A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (11 page)

Later Alex said of his early songwriting attempts, “Back then, if I came up with a lick . . . I was amazed that I could do anything that actually sounded like music. I was experimenting, so I did everything I could.” Just over two minutes long, the joyous track is kicked off by Reggie’s airy guitar lead and propelled by acoustic guitar and keyboards, with Alex’s most earnest vocals.

Alex’s “Together” is another upbeat love song that would become a track on
Dimensions
and a B-side:
“You should see me walking with my girlfriend, you would swear we both were one . . . / We walk so close, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.”

Reggie Young’s feedback guitar riffs give the number a heavy rock feel, with
Wayne Jackson’s trumpet hearkening back to the sound of earlier Box Tops R&B-tinged cuts. Overall, though, most of the songs cut for
Dimension
s and subsequent singles reined in the soul-style extended horns in favor of a more rock-oriented production.

Alex’s “The Happy Song,” a
Dimensions
track, seems a sarcastic description of a pop band whose only value is entertaining its fans:
“Band up there on the stand singing a joyful song we can all sing too / Sing us a happy little song we can dance to.”
Yet with its bouncy pop melody, the song is undeniably catchy.

His bluesy “I Must Be the Devil” is in the vein of his first Box Tops cut, “I Can Dig It,” though this time the band got the opportunity to join in, with Bill Cunningham and Gary Talley contributing to the track, which boasts barrelhouse piano and guitar vamps. Alex seems to improvise on the vocals, going for the Bobby “Blue” Bland sound, yet the song abruptly fades out in the middle of a piano solo. “I recall doing ‘I Must Be the Devil,’” Bill told journalist Barney Hoskyns, “and [Alex] saying, ‘I’ve got a song and I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out exactly, but let’s just do a blues riff and see.’ And we did it, and it was one take and that was it.”

Wayne Carson still remembers Alex arriving at the studio one day, singing “I Shall Be Released,” from the debut album by the Band, the groundbreaking
Music from Big Pink
, released that fall. “
He loved this . . . Dylan song,” Wayne relates. “He said, ‘This is one of the best songs I ever heard.’” Gary was there the day they cut the song and was thrilled that Chips okayed his playing on it: “
I think Chips saw that I had some potential as a session player, and he tried to give me chances whenever he could.” Alex’s intimate and folksy reading of “I Shall Be Released,” with prominent piano, has a timeless quality.

Maintaining the album’s love-and-togetherness theme, Chip Taylor’s beautiful ballad “I’ll Hold Out My Hand,” like the Dylan song, received Alex’s softer vocal treatment, but with the addition of the Memphis Horns. Taylor had written American’s big spring hit by Merrilee Rush, “Angel of the Morning,” as well as the 1965 garage band classic, “Wild Thing,” first performed by the Troggs, one of Alex’s longtime favorite bands.

Neil Diamond, then primarily known as a Brill Building songwriter who’d composed hits for the Monkees, contributed “Ain’t No Way.” With its rousing repetitive chorus, punctuated by horns, the number sounds like it could have been the flip side to Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” a hit the following summer. Here Reggie Young again turned to the electric sitar for a little extra color.

On B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” which appeared in an abbreviated version
on
Nonstop
, Gary got his moment in the sun, playing a particularly inspired lead during the long guitar jam; the song ran over nine minutes. Yet Gary’s experience gave credence to Alex’s complaint about less-experienced engineers, who used the wrong guitar solo on the song’s master. “
My biggest disappointment was when we were doing ‘Rock Me Baby,’” says Gary. “During one take, I got my Les Paul and a Marshall amp and turned it up really loud, thinking, ‘This is what all the cool guys are doing,’ and when I got done, I thought, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done on a Box Tops record. I’m so proud of it.’ The next morning Reggie and the other guys came in, and they were playing it back and they got to my solo, and everybody said, ‘That sounds really good!’ I was just walking on air, but then the engineer forgot to write it down or something, and that whole solo I was so proud of never got on the record. I was just crushed.”

Gary was also invited to play on what would become the LP’s biggest single, though it was not released until late 1969. “Soul Deep” sounds more like a follow-up to “Cry Like a Baby” than Wayne Carson’s previous Box Tops hits. Chips and Tommy Cogbill liked Wayne’s demo of the song so much they used its basic rhythm tracks for the Box Tops cut. Gary and Wayne both added guitar, along with Reggie, and Alex’s tenor vocals sound heartfelt on this perfect pop-soul number.

The intriguing “Midnight Angel,” written by Mark James, conversely features Alex’s raspy baritone and has a spooky piano intro and dynamics and sonics bordering on psychedelia, with a “heavy” guitar solo and bluesy harmonica as the lyrics describe the protagonist reaching out to his moody, depressed lover.

•   •   •

On December 19, 1968, Suzi gave birth to Timothee Alexander Chilton. Within days of the birth, Alex left for California, where the Box Tops performed at another West Coast pop festival on December 22. Six days later, on his eighteenth birthday, William Alexander Chilton wed Susan Brooke Greene in Memphis, with Judge Buford E. Wells Jr. officiating. The following day Alex flew to Florida to play the three-day Miami Pop Festival. There, he could forget his abrupt lifestyle change when caught up in the frenzy of a festival with two stages and a hundred thousand people.

At least in the early days, Alex seemed to adapt to his new role as a husband and father. “
I’d visit, and we’d sit and listen to music, and he’d have the baby on his lap,” Gordon recalls. One time, he says, “Alex was going out on some kind of tour for a week or so, and he asked me if I could come over and stay with Suzi
and the baby while he was gone, because he didn’t want them staying there by themselves.”

Meanwhile, the Box Tops’ greatest-hits album sold more copies than their previous LPs, reaching a high of #45 on the
Billboard
album chart, where it remained for more than six months. The new single, “Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March,” with its wacky Salvation Army–style horn parts, became controversial due to its subject matter; the resulting lack of airplay hurt record sales. While 1969 had begun introducing the burgeoning counterculture to Middle America, a pop ditty about the world’s oldest profession was nonetheless banned from radio stations across the land.

The last year of the sixties brought disappointment to the Box Tops. They had been hoping to perform in Europe since 1967. Alex had recorded their hits in Italian, the group had been featured on England’s weekly TV program
Top of the Pops
and scored on U.K. charts, but every planned overseas trip had fallen through. Excitement ran high for their engagement at the
Salone delle Feste
in San Remo, Italy, but when “Sweet Cream Ladies” failed to make the Top 10, the excursion was deemed an unnecessary expense and scuttled. “Cry Like a Baby” had sold several million copies, but hadn’t reached the top tier of 1968’s bestsellers, reaching only #18 on the
Cash Box
annual survey.

Things were not going well for Alex and Suzi, either. They relocated to a roomier apartment on the top floor of an old house on Court Street, also in Midtown, but Alex’s frequent absences and the stresses of new parenthood wore on their relationship. “
It was a real volatile thing,” Gary Talley recalls. “They would argue a lot, and I remember Alex smashing a guitar.” According to Paul Jobe, Alex “was
not the husband or dad type. It was more like a burden to his character and creativity. He never wanted any great responsibility at such a young age. I’m sure his thing with Suzi was an accident, and what made him commit to Suzi and marry her and all that, I have no idea.”

Alex’s parents urged him to get a paternity test after Timothee’s birth, but he refused, perhaps to spite them, because he didn’t want to endorse their distrust of Suzi. At some point, though, he did begin to question if he was in fact the baby’s biological father. He hadn’t been with her that many times before she became pregnant, and it hadn’t been the first time a paramour had claimed he’d fathered a child. “
I don’t remember the details,” says Gary, “but there had been more than one paternity suit” resulting from liaisons on the road. Alex
apparently had managed to wriggle out of those situations. But to Alex, Suzi was different from the one-night stands. Smitten, he’d visited her in Texas and wanted to be with her. And perhaps he thought he wanted a stable home life, something he’d never really had. Paul remembers that “Suzi pretty much had her shit together. She wasn’t a crazy teen.”

But now the realities of being a young married couple with a baby clearly did not live up to Alex’s expectations. During their fights Suzi would get hysterical, scream, and break things. Rather than work through their differences, Alex split town with the band, leaving behind a restless and unhappy wife.

Meanwhile Alex’s discontent with the band’s musicianship increased as he tired of playing the same hits at every show. “
The morale was lousy,” he recalled. “We were just going on the road and collecting a paycheck—as little as we can do and get paid, fine. If we can have some fun and make this thing as ridiculous as possible and still get paid, then all the better. That was everybody’s attitude. Maybe not mine. My attitude was more like, hey, ‘This is pretty shitty stuff, but we might as well do it as good as we can do it.’” One
Billboard
review reported that “the Box Tops did their big-sellers ‘The Letter’ and ‘Cry Like a Baby’ but suffered from mike problems and lack of enthusiasm in their playing.”

As the Box Tops’ popularity declined, some of Alex’s bandmates grew angrier that he continued to earn more than they did. Bill Cunningham defended Alex, but quarrels escalated. “
There were personnel conflicts,” says Bill. “The road worked on everybody’s nerves. Management worked us so much.” “
Alex was getting twice as much as we were,” says Gary, “and we were considered expendable. He was the star, and we were the sidemen. The manager didn’t really care if we were there or not. Alex was their meal ticket.” Monthly statements reporting their concert earnings fell further behind, according to Gary: “It was supposed to be divided up, but the first thing that happened was Roy Mack got his cut, 25 percent, off the top. We paid for everything, every pencil his secretary used, studio expenses—everything came out of the band’s money.” While hitless in early ’69, the Box Tops commanded concert fees averaging around $2,500 (about $20,000 today), and sometimes Alex signed the contracts when they were without a road manager.

Since 1967 Roy Mack had neither offered career guidance nor even attended their concerts or recording sessions. Instead he functioned as a financial middleman and issued paychecks imprinted with “Roy McElwain DBA the Box Tops.” He told the band he owned the trademark and if they fired him, they couldn’t legally perform as the Box Tops.

“
I don’t want to put Roy Mack down,” says Wayne Carson, “but he didn’t know shit about managing. You need somebody to correlate a lot of loose ends and tie-ups, to keep everybody interested and in the game, somebody who is a correlator, not somebody who says, ‘Who do I have to screw out of this to make all the money I can make?’”

“
Management totally mistreated the band,” said drummer Thomas Boggs. “The Box Tops didn’t get any respect, although not playing on the records didn’t infuriate me like it did the other members. Alex and some of the others became really disillusioned. I think that disappointment later caused Alex to want to self-destruct.”

The Box Tops’ next single, in late April, “I Shall Be Released” backed with Alex’s bluesy “I Must Be the Devil,” was their lowest seller yet, barely reaching #70 on the charts. Alex was cheered when back in Memphis, though, by spending time at John Fry’s Ardent Studios, where he had felt comfortable since he first stopped by in 1968 to sing overdubs for Box Tops songs. “
Ardent was the only place in town that wasn’t already locked up with a bunch of Tin Pan Alley writers,” said Alex, “and these sterile musicians playing all the sessions.”

Fry was an audiophile and self-taught recording engineer who, as a teen, built his first studio in the late ’50s at the family home in the east Memphis suburb of Germantown. “Being fascinated with technology led me to building a little transmitter setup,” Fry recalls of the studio dubbed Granny’s Sewing Room, “and thinking, well, this could be used to record music.” To release a few local acts, he started his own label called Ardent. Fry briefly studied electronics at college but dropped out to pursue radio. With the British Invasion feeding his voracious appetite for English music, he began ordering records from the U.K. and analyzing the production techniques behind them. In 1966 Jim Dickinson brought a group of Central High School kids called Lawson and Four More to record at Fry’s studio. There they cut a Dickinson song, “If You Want Me You Can Find Me,” and it became Ardent’s first 45 in several years, also reigniting Fry’s interest in making records. “
Fry had better equipment in his own home than Chips had at American,” said Jim, who began helping John engineer sessions there.

John’s wealthy parents sold their house in 1966. That May he leased a newly constructed building on National Street and began overseeing the design of a new studio, which he also named Ardent. A member of Lawson and Four More, Terry Manning, became, along with Dickinson, a staff engineer. Terry’s family
had moved to Memphis three years earlier from El Paso, Texas, and soon after their arrival, Terry, a fan of the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night,” had knocked on the door at Stax and talked his way into a part-time job.

In John Fry, Terry found a kindred spirit and mentor. “
We were incredible Anglophiles—Beatlemaniacs, I guess you’d say,” Terry recalls. “John was like a scientist, almost otherworldly. He sounds like Jimmy Stewart and is always immaculately dressed and coiffed. He’s very careful with his language and does everything absolutely perfectly. He had signs all over the equipment, ‘Don’t touch this, don’t do that.’ It wasn’t at all wild and dirty like Sonic and some of the other studios. It was very meticulous. He always knew everything that needed to be done; he was totally together. He was like a big brother from the beginning.”

By 1968 Ardent had become known as the most modern facility in town, with the latest advances in recording, including switching from four-track to eight-track. Stax was outsourcing some work there, and American followed suit. “
I first met Alex when Dan Penn started using Ardent for some of the Box Tops recordings,” says John. “He had tracked ‘Cry Like a Baby’ at American, then he wanted to add a bunch of strings and horns and various overdubs. So he brought the four-track tape over, and we transferred it to eight-track and were proceeding to add overdubs. There was this very young guy sitting on the floor in the corner of the control room, and it finally dawned on me, ‘Oh, my, this is the artist!’ He was pretty quiet, and during those sessions we didn’t converse much.”

Alex soon hit it off with Terry, only a few years older than he. They had seen each other around at parties and battles of the bands in the mid-’60s, and Terry’s old group had once challenged the Devilles before Alex joined. An accomplished keyboardist, Terry, at sixteen, had been offered a spot in the Gentrys for a tour, but his mother wouldn’t give her permission. So Rick Allen, who’d later join the Box Tops, got the gig.

“
Alex and I became friends when I was the engineer—and sometimes player—on the Box Tops’ recordings at Ardent,” Terry says. He estimates that Penn spent around fifty-two hours overdubbing
Nonstop
there. “Alex had become disillusioned, feeling that Dan was mostly just telling him what to do, rather than giving him much of a chance to be creative himself. On a couple of the vocal-overdub sessions, Alex was constantly making faces behind Dan’s back, and he started talking to me about wanting to do his own thing, rather than just be the Box Top Guy for his whole life.”

When Alex started pitching songs to Dan and Chips, he usually played them bluesy soul numbers, along with pop-rockers like “The Happy Song” and “Together.” But at Ardent, when the studio was not booked, he demoed some of his more confessional folk ballads, such as the upbeat “If You Would Marry Me Babe,” on which he accompanied himself on piano, and the darkly vulnerable “It Isn’t Always That Easy,” featuring fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. The latter, which he’d cowritten with Gary Talley, included such morose lines as
“all I see is sadness for years to come.”
On both tunes Alex used his natural tenor voice, rather than his signature rasp.

Terry saw real potential in Alex’s demos. “I commiserated with Alex,” he remembers, “listened to his songs, and agreed that he should be trying some new things.” By the spring of 1969 Alex was starting to sense the Box Tops’ impending demise, and on a visit to Ardent, he and Terry began making secret plans for his first solo album. He intended to keep writing songs and, in the fall, during a lull in the band’s touring schedule, slip into Ardent and commence recording. Terry, by then, was becoming accomplished on various instruments, even a Moog synthesizer. Terry suggested Richard Rosebrough, whom he’d met through Bill Cunningham back in the Jynx days, as a possible drummer. The thought of performing with musicians of similar sensibilities lifted Alex’s spirits.

In July Alex took off to join the Box Tops/Beach Boys summer tour, which stretched through the Northeast, including shows ranging from a Summer ’69 Festival in Gaelic Park (a football field in the Bronx) to the Baltimore Civic Center to the Troy, New York, armory and up to New England. Critic Ellen Willis, a Box Tops fan, covered the July 22 Bronx performance in a lengthy article for
The New Yorker
, noting that “
in a less snobbish era, [the band] would have been enjoyed thoroughly by all kinds of rock fans.” Instead, she pointed out, the crowd was “college-age and superstraight in a Jaycee way I didn’t know existed in New York. I hadn’t seen so many young people with short hair in one place, let alone at a rock concert, in five years.” In describing the Box Tops’ music, Willis called “I Met Her in Church” “one of the most sexual moments in rock and roll.” As for the band’s performance, they “played badly . . . and Chilton didn’t seem to care whether he turned us on or not. He was charming—either very ebullient or very stoned—and looked elegantly English. . . . But he didn’t put enough energy into his singing. . . . At one point, he shouted, ‘Do you like country music?’ . . . and announced he was going to do a Porter Wagoner song, ‘Jesus Lead Us to the River.’” Willis concluded that Alex “has brains, talent, and presence; if he got hold of a decent band and courted the ‘serious’ audience, with a
little luck and some smart management, he could graduate from the teen circuit.”

In August, instead of playing the most talked-about event of the summer, the Woodstock festival in upstate New York, the Box Tops performed at an auditorium in Smyrna, Georgia. (With Blood, Sweat and Tears on the Woodstock bill, one wonders if Alex didn’t regret refusing to audition as vocalist in the band in the spring of ’68, after Al Kooper quit. Someone contacted Alex about auditioning, Paul Jobe recalls, but he wasn’t interested. Canadian David Clayton-Thomas got the gig.)

In the meantime, Box Tops releases continued. Bell issued
Dial-a-Hit
, a sampler of its groups on an LP with novelty packaging: A paper telephone dial could be turned to display the name of the Box Tops or labelmates Merrilee Rush, the Delfonics, the O’Jays, and James and Bobby Purify, among others. On tour with the Beach Boys, the Box Tops showcased their new single, “Soul Deep.” Backed by Alex’s “The Happy Song,” the record garnered more radio play than any Box Tops single since “Cry Like a Baby.” Optimistic that the band was getting hot again, Uttal told Chips the time was right to release a new album. Tommy Cogbill began assembling the Box Tops tracks recorded over the past six months for
Dimensions
, which Alex later referred to as
Demented
. By the fall “Soul Deep” would peak at #13 on
Cash Box
and #18 on
Billboard
.

That summer Bill Cunningham decided he’d had enough. Particularly disappointed that he’d still not traveled to Europe, he told the band he’d continue until fall, but then he was going back to school. Roy Mack hired Harold Cloud, a twenty-three-year-old bassist originally from the Muscle Shoals area, to take his place. Just as Cloud was beginning rehearsals with the band, Rick Allen quit as well. While Mack was recruiting a replacement keyboardist, Alex used the time to start his recording sessions at Ardent. John agreed that he and Terry could make an album, free of charge, and that Ardent would own the masters and shop the record to a label upon completion. Brimming with songs, Alex showed up around 11 a.m. one day, and Terry called Richard Rosebrough to head over to start cutting the tunes.