A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (39 page)

With 1988 came another large itinerary of performance dates—seventy already booked for America, after starting the year with a lengthy, thirty-five-gig tour of Europe. “We were working like crazy,” says Doug. “We had a different country every day that we had to be in. It was insane. Some of the tours we did in Europe, I don’t know how we survived it. We did it all on the road—we never flew once in Europe, except over to England or something like that. We’d travel by van and boats.”

While journeying through Austria, some terrible news reached Alex: On February 10, Mary Evelyn Chilton had been killed when a fire broke out in her home at 1654 Eastmoreland. Apparently Alex’s mother had left something on the stove while taking a shower. The downstairs was engulfed in flames, and due to a snowstorm that had hit Memphis, fire trucks could not reach her in time to save her. She was seventy-six.

By the time Cecelia located Alex in Europe, they agreed he should stay on and finish the tour. Doug remembers that Alex, very private about his emotions, kept his grief to himself. “I was shocked and sad,” Doug says. “Alex really didn’t talk about it.”

Following his mother’s death, Alex’s trips to Memphis became less frequent. Howard was living in Chicago but would move to the garage apartment at Bob Tannen’s compound. Cecelia, divorced and raising a daughter, stayed in
Tennessee and operated Sidney Chilton’s lighting business. She gave Alex a few things salvaged from Mary Chilton’s home, including a charred statue of an angel, which Alex placed in Tav’s backyard, where he sometimes pitched a tent during occasional visits. Alex’s reel-to-reel recordings, tapes, memorabilia, records, and other documents were lost in the fire, but his mother’s scrapbook documenting Alex’s career somehow survived. When Parke Puterbaugh telephoned him in New Orleans, soon after his return from Europe, for a
Rolling Stone
“where are they now” feature on the Box Tops, Alex was friendly and talkative, even discussing Big Star; Puterbaugh was shocked to later learn from Gary Talley that Alex’s mother had recently died. It never came up in the conversation.

Alex filled the rest of the year touring, nearly 180 days on the road in the United States. He told one interviewer, “I was a confused young person. I didn’t know where I was going. I still don’t—but at least I’m going.” Royalties continued to come in, thanks to the Bangles (approximately $36,000 that year), but
High Priest
seemed dead in the water: Big Time had gone under. New Rose continued to sell the record overseas, and a couple of high-spirited covers Alex had cut at the end of the
High Priest
sessions—Porter Wagoner’s “Rubber Room” (with George Reinecke on psycho guitar) and Charlie Rich’s “Lonely Weekends”—had been released as a promo disc. (Other tracks recorded but left off the original LP would be added to a 1994 expanded release.)

During the ’88 European tour Alex had met with Patrick Mathé, who offered to fund a new recording in 1989. Alex had written another topical song, with a compelling melody and lyrics referencing economic inequity and Christian charlatans like Jim and Tammy Bakker. He returned to Ardent to cut the evocative “Guantanamerika,” one of his best-ever songs, along with Furry Lewis’s 1928 blues masterpiece “I Will Turn Your Money Green,” the standard “Nice and Easy,” and Ronny and the Daytonas’ 1963 hit, “Little GTO.” Another pair of originals, the lecherous but humorous “Jailbait” and soulful “Baby Baby Baby,” filled out the set, which Alex named
Blacklist
. Personnel included Doug Garrison, saxophonist Jim Spake, and on bass, Tommy McClure, who’d played on
Like Flies
on Sherbert
and “Whole Lotta Shakin’” during the Big Star
3rd
sessions. George Reinecke sang background harmonies on “Little GTO.” The title,
Blacklist
, accurately described the mini-album’s fate—issued only by New Rose in Europe and hard to find at U.S. shops, where it sold for $20. No American label would touch it. It was Alex’s first release available only on CD, though Alex didn’t yet own a CD player.

After four years of constant roadwork, Alex was ready to slow down a bit in
’89. He agreed to play a (lucrative) birthday party, chugging along the Mississippi River on the
Memphis Queen
steamboat on the Fourth of July, and seemed to have a good time, backed by the album’s personnel on nearly two dozen covers, with “Bangkok” and “Rock Hard” the only originals.

Alex’s own birthday that year would lead him to reappraise his options as he entered the last year of his thirties. Things with Annabelle had fallen apart, and she was planning a move to northern California to take up organic farming. His songwriting had fizzled; it would be six years before he cut another album with original songs. And while more Big Star projects began to surface in the early ’90s, Alex would be spending much of his time living in a tent in rural Tennessee.

Looking backward while attempting to forge ahead would characterize Alex’s artistic work over the next two decades. As if he were returning to a dozen years earlier, in 1990 he holed up in a Memphis studio with a primitive young R&B band. Like the early Cramps, the Detroit-based Gories were self-taught zealots of vintage music who didn’t have a bassist. Guitarists/vocalists Mick Collins and Dan Kroha and drummer Peggy O’Neill, whose kit sometimes consisted solely of tom-toms, were John Lee Hooker enthusiasts who wrote in the liner notes to their debut: “When we first started, any song with more than nine notes in it was usually too complicated for us.” They sought out Alex, a fan who’d seen them while on tour, to produce their sophomore effort
, I Know You Fine, but How You Doin’.

In keeping with his hands-off approach, Alex spent time on the couch at Easley Recording, run by Ron’s brother Doug. He supplied cases of beer, which the band consumed with abandon—and Alex even joined them in knocking back a few. When not in the studio, he hung out with Panther Burns and the Hellcats, who’d asked him to produce their first album for New Rose. Alex turned them down but didn’t explain why. That summer he produced another album at Easley,
Shocked & Amazed
by the Koolkings, a group led by German singer-songwriter Kristof Hahn. Alex insisted the band get drunk before each session; he’d first met Hahn when Kristof served as the trio’s intoxicated road manager on a European tour.

Working with the Gories and the Koolkings proved a respite from touring with his own band. The trio usually played strong sets, which had become polished and standardized except for the occasional off-kilter night, when Alex was in a bad mood—or feeling adventurous. Beginning in 1989 he mixed things
up by sometimes taking saxophonist Jim Spake along, and alternated between Memphis bassists Ron Easley, John McClure, and Mike Maffei, with Doug Garrison always on drums. When not touring with Alex, Doug had started playing in a New Orleans–based band with Rene Coman, the Iguanas, an ensemble that played a rhythmic brew of Latin, R&B, and rock.

In Memphis, sparks had flown between Alex and Gories drummer O’Neill, an attractive redhead and at the time a heavy drinker. The attraction would gradually evolve into a romance, eventually leading Peggy to leave Detroit and move into Alex’s tiny home in New Orleans. Their divergent lifestyles—Alex mostly remained a teetotaler—would result in another volatile liaison.

Alex also started making plans for building a one-room cabin on his property outside Hohenwald, 70 miles southwest of Nashville and 170 miles east of Memphis. “
I looked at a lot of books, then threw them all out and drew my own diagram,” he said about the structure he planned but never completed. He told other friends that he enjoyed camping like “a dirty hippie.” To do business or call a friend, he’d drive into town to a pay phone in a grocery store parking lot.

In the new decade he reconnected with Ron Miller, the Panther Burns upright bassist who now exclusively played jazz in New York. Ron joined Alex on a brief tour around the Northeast and then enlisted him as a vocalist on a recording of Chet Baker songs.
Medium Cool: Imagination
featured a hepcat combo including Ron, saxman/vocalist James White (who, as James Chance, recorded for Charles Ball in ’78), vibist/pianist A. J. Mantas, tenor saxophonist and pianist Robert Arron (a David Bowie vet), and drummer Richard Dworkin, a longtime member of the avant-jazz Microscopic Septet. Alex sang three selections: his favorite Baker song, “Look for the Silver Lining,” as well as “That Old Feeling” and “Like Someone in Love.” Alex enjoyed the session; the LP, issued in 1991, would be Rough Trade’s last release before going under (though the label reemerged years later).

That same year the better-distributed
19 Years: A Collection of Alex Chilton,
was issued by Rhino—the first major U.S. retrospective of Alex’s work, from 1970’s “Free Again” to
3rd
’s tracks to 1987’s
High Priest
songs. Alex said, “I would have chosen different things, but I’m glad they did it. I don’t mind people listening to things I’ve done in the past; that’s not a bad thing—but I myself keep moving on.” Ira Robbins, former editor of
Trouser Press,
reviewed the compilation in
Entertainment Weekly
:

This reissue of Chilton’s work in the ’70s and ’80s . . . answers the need for a domestic retrospective but is unlikely to earn the eccentric
singer-guitarist many new fans. It’s a melange of unfancy pop (alternately crisp and dissolute), rock (alternately raving and restrained), crooning (a straight reading of “Volare”!), Memphis soul, and country; it has many fine tracks, but Chilton is an acquired taste whose charm emerges slowly.

Though Alex and Paul Westerberg would spend an evening together after a chance meeting in New York, Westerberg said of
19 Years:
“
Now I listen to his new compilation and I can’t make up my mind whether Alex was some brilliant chameleon or just a guy who fucking lost it real quick.” He later added, “He is a vastly underrated guitar player. He showed me one of my three licks.”

Alex stayed on the move that year, living for five months in Tennessee, ninety days in New Orleans, six weeks in California (performing and visiting friends, including Annabelle in Humboldt County, where he considered purchasing property), and two months in Europe, touring and hanging out. “
Just kind of living around has its rewards and drawbacks,” he said of his peripatetic existence. At a Knitting Factory performance in October, he played a couple of new originals, “In a Big Way” and “Girl You’re Fine.” Of these, he said, “I’m writing really vacuous pop songs these days.” But with no label to pay for tracking, the pair would go unrecorded.

Labels remained interested in Big Star, however. In January 1992 Rykodisc put out a trio of recordings that would attract a flurry of attention toward Alex: an expansive reissue of
3rd
, including every song cut during the sessions; a ’74 live recording of Big Star at Long Island’s WLIR; and a collection of never-released Chris Bell music,
I Am the Cosmos
. Alex still disdained the
3rd
material, no matter that it reaped five stars in
Rolling Stone
(as did the other two CDs).

The Ryko releases—and subsequent press—got Alex and his trio numerous bookings in the Northeast, Midwest, and Canada in early ’92. On February 10, following a riveting but sparsely attended gig at Maxwell’s, the trio played New York’s Tramps, a show that “must have alternately been one of the most brilliant and awful shows of his recent career,” wrote the
New York Times’s
Karen Schoemer. Due to a noisy buzz emanating from the sound system “loud enough to be legally classified as torture,” she wrote, Alex played a desultory ninety-minute set, at one point throwing his guitar to Ron Easley so that he could focus on singing. He’d added several new numbers to his set since the ’80s, including a kooky soul song–cum–
Linda Goodman’s
Love Signs
number called “What’s Your Sign Girl” that featured Alex’s falsetto. “Let’s Get Lost,” “My Bonnie Lies
Over the Ocean,” and “Where the Action Is” were among the new favorites. “[Sinatra’s] ‘Only the Lonely,’” Schoemer wrote, “was a powerful moment of truth, showing that a lifetime of being adored by too many and too few can add up to the same thing—inconsistency, emotional drainage, and peerless dedication to the craft of the song.”

At forty-one, Alex was in good shape, with a full head of dark brown hair and a wiry, muscular body. He worked out, rode his bicycle, and still played tennis. Around this time Jim Dickinson told a reporter that Alex was “probably happier now than he’s ever been. There’s a lot of frustration, especially with the recognition he’s gotten and then to have no money, no situation, no outlet. But Alex has been very realistic about it. He hasn’t become bitter in the sense of a lot of old Southern musicians who quit playing. If anything, he plays more than ever. He does his thing, and he doesn’t care if people get it or not.”

By now Big Star songs had mostly vanished from his set. A devoted fan base had grown since his 1985 reemergence and appreciated the obscurities he pulled from R&B, country, and jazz songbooks. His response to shouted-out requests, he said, had become: “
I don’t have any feelings about it one way or another. I’m up there and I’m going to do what I want to do, and that’s about all there is to it. I realize people have paid their money to come and see me, and they would like to hear me do some things, but I have to do what I have to do.”

In the U.K. a group of young Scottish musicians called Teenage Fanclub were outspoken Chilton admirers and had recently released their second album—the first on a major U.S. label—called
Bandwagonesque
, which bore a striking resemblance to
#1 Record
-era Big Star. The group cheekily spliced a bit of the WLIR DJ asking Alex “don’t you think it’s anachronistic to be playing this kind of music in the 1970’s?” to the opening of their 1991 single “What You Do to Me.”

Alex was intrigued by Teenage Fanclub, though when
Bandwagonesque
first arrived, he said, “I’ve heard about
five or six minutes of their music and I get a kick out of it. They seem to have that kind of narcissistic, adolescent thing that Big Star had. Maybe there are some direct quotations of our band in it, but I don’t mind that a bit. I know that when I was in Big Star and writing songs, I was certainly quoting directly from songs myself—there were some definite steals in there for me.” Once they met, a deep friendship developed between him and the band; they would perform and record together over the years, including a BBC special and superb versions of Dan Penn’s “Dark End of the Street” and the Flying Burrito Brothers’ “Cody, Cody.” For the next decade and a half, he’d call
them his favorite band and spend vacations in Glasgow hanging out with the group and their friends.

•   •   •

When rumors began circulating about a possible Big Star reunion stemming from the Ryko reissues, Alex shrugged them off and continued with his trio’s touring schedule. His fees had decreased since the late ’80s, but he’d learned how to work the circuit efficiently.

While he was on the road, family tragedy struck again: Howard Chilton, living in the garage apartment next to Alex’s cottage and working as a waiter at Felix’s Oyster House, died suddenly. He’d been suffering from ill health, and in June 1992 had a heart attack at home. He was forty-six. “I remember that
Howard had been sick,” recalls Adele Tyler, “and that Alex had maybe been taking care of him. My parents said he had HIV. I got the feeling that he and Alex had been really close, and when he died, the little bit that Alex revealed emotionally . . . [it] seemed like that was really hard on him.” Perhaps as a way of dealing with the loss, Alex moved into the garage apartment himself, surrounded by Howard’s books, which he read voraciously. (A few years earlier, Suzi Chilton, who’d been living in Texas, took her own life. Sixteen years later, Timothee would be incarcerated for assault and battery with intent to kill, serving time in an Oklahoma prison.)

•   •   •

In early 1993 Alex started fielding persistent calls from a pair of University of Missouri students, Mike Mulvihill and Jeff Breeze, in Columbia, one of his favorite stops, where he’d played the Blue Note numerous times since ’85. They proposed to him that he appear at the WCOU-sponsored Springfling, a musical get-together, with Jody Stephens and possibly Paul Westerberg, now a solo artist, and R.E.M.’s Mike Mills to play a few Big Star songs, among other material. Though they could only cover expenses and offered no payment, Alex, on a whim, said yes. Mulvihill and Breeze immediately looked to fill out the band for what they called a “Big Star reunion”; when they contacted Chris Stamey, he thought it was a hoax—it seemed unbelievable that Alex would consent to such a thing. When another contactee, Matthew Sweet, who’d had a big hit that year with
Girlfriend
on indie label Zoo, told his A&R man Bud Scoppa about it, Alex’s old friend convinced his label to record the concert. The last piece of the puzzle was signing on founding members of Seattle band the Posies, Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow.

Though they’d once shared their rehearsal space with Nirvana, the Posies’
sound was pop-oriented rather than grunge. In the late ’80s they cut Big Star’s “Feel” and Bell’s “I Am the Cosmos.” “
We didn’t drastically reinterpret them,” says Auer. “We did forgeries. It was almost an experiment to see how much we could sound like those records. I remember hearing from Jody that ‘I Am the Cosmos’ gave him goosebumps—it weirded him out a little. That was what led him to check us out, and what eventually got us the [Big Star] gig.” Once Zoo signed on, the label funded a rehearsal for the Posies, Jody, and Alex in Seattle. “I hadn’t played in four years,” recalls Jody, who, in 1987, had become an employee of Ardent, where he’d hold down various positions over the decades.

“
We met Alex for the first time at our studio, and a whole mythology preceded him, with all kinds of stories,” says Ken. “He was absolutely perfectly himself when he arrived and didn’t say much. We were standing there awkwardly for a minute, and just after he said hello, he excused himself, pulled out a handkerchief, and proceeded to really violently blow his nose for three and a half minutes. Then he said, ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ We said, ‘Go ahead.’ We learned he wasn’t a small-talk guy, but he did go into a long discussion about Dostoyevsky’s
Brothers Karamazov
, which he was reading. We knew Jody, who’s very amiable, quite well already, and Alex was now proving to be a fascinating curiosity.” Thus began a partnership that would last nearly two decades.

Over two days the guys rehearsed songs after hashing out the selection. “We all picked them together,” according to Jon. Jody would make a suggestion and Alex would say no, but when Ken later mentioned the same idea, Alex would agree. “We actually got him to do songs he wasn’t into doing, like ‘Daisy Glaze’ and ‘Back of a Car,’” says Jon. “He wouldn’t do much from
Sister Lovers
. But we crammed in as many good ones as we could get in.” The final set list comprised six from
#1 Record
(which Alex always said was his favorite Big Star LP), four from
Radio City
, and two from
3rd.
Alex was most enthusiastic about revisiting the cover songs Big Star had performed during their last stand, nineteen years earlier.