A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (27 page)

“
Alex asked me if I could help him move,” says Fran, who drove in from Jersey. “It didn’t entail very much, though. Basically, he put all of his belongings into one little bag and carried it over his shoulder and grabbed his guitar. He looked at me, chuckled, and said, ‘They always tell you to pack light when you’re in show business, right?’”

Jamie and Chris and their two cats had moved to a studio apartment at 89 Bleecker, down the street from CBGB, and Alex crashed there or at Stephanie Chernikowski’s, and the band sometimes rehearsed in her basement. Chris’s apartment became the headquarters where Alex would give interviews and meet with Charles Ball.

Chris, Jamie, and Alex, stepping over unconscious winos on the sidewalk outside the building, would frequently stroll over to CBGB. “
Hilly would just let us into CB’s for free all the time,” says Jamie, “so we basically used CB’s as our living room, because our place was so tiny. They actually served food, hamburgers and chili, so we ate there sometimes. Alex and I went to lunch one time at a restaurant called Dubrovnik’s, but we needed transportation. He really wanted to take a cab, but we ended up taking the bus, and he said, ‘I’m sorry we had to take a bus. In the old days when I was with the Box Tops, we would have taken a cab or limousine.’” Alex assured her that they’d be riding in limos soon, once the Elektra deal came through. Meanwhile, Chris remembers that Alex had become so destitute he couldn’t afford to buy socks—though he always managed to scrape together the money for Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes.

On Sunday, June 12, Alex and the band, which he sometimes introduced as the Cossacks, opened at CB’s for Lester Bangs, who’d recently put together a quintet that included influential Voidoid guitarist Robert Quine. The previous
two nights, two of Alex’s favorite bands had been on the bill with Bangs—the Ramones and the Cramps—with crowds lined up down the Bowery to get in. Alex had become obsessed with the Cramps and saw them whenever possible. Led by the gaunt and charismatic vocalist Lux Interior and his partner, the primal guitarist Poison Ivy Rorschach, the group was rounded out by guitarist Bryan Gregory, whose head looked like a skull on a stick, and drummer Miriam Linna. Using no bassist, they played a somewhat deranged ’50s-style rock & roll, which came to be called “psychobilly,” a melding of obscure Sun Records rockabilly with primitive ’60s garage colored with B horror movie themes.

In mid-June the demo sessions financed by Elektra finally got under way at Secret Sound, Todd Rundgren’s former recording studio on Soho’s Greene Street. Alex had decided that heavy-hitting drummer Lloyd Fonoroff, a prog rocker at heart, was not right for the sound he wanted on the recordings. He booked Patti Smith’s drummer, Jay Dee Daugherty, for “She Might Look My Way” and “My Rival”; for “A Little Fishy” and “Windows Hotel” he chose Andy Paley, whose Boston band, the Sidewinders, had been produced by Lenny Kaye and who’d also played with Jonathan Richman. “[Alex] liked Andy because he could play something simple and not try to impose himself on the recording,” recalls Fran. “He was great in the studio.”

As he had with the Stamey session, Alex threw curveballs into the mix. “Alex asked Chris and me to go into the vocal room and do backing vocals on ‘Windows Hotel’ with no rehearsal and no arrangements,” says Fran, “in other words, totally on the fly. . . . I remember Alex telling me about the importance of ‘controlling the environment’ in a recording studio and how important it was to the end product. That’s another lesson I’ve taken with me ever since.”

Unfortunately an engineer inadvertently erased several of the best performances. “Alex was really disappointed, and he called up Karin to let her know about it but was really nice and calm about it,” says Fran. “He was a consummate professional, and Alex wanted to show Elektra he was a team player.” Still, he and the engineer didn’t see eye to eye when Alex said he wanted to leave in any mistakes.

When the sessions were completed, they were sent to Karin Berg, but it soon became clear that she didn’t like them well enough to pass them along to the powers that be at Elektra. Yet she continued to attend gigs, including on Sunday, July 3, at the Village Gate, where Alex opened for Blondie. As Alex’s manager, Charles had particularly harsh words for Karin. “
She just used Alex,” he said. “I think her kickback was the sex. I don’t know that Alex ever got a proper copy of
the masters of the demos. They were good, but the only tapes I ever heard were just purposely garbled. I don’t know how they did it, but it sounded atrocious. It was something they did post-processing—after it had originally been done correctly. She really wasn’t helpful. She never took me aside and said, ‘You should call these various people.’ I don’t really have anything good to say about her. The tapes never went anywhere, because she didn’t want to take them anywhere or do anything with them. It was her playing around with Alex.”

Jamie remembers that the situation had turned into a vicious cycle. “
I think Karin was concerned about Alex’s reliability. So she kept hedging and didn’t say absolutely no, but Elektra just wasn’t making the commitment. I think that’s what started to bug Alex, and it started him getting a little looser and wilder in what he was doing. The more he did that, the less interested Elektra became, and it went into this spiral, and then was gone. I started feeling like Alex wasn’t real fond of Karin, but it may have been because they were not signing them. It began to become this black hole. And by then, he was really on a downward spiral, and things started looking really bad.”

The most disastrous show occurred the night after Elvis Presley’s sudden death in Memphis. Back at the Village Gate, the band had to find a last-minute drummer to fill in for Fonoroff, who was on vacation. Alex asked Television guitarist Richard Lloyd to sit in with them as well. Neither had rehearsed with the group. Alex was deeply affected by Elvis’s passing, but when the opening act didn’t show up, he drunkenly agreed to play drums with a group thrown together by Jon Tiven. “
We were announced as the Yankees,” Tiven recalls. “I was the guitar player, and we did whatever songs we all knew—and it was completely chaotic and terrible.”

When it was time for his own first set, Stephanie recalls, “
Alex wouldn’t go onstage, he was still in the dressing room, and I went back and tried to drag him out. That was probably the worst night I’ve ever seen him.” The drummer clearly didn’t know any of the songs, and Alex kept yelling at him. Richard Lloyd tried to compensate by overplaying. “
Alex turned around to me during the set and said, ‘It’s like playing with Dickey Betts,’” Chris recalls, “because Richard had a way with major-key noodling where the licks just kept coming.” The second set was even more of a train wreck, according to Bernie Kugel, who saw both shows: “
The Lloyd-Chilton Village Gate thing, it was completely untogether—this may not even be music. But I’m watching
something
, two guys completely strung out with a drummer who has no idea what they’re doing. I think Chilton was yelling at that drummer so much, he might not have even come back for the second set.
They were so out of it: Lloyd and Alex couldn’t stand up, ’cause obviously they had been doing something very bad in between the sets. But it was like, ‘Wow, we’re watching two guys totally on the edge, and this is great ‘Holocaust’/
Big Star Three
kind of stuff.’”

Charles Ball, meanwhile, had arranged another session at Trod Nossel for Alex’s band to make a demo to pitch to other labels. Earlier that summer, for a planned Rolling Stones tribute album to be released by Ork, Alex had traveled to Connecticut to produce Richard Lloyd performing “Under My Thumb,” and Alex had cut a favorite Dylan song, “Please Crawl Out Your Window.” This time the group, including Fonoroff, would cut “Shakin’ the World,” “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” and a new version of “All of the Time.” “He was a whiz, really, amazing what he could do,” says Chris of the sessions with Alex producing. “
He was like a film director—he had the chops and he also had the vision, and he let the vision dictate. He showed me lots of details about using compressors and EQ, also about using chance techniques to achieve effects that you couldn’t plan. He would carefully plan and arrange as well. It was like a masters class in how to make a record. Alex, Fran, Lloyd, and I recorded a great version of [Otis Blackwell’s] ‘Handyman’ up there. Alex was doing these background vocals that were like wild animals. I was talking to Fran, who was playing keys on that track, and he said, ‘Chris, they are not what I would put on my record, but you can’t tell a painter how to paint.’ There was a sense of getting musicians in the room and capturing their personalities, but there were also things that would be very carefully written, and it would be labored over. We worked really hard on that song. Literally driving home after cutting it in Connecticut at about five in the morning and being really proud of ourselves, we heard James Taylor’s version on the radio. I don’t think Alex ever went back to that. It just killed us—of all the songs!”

Drifting from couch to couch had become untenable for Alex. He managed to scrape together $100 to rent a dilapidated studio apartment in a tenement on East Ninth Street off First Avenue where several CB’s employees lived. (Chris remembers that Alex planned to make the rent each month by cashing in bottles and cans he picked up off the street.) He had reconnected with Lesa, who’d been on her own downward spiral since her father died. She had briefly visited Alex on Thirty-fourth and Lex, bringing along her younger brothers, back from Europe, while their mother was on a boating trip. That encounter had gone fairly well; the group went sightseeing to the Empire State Building, nearby.

This time, though, Lesa drove up from Memphis alone, bringing along a
supply of pharmaceuticals. Jamie and Chris got together with the couple at one point. “
That ex-girlfriend of his was so wasted she could hardly talk or walk,” says Jamie. “It was such a messed-up thing. I felt like she was security, in a way; although she wasn’t real stable; at least he knew he had that, as messed up as it was.”

After Lesa returned to Memphis, Alex rounded up the band to play a booking in upstate New York. Alex didn’t tell them, but it turned out the club owner had booked the Box Tops. “
We were playing pretty grungy stuff,” Fran recalls, “and we played one set, and the owner was clearly expecting to see the Box Tops show up and sing ‘Neon Rainbow’ and ‘The Letter.’ The guy comes over to Alex and says, ‘I want to buy you guys a drink. Then you guys can go.’ We had an early night that night.”

Local gigs were drying up, except for the occasional weeknight, and the band was getting frustrated by Alex’s behavior. “
Alex was definitely doing Quaaludes and that kind of stuff after his girlfriend came,” Jamie Sims recalls. “At one point, Chris got really mad at me when I said this, but there were tons of winos and bums on the street, and I said, ‘Chris, I really expect to see Alex out here,’ because they would cluster around our door. And he said, ‘No, you shouldn’t say that!’ It was more that I wouldn’t have been that surprised, because things were headed so far down.”

Once, when the band had a gig at Max’s, Alex didn’t want to rehearse, though they gathered in Stephanie’s basement to play a few songs the night before the show. Fran remembers a really bad vibe, with Alex being uncommunicative. “
I think Alex’s drinking and whatever he was taking was probably masking some of his disappointment about the Elektra deal,” says Fran. “You’d see him, and he’d just be out of it. Maybe it was brought on by that, but it’s also what caused it. Karin told me that herself, that she really wanted to sign him, that she genuinely liked him as a person and certainly as an artist, . . . It’s a shame . . . but she said, ‘I really want to do this, but I just can’t.’”

Parke Puterbaugh attended the Max’s gig. “
Alex wasn’t in the best shape,” he says. “He was intoxicated, and Max’s wasn’t full, by a long shot, but people were still calling for an encore. I yelled out for ‘Shakin’ the World,’ and he was backstage and he goes,
‘Who said that?’
and this big finger shooting the bird comes through the parted curtain. I think at that point the song, which had been written at such an optimistic time, probably represented a dream he had that had been vanquished.”

“
Alex became really tough to give away,” Charles said. “It wasn’t like that with the Cramps—they had offers from California and places like that, but that
didn’t happen with Alex. Early in the year he was very happy at CBGB’s. If only Hilly had been halfway decent to us—but to Hilly, Alex was out-of-town trash. It became rougher and less fun for Alex, being in New York, and a lot of people remember that. It just seemed that things kept falling down around us.”

Then one night at Stephanie’s Alex got to meet the band he adored. The Cramps, whose new drummer, Nick Knox, had recently moved to New York from Cleveland, had started rehearsing in her basement after she photographed them. “
It was a basement with electricity and nothing else,” says Knox. “No running water. The entrance was two steel doors coming out of the sidewalk at 342 Bowery, across the street and a few doors down from CBGB’s. Often after rehearsals we would stop up to see Stephanie and use her ‘running water.’ [One night] we went upstairs, and Stephanie had a guest. That guest was Alex Chilton. We were introduced to Alex, and there was a lot of conversation, the whole while Alex was working on a steak that Stephanie cooked for him. As we were leaving, I was the last one to the door. Still working on his steak, Alex points the steak knife at me and says, ‘I know you don’t like me.’ I was shocked by the statement, not by the knife a foot from my face. I proceeded to tell Alex that I’d seen the Box Tops at a Cleveland amusement park in the summer of ’68 for a radio station appreciation day and that I had just left working at Record Rendezvous in Cleveland where Big Star was on the store turntable often. If I didn’t play it, someone else would play it.”

After that introduction, Alex said he’d love to help the group make a record in his hometown of Memphis. For the Cramps, Memphis was the Holy Land. They accepted immediately, especially after Alex mentioned he could get studio time there for free. “A few weeks later we piled in a drive-away car with Alex on our way to Memphis to record at Ardent Studio,” says Nick.