A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (36 page)

“Immediately,
the three of us just locked,” Doug recalls. “It was a solid thing, mostly because of Alex. He was a leader, musically, when he played. He just put it right there. He was a sympathetic player, but he didn’t rely on you for anything. If you were listening and you had any sort of musical savvy at all, it was super easy to play with him. The first time I ever played with him, I was impressed with his feel on the guitar. He had this Memphis funk, this feel. I’d never heard anyone play jazz the way Alex played it. . . . I loved playing with him more than just about anyone I’ve ever played with.”

Alex’s old friend Paul Williams was in the audience that night and was impressed with what he saw: “
I loved it. Everybody was just so happy to see him. Just ecstatic. It was triumphant. I think Alex’s solo work was his real accomplishment. He was really learning to become a journeyman musician and being able to play all these different styles of music. He did it so well, and he was such a quick study.”

After such an exhilarating experience, teaming up with an adequate rock drummer, Joey Torres, was a letdown, but since Alex and Rene had already booked him for the tour, they didn’t see any way around it. In addition, they didn’t think Doug would be amenable to a grueling tour in a beat-up car, for low pay, and for the most part no accommodations except friends’ couches.

“
We drove up to New York, and we were in the dressing room for the first show at Danceteria,” Rene recalls, “and Alex and I were totally out of money. We were starving. It came time for the gig, and Alex said, ‘Hey, Joey, you remember the beat on “Bangkok,” right?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I remember it.’ And Alex said, ‘Why don’t you just play a little of it so I know you know it,’ and he started to do it, and Alex said, ‘No, that’s all wrong!’ Joey said, ‘Well, it’s close enough,’ and Alex said, ‘No, it’s not close enough!’ Joey got tired of the specificity that we were looking for, and it kind of degenerated from there. He got more disgusted with Alex.”

In New York a good friend of the dB’s, Naomi Regelson, offered her fifth-floor walkup on East Fourteenth Street as a crash pad for the band. Also staying
there was a French journalist who was a Big Star fan. “He said, ‘I really want to interview you while you’re here,’ and I said, ‘Cool,’” Alex later related. “So we talked and he said, ‘Why haven’t you made a record in four years?’ I said, ‘Well, nobody’s made me a proper offer. . . .’ He said, ‘I know somebody who will,’ and he got on the phone and called France, a guy named Patrick Mathé in Paris. Then I had a record deal.”

Mathé had cofounded an indie record store in Paris called New Rose, after the Damned’s debut single. In 1981, with his partner, Louis Thevenon, he started a label of the same name to release an album by the Saints, the pioneering Australian punk band, who’d been dropped by EMI. By 1984 the jovial garage band and punk enthusiast had also issued records by Johnny Thunders, Willie “Boom Boom” Alexander, and Roky Erickson. Mathé’s independent label was just the kind of deal Alex was hoping for. “To me, the relationships between the people involved are as important as any music that’s being produced,” Mathé told
Sounds
magazine. “We’re not just here to release records and watch the cash roll in. Sure, we’re a company and we’re working with people who have to make a living, but the business side of things isn’t the only thing in life.” Mathé would advance Alex enough money to cut an EP at Ardent for New Rose; Alex could then license it to a U.S. label for North American distribution. It was the beginning of a long relationship, and Alex would soon introduce Mathé to Tav Falco and other Memphis artists. “At the beginning we were a little scared of Alex’s reputation,” Mathé said, “but he turned out to be the most professional guy you could imagine. He’s wonderful.”

The night the trio opened for the dB’s at Irving Plaza turned out to be not so wonderful, however. After his opening set Alex hung out and watched, and the dB’s called him up to do a “holiday” encore, “Jesus Christ.” Alex obliged, but as he had in the misunderstanding with Rene, he took offense when Peter Holsapple said that he could hardly believe Alex was opening for them, rather than the other way around—meaning if there was any justice in the world, that’s how it would be. Alex mistakenly took Peter’s comment as bragging and snapped back, “I wanted to do the opening set.” That would be the only time he’d share a stage with the band who’d been among his biggest acolytes and supporters. “Alex was furious at me for years,” Holsapple says.

Alex came face to face with another group of musician fans at his CBGB gig.

A few days earlier, looking handsome and healthy with his hair cut short and parted on the side, Alex had done a photo session with his old friend Stephanie Chernikowski. The day of the CB’s gig, she shot the raucous Replacements,
in town from Minneapolis. When Paul Westerberg found out she and Alex were friends, he asked her help to meet him at their double-bill gig that night. She promised she’d help.

While the group was at Stephanie’s, their manager, Peter Jesperson, pulled up outside the club and recognized Alex’s voice coming over the P.A. “
I suddenly realized Alex was in there sound-checking,” Jesperson recalls. “I got dry mouth, I started to get the shakes a little bit—I was excited and nervous. I thought, ‘Oh, my god, I’m going to be in a room with Alex Chilton for the first time in my life.’ I was really psyched, and I remember finally working up the nerve to just walk in, and he was doing a Carole King song, ‘Let Me Get Next to You.’ More proof that he was such a cool guy. . . . When he went onstage that night, all the Replacements guys were right out front watching. He did a really cool set, some odd covers and some of the solo stuff he was working on at the time. He might have thrown in one or two Big Star songs—‘September Gurls’ and ‘Watch the Sunrise,’ I think.

“The band was so excited, and they probably had more to drink than they needed to, so by the time the Replacements got onstage, it was one of those shows where they didn’t do any of their own songs,” Jesperson continues. “It was just a debacle. The place was full of all the A&R people from New York, because [the Replacements] were on the cover of the
Voice
that week.” Among the covers was a breakneck version of Alex’s “I’m in Love with a Girl.” Westerberg taunted the audience, “You may have guessed tonight that we don’t want to play any of our own songs.” Alex loved it and, with Stephanie’s encouragement, said hello to Paul after the set.

“When the night was over,” says Jesperson, “Hilly was paying me, and all of a sudden Alex walked up to get paid. So we’re standing there side by side, and Hilly said, ‘Do you guys know each other?’ I said no, and he introduced us, and I got to shake his hand for the first time, and it was just one of the great thrills of my lifetime. And then somehow I worked up the nerve and said, ‘Alex, I’m a huge fan of your work, can I buy you lunch?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, what are you doing tomorrow?’ I told him I had some free time, and he said, ‘Well, meet me at St. Mark’s Place,’ and I said okay.”

David Fricke, reviewing Alex’s show for
Melody Maker,
was initially dubious about his performance, writing, “
When Alex Chilton arrived in Manhattan to make the club rounds with a new trio, hopes were high but expectations conservative.” Since the Replacements were playing under a fake name that night—Gary and the Boners—Alex did the same, as “Deteriorating Situations,” which
belied the experience, to Fricke’s relief. “Chilton performed with a charming, sweet, embarrassed modesty, singing with warm pleasure and slicing off avant-pop chunks of garage guitar with a confident air of fond rediscovery,” Fricke wrote. “He played like a man born again to the joys of making music, unconcerned with the weight of legend bearing down hard on his bony shoulders.”

The next day Jesperson, as planned, set out from the Iroquois Hotel for his rendezvous with Alex. “
We had a couple of rooms that were adjacent, so when I got up, Paul said, ‘Where are you going?’” Jesperson recalls. “I said, ‘I’m going to meet Alex for lunch.’ He just shot out of bed like a lightning bolt and said, ‘Can I come?’ That was totally out of character for him. I said, ‘Of course,’ and so he threw some water on his face, got dressed, and we ran downstairs and jumped in a taxi and went down to St. Mark’s Place. Alex, for some reason, didn’t give me a phone number or address—he wanted to meet me on the street. So we pulled up in this taxi, and I’m looking around for him, and Westerberg nudges me and says, ‘There he is!’ He had a little bag in his hand, and it almost looked like he was taking stuff out of the trash and lighting a cigarette.” The scenario would inspire the line “Checkin’ his stash by the trash at St. Mark’s Place” in Westerberg’s “Alex Chilton,” an ode that would become one of the band’s best-loved songs when released in 1987.

“Alex wanted to go to one of the Indian restaurants down there [on East Sixth Street], so that’s where we went,” Jesperson continues. We had this meal, and Paul and I were both certainly dazzled, but in pretty rough shape. Alex was really cordial and friendly and chatty. Then Westerberg got up and went to the bathroom, and that’s when Alex leaned over the table and said, ‘Man, I thought those guys were so cool last night. I’d love to work with them in the studio sometime.’ I think it was that kamikaze thing they’d done the night before that attracted him. I probably choked on my food and said, ‘Are you serious?’ and he said, ‘Absolutely.’ I said, ‘When are you available? If you’re serious, I’ll book the studio time right now.’ He said, ‘I’d be available the second week in January, after Christmas.’ I suggested a date and he said, ‘Sounds good to me,’ and I got up right then and went to the pay phone and I called Blackberry Way and got Steve Felstedt on the phone and said, ‘Steve, I want to book a session for January,’ and he said, ‘Cool—Replacements?’ I said, ‘Yeah, and I’m bringing in a producer.” He said, ‘Who?’ and I said, ‘Alex Chilton.’ I remember him saying, ‘I’m going to work with Alex Chilton!’”

Spirits were high in the Buick LeSabre on the way home; the trip’s only disappointment had been Torres’s drumming. En route the band stopped at a motel
and for once got two rooms instead of the usual one. Torres was thrilled to get his own quarters, but his bandmates had an ulterior motive: “Alex and I got in our room and called Doug in Memphis and asked him if he’d like to come out on the road with us,” Rene recalls, “and Doug said, ‘Yeah, why not?’”

Spending Christmas and his thirty-fourth birthday at his mother’s in Memphis, Alex made plans for a productive new year. When David Fricke called from New York for an interview, he caught Alex in a particularly upbeat mood. “
Chilton responds to sensitive questions about his prodigious past and scary descent into self-built hell with the nervous but determined confidence of someone who is really bathing in the light at the end of a long tunnel,” Fricke wrote. “He’s off and running and explains it all in a soft, impossibly slow Tennessee drawl that sounds like, at any moment, he will suddenly start going backwards in time.” Alex’s plans for the future included his upcoming trip to Minneapolis to work with the Replacements, followed by his own return to the studio to record some new songs. Since living in New Orleans, “I wanted to write things that were about feeling good,” he told Fricke, “that could make people feel good. So ever since then, the idea was to get my life into a state I was pleased with, so I could think some nice thoughts, to write about some positive things.”

Alex began 1985 by flying to Minneapolis, a city he’d not visited since the Box Tops’ tours in the 1960s. Peter Jesperson put him up at his place, near the Oar Folkjokeopus record store, the hub of the city’s vibrant indie-rock scene, where Alex spent his spare time.

“
Minneapolis was a great refuge,” Alex said. “In the middle of the Reagan ’80s, Minneapolis was fun and very pleasant and unlike the rest of America for me. It was a great breath of fresh air. It seemed like the whole town was one of the few places in America where a person like me or the Replacements could be themselves and not be hauled up on charges.”

Though he’d been sober for three years, Alex had no qualms about working with a crew of partiers. Even David Fricke questioned this in his
Melody Maker
piece: “Funny, how
someone who’s gladly said goodbye to drinking should suddenly align himself with a band whose playful alcoholism is already becoming legendary. . . .” Alex’s response: “Yeah, but there’s so much great music that concerns drinking. There’s a lot I still like to listen to.” Fricke: “But as someone now off alcohol, is it safe to go producing a band made up of such flagrant drinkers?” Alex: “I bring an empathy to the project, I guess.”

“
For five or six days, we hung out and listened to a lot of music and smoked a lot of cigarettes,” says Jesperson. “He was pretty tame at the time, relative to us. I lived right behind the record store, so Alex was in there all the time, and he’d wander off by himself. I remember him getting some shirts and 45s and things like that at the junk store. But we were in the studio a good bit that week, so there wasn’t a whole lot of extra time.”

The work at hand consisted of producing demos of three new songs Paul Westerberg had composed: “Left of the Dial,” a love song and homage to college
and alternative radio stations, where U.S. indie bands like the Replacements got airplay; one of his best-ever yearning rockers, “Can’t Hardly Wait”; and punk-pop “Nowhere Is Near My Home.” Alex’s relaxed approach to production meant that he sat and listened, agreeing with the band’s ideas—even the experimental ones that eventually didn’t work. Westerberg wanted to cut an acoustic version of “Can’t Hardly Wait” with Chris Mars playing a snare drum and singing harmonies. “It was recorded in this old studio that had become the Twin Tone [Records] building,” says Jesperson. “You could go up a ladder and get into this big echoey room, the old projection room of the Nicolette Theater from back in the day. We ran cables up there.” Though nothing came of that moody-sounding track, a bootleg leaked and became “one of the Replacements’ Holy Grail tracks for a long time,” says Jesperson. “Also, Alex sang on ‘Left of the Dial,’ and we were so thrilled that he was actually singing as well.”

A local fanzine writer had been pestering Jesperson to arrange an interview with Alex. After putting him off all week, Alex finally relented, once they had a rough mix of the songs, and agreed to meet at Jesperson’s. When the writer arrived, “Alex was playing the mixes over and over again,” Peter says. “He was really enthused about what he and the band had done—great songs and recordings and performances. He kept listening to them with this big shit-eating Alex grin on his face and was really proud of himself. The kid’s trying to do the interview, and Alex would answer a couple of questions, and then he’d say, ‘Listen to this track again, man!’”

With the Replacements’ recent signing to Sire, the hope was that Alex would be hired as their record producer. But instead the gig went to Tommy Erdelyi, aka Tommy Ramone, who’d produced the Ramones’ first three albums for the label. That spring Alex did have some other studio gigs, however: producing an indie EP for all-girl band Clambake in New York, and serving as guitarist on Panther Burns’ latest EP,
Sugar Ditch Revisited
, which New Rose would release. With Dickinson producing “the Burns” at Phillips, Alex played his “
rusty derelict Mosrite guitar that hadn’t had the strings changed since it left the pawnshop,” wrote Falco,

just the opposite of the hopped-up big Gibson 335 jazzer that Alex had played in the initial phase of Panther Burns. The kilter of his Mosrite guitar reflected the present psychic predicament of the artist in that he had abated his drinking of booze and lost a great deal of weight. . . . His personality had lost something of its penetrating edge. We heard [engineer]
Roland Janes speaking from the control room over the intercom, “Alex, you’re holding back, we can barely get a signal from your guitar on the tape. . . .” Jim [Dickinson] covertly advised Roland to leave Alex to his doldrums, and that they’d bump up the volume on the board and fix it later.

Alex’s main focus was on his own record; Patrick Mathé had advanced him enough money for three days at Ardent, April 5–7. For his first solo disc in six years, Alex had written three originals: the Furry Lewis–inspired blues “Lost My Job,” the funky jazzer “Stuff,” and the country-pop number “Paradise.” The “mini-album” would be rounded out by three soulful covers he’d been playing live: “Te-Ni-Nee-Ni-Nu”/“Tip On In” (the latter half an R&B spoken piece), Isaac Hayes’s “B-A-B-Y,” and an obscure pimp-hooker narrative: “‘Thank You John’ is by a New Orleans artist named Willie Turbinton [Willie T],” Alex explained. “It’s a
song about a pimp and the girl he likes that he’s running and working at the same time, and there’s drugs involved, too. I heard the tune and thought the lyrics were outrageous, so we started playing it. Audiences usually dig it—when I introduce it as a tune about drugs and prostitution, they really respond.”

A professional, no-nonsense attitude reigned in the studio—the opposite of Alex’s Ardent experience on his prior solo outing,
Like Flies on Sherbert
. He no longer got a deal at Ardent during off-hours; he booked time and paid studio rates like any other musician. “
We knew the project was only going to allow one day of recording, one day of overdubbing, and we’d mix it on the third day,” Rene recalls. “We went in on Friday and we were done Sunday night. We cut the songs in two sessions on the first day in six hours.” A new M.O., working quickly, efficiently, and as live as possible, became Alex’s standard procedure for all his future recordings. Getting a track down in one or two takes was the goal.

In addition to his band backing him, Alex wanted a horn section and booked three Memphis musicians with whom Doug Garrison had played various jazz and R&B sessions: a young white player, Jim Spake, on tenor saxophone, Nokie Taylor on cornet, and the legendary Fred Ford on baritone sax. Though Rene had been composing arrangements for drums, writing for three horns was a real test for him. Alex was impressed, Rene remembers: “
When we recorded ‘Stuff’ and Alex heard the parts I’d written, he was really knocked out and said, ‘Wow, that sounds so much like that Gil Evans
Birth of the Cool
stuff we were into. What you wrote changed the song and made it so much better. I’m going to give you a songwriting credit on that, because you changed the song materially enough to where you deserve that.’”

Alex’s voice sounded relaxed and Chet Baker–inspired, velvety soft on “Paradise,” “B-A-B-Y,” and “Stuff.” His guitar-playing influences—ranging from Steve Cropper to Mississippi Fred McDowell—were also in evidence. The jazz he’d been listening to, as well as blues and R&B, saturated the recording.

In December ’84 Alex and Rene had tested the waters with Doug Garrison on drums during a quick road trip to Georgia for a 688 Club gig, and it had gone well. College student J. R. Taylor described the show:

It’s the oldest crowd I’ve ever seen at Atlanta’s premier alt-music venue. . . . Most are probably here as fans of Big Star. A lot of them, like myself, have shown up to see the tattered remains of a former great talent. Nobody knows what to expect from Chilton tonight. . . . I can’t be the only one expecting—or hoping for—an entertaining disaster. Maybe I’m a little disappointed when Chilton hits the stage looking perfectly fit, backed only by a rhythm section and apparently in a good mood. It probably helps that he wasn’t expecting to draw this many fans. . . . The crowd is serious about Chilton. I count five different references to him as a genius before I’m out the door. There are just as many predictions that we’ll never see him again.

As for Doug Garrison, he would be Alex’s drummer for the next decade. “When I told him
what year I was born [1956], he said, ‘Ah, the Year of the Monkey, and I’m the Year of the Tiger, and the monkey likes to ride on the tiger’s back and mock him,’” Doug recalls. “I learned Alex was very temperamental, but I always stayed out of that kind of situation. It’s not like I built a wall, but I knew what kind of place I wanted to be in and just stayed there. But we became close, too—it’s kind of a balance. I’ve always felt that the reason Alex and I got along so well was that his first impression of me was that I was not someone who was in awe of him—I almost knew Sidney better than I knew him. I think that impressed him. We just started from scratch, and we always had that kind of relationship. As long as we were taking care of business on stage, that’s really what it was all about between me and him, and the fact is, every time we hit the stage, it was beautiful. We had a chemistry.”

A few weeks after recording at Ardent, the trio was ready for its first lengthy tour, beginning with the Southeast, East Coast, and Midwest, stopping in cities as well as college towns like Columbia, Missouri. At Washington, D.C.’s 9:30 Club, Alex reconnected with writer Joe Sasfy, who’d not chatted with him since
the Cramps sessions in 1979. Sasfy reviewed the show for
The
Washington Post
and had penned a preview for
City Paper
. “
There wasn’t a big crowd for him,” says Sasfy. “It wasn’t a band that raised the rafters—that wasn’t what they were all about. It was charming, but you had to know what Alex was up to to get it.” In his
City Paper
piece, he called Alex “one of the most persistent footnotes in new wave history. The nervy twists and emotional strain he has inflicted on pop music’s canon are as responsible for what’s good in new wave as the Velvet Underground or Captain Beefheart or Iggy Stooge.”

That summer Alex and Rene drove the Buick to Los Angeles; Doug flew in from Memphis. Alex had a gig at the punk club Al’s Bar, but he was also there for a meeting at the offices of Big Time, a new label cofounded by Australian Fred Bestall, who’d made a killing managing ’70s mega-band Air Supply. Bestall was signing U.S. acts with indie credibility, including California’s Redd Kross, Boston’s Dumptruck, and Steve Wynn’s band, Dream Syndicate. “
Big Time was a cool label,” says Wynn. “They had not too many people but a great roster, and the staff were all really good people. . . . They provided tour support, ran ads, got your music to radio stations. They had a nice office in a historic old Hollywood building.”

Alex inked a licensing deal with Big Time to release in the U.S. his newly recorded
Feudalist Tarts
, plus another EP in a few months, followed by a full-length album the following year, maintaining New Rose as his European licensor. He celebrated the deal by purchasing a Telecaster at a guitar shop in Los Angeles.

Still, as Alex told Don Snowden of the
Los Angeles Times
, he was dubious of record labels in general, due to his past experiences:

I plan to continue playing music and making records as long as I can. If a major label wants something to do with me, that’s fine, but I don’t mind if I’m never on one again. At the moment, I’m making records for myself, which could make me a lot more money in the long run.

I have licensing agreements with different companies here and there, but they will expire after certain periods of time and the records will be mine again. If I still owned the rights to some of the things I had done in the past, I could probably be making a pretty fair amount of money from them. I think something really ought to be done about the way artists are ripped off for their works by corporate entities.

Alex was in effect spelling out the DIY philosophy that would become the credo for indie bands in the ’90s and ’00s.

For
Feudalist Tarts’
cover Alex posed in his thrift shop clothes, looking wraithlike and dour, in his New Orleans neighborhood. As for the title, “the album is kind of
a soul album,” Alex explained, “and in the case of white people in the South, soul is the music of a lot of rich, frat college kids who were the sons and daughters of landowners in the South, who can be regarded as Feudalists, I believe. . . . Their daughters can be regarded as tarts quite often.” Alex told another reporter that the disc’s songs were the “tarts.” He had been reading about feudalism, as well as Marxist theory, borrowing from his brother Howard’s library of political and philosophical volumes.

In early September the band played Irving Plaza again, winning high praise from Robert Palmer in his
New York Times
“Pop Life” column:

Chilton played a
tightly astringent brand of “blue-eyed soul” . . . much of it material from
Feudalist Tarts
. A generation of fans practically worships Mr. Chilton as the progenitor of the kind of music the dB’s, R.E.M., [Mitch Easter’s] Let’s Active, and other leading “new-wave” bands play today, and the New Chilton has taken many of them by surprise. They have admired his frequently intricate pop-rock songs, without realizing that his roots are in the soul music of his hometown, Memphis. The Box Tops were steeped in 1960’s soul; Mr. Chilton is doing something many other pop artists are doing just now: he’s re-examining his roots. In the process, he is making today’s soul pretenders—the British soul boys with their silly haircuts, the white soul singers fronting American rock bands—sound tame. Mr. Chilton doesn’t have to strain or push his voice. The sensual vibrato and slurred inflections, the subtlety and innuendo, are natural and unforced.

Robert Christgau awarded
Feudalist Tarts
an A– and noted that “after ten years of falling-down flakedom only a cultist could love or even appreciate, Chilton looks around and straightens up.”
Feudalist Tarts
would win top honors in the 1985
Village Voice
Pazz & Jop poll.
Rolling Stone
weighed in with a lengthy review by Parke Puterbaugh, giving the record national attention: “Chilton has
rarely sounded so relaxed. Known formerly for an eccentricity that could lapse into sloppiness, Chilton has cleaned up his act considerably and is singing and
playing guitar with a care that is commensurate with his talent. . . . It’s about time that Alex Chilton graduated from cult hero to acclaimed artist.”