A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (32 page)

“Oh, lots.”

“And [Chilton] doesn’t like any of them, right?”

“Oh, no . . . I mean, it’s not genetic. But there is a Jewish mentality, and it is very overbearing, and they do have a big influence on the media. I mean, Fred Silverman is not an Episcopalian.”

“William Paley (of CBS) might be.”

“Yeah, well, maybe . . . but the influence is obviously there, and if you can’t see it I can’t help . . .” Chilton’s words trail off, along with my cassette recorder, as he walks away to listen to the tape I’ve made of tonight’s show.

After that exchange, I’m not so interested in talking to Alex Chilton anymore. Anti-Semitism is such a bore. Of course, Alex is hardly alone here in his attitude. Even my driver and guide for the evening, a local writer we’ll call Nancy Newman, distinguishes between “blacks, whites and Jews” in her dissection of the city’s social structures.

Whether Alex was trying to insult a New York journalist (which is how Schwartz took the encounter), or was in full-bore punk persona mode, is unclear. One of Alex’s several Jewish friends, John Lightman, emphasizes that Alex never said or did anything anti-Semitic throughout their long friendship. Using racial epithets and making inflammatory statements were part of punk’s M.O. at
the time. The previous March, Elvis Costello was roughed up by Bonnie Bramlett and Stephen Stills at a Holiday Inn lounge in Ohio after drunkenly making racist comments about James Brown and Ray Charles. Costello later apologized at a press conference, saying, “It became necessary for me to outrage these people with about the most obnoxious and offensive remarks that I could muster.”

With Lesa out of the picture, Alex began carousing with Amy Gassner (soon to move in with Tav) and other young women who turned out for Panther Burns shows. “
Since Alex lived with his parents down the street from my mother’s house,” says Amy, “he was always sneaking a little action in here and there. He was very affectionate, not just with me but with any of the girls who dropped in that his mom approved of. I think it slightly titillated him that he had to be sneaky with his parents, with girlfriends lurking around. One night he set a blanket out in the backyard, and we had a little tryst that was very sweet. Another day, Alex, Kitty Summerall, and I were driving out to Graceland together. The whole time there Alex was comparing himself to Elvis, and he kept saying that he was the greatest thing musically that ever happened to Memphis since Elvis. Kitty and I just listened, and I thought he had a lot of nerve to say that so matter-of-factly.”

On August 16, the second anniversary of Elvis’s death, Alex finally got back into Ardent to complete work on
Sherbert
. He’d just written a new song, “Hey! Little Child,” inspired by the high school girls who flocked to Panther Burns gigs. Alex was particularly smitten with Syd Fenwick, a student at St. Anne’s, an Episcopal girls’ school, and a friend of Panther Burns’s trumpet player. “A lot of those people were
dating underage girls,” says Kent Benjamin. “And you see that in so many of Alex’s songs, like ‘Hey! Little Child.’ The [Chilton] house on Harbert was not far from this Catholic girls’ school, and Alex’s big thing was to go sit on the curb there when all the young girls with their Catholic school uniforms walked by. And I think that’s where some of those girlfriends came from.”

The catchy “Hey! Little Child” was written one day when Alex was hanging out with Kent. “
I picked Alex up about eleven in the morning, and we were just riding around, going to various places drinking beer,” says Kent. “He had an acoustic guitar and was working on that song all day long, bouncing the lyrics off me. We drove back to my apartment to get some herb, and my next-door neighbor wanted to go with us to [a bar called] Zinnie’s. We were sitting there and Alex was playing that song, and my friend started going, ‘Hey! Hey!’ and Alex loved it, and so that became part of the song. He and Ross went to Ardent the next day and cut it.”

In his own diverse guises, Alex cut a twangy vocal on Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas,” slurred a lascivious-sounding “Rock Hard,” sang a frisky “Hey! Little Child,” and inhabited an Elvis-y version of “Girl After Girl.” Of “Rock Hard,” he said, “Like some of my other best songs,
it was originally another song and it was recorded as that other song, which was really bland. Almost until the final mixdown of
Like Flies
, the song was pretty much left the way it was. But I knew I wanted to rewrite it, so, under pressure, as I often do, I wrote a really good lyric for it, and overdubbed it. I still like the song a whole lot.” “Rock Hard” and “Hey! Little Child” would be the last originals Alex would record for six years.

With these tracks finished, Alex completed the final mixdowns. By late fall,
Like Flies on Sherbert
, opening with Ross’s Elvis-inspired narrative, “Baron of Love, Pt. 2,” consisted of eleven tracks. Five hundred copies were issued locally and by mail-order via Sid Selvidge’s Peabody Records.

The record was mostly met with dismay or sheer hatred by critics, if not ignored, though, like
3rd,
it attracted a hardcore group of fans (“gloriously dissolute” was one favorable comment), which increased once it was released in the U.K., with a slightly different track listing, plus a single (“Hey! Little Child” / “Lorena”).

A sole four-star review in London’s
Sounds
said, “
Big Star’s first was slick, the second was tinny, the third melancholy and chaotic, and
Like Flies on Sherbert
combines 2 with 3 to evoke fast, snickering insanity, Chilton playing the axe-murderer with the transistor to his head.” Most critics tended to agree with the one who wrote that the album “painfully confirmed the degradation of a once-major talent.” Robert Christgau, who liked a couple of tracks enough to award it a B, said, “
A very bright music nut who knows from the inside how much craziness goes into the most normal-seeming product (he did front the Box Tops, remember), this long-time advertisement for self-abuse doesn’t prove craziness is universal. Just makes you forget that things most certainly wouldn’t be more fun if it was.”

“
Flies
got away from me, I must admit,” Jim Dickinson said. “It was Alex’s revenge for the way we mixed
3rd
. The mix on
Flies
sounds like it’s comin’ through petroleum jelly.” Though he would always speak disparagingly of
3rd
, Alex never lost his fondness for
Sherbert
.

One of his future collaborators, musician and musicologist Ben Vaughn, remembers the impact the LP had on him: “
Unbelievable record! That’s one of the greatest records in the history of music, it really is, and to take a Carter Family
song or a ‘Waltz Across Texas’ and just destroy it like that—no one was doing that yet. That kind of total disregard for decorum and tuning and playing. It was probably the first cow-punk record, or whatever you want to call it. And it was just Alex’s total disregard for tradition being kept as a tradition. . . . I really liked how Alex was searching for stuff through a chemical fog. It’s just a great record, because it’s like a John Cassavetes film, where you don’t get any answers. There’s a whole lot of questions but no answers.”

Between
Sherbert
and his performances with Panther Burns, Alex was purposefully reinventing himself. “I think Alex was more aware than he’d like to let on,” says Ross Johnson. “It was
intentional spontaneity, and also a deliberate referencing of source material of earlier rock & roll and obscure things. And something that was unprofessional. Alex blew his rep as being professional, as being employable, so it was much more than just about punk rock. It was a way for Alex to ruin his reputation in Memphis, Tennessee, because people would come up to Alex and treat him like he was retarded and like they were going to get his career back on track, like, ‘
tut tut tut
, poor Alex, he’s playing with these people who can’t even play.’”

While trying to destroy his reputation, Alex seemed hell-bent on self-destruction as well, by continuing to drink heavily, snorting coke and crystal meth, and indulging in an unhealthy lifestyle. “
My life was on the skids, and
Like Flies on Sherbert
was a summation of that period,” he later reflected. “I like that record a lot. It’s crazy but it’s a positive statement about a period in my life that wasn’t positive.”

Looking toward a new decade, Alex had transformed himself into a wandering musician who performed with backup players and also served as one in Panther Burns. His new role was emphasized a few days before his twenty-ninth birthday, when the
Commercial Appeal
ran a feature on him and
Like Flies on Sherbert
. “
I don’t try to make the transition understandable for people who’ve dug one thing I’ve done and then I do something else—I just do these things,” Alex told reporter Walter Dawson. “And I don’t write things to surprise people, but I don’t try
not
to surprise them either.”

Alex was attempting to quit drinking—two years before he actually succeeded in doing so—and spoke candidly about the problem to Dawson. “
I have been on the verge of disintegrating for a lot of years now,” said Alex, “but I feel like now—like stopping drinking is an indication—my character is building itself rather than falling apart. Mainly what I’m trying to do now is live good.”

Dawson took a favorable view of
Flies
: “Chilton has torn apart the songs, and left us gazing at shreds, so he forces the listener into a far more serious evaluation of the music than if he’d done these songs straight. . . . It is naked and sometimes brutal . . . though not without its moments of humor. It is a rather human album, in an existential way.”

“I do think the disintegration sound is an accurate representation of what I’ve been doing for a lot of years,” Alex agreed, “and I’m glad to get the sound on record. I had to go through a period of chaos.” Regarding his interest in Panther Burns, he explained, “Ever since I’ve been playing music professionally I’ve been up front, and there’s been all this pressure. I always wanted to be a guitar player for somebody for a while. It’s difficult to be entertaining, and if you’re
really interested in playing music—which I am—you want some time where you can just play music rather than when you’re out front. I’d love to just play guitar with somebody like John Cale.” (Cale’s most recent LP had been recorded live at CBGB.)

As for the rootsy source material on his new album, Alex pointed out, “I’ve always been into rhythm & blues, black music, and country music.
Sherbert
contains a lot of music I’ve liked all my life, some folk songs that are done in a hard rock sort of way. Very spontaneous, none of the songs were rehearsed.”

The same ideal applied to the occasional gigs Alex played at the Well, with friends or Randy Band members. He’d throw cover songs at them—from Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” to Velvet Underground’s “There She Goes Again”—and they’d try to play along. Big Star and Box Tops songs were becoming rare, except for the occasional twisted version of “The Letter.” Alex continued playing with Panther Burns, who now had their own teenage go-go dancers, called the Burnettes, occasionally introduced as “the Little Whores.”

“It’s a social event,” Alex said about their gigs. “I think, ‘Gee, I wonder who’s gonna come in. I wonder who I’m gonna look at in the audience tonight.’ I like a place where I can see everybody in the audience. I think that’s why we got this band together. We just wanted to make a scene where all these girls would come. I don’t really have any purpose for playing in Panther Burns except that it’s fun.”

Touring was no longer fun for Alex, so he begged off driving north for twenty hours with Tav for Panther Burns’s mini-tour of New York City in September ’79. Ross couldn’t leave his job as a university librarian, so bassist Ron Miller, who still spent time in Manhattan at his girlfriend’s Village townhouse, contacted the dB’s—Will Rigby and Peter Holsapple—to fill in on drums and guitar. One night, for a booking at Steve Mass’s Mudd Club, “
I went in with my best rockabilly attitude,” Peter recalls, “and made a feeble attempt to rehearse with Tav, which was so disheartening, to try to play along with this guy. Alex understood the John Lee Hookerisms of Tav Falco’s nonrhythmic behavior, and I just didn’t. I was too steeped in Big Star, frankly. It’s a jump. So I hung in there for that one gig.”

Promoter Jim Fouratt, who’d booked Panther Burns into Danceteria, insisted that Alex be part of the band for the gig, and flew him up the next day. After another rehearsal at the space the dB’s used in the funky Music Building, next to the Port Authority Bus Terminal, Panther Burns played the most high-profile gig
of the tour: Danceteria now rivaled the Mudd Club as the city’s coolest nightspot. Joining them on clarinet was an old friend of Tav’s: music critic, blues scholar, and avant-garde musician Robert Palmer. The Arkansas native had been part of the Memphis scene since the mid-1960s, when he was a member of the combo Insect Trust and cofounded the city’s blues festival. Now living in New York, Palmer wrote for
Rolling Stone
and the
New York Times
, where he’d soon become chief pop critic. He’d also developed an obsession with an ancient tribe of musicians in the mountains of Morocco, the Master Musicians of Jajouka. “
During the set, Robert Palmer made high caterwauls on clarinet the entire time,” Will Rigby recalls. “It reminded me of that Pipes of Pan–Jajouka stuff. Totally crazy.”

“
Panther Burns sawed through a brutal 45-minute set of such stridency that the audience seemed riveted in some swaying, yet petrified trance,” Tav recalled of the gig. “Afterward, Fouratt came backstage into our dressing room and proclaimed, ‘That was the worst sounding crock of unadulterated noise I have ever heard . . . but someone named Geoff Travis from some company called Rough Trade in London wants to talk to you. Shall I let him in?’”

Travis was head of England’s hippest independent label, home to some of the artiest (and noisiest) U.K. punk bands, including the Raincoats, the Fall, and the Swell Maps. When he visited Panther Burns in the dressing room, Travis “signed up the band that night to record” their debut album, according to Falco.

“
We played every night for a week, or maybe eight nights in nine days or something like that,” says Will. “I always thought that Panther Burns was the only band that actually did a tour of New York—Mudd Club, Danceteria, Snafu, the original Tramp’s, Maxwell’s [in Hoboken], the 80’s Club, CBGB, Hurrah, and the cable program
Glenn O’Brien’s TV Party
.” Venues for punk-y music had proliferated in New York since Alex had lived there two years earlier, and no wave, noisy, dissonant avant-punk had taken hold since Charles Ball had released pioneering adherents like Teenage Jesus and the Jerks on his Lust/Unlust label. But as the week wore on, Panther Burns’s audiences dwindled.

Though Alex had become averse to touring, he did agree to travel to a few dates with the Cramps as their soundman, including a return trip to Austin and a fortuitous one to New Orleans. He loved the Crescent City and became friendly with several local fans. The following year he would return with Panther Burns, opening for the Cramps, and subsequently the combo would get their own regular bookings there. But most of his income came from playing the
occasional gig in town, usually earning about $40 a pop. “If we could make a lot of money, I’d love to go anywhere,” Alex said.

His mood swings had by now begun to affect his image among clubgoers, who didn’t know what to expect from his performance on- or offstage. Some nights he’d be exuberant and outgoing; on other evenings, he’d mutter sarcastic remarks or simply ignore people who approached him. “
I’d go see the Randy Band and Panther Burns at the Well all the time, and Alex was mean and scary,” says Candace Mache, then the teenaged DJ Candy Cox, with her own Friday-night show on Memphis’s WEVL. On Candy’s eighteenth birthday, she was hanging outside the Mid-South Coliseum after a blues concert and “this car pulls up next to us, and Alex is in the backseat,” Candy recalls. “He said, ‘It was a great show, you missed it, why don’t you come over to the house?’ We go over to Tav’s place and we walk in, and Amy’s asleep in just a bra on the bed, and she takes a while to get dressed. Then we go over to Lesa’s place and we ring the bell, and Lesa comes to the door and she looks at Alex and she looks at me, and looks back at Alex and says, ‘You’ve been fucking me all day long and now you’re fucking her, and you’re bringing her into my house?’”

After Alex convinced Lesa that Candy and he barely knew each other, they were allowed to join the party: “Lesa said, ‘I need to get high,’ and I said, ‘I’ve got some pot,’ but there were no rolling papers, so we tried to use the paper on a tampon,” Candy says, “and finally we found an empty cigarette pack and used the foil from the top of it and made a little pipe. Lesa and Alex took turns playing the piano, and a drunken Ross Johnson, the drummer from Panther Burns, was lying underneath it. I thought, ‘This is what they told me it would be like—this is textbook, this is what musicians do.’”

“
It was sex, drugs and rock & roll—all three,” Lesa later said of those times. “Very few of us had a day job. We had very little structure in our lives. Too much time on our hands probably.” As Alex and Lesa became estranged yet again, she began seeing Ross, a relationship that Alex initially seemed to condone. Lesa continued to play with the Klitz, and Jim Blake’s Barbarian Records released her solo 45 that included her version of the Kinks’ “’Till the End of the Day” recorded during
3rd
. The cover art included a nude photo of Lesa as a paper doll, complete with little outfits that could be cut out to dress her. By the fall of ’80, Lesa would leave Memphis to live with her mother in Washington, D.C. Most friends thought leaving town was the only way she could save her own life. “I just needed to get healthy,” Lesa observes.

In May 1980 Alex performed his first-ever solo gig in London. Aura Records’ Aaron Sixx, who’d released
3rd
and
Flies
, flew him to England for a pair of gigs at Dingwalls, a Victorian-era venue in Camden Town, where flea market booths stood next to vintage record stalls, and punk bands had played since ’76. Sixx had put together a backup band consisting of bassist Matthew Seligman and drummer Morris Windsor, rhythm section for the Soft Boys (featuring vocalist Robyn Hitchcock, a Syd Barrett fan with a penchant for surreal lyrics and dada-esque storytelling), and, as a supplemental guitarist, Knox, of the punk band the Vibrators. Alex “
was very amiable,” Knox recalls. “He had a sort of girlfriend with him, who I think he may have met on the plane. He had this slogan: ‘Rockabilly shall inherit the earth.’”

The band rehearsed a few times in Fulham before the first gig on Tuesday, May 28. “[Alex] confiscated Morris Windsor’s cymbals and told him to play on the tom-toms,” says Seligman. “He said cymbals had high frequencies that interfered with the fuzz of the guitars. As for Knox’s guitar and my bass, he wanted them as distorted as we could get.”

A
New Music News
reporter who interviewed Alex soon after his arrival reported that he “
was in something of a daze, having just flown in,” and was “very nervous and excited” about his pair of shows. The writer asked him about Jon Tiven, who, without Alex’s knowledge, had licensed ten tracks from the ’75 Ardent sessions to a German label, releasing the LP as
Bach’s Bottom
(a play on Box Tops). “He’s got some band called the Yankees, and he’s still trying to steal records from people, mine mostly,” Alex answered. “But then again, I rip everybody off, too, so I don’t complain about that kind of thing.” After the interview Alex did a photo session with Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn (who would go on to fame and eventually direct a feature film about a then-new band called Joy Division).

Though the opening night’s show was shaky, on Wednesday the band played a tight set. A sober and barefoot Alex sang well and politely introduced the songs, drawn from throughout his career. Both nights he encored solo, playing electric guitar on an uber-twangy “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena,” baffling the audience. The second night was recorded, unbeknownst to him, Alex claimed, and released as
Live in London
two years later.

Alex was inspired enough by the London shows to agree to play an October weekend in Toronto, and contacted Bruce Eaton, with whom he’d stayed in touch, to see if the Philly Nuggets could back him there and at an add-on performance in Buffalo. Picking him up at the airport, Bruce was surprised by the
change in Alex’s appearance in just a year’s time. “
He got off the plane and he didn’t bring a guitar, his clothes were in a Piggly Wiggly [grocery store] bag, and he smelled,” Bruce recalls. “He wanted to stay in a motel, so I got him one. It wasn’t low-rent enough for him, so he ended up at the Rip Van Winkle, a motel out on Niagara Falls Boulevard, where you’d stay if you were on the run from the law. They didn’t have phones in the room, so it was a real pain to try to communicate with him in terms of rehearsal. And the guy in the room next to him had gone out and shot some squirrels and was skinning squirrels on the hood of his car. That was a little much even for Alex.

“The whole Panther Burns thing was in full bore,” Bruce recalls, “and the gigs weren’t that great. Whatever energy and adrenaline we had in the first go-round was kind of dissipated.” The performances sounded akin to the review Robert Christgau would give
Bach’s Bottom
: “
These 1975 tracks, the best already released on Chilton’s long-gone Ork EP, are about as Memphis as a garbage strike. Not only does anarchic equal chaotic equal sloppy equal a mess, but soulful equals spontaneous equals off-the-cuff equals a mess. None of which is to deny that he knows how to mess around.”

When Alex returned home, he had back-to-back Panther Burns gigs, playing at the Well on a Friday night, then traveling to New Orleans to perform at Jimmy’s on Saturday. At the show was a teenage fan who’d met Alex when he first came to town with the Cramps. George Reinecke was a fledgling guitarist who would develop into a terrific player, though his right arm was shortened and his hand deformed and missing fingers. (His mother had taken thalidomide during pregnancy.) The son of a linguistics professor at the University of New Orleans, Reinecke recalls, “
From the minute I saw the Panther Burns I knew this was the band I was going to be in,” and eventually he would join. One aficionado said of his playing with the group: “What an astounding guitarist! This guy does it all, from Scotty Moore–style rockabilly rave-ups to B.B. King blues, Duane Eddy twang-fests, Djangoesque jazz, Ventures surf, Van Halen shredding, and much more . . . just amazing.”