A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (40 page)

On April 25, 1993, under a striped tent, the day after a ferocious thunderstorm, Alex strolled onstage, looking as if he’d just woken up, wearing a zippered sweatshirt and jeans. Having played a gig the night before in New Orleans, he’d flown in with no sleep, arriving just in time for the gig. Not even sure if he’d show up, his three bandmates had landed the previous day to rehearse. Before a packed crowd of students, rock critics, fellow musicians, and aging Big Star fans, they kicked off with the old opener, “In the Street.” Throughout the somewhat sloppy set that followed, Alex looked distant and said little.
Ken tried making a few comments from onstage that fell flat. Jon and Ken sang several songs, either together or with Alex, who sometimes turned his back to the audience and seemed more intent on his guitar leads than vocals, flubbing lyrics and improvising. Jody vocalized his old Big Star numbers, and finally breaking the silence, spoke graciously to the audience. With the Big Star songs behind them, Alex visibly perked up on the set-ending covers: “Slut,” “Baby Strange,” “Jeepster,” and “’Till the End of the Day.” During the long encore, coming to life, Alex spoke: “Since we’re in Missouri, we’ll do a real cliché for you that I’m sure everybody does.” He then segued into “Kansas City,” which Jon and Ken scrambled to play. Smiling for the first time, Alex continued: “I know what let’s do—‘
Duke of Earl
!” during which he became animated and sang his heart out as his befuddled bandmates did their best to learn the song onstage. Fourteen songs (bum notes and all) would be included on
Columbia: Live at Missouri University
, rushed out by Zoo that summer.

Backstage after the gig, Alex quickly gave a resounding “No!” when asked by a journalist if he’d be doing another Big Star show. He signed autographs and gave an MTV interviewer a shrugged “I don’t have anything to say.” “A lot of fun today?”
“Right.”
An old friend, record label exec Karen Glauber, hung by his side, and when he spotted Peter Jesperson, he said, “Let’s get out of here.” They took off in Peter’s car, and while driving outside town, Alex, smoking a joint, started reminiscing about Chris Bell. When they stopped at an intersection, Alex suddenly pointed out the window: “Check that out!” It was a street sign for Cosmos Avenue: perhaps an omen that Alex, though initially opposed to the idea, would spend the next seventeen years sporadically performing with the reconstituted Big Star.

In June Alex was off to Germany on a quirky package tour that was more to his liking. Organized by Memphis writer Robert Gordon and sponsored by Jack Daniel’s bourbon, the weeklong “Love Is My Only Crime” revue featured Alex; Lorette Velvette’s Alluring Strange, with Melinda Pendleton; the great Texas songwriter Townes Van Zandt; and the Country Rockers—a “gawk” combo featuring Ron Easley (their bassist, producer, and manager), an octogenarian dwarf drummer, and a septuagenarian guitarist—whose 1989 album
Free Range Chicken
was a favorite of Alex’s. (The tour participants had each contributed a track to an album of love-themed songs—with Alex’s selection a masterful reading of the 1991 country hit “You Can Bet Your Heart On Me,” originated by Johnny Lee.) Solo on acoustic guitar, Alex performed an eight-song set, all standards and jazz favorites, including “Let’s Get Lost.” His intimate late-night repertoire led to
a small European label commissioning an LP of such material, which he began recording back in New Orleans. At Keith Keller’s low-key Chez Flames studio, Alex cut a dozen unadorned tracks, mostly standards plus “What Was,” featured in the 1977 Robert Benton film
The Late Show
, and “Gavotte,” a Bach piece he’d transcribed to guitar. The collection would be released with the title
Clichés
.

Alex also agreed to sing tracks for another jazz album in New York with the same team Ron Miller had assembled in 1991. After the sessions at the old-school Sears Sound, he shared a cab downtown with drummer Richard Dworkin and inquired whether he’d be interested in doing some trio shows. Doug Garrison, now living in New Orleans, was playing full-time with the Iguanas, who’d just inked a record deal with Jimmy Buffett’s MCA imprint. Dworkin, a Chicago native, had been active on the downtown Manhattan scene since moving there from San Francisco, where he’d been active in the gay-rights movement. Richard had never heard of Big Star but was well versed in blues, R&B, and jazz. “
From doing the Micros, I was used to going back and forth between various feels and time signatures,” says Richard, “so it was something I was comfortable with and enjoyed. Right away, Alex and I liked each other. He was relaxed and laid-back, knowledgeable, interested in a wide variety of things, easy to talk with, had opinions about things, and was interested in your opinions.” Richard agreed to play a show on Labor Day weekend ’93 in Pontiac, Michigan. The performance, atop a parking garage, would initiate a fifteen-year musical partnership. Alex flew to Michigan, having just returned from his first string of European shows with Big Star.

The lucrative Big Star offers were hard to resist: repeating the Columbia set at a couple of legendary festivals in August, the Dutch Lowlands and England’s Reading Festival. “
We booked an Amsterdam venue to rehearse,” Ken recalls. “This was Alex’s pot-smoking period, and he was absolutely—shall we say—at home in Amsterdam. Alex said, ‘All right, you guys rehearse, and I’ll check some things out,’ kind of working on his smoking project.” Concerts followed in Leeds, London, and Glasgow, where Alex spent his spare time with Teenage Fanclub.

Alex kept on the road constantly in 1994 between a slew of bookings with the trio and more Big Star gigs—and there was a stark contrast between the audiences in attendance. This was especially obvious when the trio got an offer to tour with a buzz band that idolized Alex’s work: Counting Crows were just picking up steam via their single “Mr. Jones” after Adam Duritz sang it on
Saturday Night Live
, substituting the name “Alex Chilton” for “Bob Dylan” in the lyric. “Actually,
that’s when I found out that Alex had a place in the world that I didn’t
know about,” says Richard Dworkin. “[The Crows] asked Alex to open about ten dates. Alex made them pay him a little more than they would normally on a tour like that, and then Alex even kicked in more so that Ron and I were making money—though he wasn’t. Every now and then he would do a tour like that to raise his profile. But he was anti-merch. He didn’t have management, only a booking agent. He was against all of it. Once in a while I’d say, ‘Maybe we should bring some CDs,’ and he would not be interested. He thought the idea of being on a T-shirt was really idiotic.” Most other touring indies, of course, made the majority of their money at the merch table.

When the Counting Crows tour kicked off in Madison, Wisconsin, Richard was the first to arrive at the venue, where he discovered several semi trucks parked behind the large theater. After shocking the production staff when he told them that his bandmates would be arriving by car, without a crew, Richard was informed that Alex would have to pay a soundman, since he didn’t bring one. When Alex refused, the Crows stepped in to cover it. “We were opening for
this gigantic production,” says Richard—“what a contrast. One night, at a big rock venue in Indianapolis, the audience skewed much younger, and they didn’t know anything about Alex, and they were not into him. In fact, it was the only time I ever played with Alex where they were throwing fruits and vegetables. As people were throwing stuff and booing, Alex was just standing there with his guitar and his pick in his hand, saying, ‘It’s all right, go ahead, boo! I can take it!’” The following night Adam Duritz appeared onstage prior to Alex’s set and said, “I want you to show deference to our special guests—please welcome Alex Chilton!” Alex refused to play the most frequently shouted-out requests, “September Gurls” and especially “No Sex,” which he had come to detest.

Alex got the opposite treatment in June when Big Star played five nights in Japan, where he was treated like a god. During a press conference he was unabashedly moved by the welcome he’d received. “
The fans in Japan are the most demonstrative fans I’ve ever seen,” he said. “On a night when you’re not feeling so good, and you look out there and the fans are just really, really into it . . . that makes it more fun. It’s something that’s tremendously important to them, so it makes it more important to me.” He was also warming to his new bandmates and always complimented Ken and Jon’s musicianship. Yet when asked if they might record together, he said, “People have urged me to do it. But it’s all I can do to make my own records. Our tastes in music are really quite different. Maybe Jody and Jon and Ken all share a taste in music, but I certainly don’t with them. Hell, I don’t have time or the inclination to create [their] kind of music.”

His renewed contact with Jody had resulted in his signing to Ardent, which had reactivated its record label, with Jody serving as its A&R exec. Alex’s first release would be 1993’s
Clichés,
comprising the dozen tracks he’d cut at Chez Flames. But he made plans to record a new album at Ardent as soon as possible. And after playing several high-profile U.S. dates with Big Star, including an appearance on the
Tonight
show, he returned to a Manhattan studio for a project with Ben Vaughn.

“When Alex and I would talk about music,
Suicide came up as a band we both really liked a lot,” Ben recalls. “We thought Alan Vega had the most amazing voice, really unorthodox, like Elvis from another planet. Alex saw Suicide a few times during the ’70s when he was living in New York, and I had seen them when they’d come down to Philadelphia in 1978. I was talking to Alan about making a record together, the two of us, and I mentioned it to Alex, and he said, ‘If you get Alan into the studio, I’ll pay my way up and play on it, and I’ll work for free, because I’d just love to work with him.’”

On December 6 and 7 the three worked from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. improvising on twelve tracks, with Ben alternating between bass and drums, Alex on guitar, and Vega singing lyrics composed on the spot. “I would just start playing a beat, and Alex would play a guitar part, and we’d mess around with that and then press
RECORD
,” says Ben. “We’d turn the lights off, and Alan would look out at street traffic and at people walking by, and sing. Phenomenal talent.”
Cubist Blues
didn’t get much attention in the States, where the trio reconvened a year later to play one off-the-cuff gig at the Knitting Factory. But when they traveled to France to play a festival in December ’95, the show swarmed with European fans of all three artists. In January ’95, a week after recording the album, Ben Vaughn moved to Los Angeles, where he got into the film and television world—a move that would bode well for Alex.

•   •   •

Alex contacted another longtime collaborator, saxophonist and horn arranger Jim Spake, who’d participated on his ’80s albums, about his upcoming sessions at Ardent. Now a family man, Spake no longer toured with Alex but received a tape filled with demos and notes detailing what Alex envisioned for each track: “I hope you get really inspired and write some stuff that is beautiful and will make us rich and famous—in a good way,” Alex alerted Spake. “Please use some discretion about playing this for people. Please do not copy it for anyone, don’t want to let the cat out of the bag until we get the record out. Good luck trying to make anything interesting out of any of this.”

The album, entitled
A Man Called Destruction
, would be Alex’s last solo release to include his original compositions. With a respectable budget from Ardent, Alex hired both of his drummers, Doug Garrison and Richard Dworkin, as well as Ron Easley, a horn section, several keyboardists, and Hi Records session guitarist Teenie Hodges. The album’s name was inspired by “Destruction,” an itinerant Louisiana bluesman Alex had encountered, with whom he now felt a close affinity.

As for choosing Ardent over major labels that had expressed interest since his higher profile with Big Star, he said, “
I’m not searching to appeal to a mass audience with what I’m doing these days. . . . To try and get on the radio is not my thing, and I want to do what I think is best. To sign with a record company where if I only sold a hundred thousand records, I’d be a failure, isn’t for me. I should stay where I can sell ten thousand records and be a big success. Because ten or fifteen years [from now], people are still buying it, whereas for mainstream groups, after two years, forget it, nobody wants their records.” Undoubtedly referring to his experience with the three Big Star albums, Alex had no way of knowing that Zoo Records would close down the following year, with
Columbia
going out of print.

•   •   •

A Man Called Destruction
represents an aural equivalent of Alex’s multitextured musical scrapbook. His originals numbered six (the most on any album since Big Star): a tongue-in-cheek Satanic pop-rocker, “Devil Girl,” with a killer guitar break and the refrain “Hail Satan!,” which he clearly relished cutting at Ardent, whose primary clients were Christian artists; the sassy R&B come-on “You’re Lookin’ Good”; the tear-jerkin’ Hi Records–styled “Don’t Know Anymore”; and the catchy “Don’t Stop,” which could have been written for Teenage Fanclub. The album also features a couple of instrumentals: “Boplexity,” a showcase for Alex’s intricate fretwork, and “It’s Your Funeral,” which borrows heavily from both a Chopin sonata and the traditional New Orleans funeral march (and for which Alex shared songwriting credit with Spake).

The sessions marked Richard Dworkin’s first trip to Memphis, and Alex showed him his personal landmarks around town. In the studio, “
Alex asked me to play like Hal Blaine on [the Beach Boys’] ‘New Girl in School,’” says Richard, “which he called a brilliant drum arrangement.”

The covers rounding out
Destruction
shed light on Chilton’s musical eclecticism: pop (“New Girl in School”), soul (“What’s Your Sign Girl”), Italian-language rock & roll (“Il Ribelle”), blues (Jimmy Reed’s “You Don’t Have to Go”), and R&B
(Chris Kenner’s “Sick and Tired” and Chez Flames owner Keith Keller’s “Lies”). “What distinguishes this record is that I didn’t feel particularly rushed about doing it,” Alex said. “If it’s got more of a blues and soul edge to it, it’s because it’s something I grew up around. And it feels natural for me.”