A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (24 page)

“‘
This is gonna be mine, so I’m gonna be the one who fucks it up’” is how Dickinson described Alex’s early studio endeavors: “It’s beyond self-destruction. It’s a kind of creativity. Unfortunately it’s the art object that suffers. Alex doesn’t see it that way. Alex is performance-oriented. He thinks of himself as a producer, and he understands some of production. But not all of it.”

By mid-1975, around the time Fry and Dickinson were striking out in getting distribution for
3rd
, Alex’s three-year contract with Ardent expired, and he began discussions with John regarding its renewal. “
Fry and I sort of fell out about our contract,” Alex recalled. “[It] called for a pretty hefty bit [of money] in front to keep the contract active, and I was sort of counting on that money, and he didn’t want to do it that way. He wanted to put me on a weekly salary of some sort, rather than come across with a lump sum. I said that wasn’t acceptable, and he said, ‘Well, I’m not going to give you a lump sum,’ so we fell out of the contract. At that point he stopped doing anything about trying to sell the
[3rd]
record.”

Alex had stayed in touch with music writer Jon Tiven, whom he’d last seen
at Max’s in March ’74. Tiven, twenty, was now working for a latter-day version of Chess Records; its founders had sold the label to a company that moved operations from Chicago to New York and Los Angeles. “
Alex . . . sent me some tapes of what he’d been working on,” recalls Tiven, “‘Take Me Home and Make Me Like It’ and ‘Walking Dead,’ and I said, ‘Oh, there’s some interesting lyrics here.’ It was just chaos—a drum machine with some garbagey-sounding instruments and him intoning over the top. I said, ‘Alex, I don’t know if you can find an audience for that.’ Alex was heading in a direction further and further from what people liked about him. I said, ‘Alex, do you have anything else I could play for somebody?’ and he sent me a copy of the record he had made with Terry Manning [in ’69–’70]. I played that for this guy Bob Feiden, who had a mad crush on Alex. He was working at Arista Records [as VP of A&R East Coast, beginning in ’74, when the label was founded by Clive Davis from the ashes of Bell Records], and he said, ‘Alex has come a long way, but I still don’t think he’s where he needs to be for us to sign him.’ I was feeling bad for Alex, because I knew he was going through some shit.”

Further discussions resulted in plans for Tiven to fly to Memphis on Monday, September 29, and produce Alex at Ardent. When Alex and Lesa picked him up at the airport, Jon was shocked by their appearance. “
They look like they’ve just come out of a concentration camp,” Tiven recalls. “They both have razor-cut hairdos, and Alex has got his arm in a sling. I was expecting him to play guitar on the sessions, and I said, ‘What happened?’ and he said, ‘Well, Lesa and I had a fight last night, and I went to hit her in the head and I hit the wall.’” That was just the first of several disturbing incidents.

Alex had made plans to meet with a Mercury Records A&R executive visiting from New York and invited along Tiven and a new pal, Rick Clark, and his friend Tommy Hoehn. Alex had become friendly with several Memphis musicians, most a few years younger, who were Big Star fans. Rick had worked at Poplar Tunes, and he and Hoehn had started cutting demos at Shoe. Rick had his own primitive rehearsal studio in his bedroom, where late-night jams often occurred. The dinner with the A&R man amounted to little more than free drinks, as Rick recalls.

From the restaurant, Rick, Tommy, Jon, and Alex headed to Rick’s bedroom studio to run through songs planned for the recording sessions. Rick set up two mics and turned on his tape deck to record the proceedings. With Tommy and Jon on guitars and Rick behind the drum kit, Alex began singing. After
stumbling through a few Stones numbers, his mood changed, really catching fire when one of the guitarists played the opening riff to the Kinks’ “Lola.” “
It was a total rock & roll love letter moment of abandon,” says Rick. “We had spontaneously tumbled into this chaotic channeling of a song we all loved.” “I’m anxious to hear the tape of that one!” Alex said once they finished. They also tried a Tiven original, “(Every Time I) Close My Eyes,” and a pretty new song Alex and Lesa had written, “All of the Time.”

Tiven asked Tommy and Rick to join them at the Ardent sessions, beginning that Friday, October 3. Former Big Star bassist John Lightman was also invited, and Andy Hummel showed up and played organ. With Richard Rosebrough on drums, they worked up the basic tracks for an altered version of Alex’s six-year-old song “Free Again,” a sarcastic-sounding “Jesus Christ,” a drowsy attempt at the Beatles’ “I’m So Tired,” and a chaotic take on Eddie Cochran’s “Summertime Blues.”

“
Alex was using a different vocal personality than I’d ever experienced, not much singing,” says Tiven. “He was like a clown entertainer. I thought, ‘This is going to be very strange,’ and it devolved very quickly when he started singing ‘Jesus Christ’ with a German accent.” Some of the goofing around was similar to Alex’s “Sugar Sugar” session with Terry Manning back in ’69–’70, but Tiven was not amused.

At a party with Dickinson in Mississippi, Danny Graflund heard that Alex planned to cut “Take Me Home” at the session, and barreled back to town with a pair of blitzed-out women. He arrived at Ardent and talked the guard into letting him in. The women could barely stand; one angered Rosebrough, the session’s engineer, when she started messing with the control board.

Then, during an extended jam at the song’s end, Graflund hollered into the microphone,
“If you was Mott the Hoople, I’d come out there and pee all over you. Who gives a shit!”
“
I was in the studio playing drums,” recalls Rosebrough. “Alex would stand in the control room with a microphone and sing while running the board. I saw Graflund in there, at the back wall, and I could see by looking at his back—
what is he doing?
I could see this spot on the wall getting larger and larger. He was peeing on the back wall. We finished that song, I put my sticks down, and I threw them out.
‘You can’t pee on the wall! I have to use this room tomorrow!’
”

Alex found the whole thing hysterically funny; Tiven, Lightman, and Rick Clark were disgusted. “
We tried to get everybody out, but there were these two girls, and one of them was missing,” Tiven recalls. “I found her unconscious on
the bathroom floor, so I picked her up. I had a little talk with Richard, saying, ‘Let’s meet here tomorrow, and we’ll do rough mixes of these takes.’ So we got together that Saturday and had lots of discussions about Alex, and basically Richard was just shaking his head, and his heart was broken that this guy who he was so friendly with had gone off the deep end. We figured that was the end of it. We decided that he and I and Alex and John Fry would get together on Monday and just close the deal, and I’d leave town on Tuesday. So we got together in John’s office, and Alex is sitting there like, ‘I promise to be good if you give me another chance.’ He was very straight ahead that day. He was trying to be the ‘good Alex,’ and John was trying to find a way for me to continue and finish recording the album. John said, ‘Look, I don’t mind this continuing, but you’ve got to have disciplined sessions and you’ve got to just do the music and none of this partying stuff.’ Alex said, ‘I’ll be a good boy; I really want to make this work.’ So I said, ‘If we’re going to continue, let’s be really disciplined. No night sessions—let’s do afternoon sessions.’”

Lightman and Hummel didn’t return, but Richard continued on drums. Another Shoe studio regular, bassist Ken Woodley, who’d also played with Chris Bell, was invited, along with keyboardist David Beaver, with Rick and Tommy contributing on various instruments and vocals over the course of three more sessions.

In this more controlled environment, “
Alex couldn’t really find what he was supposed to do,” says Tiven. “It was like seeing a drunk man who’d just gotten sober.” They recut a bouncy version of “Take Me Home” as well as the Stones’ “Singer Not the Song,” one of Tiven’s cover choices, in which Alex’s vocals sounded too low for his range. One of the best songs, Alex and Lesa’s “All of the Time,” found him singing
“I’m going to the drugstore to pick up a scrip
” in an effective, keening tenor, complemented by Rick and Tommy’s background vocals. The same approach was attempted on Tiven’s “Close My Eyes.”

Though Alex was subdued, unusual methods were employed for some of the tracks. “
During the backing vocals for ‘All of the Time,’” Rick Clark recalls, “someone said, ‘Let’s turn out the lights and all lay on our backs with our heads facing each other and our legs splayed out like a flower, and look straight up to the ceiling and pretend we’re German opera singers.’” Rick also contributed an off-the-cuff piano part for one of three versions of “Take Me Home.” At times “there was a playfulness and a sense of humor true to the spirit of rock that I saw in Alex that I certainly identified with very personally,” Rick says. For
Tiven, though, Alex’s refusal to sound anything like Big Star was a big disappointment.

“In the last session we did with Alex,” Tiven says, “I have
a very vivid memory of Alex turning to me and saying, ‘Jon, do you think I have brain damage?’ And he was dead serious. I said, ‘Alex, I don’t think I’ve known you long enough to make a kind of evaluation like that, I just don’t know.’ After that, I never looked at Alex the same. We finished the sessions, Richard and I mixed them, and I went back to New York to try to sell them to a record company.”

“
Most of the people around Ardent decided that I was going off the deep end and was getting a little too crazy to be dealt with,” Alex said about that period. “The music I was making was pretty crazy, too. I was getting very destructive in a lot of ways then, and I was trying to capture that on recordings.”

On December 19, nine days before Alex’s twenty-fifth birthday, Stax Records, which had been forced into bankruptcy, was shuttered. John Fry, nervous about his own future, put Ardent up for sale. “
I made a deal to sell the studio to some people,” says Fry. “I was completely out of the business for about six months, and then they went broke, so I got back in.”

As Americans began celebrating the country’s Bicentennial, Alex felt more and more depressed. He’d gotten occasional middle-of-the-night calls from Brian Wilson, then a reclusive mental case in L.A., asking him to sing “Shortnin’ Bread” on a recording. “He was telling me I had the perfect voice for it,” Alex remembered. Another call for a session came from budget label Pickwick, which specialized in rerecording hits from the ’60s (and where Lou Reed started his career as a songwriter in 1964). Alex cut vocals for “The Letter” and “Cry Like a Baby” to new backing tracks for $1,000.

For the most part, though, Alex slept until the afternoon and spent his nights at Midtown bars and friends’ apartments. Now broke, he’d lost his rental house. Occasionally he sat in with Big Star acolyte Stephen Burns’s new band, the Scruffs. On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday evenings, he usually headed to the Procape Gardens, a Midtown cocktail lounge that featured folk music, where vocalist/guitarist/songwriter Sid Selvidge held court.

Alex sometimes saw Danny Graflund, who had started running a Midtown dive, Ray’s Lounge. Danny detected that Alex was more contemplative than he had been previously. “
Alex was always thinking—
always
. There’s a group of people in Memphis that I don’t think people realize when they get hurt, how deeply they hurt. So they get a persona. They become where you can’t hurt ’em,
because they can’t be close. They keep the group very small, and if you get into this group, it makes life real easy not to have all these people around that can hurt you. That’s one of the reasons Alex is always thinking. He’s trying to watch out—for
something
. But with me, maybe he found someone he trusted.”

At the Procape Alex debuted another new song, inspired by his latest altercation with Lesa. He’d introduced her to Bernard Patrick, a good-looking drummer; sparks flew, and they had a fling. Jim Dickinson’s wife, Mary Lindsay Dickinson, who hung out at the Procape with her husband and saw the situation unfold, thought that
Alex “introduced them to each other and orchestrated the situation and used it as an excuse to sever their ties.”

Whatever the case, the result was “My Rival,” a song Alex would play frequently over the next few years. A catchy tune with lyrics like
“I’m gonna stab him and shoot him on arrival/He stole my girl away.”
It was slight compared to the songs on
3rd,
yet Alex considered it a breakthrough. “‘
My Rival’ I thought was good,” he said. “The whole way through, I knew what the words said and I knew what it meant. Before that, I’d write things that were an ethereal, nebulous string of words that really didn’t mean anything. Somehow, when I wrote that tune, it was the first song I had ever written that I was sure of what it was. I knew
exactly
what it was worth. It was like, ‘Now I know how to write.’ I knew I could do it again and again from then on.”

At the same time Alex focused on playing distorted guitar, looking for new ways to attack the instrument. “
Alex was at a juncture,” Sid Selvidge recalled. “He’d had a real bad experience with the Big Star stuff and was trying to distance himself from his acceptable past, I felt, because what he would do at the Procape would chase people off. They didn’t understand it. His whole concept was, If I were a thirteen-year-old right now, and I were just learning my instrument, how would I play guitar? People don’t realize what an accomplished guitar player Alex is, his versatility. He’s a consummate guitarist. So from that level of sophistication, he was trying to play without knowing all that he knows. He was trying to play note for note what somebody who doesn’t play the guitar would play like. That’s a pretty convoluted concept, but that was his idea. And it fits perfectly into rock & roll. This was popular music to him—from where he came at it and got his hits in the first place.”

Those early singles with the Box Tops were still remembered by Barry Lyons at tiny Amherst Records, which specialized in releasing LPs by ’60s stars like Jackie DeShannon. Based in Buffalo, New York, Lyons tracked down Alex in Memphis and sent him a plane ticket to fly north and discuss the possibility of
cutting a record. He drove Alex to Toronto to jam with Bob Segarini, a like-minded musician from California who, since ’68, had been on several major labels, releasing albums with different bands including Family Tree (during which he collaborated with Harry Nilsson), Roxy, the Wackers, and most recently the Dudes, all with little or no commercial success. Lyons’s idea was to put together a pop-rock supergroup composed of Segarini, Alex, and possibly such players as former Raspberries bassist Wally Bryson and guitarist Nils Lofgren. Alex got together with the Dudes, but after they didn’t click musically, they instead got wasted.