A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (31 page)

The shows got off to a bad start during the first set on Thursday night, with constant high-pitched feedback and annoying loud buzzing from the guitar cables, and it didn’t take long for the crowded room to thin out. Alex invited “our lead guitarist, Gustavo Falco,” to take the mic, then Tav recited a sort of Beat poem—with the audience stomping their feet—and sang an off-key tune best described as “wreckabilly.” Meanwhile, Stamey became more upset.

“
I hadn’t planned on backing up Tav, who couldn’t sing or play at all,” says Chris. “We went onstage, and a lot of it was these old songs I should have
known, but I just kept having to watch their fingers.” Alex angered Stamey, too, by the way he treated Hagedorn. “It had been booked by this young college kid, and not many people came, and there was no money for a hotel room, and Alex really let the guy have it,” Chris recalls. “I thought, ‘This poor kid, he’s trying to help you guys out.’”

The second set was no better. Yet, mixed in with the blues dirges and noise-rock, Alex pulled out a gorgeous solo version of “I Only Have Eyes for You,” explaining, “I’m into torch songs. Anybody in the mood for a slow dance?”

Chris left, refusing to return for Friday night’s show, and laid low until he could catch a flight home. “
It made Alex mad that I left, and as it turned out, I didn’t actually leave. I had to sleep under bushes in Austin. I only had enough money for a couple of doughnuts. It was awful.”

On Friday night a sober Alex told the few brave souls who returned to the Rome Inn that “our bass player decided it would be best for him to leave town today, so we’re gonna get through tonight in a very interesting fashion.” As it turned out, the sound problems had been corrected, and the band was actually much tighter than the night before, with a zippier energy. At one point, a guy jumped onstage and grabbed a bass left by the previous band and began playing along before he was ejected by a bouncer. Performing “Hook or Crook,” Alex alerted the audience that the song was from his forthcoming LP, which “you’re gonna have to pay $30 for!” By the end of the night, though, only a half-dozen diehards remained, all calling out for more. They got a snarling, abbreviated “I’ve Had It.”

In Memphis, Panther Burns continued to put on more shows at the cotton loft, inviting as opening acts such guests as the irascible Charlie Feathers, by then a Sun Records footnote who wrote “I Forgot to Remember to Forget,” a 1955 hit for Elvis. At another gig, they met the irrepressible Cordell Jackson, a rare female producer and label owner who started her Moon Records in Memphis in the ’50s. An able guitarist and songwriter, the bouffanted and gregarious Cordell took a shine to Alex and Tav, gave them a stack of her label’s vintage 45s, and insisted they cover her “Stranded on a Dateless Night.” She said the combo reminded her of former Moon recording artist Allen Page, whose “She’s the One That’s Got It” became a Panther Burns standard, along with “Date.” Alex cut an instrumental version of “Date” during the
Flies
sessions but never added vocals.

As “musical director,” Alex expanded Panther Burns’ membership: “
I did the organization and Alex did the hiring and firing, you might say,” says Tav. “He wanted Rick Ivy in the band for a while. Ivy wanted to play trumpet so bad
with us—I didn’t care if he played or not. I didn’t think we needed him. In fact, I thought he was kind of an interference. Eric Hill I liked on the synthesizer because he was so bizarre in a melodic way, whereas Rick Ivy just made a lot of honking noises, which wasn’t particularly adding much, in my view. Then there was another keyboard player for a while who worked with Eric; Vincent Renn had a huge synthesizer of his own, so we let him play in the band because he owned one, though I didn’t like the way he played, particularly.”

The band’s most widely seen live performance occurred in May at 9 a.m. on the chat program
The Marge Thrasher Show
, on Channel 13, WHBQ, with the aforementioned lineup. Thrasher was a grand dame of Memphis culture, and Randall Lyon and Tav’s Televista had coordinated the appearance so that it was beamed via satellite from Memphis to art outposts ranging from New York to San Francisco to Vancouver, Canada. Tav recalled the disastrous performance in his tell-all,
Mondo Memphis,
as though he’d been a dispassionate witness:

The music seemed to exude in an oily, low-fi fashion from their instruments, combined with the dismal whining and low squall of the refrigerator-sized synthesizer. The voice of Falco was questionable as well, sounding like a flat disharmonic croak—due in part to the dead acoustics of the room. When “Train Kept a-Rollin’” ended, to the relief of most everyone present, including the band, there was a brief silence. Marge knitted her eyebrows, looked directly at Falco and asked, “Gustavo, that’s really just about the worst-sounding thing I’ve ever heard. Do you really expect to make money with
that
?” [She later added, “After that, I feel like I need to take a bath.”]

A dialogue between the two followed, and Tav introduced the band, including a sheepish-looking Alex, as LX Chitlin (a tag that later morphed into Axel Chitlin).

The TV appearance may or may not have helped move copies of the 45 the band had recorded live (and self-released) at a new Memphis hangout—the town’s very own CBGB—called the Well, at 1588 Madison. Previously a dive bar of various incarnations, the joint became a favorite of bassist Randy Chertow, who got his pop-punkish Randy Band onstage on a Saturday night. “
Falco’s crew noticed the rather large crowds the Randy Band was drawing and wanted to be a part of that scene,” wrote Ross Johnson, who later filmed a documentary on the club. “They also noticed the growing numbers of teenage girls
attending Randy Band gigs. . . . So the Burns and the Randy Band started sharing weekend dates at the Well. During this period [owner Frank] Durand would occasionally pull the power on the Panther Burns when they got particularly noisy and unmusical. . . . The Well was very much a drunken social club in those early days, with band members swapping out both musically and sexually, quite a lot like other developing punk scenes across the country at that time.”

Buffalo, New York, had one such watering hole that booked punk bands in 1979, the dank McVann’s, where Alex played on June 23. Like Hagedorn in Austin, a Buffalo band called the Blue Reimondos were fans of Alex’s and managed to locate him by phoning the Chilton residence. For a plane ticket and $300, Alex agreed to join them for a gig in their hometown. For the gig, they renamed themselves the Philly Nuggets, says bassist Bruce Eaton, who’d go on to write a book on
Radio City
.

“The band literally met Alex during the afternoon on the day of the gig,” recalls Eaton. “I was pretty nervous, because I really loved Big Star, and it was a big deal just to meet him. But I remember how at ease we all were with Alex. When he was in a good mood, he was incredibly charming, without trying to charm you. We didn’t bug him about anything from his past.” When the band suggested running through some songs before the gig, Alex begged off, says Eaton: “He said, ‘No, if you play it for the first time in front of people, some of it might not be that good—but the best stuff, you could never get rehearsing.’ And he was right.”

Alex had a money gig coming up in Memphis that he was particularly excited about. The Cramps tracks he’d produced two years earlier were rereleased by Illegal/I.R.S. in June on a twelve-inch EP entitled
Gravest Hits
. The band had developed a rabid following in Europe while touring with the Police. I.R.S. Records head Miles Copeland, who signed the Cramps, okayed Alex as producer of the band’s debut LP, to be cut at Sam Phillips’s studio, albeit with a tiny budget. They’d cut a demo produced by U.K. guitar slinger Chris Spedding earlier and hated it because it was too polished and slick.

When the Cramps returned in July, Tav Falco joined their Memphian fan club, frequently photographing the band. “
I saw the Cramps on top of their amplifiers, man, going totally, totally berserk,” Tav told Cramps biographer Ian Johnston. “The engineers had never encountered anything like it. The way the Cramps recorded, they had to develop a feeling right there, and they did. The engineers had to get past it. They got it on tape, but I don’t know how. The Cramps . . . almost
changed the architecture of Phillips Studio. Things were coming out of the walls, weird ghosts were coming out everywhere. It was fantastic.”

Things did not go as well at Phillips, though, as they had at Ardent, since the band, novices in the studio and in awe of their surroundings, struggled to capture their live sound. Washington, D.C.–based music writer Joe Sasfy was a good friend of the band’s and traveled to Memphis to hang out at Phillips for a week. For a D.C. zine, he covered their recording travails:

The Cramps have been in the studio for five days and have produced more tension than music. Things haven’t been going right and their producer Alex Chilton seems content to eat [fried chicken], smoke and watch the band anguish over their lack of progress. In order to help the whole group catch the primal spirit, Lux and his mic have been put on the floor with the rest of the band—just like on stage. He had done three takes of ‘I Was a Teenage Werewolf’—on each take he steps outside the studio door, bellowing and snorting himself into a rage. He then crashes through the door, knocking over all in his path, tossing chairs and mic stands against the wall. Howling diabolically, he finally makes his way to the mic and cries out the first verse:
“I was a teenage werewolf / with braces on my fangs.”

Three friends of Alex showed up, sitting on the studio floor—and from the control room out comes Lux in his zone: The door smashes open and they behold a frenzied, perspiring, red-faced Lux Werewolf. Lux picks up a chair, lets out an unearthly cry, flings the chair over their heads and staggers to the mic. I’ve seen eyes open and mouths drop, but these kids had their eyes threaten to leave their sockets and their jaws come unhinged. Finally, one of them, a muscular redneck, reacts. He jumps up and runs over to Lux and stops him before he can sing a note. . . . I’m not sure if he thought he was calming a crazy man, helping an epileptic or just saving the studio from further destruction, but he broke Lux’s concentration. And Lux goes berserk, starts growing real fangs, sprouts hair from his ears, shoots flames out of his nostrils and screams, “
No one can stop a Cramps performance! What the fuck are you doing
?”

“Next take—got it!”

Clearly Alex had adopted the Dickinsonian approach to allowing all manner of mayhem, then capturing the chaos sonically. At Ardent Alex would spend a few more months mixing, then remixing, the Cramps album. Originally
intended for a fall ’79 release,
Songs the Lord Taught Us
was delayed by I.R.S. after criticism of Alex’s mix, deemed “too murky.” (The LP finally was issued in spring 1980; it sold well in Europe but not in the States. It now stands as their greatest album.)

“I don’t remember
any particular production style that Alex used,” says Jim Lancaster. “But you didn’t have to have a style—you had the whole city. You bring these people from the North down to Memphis, where rockabilly and Elvis were invented, where they came from, and that’s production enough. If you get it on tape, that’s the thing.”

On a typically steamy August night, Jim Dickinson orchestrated an ambitious bill at the Orpheum: himself, masked and billed as Captain Memphis; Panther Burns; the Klitz; and the Cramps. Andy Schwartz, editor of
New York Rocker
, took his first trip to town to cover the concert and interview the Cramps:

We drive down burnt-out, boarded-up Beale Street . . . and pull up to the stage door of the Orpheum. It’s an incongruous place for the city’s biggest punk show of the year: a magnificent Mid-South showplace built in 1925, then abandoned, then restored to its original glory by concerned civic groups, all thick brocade carpets, wall tapestries and gleaming chandeliers. The place holds nearly 2700 people; there are maybe 150 here tonight, a mixture of local punks (who offset conventional long hair with torn t-shirts and leather jackets) and the merely curious. . . .

Dickinson is one well-known figure within the city’s close-knit rock ’n’ roll underground. Alex Chilton is another. . . . Alex looks thoroughly wasted: He wears rumpled clothes, an institutional haircut and the vaguely distracted air of a terminal space case. But Chilton is no casualty of excess, no matter how freely he partakes of any available stimulants including drugs, alcohol and teenage girls. Rather, he is doing exactly what he wants to do, and will tell anyone who asks that the music he’s making now is the best he’s ever made. He’s wrong, but here in Memphis no one would bother to tell Alex Chilton it isn’t so. Here in Memphis, in fact, some people think Alex Chilton is God. . . .

The set starts nowhere and ends up where it started, as Falco smashes his vintage Silvertone guitar (the kind with the built-in speaker) into a half-dozen pieces. It’s an appropriately pointless climax that leaves me wondering what the hell’s come over Alex Chilton. He devoted ten years
to making great rock ’n’ roll, from the Box Tops to Big Star to his solo career, and now he seems intent on making a bad joke out of it all. . . .

After the show, everyone heads for a bar across town. . . . The gang’s all here: Tav Falco, a couple of Klitz, Bryan Gregory and Alex Chilton, who has become the center of attention, effortlessly. He says little, unless it’s to tell someone how great Panther Burns played tonight or to ask for a cigarette, a beer or a dollar. His child-like visage fascinates me; he seems to know something you don’t, but should. At the same time, there’s an air of contempt about him as he holds court with a couple of adoring girls, neither of whom can be a day over sixteen. With his sense of superiority and his admiring clique, Chilton is a kind of punk mirror-image of another Memphis rocker, Jerry Lee Lewis.

A green Volvo pulls up to the stoplight at the corner. The young women in the front seat laugh loudly and call out to some of those sitting outside the bar. As the car turns the corner, Chilton quietly says something about “Volvo Jews.” His remark is so casual and unexpected that it takes me a minute to ask if there are any other kind.