A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (21 page)

Van told Rob Jovanovic:

I was so nervous and so green as a guitar player. I think Jody saw the potential of having another vocalist and maybe songwriter in the band, but Alex, God bless him, was pretty out of it and uncommunicative. No doubt about it—I was not the lead guitarist they were looking for. I showed up at Ardent to play some stuff, and Chilton was taking Mandrax, which was like Quaaludes, and having a big time! But it was ridiculous, it was a disaster musically. I couldn’t follow anything they were doing. I loved the Big Star stuff, but they were doing T. Rex songs that I’d never heard before. Jody was sitting there and just rolling his eyes. It was a mess. There was no chemistry at all between me and Alex.

John recommended that they try Evan Leake, the guitarist in a local six-piece band called Post. His bluesy style on a Les Paul contrasted with Alex’s
British Invasion-y Strat, and Alex decided he was the man for the job. Evan began working out parts for the songs on
Radio City
, as well as Kinks, T. Rex, and Velvet Underground covers. Alex taught the band “Thank You Friends,” recently added to the set, and at one rehearsal, he and John messed around with “Jesus Christ.” As they reworked
Radio City
songs, Evan later recalled that Jody didn’t seem to like their more blues-tinged sound, which continued to veer away from the Anglo-pop style of the original quartet.

Alex dug Evan’s blues touch, however, and also appreciated the amiable guitarist’s willingness to drive him around. “
Alex liked to stay wasted,” says Evan. “I was Alex’s ride most of the time, usually waking him up at two or three in the afternoon with Lesa.” After a few desultory performances where Alex dialed it in, sometimes popping a Valium before the show, John and Jody were losing their patience. At a college gig in Arkansas, Alex broke a string during the set. Since the theft in Cambridge, he’d lost several other guitars, apparently stolen from Ardent, and now he didn’t have a backup. So he plopped himself down onstage to change the string, “taking his time while the audience waited impatiently with a few jeers,” says Evan.

Jody had taken a job waiting tables and begged off the next gig. On a night in September, Big Star would play their last concert at a school near Millington, Tennessee, with Jody’s spot taken by drummer Bill Marshall, on loan from the band Target. It was a thankless task; Marshall’s snare was stolen that evening, and he had to borrow one from another group on the bill. Later a disheartened Alex told John Lightman, “Music—I could take it or leave it.”

“I think he only
said that for shock value, not meaning it whatsoever,” says John. “But at the time I was crushed and terribly sad, because I greatly admired Alex’s musicianship and thought it a terrible waste of talent. So I quit.”

Big Star seemed to be finished.

Despite his remark to John, however, Alex had completed a demo reel of twelve songs, eleven originals plus a version of the Velvet Underground’s “Femme Fatale.” He’d decided to bring in an outside producer to Ardent, and he’d come up with a candidate. He asked John Fry to call Jim Dickinson and see if he’d be interested in working on the next record. Jim instantly agreed: “I was fascinated by the thing as soon as I heard it,” he said of Alex’s demo tape.

“I knew Jim slightly back in the ’60s,” Alex said, “and I enjoyed his company.” Since the two had met in ’68, Dickinson had gone on to make a name for himself. In 1969 he played piano on “Wild Horses” during the Rolling Stones’ recording sessions for
Sticky Fingers
in Muscle Shoals. Atlantic’s Jerry Wexler
then engaged him and several of his musician buddies to become the session team, known as the Dixie Flyers, at Criteria Studios in Miami, where they backed up Aretha Franklin, among others. Afterward he’d partnered with California-based guitarist Ry Cooder on a number of projects before returning to Memphis. Back in town, Dickinson had cut his own eclectic LP,
Dixie Fried
. He then spent months with Dan Penn producing his solo album
Emmett the Singing Ranger Live in the Woods
. That unreleased venture ended in a disagreement between the two. (“I could have made him the psychedelic Dean Martin,” Jim later quipped.)

Alex occasionally stopped by Dan’s studio, where he’d run into Jim, who’d recognized Alex’s artistic potential since the Box Tops days. “
I’d always been interested in Alex,” Jim told Jonathan Valania. “I knew who he was before he knew who I was. I think the second Box Tops album is where Dan Penn was at the peak of his creative genius—‘Deep in Kentucky’ and ‘Weeping Analeah’ are as good as it gets. As Dan was mixing it at old Ardent, I would sit and listen to it outside the wall—I learned a lot from the experience.” Just before connecting with the Stones, Jim, in a misguided moment, decided to become a music journalist and got an assignment from
Cheetah
magazine to write a profile of guitarist Steve Cropper. He followed that up by interviewing Alex for a prospective feature.

“I went and
talked to him at his mama’s house,” Jim remembered. “Alex had just got back from his tour with the Beach Boys. On the wall hung the framed gold record of ‘Cry Like a Baby,’ and the label had peeled off the record and was laying down at the corner inside the frame like a dead bug. That’s what Alex liked. I was the first person who ever talked to him about his own creativity—that he was doing art, that he could be a producer. Literally no one had ever discussed his creative ideas with him.” Jim was convinced that it was that encounter seven years earlier that had led to John Fry’s call.

That might have been the case, but Alex had, in fact, followed Jim’s career as well and thought he had the ears and vision he could trust. As Alex’s relationship with the six-years-older John Fry deteriorated, he needed another big brother; Jim, nine years Alex’s senior, would turn him on to new musical ideas, as his brother Reid had done with the Coasters record eighteen years before. Jim later recalled that Alex said as much, mistakenly thinking Dickinson was born the same year as Reid. “
When I asked him why he wanted me to produce the record,” said Jim, “he told me that I was born in the Year of the Snake, and he had a brother who was born in the Year of the Snake that was drowned in the bathtub. [Reid] was the only person in his family he was close to.”

Alex wanted to experiment outside the box, and Jim seemed the kind of maverick who’d help him get there. “
I was living kind of progressively wilder and wilder all the time,” Alex explained. “I was writing a lot, just scribbling things out, doing odd ideas, and I didn’t want to be bothered with all the details of producing the record at that point. I wanted somebody else there to say, ‘That’s good,’ ‘That needs work,’ ‘Change it here,’ and that kind of thing. Be like George Martin and guide things along, while I was doing raw creating and not discriminating between what was good and what wasn’t.”

Some drunken recordings Alex and Andy Hummel had cut at Dan’s studio a few years earlier had inspired Jim. “
I had heard this recording that he made there of ‘Dark End of the Street,’ and this is really where it started for me,” Jim said. “You get to the end of the first bridge, Alex says, ‘Hit me, band.’ And then nothing happens. Finally they start to play again, and it was like a lightbulb went off over my head, and I thought, ‘He hears the band in his head. He’s hearing something that isn’t happening.’ If I ever get the chance to cut Alex, that’s what I want—I want the band that’s in his head.”

When recording began in September 1974, however, Jim realized that Alex was actually looking to get
out
of his head. “The first night of the first session I watched him
shoot Demerol down his throat with a syringe,” Jim said. “That set the tone.” Alex later explained, “I was getting very destructive in a lot of ways then, and I was trying to capture that on recordings.” Richard Rosebrough, who engineered some of the tracks, along with Jim, Alex, and John Fry, says, “
Alex was getting close to being out of control at that time. Dickinson had the ability to keep his feet on the ground, make sure that whatever happened would get recorded. And he could pull all of this off without getting distracted.”

The process—and instrumentation—for the sessions, mostly cut in Studio B, differed greatly from the previous Big Star albums. Since Jody and Alex were the only two members left, the basic tracks they laid down together were just guitar and drums. Alex apparently hadn’t given Jody his demo beforehand, but the drummer jumped gamely into playing the songs nonetheless. “
He’s a real significant part of the record,” says Jim. “He is a great drummer. Jody sat down and played those fuckin’ songs like a man. . . . With no bass player, there was eye-to-eye lockup. Alex had Jody so intimidated that those performances just came out of him. Jody didn’t analyze the situation—he was trying to get through it. Jody’s a rock star to this day, and he wanted to ride it out.” Various bassists would be brought in later to overdub parts to some of the songs.

As for Alex, he immediately sensed the artistic freedom Jim’s production
style allowed him—“removing the yoke of oppression,” as Jim put it. “
Getting involved with Dickinson opened up a new world for me,” Alex said. “Before that, I’d been into careful layering of guitars and voices and harmonies and things like that, and Dickinson showed me how to go into the studio and just create a wild mess and make it really crazy and anarchic. That was growth for me.”

Though John Fry engineered some of the basic tracks, he exited during the late-night overdubbing sessions, where a kind of madness swirled around the studio. “I tried in most cases as much as I could to avoid the overdubbing, because the atmosphere at times was not the most pleasant,” he recalls. The overdubs could transform a pretty little ditty into a harrowing, complex, sometimes dissonant art piece. Simple guitar, vocals, and drums would be surrounded by a mélange of sonics, resulting from experimentation, and reflecting angst gone amok. “It was entertaining and kind of disturbing,” Jody remembers. “The entertaining part was when somebody would come in and do a great part for a song, and then Alex would twist it in some form or fashion.”

Alex sometimes cut tracks late at night, then presented them to Jim the following day. After the two had been discussing the producer’s role, Alex showed up with one of these, originally called “Like St. Joan,” possibly referencing the martyred Joan of Arc, which morphed into “Kanga Roo.” “
Alex came in one morning and he had this little evil grin on his face,” Jim recalled. “He said, ‘Lesa and I cut something last night I want you to hear.’ Okay, so he plays me ‘Like a Kangaroo’ [its second title], which is acoustic twelve-string and vocal on one track [making it difficult to separate the sounds]. I said, ‘Yeah, Alex, what do you hear on that?’ And with the evil grin, he says, ‘Well, why don’t you produce it, Mr. Producer?’” Jim jumped into action, adding electric guitar feedback, strings via a Mellotron, and his own amateurish drums—since Jody wasn’t there that day—including a very loud cowbell. Inspired, Alex grabbed a drumstick to use as a bow on his Strat, creating an eerie sound. Effects were added to Alex’s drowsy vocals, which presumably related the story of his and Lesa’s love affair:
“I first saw you, you had on blue jeans / Your eyes couldn’t hide anything . . . Thought you were a queen, oh so flirty.”
Alex later said of the lyrics, “I was spewing things out, just song after song. . . . The whole process was kind of automatic, free association.”

After “Kanga Roo,” which he once called his favorite track from the sessions, Alex knew he’d found his perfect partner. “On that one, we got the band that was in Alex’s head,” Jim said. “I think of
Alex as a collaborator. He allowed me to collaborate with him.”

Alex continued to write new songs in the studio: The lusty rocker “Kizza Me” references Lesa in the lyrics. Lines in the up-tempo “O Dana” came from the utterances of a paramour with whom Alex was briefly involved “
to torment Lesa,” according to Jim. “She was a girl Alex went with for a couple of weeks—a spacey Midtown girl who never took her cashmere overcoat off. Alex wrote down everything she said.”

Denizens of Midtown nightspots sometimes accompanied Alex to Ardent, witnessing or participating in the action. Pat Rainer, his old friend from Central High, had become friendly with Dickinson and Eggleston, and she occasionally stopped by. “I remember one night we were at Ardent, and Alex and Jim were having
a big confrontation about Jim wanting him to do something his way and Alex not wanting to do that,” says Pat. “Jim just turned around, walked out of the studio, got in his car, and headed down the road back home to Collierville. Alex went to Fry, got the keys to Fry’s car, and he and I got in that car and followed Jim all the way to his house. Jim wouldn’t come out. Alex got on his knees in the front yard, begging him to come back to the studio.” His pleas worked, and Jim returned.

Pat was also there the night they worked on the discordant “Downs,” filled with cacophony and kicking off with Jim playing steel drums. The most unusual percussion, though, came with an outlandish request from Alex: “Let’s do the snare drum with a basketball!” “I will never forget
Jim getting out that basketball and taking that drumstick and just whacking it,” says Pat. “Honest to god, the shit that I witnessed there . . .” “That was a good song in its own way,” Jim said, “very skewed.” Experimentation continued with every overdub session. Alex played an off-kilter barrelhouse piano instrumental called “Manana,” later tacked onto the beginning of “Jesus Christ,” which ends with a saxophone overdub.

Jody added a crucial element to the recording when he brought in his first original song, for which he envisioned strings arranged by Carl Marsh. Marsh had been employed by Steve Cropper at his studio, TMI, which had just gone under, and both were doing work at Ardent. Jody wanted his paean to Holliday, first called “Fireplace,” then “Sometimes,” to have a string quartet, as on “Eleanor Rigby.” When Alex heard the results of Marsh’s arrangements and subsequent string section on Jody’s tune, later renamed “For You,” he requested that such orchestral touches be added to some of his own recordings.