A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (23 page)

There’s a magic in this 7-inch incarnation that was lost in the context of the uniformly excellent album. [Alex’s] commitment to pop is as intense and overt as the domestic 9th grade fashions he adorns. . . . It’s not often that greatness, once rejected, gives us a second chance. . . . Remember this man, Alex Chilton: I have the distinct premonition that he has barely begun to offer up what will be his ultimate contribution.

What Alex had just completed over the past few months didn’t yet have a name. In fact, Alex wasn’t sure which among the nineteen songs they’d tracked he wanted to include on an album. But what he’d eventually discover was that these decisions would not be his to make.

“
I was just living this very unsettled lifestyle—drinking a lot and drugging a lot—and continued that all through 1975,” Alex said of the recording sessions’ aftermath. After John Fry pulled the plug on the project, Jim Dickinson asked him to do the mix, as he had for
#1 Record
and
Radio City
. But Alex was not invited to the sessions. “
Mixing is half the record, and Alex was excluded,” Jim said, “because he would have ruined it.”

Alex was embittered at being left out of this important part of the process. “
I was just throwing ideas at the wall, and the idea was to choose, at the end, what to use from a greater number of songs,” he said twenty-five years later. “I was pitched out of the process by Dickinson and Fry, and not allowed to make any of those choices. I guess with my drug use and drinking, they decided I was too unreasonable to be dealt with. Dickinson took over the whole thing. . . . I feel—to this day—very betrayed by that. I wanted to take stock of what was there and say, ‘Okay, let’s use this, and let’s change this a little bit,’ but they just said, ‘Forget it. Nothing you say are we listening to anymore. We’re mixing what’s on here the way we want to, fuck you.’”

Dickinson always contended that with Alex involved the mix would not have happened and the recordings “
would never have been finished. [Alex] and Fry—their relationship had deteriorated to the point that they could barely be in the room together,” Jim said thirty years later. “
The record broke John’s heart. It’s the last record he ever did, top to bottom. But—and this may be cruel of me to say—I got the sound of Fry’s heart breaking. At the point at which it was taken away from Alex, he had done his part. Fry’s part remained to be done, and that was the only way we could do that. There was a lot going on for John, and Alex was being Alex. They couldn’t have mixed it together.”

John put his usual diligence and expertise into the mixing, though he found some of the material hard to take. “There was a tendency to be sonically deconstructive,” John reflects, “and it was pretty clear to me that [during the recording Alex] didn’t have much interest in trying to tailor anything to have commercial appeal, to be radio friendly.”

“
I worked with engineers who were supposed to be the real guys, but none of them were nowhere as good as John,” Jim said. “And that’s the best I can put it. On that record, he would take a classical cello and sheer distortion and treat them equally. They were both equally musical paint that he was pushing around the canvas.”

While doing the mix, John and Jim discussed finding a label to distribute it. Stax’s operations were still intact, but the writing was on the wall. “
Everybody’s kind of down and depressed,” John says. “Stax was sort of the Mother Ship around here, and so many things revolved around it, in terms of music. That was a big record company for the time. They had, not counting the people who were scattered around different places in the country, 200 or 300 employees in Memphis. And we were wondering, ‘Is Memphis music now going to implode, and we are all going to be unemployed?’” The despairing sounds of the record’s tracks only added to John’s desperation.

For the sequencing, Jim recalled that Alex wanted the album “to begin with ‘Thank You Friends.’ It was supposed to end with ‘Take Care.’ ‘Take Care’ is for Alex an optimistic statement, a statement of love for Lesa—a direct statement to her.”

As he listened to song after song, Jim realized that “the record was about
deteriorating relationships. The band had fallen apart, Alex and Lesa were going through this soap opera that was their relationship, John and Alex were not getting along.” Over the years, as he continued to contemplate the album, he theorized that it was also about Midtown Memphis. “
Every song has a geographical location,” Jim says. “I can picture various parts of Midtown: Alex’s mama’s house, Lafayette’s Music Room, Ardent, the Aldridge sisters’ house.”

The way John Fry saw it, the album “
had its moments, but generally speaking, if you just sit and listen to that thing, it will not put a smile on your face. But it’s a great record in the sense that if you want a snapshot of what was going on primarily with Alex at that time, it really does that. He’d had this whole series of professional experiences [that] would tend to make you disillusioned and depressed and everything else.”

The album remained shrouded in uncertainty. Was it a Big Star album or an
Alex Chilton solo project? The Ardent recording boxes were marked either “Al & Jody,” or “Alex Chilton”; the latter was the name on the mastering card. As for the album title, that had not yet been determined. Toward the end of the recording sessions, Jim had jotted down “Beale Street Green,” a line from “Dream Lover,” a song he later called the soul of the record. He and Alex had both been dismayed at the “urban renewal” of Beale Street, resulting in hundred-year-old buildings being razed, with grass-covered vacant lots left in their place. Jim remembered Alex liking
Beale Street Green
as a possible title. Early on Alex had joked with Jody about calling themselves Sister Lovers. Jim’s only memory of that being a title option was an idea that the album cover be created as a gatefold, with one side featuring an Eggleston portrait of Lesa and the other a photo of Holliday, “so the two girls kissed when you closed the album.”

“I’m
not sure we were calling ourselves Big Star anymore at all,” Alex said later. “We never got to the point of naming ourselves in any final way.” “Sister Lovers” was how Alex and Jody were introduced by the DJ on the Southwestern campus station WLYX when they appeared there in February ’75, accompanied by three friends. The broadcast “was way over the top in terms of self-indulgence, which usually comes after you take a lot of pills,” says Jody. They were joined by Pat Rainer, who’d contributed her robust whistling to the “Whole Lotta Shakin’” recording; Randy Romano, a backup singer for various groups, who harmonized on “Shakin’”; and Beth Chapman—a kind of cheering section–cum–chorus. In an overly saccharine greeting Alex emoted, “I can’t tell you how pleased we are,” before kicking off shambling versions of “Femme Fatale” (with off-key harmonies) and “O Dana,” stumbling over the lyrics and between-song chatter. Alex plucked a blues lick on his electric guitar, saying, “We’re gonna do a song I wrote with Danny Graflund,” then laughing and slurring lines like
“licking the sewer,” “getting beaten with a chain,”
and
“Blondie, you’re the dredge / but take me home and make me like it.”
As always, Alex’s cover choices demonstrated his eclectic taste: Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You,” not well-known at the time, with the ad-libbed spoken lines
“I took my last 35 mg of Valium before coming here . . . / Thinking about my green sweater / and I got my green MG out of the shop today”
; and the Bonzo Dog Band’s “Death Cab for Cutie.” The set concluded with “my Christmas song—‘Jesus
CHRIST,’”
followed by Pat and company’s testifying “Hallelujah,” “Amen.” (Rumors circulated that Alex had taken Valium before the broadcast to come down from acid he’d ingested earlier—though he later claimed his last acid trip was in 1974.)

Afterward Jody decided he wanted out. “
That scene was disturbing enough
for me to quit the band after that,” he said. “My relationship with Alex had suffered all the way through that third album. [The radio station scene] was pretty mild compared to what went on in the studio and outside the studio—but I had gotten to the end of my rope.” Twenty years later, when someone sent Jody a tape of the show, he threw it away.

After the album was mastered by Larry Nix, on February 13, 1975, Ardent pressed up a few hundred copies of a “white label” version. Jim and John selected the disc’s fourteen songs from among the nineteen recorded: “Stroke It Noel,” “Downs,” “Femme Fatale,” “Thank You Friends,” “Holocaust,” “Jesus Christ,” “Blue Moon,” “Kizza Me,” “Sometimes” (Jody’s song, later renamed “For You”), “O Dana,” “Nighttime,” “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On,” “Kanga Roo,” and “Take Care.” For marketing purposes the record was labeled
Big Star 3rd
.

“The
shopping of it was a nightmare,” according to Jim. One of the targeted A&R executives was Alex’s old friend
Karin Berg, who’d worked her way into the music business and was now signing artists for Elektra. “Karin Berg accused me of destroying Alex’s career,” Jim remembered. His former boss Jerry Wexler’s response was just as negative: “Baby, listening to this record made me feel
very
uncomfortable.”

“I had the sense that a lot of
people at these conventional record companies were going to find some of the music a bit unconventional for their taste,” John recalls, “and that turned out to be the case. John King and Dickinson and I went to every A&R guy at every record company in the country, and they looked at us like we were crazy. No one would touch it.”

“
I tell my victims: I can only make ’em, I can’t sell ’em,” Jim once joked. “But I guess [the album] was too far in front of itself. I got my break in the business from Bill Justis [of “Raunchy” fame], and he used to say, ‘Dickinson, your problem is, you’re eleven years in front of everybody else.’ Why he thought
eleven
, I don’t know. But I guess we were, in that case. I was surprised people didn’t think it was good. I thought it was great. The sound of it alone—even if you didn’t recognize the songs or the performance. Just the sound of the fuckin’ thing compared to what was on the market at the time.”

In 1974 and ’75 the big sounds coming out of the South were Lynyrd Skynyrd and the Allman Brothers. On the West Coast the mellow country-pop of the Eagles and Linda Ronstadt was gaining steam. Nationally Elton John and Paul McCartney and Wings sold millions of records, and disco was beginning to catch fire, while prog rock still got plenty of FM airplay. Clearly this album didn’t fit into any of those niches. As Jim Dickinson famously quipped, “
The best
songs don’t get recorded, the best recordings don’t get released, and the best releases don’t get played.”

Throughout the making of
3rd
(the name Alex later used when referring to the LP), Alex had continued to listen to and play a variety of music with various people—including Chris Bell. In 1974 Chris had started recording again at Shoe, a tiny Memphis studio known as “the poor man’s Ardent.” On a trip to Europe with his brother David (who bankrolled Chris’s musical endeavors), he cut four new songs at a studio in France where Elton John had recorded. They were joined by Richard Rosebrough, who played drums on the tracks. Chris then connected with Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick, working at George Martin’s AIR Studios, in London. There Emerick mixed Chris’s “I Am the Cosmos,” and to Chris’s great delight he met Paul McCartney, who stopped by the studio. When Chris returned to Memphis, he asked Alex to join him at Ardent and overdub background vocals on his “You and Your Sister.” Former Box Top Bill Cunningham, now playing classical music, wrote its string arrangements and performed upright bass on the song.

Richard Rosebrough witnessed the Chilton-Bell session. “
After the split between those two guys, eventually they made up and decided they were still going to be friends—although they would be distant friends,” says Rosebrough. “Alex came down to the studio and sang a background part, and it was like two angels holding Jesus. Alex was in the control room for the playback; I saw the look in Alex’s eyes—his heart just melted. He thought that was just beautiful, and he was so sweet with Chris [like], ‘I feel so bad that all this has gone down between us—listen to this beautiful voice, and it’s like an angel.’ You can tell that it got to him. He appreciated it for exactly what it was.”

Though he and Alex clicked in the studio, Chris still dreamed of re-creating Big Star—without Alex. He wrote Fry a note, suggesting they rerecord
#1 Record
with new players, and he unsuccessfully tried to entice Jody, Richard Rosebrough, and others to join him in Europe to tour as a reconstituted Big Star. He also told U.K. journalists that Alex’s behavior was the reason he quit the band.

•   •   •

As the
3rd
sessions had gotten under way in ’74, Alex had agreed to produce a couple of fellow partiers who worked at an Overton Square nightspot. Vocalist Scott Adams and guitarist Michael Elliot had written a half-dozen originals, and Alex recruited John Lightman on bass and Richard Rosebrough on drums for sessions at Ardent. Engineering the tracks, Alex overdubbed lead guitar on the loose-limbed “Torso Tourinado” and backing vocals on “Games,” while Jim
Dickinson contributed piano to “Mojo Man” and “Sunshine Sam.” With a surplus of attitude and a disregard for staying on key, the protopunk Adams sounded akin to Richard Hell, then forming Television in New York with Tom Verlaine.

After the
3rd
sessions, in early ’75, Alex and sidekick Danny Graflund recorded “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It” on Alex’s home recorder. Graflund used the song’s title as a pickup line in bars, and Alex loved it. Alex played guitar while Danny sang; then Alex added it to his own repertoire, tweaking the lyrics
(“You call me a slut / in front of your family”)
each time he sang it. Late one night, Alex slipped into Ardent to cut the song, playing all the instruments himself. He also tracked a couple different versions of “The Walking Dead,” perhaps inspired by
Night of the Living Dead
. His process seemed closer to the more chaotic
3rd
sessions than to any of his previous studio work. His first attempts to utilize what he had learned from Jim Dickinson were clumsy. Sounding unhinged and singing off-key, Alex howled the lyrics to “Dead,” his accent ranging from faux Elvis to British Invasion Mod. The ptomaine stew included spiky, disjointed guitar lines, meandering piano, and arrhythmic drumming with an overabundance of cymbals. Another, more haunting take featured a long, moody guitar intro, with the vocals buried in the mix. A glacier-paced “Take Me Home” was backed by a cheesy drum machine, chaotic riffing on both piano and organ, and, on an extended vamp, an assortment of wacky sound effects.