A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (22 page)

Carl Marsh’s contributions would take the songs to a whole new level. He later discussed his Big Star experience with filmmaker Drew DeNicola:

We were producing
R&B things like the Ohio Players and heady stuff like John Prine, but what I saw with Big Star and Jim—I would just have no idea how they were putting all that together. It was something completely different. I was completely fascinated with it, too, because I heard some pretty amazing stuff coming out of the speakers.

Jody said, “There’s one song that Alex has some specific ideas on.” So we sat for about six hours together. We basically went through every line in the whole song, just crawling inch by inch, millimeter by millimeter, on the cassette, with him singing the lines. So at the end of the six hours, I played back everything to him on the piano, saying at the same time, “These are violins, these are violas, these are low strings here,
pom pom pom pom,
these are going to be pounding it out here, these are doing this, accenting above your voice.” He said, “That’s great, I love it. This is gonna be so great, I love it.”

I showed up at the session on that Monday or Tuesday morning: Here’s the glassed-in control room, there I was, conducting, standing in front of the string players sitting in a semicircle facing the glass so they could see everything that was going on in the control room. We ran it through with the string players, and they were great sight readers, so they played it almost perfectly the first time through. I waited for some feedback from the control room. And I waited, and waited, and I said, “Well, what do you guys think?” I still had my back to them, and I looked at the string players, and they were going [eyes widening large], all of them like that. I’m thinking, “Oh, my god, what is happening?” I turned around and I can see the silhouette of Alex and Jim Dickinson—let’s just say they were having an animated discussion. Jim hits the button and he says, “Hey, Carl, I think Alex has something to say.” Alex got on the button, he said, “Um, you know, it doesn’t sound anything like I thought it was gonna.”

We decided that Alex was going to come out and sing the lines he wanted to use. And he started singing these lines, and they were all completely different. I realized, “Here is this brilliant guy, this brilliant creative force, who had these great ideas on Thursday, and he’s moved on. And that’s what he wants.” I told the string players, “Okay, everybody, get your pencils out, we’re going to have to make a few changes on the charts.” Alex sang the lines, and we went through and rearranged the entire song. The string players who weren’t used to this at all had to find room on their
paper to write the new parts. We finished recording “Thank You Friends” at two hours and forty-five minutes into the session; we had fifteen minutes left for recording the next three songs. Which we did.

In addition to greatly affecting the mood of several songs, the strings transformed “Lovely Day” into a different composition—“Stroke It Noel.” Noel Gilbert, the talented violinist who’d played on Box Tops records and was an old friend of Sidney Chilton’s, performed as part of the string section. “Alex was so delighted with that violin,” Jim remembered. The altered song soars, with Alex giving the directive, “Stroke it, Noel,” along with adding new lyrics like
“Keep an eye on the sky / Will they come / Oh the bombs.”
The song became one of Jim’s favorites.

Marsh suggested bassoon to open “Blue Moon,” which also features clavichord, while the string quartet in “Take Care” blends beautifully with woozy slide guitar, accordion, recorder, and pump organ, the latter played by Alex. The cello, violin, and viola color the acoustic guitar–fueled “Nighttime” with gravity and majesty, and tympani and tambourine add more sonic contrast. “What Carl Marsh did was futuristic, to say the very least,” said Jim, who attributed the woodwinds played on the sessions to the string arranger as well.

Steve Cropper was also enlisted for a track. On “Femme Fatale” Alex had reversed the Nico lead and Lou Reed backup vocal roles by singing Nico’s part and having Lesa in her girlish, slightly off-key French replace Lou’s lines. “
Cropper was doing an Yvonne Elliman album and a John Prine album,” recalled Richard Rosebrough, “and I was the engineer on both of those records. We would be in one studio, and Alex, Dickinson, and Fry would be in the other, and then rumors would be flying around the building the next morning—‘What in the world happened last night?’ Somebody asked Cropper if he would come in and put guitar on ‘Femme Fatale.’ He showed up at the appointed time. I already had a guitar lead to plug him in direct, I already had the level, he was in the speakers, we played the tape, and Cropper walked inside the door, plugged his guitar in, and didn’t come any closer into that control room but one step. He was freaked out. It was this bizarre song with Lesa singing—talk about some confused boys!” Later, when Alex tried to erase Lesa’s parts, Jim demanded they stay on.

“At your leisure,” Jim directed Alex as he sang into the mic the devastating “Holocaust,” its harrowing lyrics given even more weight via the piano,
bassoon, a spooky slide guitar, Alex’s desolate vocals, and, added later, a background chorus by a female soprano that sounds like death knells. Alex said of it, “
I like [‘Holocaust’] as a song but don’t really like my vocal performance. A lot of those songs just had a real lack of arrangements. . . . I think that if I had my head screwed on a little straighter at the time I probably would have approached it a bit differently. ‘Jesus Christ’ works. It fell together nicely and rocks a bit. . . . I’ve always been unhappy with ‘Femme Fatale.’ . . . I think I should have taken it down a key.”

Alex approved of most sonic mistakes, though, including one made by Bill Eggleston, who dropped by the sessions while on crutches and played an eloquent piano on “Nature Boy,” which Alex sang with a melancholic voice. The mood was broken and Alex nearly cracked up when Bill’s crutch fell over and crashed to the floor. Alex told Jim to leave the noise in the recording: “I liked the sound of a microphone falling down, things like that,” Alex said.

Other covers brought rock & roll energy to the sessions. Originally Alex sang a powerful lead on “’Till the End of the Day,” punctuated with Jody’s strong drumming, but one night he had Lesa cut the lead vocals. Jim, skeptical when he heard about the switch, ended up adoring the new version, but after another fight with Lesa, Alex replaced hers with his.

There were other, more troubling signs of the couple’s discord. “There was
physical abuse of Lesa,” according to Jim, “and I thought she participated in that willingly. I used to have a picture of me and Lesa sitting in the control room together, with [her] two black eyes, and she’s grinning into the camera.” Another day John Fry approached Jim to say, “We can’t have blood on the console. Please speak to Alex about it.” Though it may have come from an accident with the razor blade while splicing tape, Jim thought the worst. He remembered saying, “‘Alex, the next time take her into the bathroom.’ That was something that was part of the relationship. I don’t know what happened to cause the blood on the console. I don’t know how it got there. Part of production is knowing when to leave the room. I learned that from [legendary Atlantic engineer] Tom Dowd. When certain things are going to happen and you don’t want to witness it, you have to leave.” One witness to the havoc was Carl Marsh, and when he tried to break up a pummeling match between Lesa and Alex, Lesa told him to mind his own business.

“You Can’t Have Me,” with the lyric
“The drummer said you’re not very clean!”
was recorded around this time, and whether it reflects Alex and Lesa’s relationship or is simply his statement to the world about his exploitation as a musician
is debatable. At some point Alex noticed that the artist-producer Don Nix, a collaborator with Leon Russell, Albert King, and Eric Clapton, was accompanied at Ardent by a bodyguard. Impressed, Alex told Jim and John Fry that he wanted a bodyguard, too, so Jim phoned Danny Graflund, his close friend since the fourth grade. “
I wasn’t doing anything, so this sounded like fun,” recalls the six-foot-three, well-built Graflund. “There was a pretty good age difference, but a great friendship came out of it.
We were together every day. I picked him up at his house to take him to the studio, and I had a little ’57 Porsche, which he loved. We got to where he would come over to my house when they weren’t working in the studio, and I had a huge collection of records that he loved. When we went to bars, Alex was like, ‘Let’s go out there and be nuts! Let’s go get invisible. Let’s be like Jerry Lee [Lewis].’”

On one such night the Killer himself was performing at a local club. Danny, Alex, and a friend, who carried a tape recorder in her purse, went to check out the show. All three were rubber-legged and knocked a
RESERVED
card off a table to sit down. Alex “likes to get to that edge, but then step back and watch,” Graflund says. “I’ve seen him cause scenes, hoping or knowing someone would come up and get in the middle of it and let him back away.” That night was no exception. The friend pushed
RECORD
and documented the following scene:

Angry male voice: “
You better tell your friend to settle down, because there’s a bunch of folks here that want to whip his goddamn ass.”

Alex: “If you’re not some kind of chickenshit, you’ll tell him yourself.”

Crashing tables, breaking glass, screaming people. Jerry Lee’s band picking up the tempo.

But Graflund wasn’t always there to protect Alex from himself. Fortunately John Lightman happened to stop by Alex and Lesa’s house one afternoon while Alex was taking a bath. They heard a loud
thump
, and John discovered that Alex, after getting out of the tub, had fallen to the floor and was gripped with a seizure. “
His eyes rolled back in his head, and he started shaking and swallowing his tongue,” says John. “Lesa was really stoned, talking real slow and slurring her words, ‘Alex, are you all right?’ I put my left hand on his forehead and my right hand, with a couple of fingers, in his mouth to cup his tongue so he wouldn’t bite his tongue off. He almost bit my finger, because he was clinching up. And then he looked at me and kind of laughed and said, ‘We fooled ’em, we fooled ’em all!’ I don’t know where he went, but that’s what he said to me. We took him to the Methodist Hospital Emergency Room. A few minutes later, he comes bopping out to the waiting room. I said, ‘Alex, did you see the doctor?’ When he said no, I took
him back in there and I had the doctor look at his eyes to see if he had a concussion or anything. And the doctor said, ‘Have you ever had a seizure, or do seizures run in your family?’ And he said no. I told the doctor, ‘Listen, he’s been taking a bunch of barbs and he’s withdrawing from those, and he’d just gotten out of the bathtub and was probably chilled, and he just went into a seizure.’ Because Alex didn’t tell the guy anything.” It only later dawned on Lightman that if Alex had had the seizure in the tub, he could have met the same fate as Reid.

Alex was eventually admitted to the hospital, and both his parents, very concerned, took turns sitting at his bedside. “
His mother was so upset and worried because he’d had a seizure and that’s how his brother died,” says Lesa. “She was afraid that Alex had developed the same thing.” By the time he was released, he seemed fine, and—at least temporarily—was drug-free.

Soon after that incident, Alex wrote one more song for the album. “‘
Dream Lover’ is the furthest we went in terms of artistic vision,” according to Jim. “We didn’t even arrange that song. Alex said, ‘I’ve played it twice, once when I wrote it, and then I played it for Lesa and I shouldn’t have done that. If I play it one more time, I’m going to be bored with it.’ That’s the kind of thing I’m sympathetic to, so I said, ‘Okay, Alex, sing a little bit of it, we’ll find some stuff, then we’ll do it.’”

“Dream Lover” begins quietly and starkly with piano and Alex’s layered vocals intoning,
“I’m never gonna let you go.”
Jim’s friend Lee Baker, who played in the avant-blues band Moloch, added some jagged guitar. “Baker didn’t even know the changes,” according to Jim, “he just started playing. It got to this point after the bridge, and Alex just leans over and says, ‘Play it for me, guitarist,’ and Baker goes into a scratchy kind of funk solo.” Near the song’s end Alex starts making more vocal sounds, an ominous
“neetneetneet
,” as the guitar and piano fade out. “
That’s an imitation of Graflund,” Jim later explained. “Graflund used to scream ‘
neet neet neet.
’ It took Alex’s genius to figure out that it was a background vocal part. It actually comes from
Easy Rider
when Jack Nicholson takes a drink of water.”

A nod to Danny and Alex’s night with Jerry Lee, “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” was the final cover chosen for the sessions. Dickinson booked Dixie Flyers bassist Tommy McClure (who’d grown up across the street from the Chiltons’ house in Sherwood Forest) and drummer Tarp Tarrant, who drummed in Lewis’s band. Adding overdubs to that track brought the four months of sessions to a close. “Whole Lotta Shakin’” nearly featured a guest vocalist, Slim, an acquaintance of Graflund’s who had traveled to Memphis with him from Birmingham,
Alabama. They stopped by Ardent, with Slim blitzed after a three-day drinking binge. The toothless drunk became obsessed with Lesa, according to Danny, and wanted her to leave with him. Alex, also drunk, got the idea for Slim to sing a verse, and ushered him into Studio B. With the tape running, Alex urged, “Go on, Slim, sing for us.” Just as John Fry walked in, Slim broke down into a puddle of heaving sobs, pleading with Lesa, and everyone started laughing. Infuriated at the callous treatment of a guy he assumed was a homeless wino, John pulled Jim aside. “This is just perverse,” Fry told him. “Get that guy out of here. That’s it—I know you’re not finished recording yet, but we’ve got to mix the album the way it is.”

As the sessions were shut down, Alex came across the November issue of
Phonograph Record
, which featured the article “Alex Chilton & Big Star: Innocent but Deadly,” by Martin Cerf. After relating the backstory of Big Star’s ill-fated career, Cerf reviewed “September Gurls,” originally an Ardent single, released just after the label’s split from Stax, then reissued by the Mannings’ label, Privilege: