover of “September Gurls.” Friendly with R.E.M. and the dB’s, the gals had looked up Alex soon after the album’s release, in late ’85. When they discovered he’d not received any songwriting royalties for the track, they reportedly wrote him a personal check for $16,000. Then, in 1987, the publishing accounting was finally accrued, with close to $48,000 in royalties coming to Alex for the song.

  “Making money off a thing like the Bangles record makes up for a lot of things,” Alex told music writer Dawn Eden. “You can’t live your life being upset about things, but it’s a lot easier to not be upset about it if you’ve got enough money.” He would enjoy his most financially successful year in two decades.

  A large chunk of his performance income in 1987 came from his participating in more oldies package shows, which brought in nearly $33,000. It did
n’t hurt when Entertainment Tonight ran a special segment on “The Letter” as part of a series on hit songs from the past. They interviewed Alex, who was soft-spoken, articulate, and engaging; Dan Penn also got a bit of screen time telling his side of the story. ET’s cameras caught people on New York City streets singing “The Letter,” illustrating the song’s longevity. And though to some people Alex seemed sheepish about doing the oldies shows, others thought he truly enjoyed meeting and hanging out with artists on the bills. “Some people would be embarrassed about that stuff, but he had no qualms about it,” according to Doug Garrison, who occasionally drummed on the gigs. “Alex loved to be in that scene. I remember he introduced me to B. J. Thomas on the elevator once. He was into it.” When he later appeared as a guest on “Fresh Air,” Alex told the NPR host Terry Gross how great it was playing on bills with ? and the Mysterians, Ronnie Spector, Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits, and others on the oldies circuit.

  • • •

  “No Sex” had gotten quite a bit of airplay on college stations, and to promote High Priest’s upcoming release, Frank Riley booked more than sixty dates for Alex between September 13 and December 19, 1987, including lucrative concerts at several universities. Back in the spring, Alex had broken up with Lisa McGaughran after reuniting with Annabelle, who shot the photographs for High Priest’s album sleeve. The front cover was a small white-frame country church, and the back depicted a vintage motel sign on Route 66, with Alex standing below a colorful neon Indian. It was apropos of his life once the LP was released—on the road nearly nonstop. Part of the tour took the trio through the Midwest, and beginning on September 29, they played numerous bills with Ben Vaughn, whose knowledge of eclectic music rivaled Alex’s. The pair had briefly met several years earlier at an Irving Plaza show, where Vaughn passed Alex a tape of his original songs.

  “We did our first gig together in Kansas City,” Vaughn recalls, “and we’re doing a sound check, and Alex walked in and the first thing he said was ‘Hey, Ben, how are you, I really love that cassette.’ Like he’d just received it. It had been five years since I gave it to him, and he was reporting back like no time had passed. There was that blasé tone that kind of canceled out your chance to know if Alex was sincere or putting you on. There was always that kind of weird veil, and he would slow down how he spoke, or he would sound unenthusiastic even when he was using superlatives.”

  The two hit it off on the road, the gigs were a successful pairing, and they found they had similar tastes. “Alex and I got along,” says Vaughn, “and it was a bill that made sense to the audience, because the same people who were buying his records were buying mine, so it was a good night for the clubs. I would open and he would do the headlining set. It was a weird time for him, because the Replacements song was out, so lots of people were coming to see him based on one song by the Replacements.”

  The following year Ben and Alex toured more extensively, frequently riding together in a rented car while Ron and Doug traveled separately. The pair talked about music and history. “He was really a historian on the reconstruction of the South,” says Ben. “He knew a lot and read about it, and talked a lot about it. He was a self-taught intellectual.”

  With more income (he grossed $73,000 performing with the trio in ’87), Alex now rented vehicles for touring, sometimes hiring a driver as well. Between recording and performances, he paid his band more than $18,000 that year. In September he bought his first new car since the Box Tops days: a red Isuzu Trooper. He deposited surplus funds into a savings account and purchased land in a wooded area near Hohenwald, Tennessee, where he hoped to build a house one day. A post office box there became his new address. While on a break he wrote Danny Jones a letter and sent him a check for $300 to compensate him for using his song on the Lost Decade album; he also paid his mother more than $300 for long-distance phone calls from her house. That fall brought a gig he was particularly proud of: a September 4 solo performance of “The Letter” at the Liberty Bowl, alongside soul legend Solomon Burke. Other highlights were successful runs in France, Germany, and Canada.

  With the release of High Priest, Alex did seem to live up to its title—which he told some interviewers was inspired by a Ray Charles LP. The album received mostly positive reviews, the majority applauding the return of a Chilton long-player, as well as mentioning the growing Big Star cult, via the Replacements and Bangles. In Rolling Stone Michael Azerrad wrote,

  No doubt about it, Alex Chilton is really hip right now. . . . High Priest, indeed. But while . . . young whipper-snappers have taken his antislick philosophy all the way to the bank, guru Chilton hasn’t, despite a fanatically loyal cult following. So the time couldn’t be better for a great new album, and with High Priest, Chilton delivers it . . . a strong, consistent effort, featuring a loose mix of Southern R&B, gospel, blues and straight pop. . . . Some of the best songs hark back to the melodicism of Big Star. . . . Chilton’s own “Thing for You” [is] sweet, archetypal pop delivered with an honest but half-baked delivery that sabotages any hit potential. Chilton can write great songs, but “ruins” them with skranky guitars, sloppy takes or off-key singing.

  In the next decade, these so-called flaws would become the attributes of indie-rock’s biggest bands, such as Pavement and Guided by Voices. But in 1987 “the record still has the same seductive whiff of self-destruction that tinged his previous work,” Azerrad concluded. “[Yet] High Priest is a big step in the right direction for an American original whose time may finally have come.”

  With all the success he enjoyed that year, Alex’s personal life was still in disarray. Once the glow of his and Annabelle’s reunion—including a trip to Curaçao together—wore off, the fighting returned. “I think he met his match in Annabelle,” Ron Easley says. “I heard some horrific arguments, and every time they would start, I would just leave.”

  Sometimes she traveled with Alex. After a gig on November 8 they spent the night with Randy Reeves and his wife, Donna Rose, in Dallas. Also joining them there was Timothee, then almost nineteen, divorced, and working at the local Whole Foods. “Timothee looked like kind of a tough kid,” Randy recalls. “Alex stayed up pretty much all night talking to him in the other room while we went to bed. It seemed like Alex had genuine concern for him. I remember Alex saying to him, ‘You need to eat the stuff that they sell at Whole Foods.’” An early proponent of the organic food movement, Annabelle had taught Alex a lot about it, and he continued to try to improve his own diet, avoiding refined sugar and processed foods. His main vice was Diet Coke, though he’d occasionally have a beer or a glass of wine, and he still smoked heavily—cigarettes and pot.

  After his thirty-seventh birthday rolled around, Alex started stating his age as “twenty-seventeen.” Playing the club circuit with mostly younger bands made him not only the “high priest” of indie music but also its reluctant elder statesman. He told a U.K. journalist, “What rock & roll means to me, and what I’d love to be able to achieve every time out, is that kind of mindless transcendence.” He saw himself as “the kind of fish . . . who’s older than most of the current rockers, so I try to do something that other people can learn from. In a way, I’ve always been ahead of most rockers theoretically, knowing some music theory as I do, but not to the point of some jazz players. . . . I think I can do a lot of harmonic forms that can show rockers some new things. And that separates me from a lot of others.”

  After answering questions about Big Star for years, he gradually began avoiding the subject, cutting off interviewers or simply refusing to do Q&As at all. “Especially in Europe, journalists would come up to Alex and start asking him Big Star questions,” Doug Garrison recalls. “He would say, ‘I’m not here to talk about Big Star, I’m playing my show with my trio—if you want to ask me about that.’ If they persisted, I saw him get pretty ruthless with some people, like this one guy in Germany [at a press conference] had to walk out of the room of thirty people. Alex made no bones about putt
ing somebody in their place if they were asking the wrong questions or going down the wrong path, especially if they thought they knew some shit about Big Star and they didn’t really know it.” Though he continued to play “September Gurls,” Alex didn’t seem happy about it.

  With 1988 came another large itinerary of performance dates—seventy already booked for America, after starting the year with a lengthy, thirty-five-gig tour of Europe. “We were working like crazy,” says Doug. “We had a different country every day that we had to be in. It was insane. Some of the tours we did in Europe, I don’t know how we survived it. We did it all on the road—we never flew once in Europe, except over to England or something like that. We’d travel by van and boats.”

  While journeying through Austria, some terrible news reached Alex: On February 10, Mary Evelyn Chilton had been killed when a fire broke out in her home at 1654 Eastmoreland. Apparently Alex’s mother had left something on the stove while taking a shower. The downstairs was engulfed in flames, and due to a snowstorm that had hit Memphis, fire trucks could not reach her in time to save her. She was seventy-six.

  By the time Cecelia located Alex in Europe, they agreed he should stay on and finish the tour. Doug remembers that Alex, very private about his emotions, kept his grief to himself. “I was shocked and sad,” Doug says. “Alex really didn’t talk about it.”

  Following his mother’s death, Alex’s trips to Memphis became less frequent. Howard was living in Chicago but would move to the garage apartment at Bob Tannen’s compound. Cecelia, divorced and raising a daughter, stayed in Tennessee and operated Sidney Chilton’s lighting business. She gave Alex a few things salvaged from Mary Chilton’s home, including a charred statue of an angel, which Alex placed in Tav’s backyard, where he sometimes pitched a tent during occasional visits. Alex’s reel-to-reel recordings, tapes, memorabilia, records, and other documents were lost in the fire, but his mother’s scrapbook documenting Alex’s career somehow survived. When Parke Puterbaugh telephoned him in New Orleans, soon after his return from Europe, for a Rolling Stone “where are they now” feature on the Box Tops, Alex was friendly and talkative, even discussing Big Star; Puterbaugh was shocked to later learn from Gary Talley that Alex’s mother had recently died. It never came up in the conversation.