A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (17 page)

Not all the lyrics of his new songs were so personal, however. Another late-night studio session with Richard led to “Mod Lang,” an abbreviation for “Modern Languages,” a department at Memphis State. “
All the words were stolen from blues songs,” Alex said of the lyrics. “We took one line from each song—‘I Can’t Be Satisfied,’ the Muddy Waters song, and ‘(Baby) What You Want Me to Do’ from Jimmy Reed.” Alex laughed at the memory. “I’d cut a track and I didn’t have [lyrics] for it, so I just stole a line from every old blues song I know.”

On the “Mod Lang” recording, Alex employed his dirtiest guitar sound with a brief but potent lead during the break. Again he brought in Danny Jones to successfully add the bass lines. After this session, the loose trio of Jones, Rosebrough, and Chilton played a one-off gig to a drunken crowd on the small stage
at Friday’s. Alex enjoyed working with Danny, a Jackson, Mississippi, native, so much that he later produced an Ardent session with Jones’s hometown band, cutting an improvisational number called “Toe Jam.”

While Alex was pursuing music with others, John King was brainstorming a means of getting Big Star back on track, as well as helping Stax promote their new rock releases. In addition to distributing Ardent’s LPs, Stax had signed a British rock band called Skin Alley, as well as a group formed by Larry Raspberry, on the scene since the Gentrys, including a stint in Alamo with Richard Rosebrough. While corresponding with rock critics about Big Star’s LP, King had become friendly with several of them, particularly a Connecticut teen named Jon Tiven, who founded a fanzine called
New Haven Rock Press
. After Tiven penned an exuberant review of
#1 Record
in Boston’s
Fusion
, King flew him to Memphis to meet the band, as well as to a Gavin radio convention on the West Coast, where Ardent was promoting Big Star. In the February 1973 issue of
Phonograph Record
magazine, Martin Cerf wrote of the Tiven–Big Star lovefest, in a glowing review of the single “When My Baby’s Beside Me”: “Word has it within four days of receipt, DJ copies [of
#1 Record
] the nation over were showin’ up in bargain bins everywhere . . . sealed. In fact, only one bothered to listen, Jon Tiven, and he quacked in
Fusion
that ‘Big Star are the greatest thing since Count Five, the Yardbirds,’ and so on.”

To build on the press, King, together with Tiven and writer/rock historian Greg Shaw, who ran his own L.A.-based fanzine,
Bomp
, among other ventures, decided to organize a Rock Writers Convention, to be held in Memphis on Memorial Day weekend. Ostensibly the summit’s mission was to organize a union for rock scribes, so they could earn better pay and get more respect as journalists. Stax agreed to foot the bill, which amounted to $40,000 (over $200,000 in today’s dollars) to fly in more than one hundred rock critics from across the U.S. and U.K., put them up at the Holiday Inn, wine and dine them, bus them to Memphis landmarks like Graceland, and, on the final night, knock them out with a showcase at Lafayette’s Music Room, featuring Skin Alley, Larry Raspberry and the High-Steppers, and Big Star. As writers from California (Shaw, Gene Sculatti, and Cameron Crowe), the New York City area (Richard Meltzer, Andy Shernoff, Gary Kenton, Pete Tomlinson, Lenny Kaye, and Nick Tosches), upstate New York (Billy Altman), Austin (Chet Flippo), Detroit (most of
Creem
’s staff, including Lester Bangs and Jaan Uhelszki), and the U.K. (Simon Frith, Ben Edmonds, and Pete Frame) signed on, King persuaded Alex, Andy, and Jody to play a gig.

“The big push was behind this English band called Skin Alley,” Jody recalls, “but as John King was making these calls, and as the writers were our audience,
[they] would ask if Big Star was going to play. So John came to us and said, ‘Hey, would you mind playing?’” Soon after, the threesome began rehearsing and planning their set based on their January gig at Lafayette’s.

Whatever the stated purpose of the gathering, most of those in attendance saw the First Annual National Association of Rock Writers Convention as a free ride to party with their friends in the town where rock & roll was born. The thirsty scribes began arriving in Memphis for the convention’s start on Friday, May 25. Though some of the journalists missed the Lafayette’s show on Saturday night to join a renegade field trip to a Mississippi roadhouse where Charlie Feathers was playing, enough turned out that the room was packed.

By the time Big Star took the stage, around midnight, the audience was well lubricated. One of the most sloshed, Richard Meltzer, an incendiary writer in word and deed, jumped onstage to introduce the band: “Puke on your momma’s pussy!” he screamed into the mic. “BIG STAR!” After that auspicious beginning, the boys ambled to the stage and plugged in, Alex and Andy twirling the dials on their amps to get the sound right. Feedback shrieked. More twiddling followed. The audience became restless. Finally, Alex, who’d recently had his hair cut short, attacked the
chucka-chucka
riff to “Feel.” Stripped down and spare, the song was a powerful start, and the attendees jumped from their seats, crowded onto the dance floor, and by the fourth song, were boogying down. “
All the rock writers started dancing, and Richard [Meltzer] took his pants off on the dance floor while Big Star was playing, so he danced in his tighty whities for a while,” recalls Arkansas native Ross Johnson, then a fledgling rock writer and drummer. “I had seen Big Star perform before, and they had never had this kind of reception. They were never adored as with this handpicked perfect audience.”

“
The sound was much more driving than on
[#1] Record
,” another Arkansan Metal Mike Saunders wrote in his live review for
Phonograph Record
magazine, “very close to the chunkiness of the ’60s Kinks. Jody Stephens was an excellent [Mick] Avoryish drummer on stage, Andy Hummel used a chungy, treble-heavy bass sound, and combined with Chilton’s incomparable guitar style, it made for an exceptionally tight, self-contained group sound.” Saunders (who’d later form L.A. hardcore band the Angry Samoans) was particularly impressed by Alex’s punky attitude and instrumental prowess, calling him

the greatest rhythm guitarist I’ve ever seen in the Beatles/Badfinger genre of English lightweight pop, and maybe one of the best ever in any rock style. He plays a Stratocaster with tremolo attachment, plus heavy reverb
from his amp. In between picking the top strings to get a shimmering sound, he’ll drive out treble power chords that do for Badfinger stuff what Jimmy Page did for “You Really Got Me.” All the while working the tremolo! His guitar style and the group’s sound didn’t come off on
[#1
]
Record
. Onstage it did, and it was superb. “Feel,” “In the Street,” “My Life Is Right,” “Don’t Lie to Me,” “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” among others, rocked out ten times as hard as on the record. Supplemented by Chilton’s moves—very wiry and captivating—and looks—straight 1966—it was perfect.

In the middle of the set, Andy and Jody departed the stage and Alex strapped on his Martin for a brief acoustic interlude, including “Thirteen,” “Motel Blues,” and “The Ballad of El Goodo,” of which Saunders declared, “I’ll swear up and down until I die [it] should’ve been Big Star’s single, could’ve been a hit, too.”

When Andy and Jody returned, Big Star broke out their new songs, “She’s a Mover,” “O My Soul,” “Way Out West,” and “Life Is White,” interspersed with their favorite covers by the Kinks, Todd Rundgren, T. Rex, and Chuck Berry. When the band dashed offstage, the room reverberated with stomping floorboards, applause, and rebel yells; Big Star returned and pulled out all the stops. Alex looked at Jody and Andy, telling them he wanted to do a song they’d never tried before, and to the audience, “This is a song you may remember. . . .” Over the din he shouted to Andy, “A minor, F, G . . .” and, in as gravelly a voice as he could muster:
“Gimme a ticket for an aeroplane
 . . .” The place erupted. This was the first time Alex had unleashed his debut hit since leaving the Box Tops in 1970.

Metal Mike wasn’t alone in his high praise for the show, which, over the years, would become legendary. New Jersey writer Pete Tomlinson called the Big Star gig “
one of the most electrifying rock & roll performances ever. . . . The Chilton-led group turned a crowd of drunken freeloaders into drooling disciples with a taut, explosive set.” Bud Scoppa reported, “We thought they were the godhead.”

Billy Altman, editor of Buffalo’s
Punk
magazine (precursor to a NYC rag of that name), considered the show “lightning in a bottle. Everybody was blown away.” And future film director, then
Rolling Stone
’s cub reporter, Cameron Crowe recalls, “That was the big event of the weekend for most of us. There were more big-name rock critics in one place at one time than ever before or since.”

“They nailed it,” John King says of Big Star’s performance that night.

All three band members couldn’t help but agree. Jody: “We thought, ‘
Wow!
’ It was encouraging.” Andy: “It was the first time we had a
real
, no-kidding gig.”
Alex: “
We played that gig, and for me the moment when I decided we would do more together was speaking to John King. John was sitting there, kind of musing, and said, ‘You know, we did well in a lot of ways with that first album, and I think if we do
another one
, we can really make some success out of it.’ I like John King, and I liked him a lot then, and that little conversation was when I made up my mind—‘Okay, we’ll do it.’”

But on Tuesday, May 29, as Big Star made plans to cut a new album, eleven hundred miles away in midtown Manhattan, Columbia Records president Clive Davis was summoned into the office of parent company CBS president Arthur Taylor. There Davis was summarily fired amid charges of alleged financial irregularities and escorted out of the building. Davis’s sudden departure from Columbia would have as much effect on Stax Records and its releases as the cheering cries from drunken rock writers had on the morale of a disheartened band who decided to give it another shot.

“
The important thing is to make a good record,” Alex once said, “because if you make a good record, it doesn’t matter what happens. It’s going to sell from then on to some degree, even though it doesn’t sell anything when it comes out and is a big disappointment to everybody. If it’s really good, people are going to want it from then on, and that’s the important thing. It might take five or ten years for it to pay off—or it might take twenty years, and you might be dead when it pays off. If it’s good, it’s going to pay off for somebody, sometime.” No truer words could have been spoken about the second Big Star album.

When the news reached Stax executives that Clive Davis had been fired, it was just one more worry to add to a growing list for the company, which had expanded and invested to the extent that it was hemorrhaging money without equivalent returns. The distribution agreement Stax had inked with Columbia in late 1972 had not made
#1 Record
more available in stores. Still, at Ardent, in the summer of ’73, the new Big Star album got under way.

Before Chris Bell’s departure, Big Star had written or demoed nine songs for their next album. After he quit, Chris and Alex divided up the songs they had worked on together. “
We had a bunch of material, a lot of it written with Chris,” Alex recalled. “We made an arbitrary decision—Chris and us—which was that we took . . . songs and didn’t cut him in on them, and he [took] some things that we had helped him on, on which he didn’t cut us in either. . . . Chris didn’t want to be cut in on any of the songs on the second album, as far as credit or money goes.” Chris kept “There Was a Light” and “I Got Kinda Lost,” while Big Star held on to “Back of a Car” and “O My Soul.” “
I don’t recall it as being an uneven deal,” said Andy. “He got as much as he took.” Later, after “Back of a Car” and “O My Soul” had been rerecorded and released by Big Star, Chris wrote John Fry
requesting that his name be added to the songwriting credits for the songs. It wasn’t.

As the band reconvened at Ardent’s Studio B they sought out the demos they had cut in mono with John Fry the previous year, but the tape was nowhere to be found. John assumed that someone had accidentally recorded over it during one of the late-night sessions; Alex suspected that Chris had taken it from the studio. Decades later the tape would turn up among Chris Bell’s recordings.

Generally Big Star wanted a looser, live-sounding approach for the new LP, similar to their four-song demo session, with as few takes as possible. “Back of a Car,” the first track recorded by the new three-member Big Star, sounds similar to much of
#1 Record
. It boasts the lush harmonies and guitar interplay—this time the result of Alex’s overdubs rather than two guitarists playing together. “
We kept up the tradition that had been set on the first record for the second record as much as we could,” Alex said, “but I had no clue about what songwriting stuff I wanted to do.”

It took only three takes to cut the basic track. Alex later double-tracked the lead vocals, and Jody added harmonies. The lyrics—teen confusion and lust—are of a piece with “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and “Thirteen.” Andy, who has a cowriting credit with Alex for ”Back of a Car,” associated the lyrics with his own teenage experience, cruising Memphis’s hamburger joints and other hangouts in his father’s Lincoln, blasting a Led Zeppelin tape.

Alex had unsuccessfully tried cutting “O My Soul,” the first of the new songs to be written, with Richard Rosebrough on drums and Danny Jones on bass. Big Star performed it twice at Lafayette’s Music Room that year. For the album the band tried a slower tempo than on their live version, experimenting with an extended instrumental intro featuring Alex’s guitar played through a whirling Leslie speaker (like Eric Clapton’s on Cream’s “Badge”) and other such effects. But a more raw, primal version, which became the keeper, rocked harder, inspired by Dave Edmunds’s 1970–71 hit, “I Hear You Knockin’” (a cover of a 1955 Smiley Lewis song).

“I remember very consciously trying to depart from the standard Big Star sound on this,” Andy told Bruce Eaton for his monograph on the second Big Star album. “It sounds much more sparse than our previous stuff. . . . We were working with Jody to try and get out of the usual sort of rock & roll drum style [using] ride cymbal/bass drum on the downbeat, snare on the upbeat, etc. . . . Jody’s just playing lots of sort of broken rolls and stuff, almost like an eclectic drum solo throughout the song. . . . This was when
Alex really started getting great on
guitar, picking out [Hendrix’s] ‘Little Wing,’ the Bach Bourrée in E minor he liked so much.” (The eighteenth-century J. S. Bach composition inspired other rockers, most famously the Beatles in “Blackbird,” as well as songs by Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull.)

“‘O My Soul’ starts off like it’s going to be a traditional Big Star rock song, but then Alex started adding other parts different than the original line,” said Andy. “This was very anti-traditional Big Star. When we got around to producing it, all the other parts and the different sounds got dialed in.” Alex played Mellotron on the track and possibly engineered some of the overdubs. Throughout the album, engineering duties were split among Andy, Alex, John, and Richard. “O My Soul” would be the longest song on the record, at just over five and a half minutes. Otherwise, Big Star strove to keep their songs at around three minutes or shorter.

The lyrics to “Life Is White” are more personal and embittered, probably a kiss-off to Diane, whose relationship with Alex had splintered, while also dissing Vera (here, Ann):
“Don’t like to see your face, don’t like to hear you talk at all / I could be with Ann, but I’d just get bored.”

The song may have started as a response to Chris’s “My Life Is Right,” from
#1 Record
, but it clearly evolved into something else. Following the structure of Alex’s acoustic demo, the basic track was captured during the first take, followed by Alex’s late-night overdubs, including prominent harmonica and a honky-tonk-style piano. “Jim Dickinson would
bring his tack piano,” said Andy. “This was an upright, and someone had actually stuck thumbtacks into all the hammers to get that tacky sound.”

Another song Big Star had played live at Lafayette’s began on a Knabe piano at the Hummel home. Andy had written “Way Out West” as a quiet ode to his absent girlfriend, but playing it in Studio A, as the band jammed on new material, transformed the tune into a richly textured, guitar-driven, mid-tempo pop-rocker.
Rolling Stone’s
review had slammed “The India Song” as the only weak track on
#1
Record,
and since then Andy had been particularly sensitive about his abilities as a vocalist and songwriter. Though Alex talked him into cutting “Way Out West,” Andy refused to sing it. Jody took it on, vocalizing with a charming, somewhat tentative style perfect for the yearning lyrics and complemented by Alex’s background vocals.

Alex’s future musical direction is evident in the moody “Daisy Glaze,” with its vulnerable vocal approach. There’s a break, signified by three beats on Jody’s bass drum, and then the tempo and the narrative’s location change, from slow
in a car to fast in a bar, before building to a nihilistic ending
—“I’m thinking Christ, nullify my life / You’re gonna die, you’re gonna decease”
—accompanied by the driving guitar’s ascending notes. Credited to all three members and originally entitled “Knoxville,” the song was a work in progress for weeks, and much of its sonic intricacy was overdubbed after the basic track was finished.

Alex had been obsessively playing a recording of a 1739 composition by Handel on his LHI stereo in his bedroom—possibly a recommendation from his brother Howard or family friend Bill Eggleston. “I had some experience listening to Baroque music before that, but I was starting to get into it more and more in 1973,” Alex told Eaton. “I was really starting to dig on Bach and Handel—discovering Handel for the first time. . . . The transition from slow to fast [in “Daisy Glaze”] cops Handel in Movement One of Concerto Grosso Number 7 Opus 6. It starts off with a very bombastic, slow, beautiful intro for about a minute—then stops and it’s just
bomp, bomp
.” Alex’s attraction to Baroque music can also be heard in his guitar work on “Way Out West,” with “its second verse entirely given over to a glorious symphony of ringing guitar,” as described by Eaton.

“Daisy Glaze,” with an intriguing sonic palette, filled all sixteen tracks, the most available at Ardent and more than were usually required for Big Star recordings. Andy played an old pump organ on one track; another featured a shimmering stringed instrument: a Fender mando-guitar. Alex had recently bumped into original Box Tops guitarist John Evans, who owned it. The combination mandolin and guitar intrigued Alex, who borrowed it for a couple of weeks, long enough to play on “Daisy Glaze” and another new song he was writing. For the woozy effects, an oscillator varied the speed of the recording of the acoustic guitar track. “Those overdubs were just kind of kinky things we did on evenings,” said Alex.

Eaton calls “You Get What You Deserve” “a textbook example of how three musicians and an engineer can use space and restraint . . . to create a powerful mood.” A straight-ahead rocker, the song also has an ominous vibe created by the piano line (played by Terry Manning), matched with acoustic and electric guitar work. “The title matches the sound,” said Alex. “I would just let the music create the lyrics in my head.” The song’s bridge has a spaghetti-western feel, with maracas adding Latin-tinged percussion. The rhythm section really excels on the track—a fact that was not lost on Alex, who called his bandmates “
great musicians. . . . The parts that both of them made up for the songs really helped. Andy would think of parts to play and would play them consistently. Jody is
very much a drummer who plays arrangements. Once he gets that arrangement, it’s like granite. . . . His fills are very interesting. Jody will somehow arrange to have a flam in the middle of this [fill] that sets it off from the way that any other drummer would do it. I think he studied in school with a drum teacher that influenced him. He has the most unique way of doing fills [that are] very premeditated and deliberate things.”

As much as he liked Andy and Jody’s parts, Alex decided to mix it up on the LP and keep the three tracks he’d earlier recorded with the Dolby Fuckers. “
There were versions of ‘What’s Going Ahn,’ ‘Mod Lang,’ and ‘She’s a Mover’ that Alex cut with Richard Rosebrough and Danny Jones,” says Jody. “When it came time to record those, we did, and we demoed them, at least ‘She’s a Mover.’ Maybe we tried ‘Mod Lang,’ too. But they didn’t work as well as Alex’s version with Richard. They just had a better feel. So, at any rate, we wound up using those. We couldn’t top them.” Andy overdubbed the bass to “She’s a Mover,” originally called “So Wild.” “We pushed everything out of the way in the studio, then went into the equipment room and found a real old Fender Showman amp,” said Andy. “I would never ordinarily use such a thing because they don’t have nearly enough power or speakers, so they distort badly. But we set it up all by itself in the middle of the room, put a microphone about six feet away, hooked up the bass, and blasted away.” The other, unused version of “Mod Lang” kicked off with a spoken intro in which Alex imitates a black bluesman busking for change—“Rattle my tin”—but it didn’t make the cut.

“What’s Going Ahn,” which John Fry had engineered earlier in the year, had a moodiness that couldn’t be replicated, according to Richard. “When we did ‘What’s Going Ahn,’
I probably was sedated that day,” he remembers. “There was a push to slow it down and hold it back, and I had to work so hard to keep that tempo way back there. It was a dark session, and things had happened and feelings were hurt, and friendships were becoming fragmented, and the air was thick, and a butter knife could cut the air easily. . . . Alex had taken control and was starting to get wild and crazy. Everybody didn’t know how to react to it, so they just followed it and did what he said.”

Heavy drinking and pill-popping continued at Friday’s, with “after parties” spilling over at Ardent, sometimes until the sun came up. Alex spent a “
lost weekend” with his longtime hairdresser Clifford Hill, a David Bowie fan and one of the few openly gay young men on the scene. Wearing his own locks long and curly, he’d been doing Alex’s hair since his Box Tops days. Alex, licking his wounds from his recent breakup with Diane, fell into Clifford’s arms for a
little Quaalude-fueled sexual experimentation that lasted a few days before the two went back to being just friends. There were several teenage girls waiting to take Clifford’s place.

The last song Alex, Jody, and Andy recorded together for the new album summarizes everything Alex had been going through that summer, both musically and emotionally. Women were on his mind, including his ex-wife, Suzi, who had left Memphis with Tim Benton and Timothee for Texas; Vera, back and forth from Colorado; and Diane, now seeing other guys. They had one thing in common: All three were born in September. The pop masterpiece resulting from Alex’s tumultuous love life, “September Gurls,” is a three-minute burst of euphoric, chiming guitars, kicked off with the mando-guitar, accompanied by yearning vocals singing lyrics both heartfelt and snide: “
I love you, well, nevermind / I’ve been crying all the time
.” The vocal harmonies on “September Gurls” are reminiscent of those on #
1 Record
(particularly on the bridge and chorus). The title was a nod to the Beach Boys’ “California Girls,” and the song beguiled everyone who heard the playback.

“
Alex and I were hanging around together a lot in those days,” said Andy. “He was going through a lot of different girls that he was having relationships with, kind of simultaneously, and a lot of what’s in those songs is him really just telling about his experiences with them, and how he felt about them.” Said Alex, “
I’d never had an easy relationship with a woman that didn’t degenerate into some kind of deception or bad feeling. I always wrote about what was happening to me.”