A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (7 page)

At the studio the Devilles expected to find Chips, who’d recorded them before. Instead, twenty-six-year-old Dan Penn, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with one sleeve rolled up around a pack of Lucky Strikes, awaited them. “
He was the darnedest thing to see,” John Evans recalls. “We didn’t know what
to think.” He remembers being struck by the overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups strewn around the studio. Knowing that Chips had cut a hit for the Gentrys, the Devilles thought they were getting a raw deal by working with an unknown producer.

“
We had a big room with some baffles where I set them up,” Dan recalls about the session. “Alex was quiet, polite—a good-looking kid—and I walked him to the mic and said, ‘There you are, son.’” He would be singing live while the band played the song.

“
We set up and started running the tune down,” Alex remembered. “[Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.” Dan recalls, “
The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.”

Never having recorded before, Alex started singing tentatively, “
Give me a ticket for an airplane
,” similar to Carson’s country-inflected style. “Punch it up, Alex,” Dan advised. Alex, whose first attempt was inspired by Chet Baker, later recalled that Dan demonstrated the way to emphasize the three syllables of “aer-o-plane.” Alex told Cub Koda:

After Dan got all the instruments sounding the way he wanted them to sound, we started running it down in earnest. I was a little bit intimidated by my surroundings and I was singing kind of softly. Then Dan came out [of the control booth] and said, “I really want you to lay into this, I want you to sing like this.” And he started rocking back and forth and started singing it . . . he is one of the great soul singers in the world of any color. . . . So Dan showed me what he has in mind for the song, and I go, “Yeah, I can sound something like that.” Sounding like a soul singer is something I prided myself on being able to do. We did it like that a few times and Dan seemed to be liking it pretty well, and as we ran through it a couple of times, my voice, considering the night before, didn’t have a lot left in it. So I was getting kinda hoarse, which fitted into things just fine.

“
Alex was one of the few people I’ve ever seen that at an early age had his own voice,” says Dan. “He had something in him when he came into the studio.”

After five or six takes, “The Letter”—originally clocking in at a minute and a half—made it onto tape, using up two tracks of what would be a three-track recording. (Most recordings today use up to twenty-four tracks.) Dan set to work on some overdub ideas to fill out the sound and expand the song by twenty-eight seconds. Alex went home to take a nap, and his fellow Devilles didn’t give the recording much thought. What they had just cut, though, would become the biggest hit single ever recorded in Memphis, Tennessee.

“
I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I’ll ever have,” Alex mused twenty years after he recorded “The Letter.”

Producing the single, Dan Penn focused on Alex’s raspy, soulful vocals, bringing them up in the mix. He had a few tricks up his sleeve to enhance the song’s pop appeal. “
When we cut it, I thought Alex was real good, but we didn’t know we were going to have a million-seller at this point,” says Dan. “We just had a track, and it was not complete.” At American, Chips had assembled a staff of talented session players—later known as the Memphis Boys—and, unique among them, bassist Mike Leech could read music. At Dan’s behest Mike wrote out arrangements for horns and strings for “The Letter.”

“My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter,’” Mike told Roben Jones for
Memphis Boys
, her authoritative history of American Recording Studios. “The only reason
I
did that was because I knew how to write music notation. . . . Dan called me to come into the studio and play some things on the [Hammond B3] organ while he listened in the control room. When I played something he liked he would tell me to ‘write that down.’ . . . After he was satisfied with the arrangement he asked me if I had other ideas and I suggested the two trombones. He liked the idea and said, ‘Do it.’ The string section consisted of two violins and one viola.”

Dan hired members of the Memphis Symphony for the string section, including Noel Gilbert, who would later participate and be name-checked by Alex in a Big Star song, “Stroke It Noel.” Gilbert had been Mike Leech’s music professor at Memphis State. This particular string section became a favorite of Dan and Mike’s and would become part of American’s signature, as would “the
stateliness of [Mike’s] arranging style,” according to Jones. Dan liked the Memphis Strings because “they just had this barbecue sound.” Mike agrees: “
The Memphis Strings were a little sloppy. Downbeats were a matter of opinion. But they had a soulful sound. Dan Penn loved them. The very first time I heard of a violin using a mute came from Dan.”

Mike attended the sessions with Dan while the strings were overdubbed on “The Letter.” “Everything was going well,” Dan recalls, “except there was a space on the record where Alex quit singing [near the end] and the strings are playing, and it hit me that we could put in the sound of a jet plane.” Going for what Roben Jones called a “literal illustration” of the song’s narrative, Dan checked out a sound-effects LP from the library that included airplanes. A studio assistant, Darryl Carter, played the record while Dan overdubbed it onto the acetate; during the last twenty seconds of the song, with keys and strings as backing, the jet takes off and soars into the clouds. “
That was a big part of the record,” says Dan. “When I finished it up, I played it for Chips, and he said, ‘That’s a pretty good little rock & roll record, but you’ve got to take that airplane off it.’ I said, ‘If the record’s going out, it’s going out with the airplane on it.’ He said, ‘Okay, it’s
your
record.’”

The result was perfection: It opens with the spare
rap, rap, rap
of a snare drum and a simple guitar riff, then Alex’s distinctive gruff voice comes in loud and clear. Accented by trombones and cushioned by strings, the vocals never lose their prominence in the mix, grounded by a tight rhythm section. The fadeout includes background “humming”—by Devilles Russ and John, as well as vocalist Sandy Posey—the strings, and the “aeroplane” sound effects. Instrumentally, there’s a key change here, the subtle modulation adding to the “liftoff” feeling of the song.

Chips had given Dan the green light to make his own deal. The next step was to find a record label to put it out. The Devilles played the song for the first time at a dance at the University of Tennessee in Martin in the spring of ’67. “
We hadn’t really worked up ‘The Letter,’” Russ remembers, “and we got into the tune and didn’t know how to end it. Alex made a sound on the mic with his mouth to simulate an airplane, but the ending was a train wreck.”

As the school year came to an end that May, Alex couldn’t be bothered with final exams; after all, in the past, he’d “
never had to crack a book to get straight A’s at school,” Alex recalled. “I never had to study at all. I was like a sponge and just absorbed everything I needed.” Now, however, he failed his classes, and his Central High report card informed him he would have to repeat tenth grade. His
parents berated him about this bad news, and his stormy moods darkened. “
We worried before shows,” says Russ Caccamisi, “‘Is he gonna be pissed?’ He was a very moody guy. But he was never moody onstage; he was always ‘on’ when he was on the stage.”

One Saturday night Alex got into a drunken altercation with a cashier at a Krystal hamburger joint on Cleveland Avenue; workers called the cops, Alex mouthed off to the police, and they hauled him off to jail. Not wanting his parents to know what had happened, he phoned his friend Day Smith to bail him out, but she had a minor car accident en route. Finally, Alex was released to his father on Sunday afternoon. (Eventually the “drunk and disorderly” charges were dropped.) Too late the Chiltons realized that Alex needed disciplining and tried grounding him, to no avail. As soon as their backs were turned, he was out the door, or his buddies were slipping in.

Though Alex had gigs coming up with the Devilles, the band was unraveling. “The guitar player and the bass player, who were kind of worldly wise to the recording industry, said, ‘Look, man, [‘The Letter’ will] never come out. Don’t hold your breath,’” Alex told Cub Koda in 1992. Guitarist Richard Malone quit the group in late May, when his father, a Navy man, was transferred to San Diego. Bassist Russ Caccamisi would be turning eighteen in October and had to register for the draft. An only child whose father had died years before, Russ had started playing on sessions at American and in Muscle Shoals. He wanted to make music his life, but his mother, worried that her son would be sent to Vietnam, implored him to apply to college. So Russ gave notice that his Devilles days were numbered. “The Devilles were trying to keep it together, but we kept losing members,” said Alex. “I was just drifting.”

Alex’s relationship with Kokie was falling apart as well. That summer she began spending time with older guys, including the notorious Tiller brothers, who strong-armed for gangsters and drug dealers. (She would eventually marry one of the Tillers and die young of a drug overdose.) Alex’s “drifting” soon turned into something more violent; his aggression turned inward, toward himself. Whether it was Kokie’s leaving him, or his band disintegrating, or his flunking tenth grade, or “The Letter” going nowhere, or his anger and drinking slipping out of control, it all must have become too much for Alex.

“
Somewhere around that time frame,” Paul Jobe recalls, “Alex tried to commit suicide. He cut his wrists, but then he started freaking out because, I guess, he realized what he’d done. His father took him to the hospital, and they sewed him up. I don’t know the motivating factor, what caused him to do it, but he
didn’t want anybody to know. I happened to come over a day or two after that, and both of his wrists were bandaged up. I asked him about it, and he told me.”

Paul kept Alex’s secret, and no one outside his family discovered how desperate Alex had become. Within the family the incident seems never to have been spoken of again—until a decade later.

And then, suddenly, news arrived from Chips Moman and Dan Penn. Larry Uttal, who ran New York–based Bell Records, had stopped by American Recording Studios to hear new tracks by Bell artists James and Bobby Purify. The duo had hit it big with 1966’s “I’m Your Puppet.” “He came around, and I played ‘The Letter’ for him,” Dan recalls of his meeting with Uttal, who immediately wanted to release it on Bell: Eager for the single to be issued, Penn “told Larry Uttal, ‘You pay whatever we spent, and it’s yours.’” American’s co-owner Don Crews remembers, “
I think he paid us $900 for the master; it was a lease deal.” According to Roben Jones, “Dan had thought in terms of placing one master, and now they were, in effect, officially signed to the label. American Studios would be, for all practical purposes, the Southern division of Bell Records until the three-year deal with the label ended in early 1970.”

Atlantic Records A&R chief Jerry Wexler, who’d organized recordings at American by Wilson Pickett and others, had fronted $5,000 to Chips Moman to upgrade the studio and had expected first dibs on any musical discoveries. Much to his consternation, he did not get “The Letter.”

Before Uttal would release “The Letter” on Bell, he wanted two things: a B-side, and a new name for the Devilles, which had been taken by another group. “
Our manager [Roy Mack], I believe, came up with the name the Box Tops,” remembered Alex, who disliked it at once. “I think he wanted to have a name that had something to do with the song, so he originally came up with . . . the Mailboxes! But he thought that had a dirty, somewhat blue connotation to it. So he toyed around with it a bit and came up with the Box Tops, because you send in a box top through the mail in a letter.”

Russ Caccamisi recalls sitting at the kitchen table at the Chiltons’ one Saturday morning, eating a bowl of cornflakes with Alex and John Evans: “
We were talking about the band name,” Russ says. “I remember Howard [Chilton] coming in to get a bowl of cereal, and he opened the cereal box and said, ‘Hey, your first album could be
The Box Tops Tear Off!
’ As he tore the top off this cereal box, we looked at each other and said, ‘Yeah!’” (That album title would be put on hold for nearly thirty years, by which time Alex had grown to like the name the Box Tops.)

The flip side to the single was not quite a group effort. Bell needed a track
quickly, and with the band membership in disarray, Dan booked the American house band, a group of stellar players Chips had assembled. It included former session players from Sam Phillips’s studio and Royal Studio, run by Willie Mitchell: guitarist Reggie Young, drummer Gene Chrisman, pianist Bobby Wood, organist Bobby Emmons, and bassists Mike Leech and Tommy Cogbill. This core unit would eventually play on approximately 122 hits recorded at American between 1967 and 1972.

For the B-side Dan turned to a song he and Spooner Oldham had written, a jaunty number called “Happy Times.” When the newly christened Box Tops showed up at the studio, all that was needed from them was Alex’s lead vocals and their in-unison background shouts,
“Time!”
accented by a trumpet blast. “
I went in again on a Saturday afternoon and sang to a pre-recorded backing track,” Alex recalled. “I didn’t care much about it, but I was just doing what I was told.” Studio bands playing on the recordings of established groups was not uncommon in 1967, having been the practice for such bands as the Byrds, the Beach Boys, and, of course, the Monkees. “
Nobody was happy about it,” Russ remembers, “but nobody gave a shit about the flip side. It was a dreadful song, but you had to have something on the back.”

The rest of the Devilles had previously signed a contract with Roy Mack, and for their Devilles singles, with Chips’s Youngstown label; when Sidney Chilton met with Mack to negotiate Alex’s deal, he demanded that his son get twice the salary the rest of the group earned. “
My dad said, ‘Well, in the circles I run in, in the Musicians Union, the band members get one share and the leader gets a double share,’” Alex remembered. “And he negotiated a double share for me.” “
We weren’t too happy about that,” says Danny Smythe. “But we wanted the record to come out, so there wasn’t much we could do. We did whatever they said we had to do.” The band signed a production deal with American Studios, which inked a contract for the Box Tops with Bell Records’ Larry Uttal, specifying Alex as the group’s singer.

To kick off publicity for “The Letter” in Memphis, Chips and Roy Mack quickly got the Box Tops booked on their buddy George Klein’s popular
Talent Party
television program on WHPQ, Channel 13, an ABC station. The program had originally been called
Dance Party
, but by Klein’s tenure, desegregation had motivated the producers to prohibit teenage couples from dancing:
Management “was scared there would be a black and white couple, and it could cause a situation,” George Klein, aka GK, remembers.

In lieu of teen couples, Klein hired vivacious eighteen-year-old girls to dance
alongside local and touring artists who performed on the show. These miniskirt-clad go-go girls, known as the Q-ties, gained their own following; one, Cybill Shepherd, went on to become a model and actress (debuting in
The Last Picture Show
). Chips Moman gave Klein the finished tape of “The Letter” to air on the program, and the Box Tops lip-synched their performance. “They didn’t even know what lip-synching was,” says George. The boys considered their appearance a goof, with Danny Smythe wearing a vintage aviator’s cap with goggles. “We went on there and just played around,” Danny recalls. “I was playing air drums. It was a joke to be pantomiming, so what the hell?”

Though things looked bright for the Box Tops’ future, Russ left the band in late June to enroll at Mississippi State. The month before, the band had replaced Richard Malone with nineteen-year-old guitarist Gary Talley, who hailed from a musical family. By the time Talley joined, the band had started rehearsing at the Chiltons’ in the art gallery space. “Alex’s house was one of the most amazing things I’d ever seen,” says Danny. “I lived out in the ’burbs and was totally white-bread. His front door was never locked, open to anybody who wanted to walk in. Every wall, from top to bottom, was covered with oil paintings.” Exhibitions were becoming less frequent, however, and Mary Evelyn eventually closed it down after another private gallery burned and the owner was held responsible for the lost art. Mary Evelyn couldn’t afford the insurance coverage to protect herself from such a catastrophe.

Alex wanted a familiar face in the Box Tops to replace Russ, and he remembered Bill Cunningham, a longtime bassist and keyboardist in various garage bands, including the Jynx. Alex felt comfortable around Bill, whose family lived in Alex’s old Sherwood Forest neighborhood. Bill had been immersed in rock & roll for his whole life: His father, Buddy Cunningham, had been a Sun Records artist (billed as Buddy Blake), though he’d cut only a few sides, and his brother B.B. had played in bands, most recently touring with Ronny and the Daytonas and an offshoot of that group called the Hombres (soon to score their hit “Let It All Hang Out”).