Unlike Alex, Gary wasn’t pleased with the results of the “loose and sloppy” recording. “I didn’t like the way we played together,” he says. “I was used to playing in Nashville, where everybody’s real tight and precise. On some of the songs, we all ended at different times, and some of the tempos were off. But later on, I figured, ‘Well, it does have some kind of energy and charm to it.’” Alex wanted to call the album Tear Off!, a reference to an idea Howard Chilton had had for the band’s name in 1967.
In April 1997 the group reconvened to play its first gig, at the House of Blues in Hollywood, twenty-seven years after their last show together. Though they’d rehearsed a few times, they got off to a shaky start, infuriating Alex and Gary. They’d already agreed to play an exclusive party the next night at the home of Barry Bonds’s manager, which was disastrous. Still, they stuck it out and agreed to more bookings, though Alex lambasted them publicly. Gradually they evolved into a tight little combo, with John Evans eventually dropping out. Augmented by a horn section at most gigs, they played the Box Tops classics with gusto and precision—for Alex, particularly, a real dose of fun. Freed up from guitar (though he’d sometimes play bass on a song or two), he took on a joyous front man role, acting out songs, dancing around, and putting himself out there with abandon.
“The interesting thing was, in the ’60s Alex was not a disciplined person at all,” says Gary, “just the opposite. But when we got back together and started playing gigs, he was really insistent on everything being just right, and it was so different from when he was a kid. He learned how to be a good guitar player and a good front man, and he taught himself music theory, he learned classical music. He was really a stickler about every aspect of these shows.”
As Alex spent more time playing Big Star and Box Tops dates, his trio gigs decreased. Yet Chilton acolytes still called, requesting that he share a tour. In 1998 the trio joined the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on what would be a grueling tour through Canada and the Midwest. The Canadian leg turned out to be a nightmare due to past problems Alex had encountered at border crossings. Once ill-advised to inform Canadian authorities of his U.S. arrest record, even though he’d never been convicted of a crime and no criminal records existed for him, he’d been flagged permanently by Canadian immigration. Because there was no documentation proving his innocence, he’d been unable to demonstrate a clean record, even after hiring an attorney. At the Vermont-Canada crossing on this tour, Alex was held for hours and refused entry into the country. By the time authorities finally decided to let him in, he’d snapped, and his angry outburst resulted in his being turned back.
He didn’t need the aggravation, now that his Big Star and Box Tops tours paid well. In addition, he’d begun receiving residual checks, thanks to a version of “In the Street” being heard weekly on a popular Fox network program, That ’70s Show. Working for the series, Ben Vaughn had suggested it as the theme song when producers were looking for something to represent both the era and teenage ennui. “It’s the perfect song about being bored and doing nothing,” Ben says. With Alex’s approval, Vaughn hired LA musicians to rerecord the song at a faster pace, with slightly tweaked lyrics—the line “wish we had a joint so bad” was replaced with “Nixon’s gone / But rock lives on.” Alex and Ben collaborated on the change. The following year Cheap Trick recorded the song for the show’s theme, which was released on an album as well. The series also licensed several other Big Star songs, as did Heineken for a lucrative commercial.
The extra cash enabled Alex to do something he’d been yearning to do for a long time: put down roots. He’d bought a decrepit nineteenth-century center-hall cottage in Tremé for around $12,000 and began spending time renovating it. (The Hohenwald house never progressed much further than a bit of cleared land and a bit of framing.) He and Peggy had broken up, and he longed for a young artist and Tulane graduate named Aimee Toledano. She had photographed the cover for his 1999 album Set (in Europe it was titled Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy), recorded in one day at Sears Sound with his trio (and mixed at Ardent). The record documents the 1999 Chilton trio shows, featuring country (Gary Stewart’s “Single Again”), a 1920s obscurity about weed-smoking (“You’s a Viper”), standards (“April in Paris”), R&B (“Oogum Boogum”), and hokum (“You’ve got a Booger Bear Under There”). For its release he’d switched to Bar/None, the indie label owned by Glenn Morrow (aka Greg McLean, who’d reviewed Alex’s Maxwell’s gig back in 1981).
Alex’s friendship with Toledano did not progress as he had hoped. In 2000, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, he told journalist Jonathan Valania that he’d never felt more alone. Yet this solitude had helped him to focus on his songwriting. “I’m more settled now than I’ve ever been,” he said. “Before, I hardly had a place to call my own. All through this [previous] decade I had a place, but I was living with a girl in a two-room apartment up until two years ago. Now I’m sort of living in a construction project that has quite a lot of space in it, and my piano is there, and I don’t live with anybody. So I wake up in the morning and go straight to the piano and play some music, and I hang around doing precisely what I want to do all day long, so the music is developing in a way it really hasn’t since the early ’70s. We’ll see what happens.”
Slowing down his touring schedule, Alex spent time working on his house, reading Thackeray, computing complicated astrological charts (his chart that year indicated a time of emotional austerity), and playing a new $7,000 Baldwin upright piano he’d splurged on with That ’70s Show funds. He enjoyed listening to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, as well as gospel, which he shared with fellow enthusiast Richard Dworkin, who occasionally visited. (“Atheists love gospel music,” according to Richard; Alex agreed: “You don’t have to believe in Jesus to like gospel.”) Alex told Valania that he’d started writing again, for the first time since 1994. The gap, he explained, had been due to “living sort of an unsettled existence.” Alex said, “It seemed I had all the things that I could possibly deal with . . . other than music . . . and I didn’t have enough room or space or time to ruminate around with many musical ideas. But now I’m really starting to do that quite a bit. So far this year I’ve written maybe ten sets of lyrics that are really, really good. They might not all be things that I’ll use, and I’ve put music to several of them, and some of them I’m just going to try in the studio sometime—just do whatever happens musically. . . . There are a few sets of lyrics I actively tried to put some music to, and some of them turned out fairly well. I’m still a year or two away from doing another record anyway, and what makes the cut when the time comes, I can’t say.”
• • •
Alex’s last songwriting outlet turned out to be the source of one of his earliest: spurred on by a restless crowd at a festival where Big Star played the same set it had performed for a decade, Alex announced to the band that they were going to Ardent to cut an album. It would be a communal effort, with the four collaborating on a song a day. “Alex was much more interested in creating the music in certain conditions as opposed to ‘I’m this songwriter and I’ve got this angst to express to you, and you have to listen to it,’” says Ken. The collaboration, which Alex called In Space, included pristine pop, soulful numbers, classical pieces, and R&B-tinged rock. Produced by Big Star and Ardent’s Jeff Powell, In Space got under way in spring 2004: Recording took place over a two-week period in March and April, with overdubs and mixing finished in May. Alex sang lead on seven tracks, with the Posies’ harmonies blending beautifully behind him. The album opener, the catchy shuffle “Dony,” features his distinctive drawl. (“A dony is a reference to a pretty girl that you’re really taken with,” says Jody. “[The word] was originally used by Furry Lewis.”) “We all worked on ‘Dony’ together,” Jon says, “but after I came up with most of the verse and chorus riffs, I can remember sitting there with Alex, and he was breathing down our necks, saying, ‘Where’s the bridge to this song?’ There was some a
ctual palpable tension at that point. But it was like, ‘We’re all in this room together, let’s fuckin’ write this thing.’ That kinda broke the ice. It’s very odd how collaborative the whole thing was. We all took turns taking the lead.”
The kitschy “Love Revolution” finds Alex calling via megaphone for “platforms”—both the political agenda and the shoes—as well as soulfully crooning and using his falsetto. The sole instrumental track, “Aria Largo,” was written by seventeenth-century classical composer Georg Muffat, one of Alex’s favorites. He transcribed it for two guitars, bass, and drums. Alex also brought in Bill Cunningham of the Box Tops to cowrite the poppy “Hung Up with Summer.”
While in Memphis, Alex reconnected with his youth, getting together with his friends from junior high school and the Big Star days. He was suffering from intense pain due to a severe gum infection, which took nearly two years to eradicate, but he still seemed in good spirits. He played with Big Star at South by Southwest, where Andy Hummel and Terry Manning appeared on a panel about the band (though Alex didn’t participate). He’d seemed to make peace with the things that used to haunt him about Memphis. When contacted by a Canadian woman who claimed to be his daughter, the result of a brief liaison during his Box Tops days, he took a paternity test and learned that he was, indeed, her father. He flew to Canada to meet her and his grandchild, and they sporadically stayed in touch.
• • •
In New Orleans he’d become friendly with one of his childhood idols. The Kinks’ Ray Davies had been living off and on in the city, and they’d originally met in 2000. After Davies was shot in the leg during a robbery attempt, Alex helped out while he recuperated, lending him a guitar as well as the cottage on Esplanade where Alex had lived. During one visit, Alex gave Davies a Big Star album and asked him to write an album’s worth of songs for Alex to record. Though Davies said he’d consider it, nothing came of the idea. “He was very polite,” says Davies. “We didn’t talk about music very much, just talked in general terms. He said he’d recorded a Kinks song, but he didn’t mention which one. I told him next time you’re in England, look me up.”
Just after In Space’s release, Alex’s life turned upside down when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in August 2005. He gave his beat-up Volvo station wagon (which had replaced the Isuzu, destroyed by vandals) to Peggy O’Neill and her husband, Dan Rose, who lived down the street from Alex. They fled to Memphis, but Alex wanted to sit it out, unwilling to leave his precious home. The floodwaters never reached the inside of his house, but after five days of living under terrifying conditions, he decided to get out. He flagged down a helicopter, which first took him to the Superdome. He managed to catch a van to the airport and flew to Houston. His old friend Pat Rainer, who’d been his travel agent for years, helped with his arrangements. When Alex had gone missing in the aftermath of Katrina, people from all over the country had been sick with worry. A network of concerned friends had tried to locate him, the efforts led by his former girlfriend Lisa McGaughran, with whom he’d stayed in touch.
After a brief visit in Memphis, during which he spent time with his sister, Cecelia, Alex rented a room in a house in McComb, Mississippi, his mother’s hometown, only two hours from New Orleans. There he got his first cell phone. Alex returned to New Orleans as soon as officials allowed it, hiking around the stricken city to survey the damage.
• • •
As Alex had said when he left Memphis for New Orleans in 1982, what he wanted most in life was to find happiness. That became more important to him than music, success, or anything else, and he finally found it two years after Katrina. He’d built a community of friends in New Orleans, most of whom played music. In 1998 he’d produced a young garage band called the Royal Pendletons and frequently hung out with its members. Following Katrina, Pendletons guitarist Matty Uhlman split with his wife, Laura Kersting, a classical flutist and librarian born in New York, on March 24, 1970. She had relocated to Philadelphia, and there she and Alex fell in love. She returned to New Orleans with Alex soon after. Friends who bumped into the couple said Alex looked “giddy” with happiness. He’d given up smoking pot and had started painting watercolors. On a trip to visit his uncle Jack Chilton in Coronado, California, in August 2009, Alex and Laura married.
They had just returned from a trip to London, where, after a well-regarded Big Star show, Alex had called Ray Davies. Ray invited him over to the Kinks’ legendary Konk Studio. There Alex recorded two of his favorite songs, accompanied by his longtime idol. “It was very impromptu,” says Ray. “Very casual. I just loved to hear him talk about his days on the road. I played guitar, and he sang ‘’Till the End of the Day’ and ‘Set Me Free.’ It was just the two of us in the studio—it was a really great experience with him.”
It would turn out to be Alex’s last vocal recording. Four months after performing with Big Star at Masonic Hall in Brooklyn and the Box Tops at a casino in Niagara Falls, in November 2009, Alex began experiencing shortness of breath and chills. On March 17, 2010, he phoned Laura in distress, and she raced home from work to rush him to the hospital. Collapsed on the seat, Alex uttered his last words, “Run the red light!” before slipping—forever—into unconsciousness. He was fifty-nine.
Ten years before, he’d said, “Being fifty is a very different thing. I find myself being very alone in the world, and it’s something I never even considered. All of a sudden, I just realized, ‘Wow, I am sitting here, and who do I really call a friend?’ I can’t think of anybody. Is there a girl in the world that is in my future?” The answer was yes. Alex Chilton died a satisfied man. With his wife, Laura, he’d found his heart’s desire—something he’d chased throughout a life filled with music.
For decades, Alex had confounded fans and critics with his frequent dismissals of what they considered his most brilliant work—the songs he wrote and recorded in the ’70s with Big Star. Distancing himself from that tortured past, he told Bruce Eaton in 2007, “Big Star was one thing. I was something else.” Yet, near the end of his life, Alex accepted that period of his career, along with his stint in the Box Tops, with equanimity. A few years before his death, while spending time with Ray Davies in New Orleans, Alex told the songwriter, whose band had first inspired him as a teen: “Playing songs is ageless—the songs never seem to get old. You can sing a song that you wrote twenty or thirty years ago and it’s like the first time you played it. It makes you feel young. . . .”
Alex’s happiness showed at his final Big Star and Box Tops performances; after each concert, he socialized with friends, and in upstate New York, following the casino performance, he even joined a Buffalo bar band at the Sportsmen’s Tavern for an off-the-cuff “Alligator Man.”
Alex’s last public appearance, on January 24, 2010, was at a Doctors Without Borders benefit in New Orleans, backed by a makeshift rhythm section. Fittingly, Alex refused to rehearse beforehand, teaching songs to his backup band onstage—calling out chords for early rock & roll and R&B numbers, some of which he’d first played in Paul Jobe’s backhouse with the Moondogs in 1965.
Many times and in many ways, Alex had tried to destroy his musical past. But he was a tireless journeyman, and to his surprise, he found a path where he could embrace it all and carry it with him, peacefully, until the end.
Epilogue
The first time I met Alex Chilton, I threw up in his sink. Since he was tight with Lux Interior, who vomited regularly from onstage, I think Alex didn’t mind too much. I hoped that he was too occupied with his paramour in the other room at the time to notice. My friend Melinda and I had been the recipients of Alex’s kindness that summer night in New Orleans in 1982: first, when we happened to bump into him—just off work and clad in a standard-issue dishwasher shirt. On the streets of the French Quarter, he recognized Melinda from four years earlier, when she and her then-boyfriend had lived in Memphis. Her musician beau, a Big Star fan, had been drawn to the city due to Alex’s work ther
e. Then they each moved separately to New York, and that’s where I got to know Melinda.
We were now driving around the country, à la Kerouac and Cassady, and because we’d been listening to Big Star and Like Flies on Sherbert on the Honda Civic’s tape player, meeting Alex seemed like an extraordinary event. After the requisite exchange of birth date info, we apparently passed muster, because he enthusiastically showed us the bars of the Quarter, where he made cocktail recommendations, though he wasn’t drinking a drop. I remember lots of cigarettes, and maybe a joint, some good stories about the history of certain watering holes, and also Alex’s anticipation about his then-crush Annabelle’s getting off work. When she joined us, they kindly accompanied us back to our car, which was parked along Canal Street, a very long walk. That trip turned out to be in vain: Our car had been towed. By then, it was 2 or 3 a.m., we’d spent all our money (there were no ubiquitous ATMs yet), and our belongings and extra cash were at Melinda’s brother’s house in Slidell. So, gentleman that he was, Alex Chilton welcomed us to crash on his couch—which we sheepishly did.
The next morning we slipped out to find a pay phone, as Alex didn’t have a telephone. In our haste to meet Melinda’s sister-in-law and get some cash to retrieve our car, we didn’t get a chance—or maybe we were simply too embarrassed—to say goodbye.
• • •
Fast-forward two-plus years. I had by then joined an all-girl band called Clambake, named for an Elvis movie, with an indie-label deal to cut an EP. Alex had started gigging again, and since I’d once met him and he had produced the aforementioned Lux Interior’s band, the Cramps, as well as his own work, we wanted him as our producer. After the Chilton trio’s performance at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, my first time seeing Alex live (and digging it), I clomped down the rickety steps to the “dressing room” located next to kegs and cases of beer. When I began to introduce myself, Alex said, “I remember, October 10th . . . ,” citing my birthday. Without hearing a sample of our music, he agreed to be our producer for $500 and a lamb-chop dinner. We made plans for a recording date in April 1985.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 42