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The Beginning

Singer, songwriter and erstwhile cult figure Alex Chilton died on March 17 at age 59, unexpectedly, of a heart attack.  One story said he was out mowing his lawn when he began to feel sick.  He was one of my music heroes, I guess you could say, and I have been thinking hard on the subject of what to say about Mr. Chilton and his bands.  And I really can’t figure it out; I am not going to get it right.  I think that I am not able to explain it unless you also read Robert Gordon’s book, It Came From Memphis, which is about just how strange and wonderful the music community is in Memphis.  I know you probably have not read Mr. Gordon’s book, but I will try anyway.

Chilton’s career started brightly.  In 1967, Dan Penn (who went on to richly deserved success as a songwriter) was producing a session with an as yet unnamed Memphis band trying to record a song called “The Letter.”  You know it:  Give me a ticket for an aeroplane/ Ain’t got time to take a fast train/ Lonely days are gone/ I’m a-comin’ home/ My baby wrote me a letter.  Penn didn’t like the band’s singer, so he told the group they could only have the song if they got a better singer.  Next day, the band returned with 16-year-old Alex Chilton.  After Chilton ran through “The Letter” more or less conventionally a couple of times, Penn told him to “sing it rough,” and that’s how Chilton, in his credibly gruff, adult voice, recorded a multimillion seller on his first try.  (Penn’s other great suggestion was to dub in the jet plane noise at the end of the song.)  After the session, the band still did not have a name. One band member supposedly suggested, “Let’s have a contest and everybody can send in 50 cents and a box top.”  Penn dubbed them the Box Tops.

After a pretty good run (“Cry Like A Baby,” “Soul Deep,” and a few other hits), the Box Tops fell apart, and Chilton moved to New York where he cut a number of solo songs, including a medley reprising both the Archies and James Brown – a hint of things to come.  Back in Memphis by 1971 or so, Chilton joined his childhood friend Chris Bell, who had put together a band that was first called Icewater, then called Rock City.  With Chilton and a new bass player, they called themselves Big Star, the name of a local grocery store.  They emulated guitar bands from the British Invasion and released three albums, #1 Record, Radio City and the lyrically beautiful, downbeat 3^rd.  (Produced by the late, great Jim Dickinson, 3^rd was also known as Third/Sister Lovers when it was expanded and reissued in 1992.)  Despite great critical acclaim (and songs like “September Gurls,” “Thirteen,” and “In the Street” were truly great), all three of these albums failed to sell at the time, largely because of distribution problems; Ardent Records was distributed by Stax Records, and Stax was struggling to avoid bankruptcy and in any case Stax was all about Memphis soul, not this latter day, sometimes ramshackle, sometimes poignant, basically guitar-driven music.

Some think Chris Bell was the genius behind Big Star (I don’t agree), but when Bell realized that Chilton’s fame with the Box Tops made Alex the de facto band leader, Bell left Big Star in 1972 and recorded on his own.  Chris Bell died in December 1978 when he crashed his Triumph sports car into a light pole one night in East Memphis; his funeral the next day took place on Alex Chilton’s birthday.  Everything about Chilton’s cult status derives from Big Star.  But of course nobody knew that then.

The Middle

Drinking and drugging heavily, disgusted – not unreasonably – with the music business, Chilton went back to New York for a time, recording in a band he called Alex Chilton & the Cossacks (I wish I had more Cossacks music than the one track I have), and hanging out at CBGB’s, where he met The Cramps, a psychobilly band whose album Songs the Lord Taught Us Chilton went on to produce, using exceptionally satisfying amounts of reverb.  At the end of the 70s he recorded some sessions with Jim Dickinson again that were the antithesis of what that tiny group of Big Star followers loved about him.  Barely coherent (was anybody sober?), as out of control as anything in punk, but in my opinion totally brilliant, Like Flies on Sherbert (for God’s sake, they misspelled sherbet) and Bach’s Bottom (we’re all done with those hit records now, get it?) sold fewer copies, if possible, than anything by Big Star.

And this was the point, I think, where Alex Chilton decided to serve himself.  At the end of an interview in 1977, he was asked what words he wanted on his gravestone, and he laughed and said, “A self made man.”
         
Some anecdotes amplify both the Memphis scene and Chilton’s artistic direction.  In 1978, Chilton was friendly with a Memphis resident named Gus Nelson, a soft spoken gentleman who couldn’t play an instrument but understood something about art.  First off, Gus renamed himself Tav Falco.  The rest of this particular longish story is told by David Gendelman, writing in Crawdaddy.           

Falco is a small man, who often fashions a pencil-thin mustache that looks hand-painted and wears his black hair in a pompadour….  For [his first] show, Falco says, “I had my own video installation on stage with a large video monitor.  I brought my own sound system to the Orpheum Theatre because I didn’t want the house engineer to tamper with my sound.  Mainly, I just didn’t want them to pull the plug on me, which I knew would be quite likely.”

“He set up a stool and a chair on stage and a guitar amplifier,” [Jim] Dickinson said, “and a Skil saw which was plugged in on the stool.”  An electric chainsaw sat on a second stool.  He wore a tuxedo.  He played a discordant version of Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues” on electric guitar, and when he finished he began blowing a police whistle and put the guitar on the floor.  “He picked up the [chain]saw and sawed through the guitar, strings first,” Dickinson said.
          
“[The engineers] didn’t pull the plug,” Falco says.  “They have an incredible sound system at the Orpheum.  It was absolutely crystal clear.”  Then he switched saws.  The destruction of the guitar sounded like an explosion went off in the auditorium, like thunder had crashed through into the theater itself.  “For 1978, it caused unbridled hysteria, to my surprise,” Falco says.  “People got out of their theater seats and were screaming and appalled.  Others were elated and enthralled.  Others were outraged and booing.  It was the typical howl of contempt, derision, and ecstasy that Panther Burns were known to generate later in our performances as a group.”

“Alex, who was in the audience, came backstage,” Dickinson said, “and he pointed at Gus, and he said, ‘You and me. We’re a band!’”

Falco and the rotating members of Panther Burns (except for Chilton, an accomplished guitarist) were always in the process of learning how to play.  Chilton urged the band to find a musical groove, and when they found it, he did his best to break it up.  If you can find their albums and have an open mind, I recommend most of the Panther Burns music.  I especially like the live album Midnight in Memphis, on Triple X.  By the way, Panther Burn, Mississippi, now a town, was once a plantation; its name recalls a wildcat that so terrorized residents of the plantation in the 19th century that they set fires to keep the scary animal at bay.

The End

Chilton eventually quit drinking (though he couldn’t control a heavy smoking habit), but he could still be impatient, even mean.  He did not suffer, gladly or otherwise, those he thought to be fools.  This, from a blogger:

I had this experience working a Chilton show in Iowa City.  He showed up alone in his own car, walked in with his guitar, and asked where the nearest movie theater was.  When asked if he wanted to sound check he gave that “My, you’re an idiot” grin and said, “Well, you can hear me talking, so there must be sound in here, right?  I guess we checked.”

By most accounts, Chilton lived frugally.  He joked in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR that he was paid about $70 each time his song “In the Street” played in the opening credits to That 70s Show.  (Cheap Trick, not Big Star, performs the song.)  When he died he owned, free and clear, a little house in New Orleans that had belonged to his brother, and a used car.  For a time he was worse off than that.  Paul Westerberg, the lead singer and songwriter of the Replacements (also known for drunken and sloppy but somehow really great music), wrote a song in honor of Chilton called, well, “Alex Chilton,” with the famous line I never travel far/ Without a little Big Star.  Westerberg’s appreciation in the March 21 New York Times notes:

It was some years back, the last time I saw Alex Chilton.  We miraculously bumped into each other one autumn evening in New York, he in a Memphis Minnie T-shirt, with take-out Thai, en route to his hotel.  He invited me along to watch the World Series on TV, and I immediately discarded whatever flimsy obligation I may have had.  We watched baseball, talked and laughed, especially about his current residence — he was living in, get this, a tent in Tennessee.

Because we were musicians, our talk inevitably turned toward women, and [Alex], ever the Southern gentleman, was having a hard time between bites communicating to me the difficulty in … you see, the difficulty in (me taking my last swig that didn’t end up on the wall, as I boldly supplied the punch line) “… in asking a young lady if she’d like to come back to your tent?”  We both darn near died there in a fit of laughter.

In the end I think Mr. Chilton figured out how to be himself.  No more hit records, no more cult figure.  Listening to his records and concerts in the 80s and 90s, you can see that his knowledge of music was both catholic (lower case) and encyclopedic, he loved a good set of lyrics, and he appreciated songs and singers that others overlooked.  When Terry Gross asked him, in 2000, what music he was humming to himself lately, he mentioned “Claim to Fame,” a song so obscure, he said, he couldn’t find a copy to get all the lyrics.  He remembered the first verse, so he decided to make up his own words on the second.  His rendition, which is delightful, appeared in 2004 on Live in Anvers, but you can download the one song on iTunes for 69 cents.

As I was thinking about this piece, I was listening to a concert Chilton played in January 2000 at a little club called the 7th Avenue Entry in Minneapolis, a concert he opened with an Eddie Floyd song, “I’ve Never Found A Girl (To Love Me Like You Do).”  A friendly, lively soulful number, and the crowd and the band are really into it – then, at the guitar break, Chilton starts playing, smack in the middle of Memphis soul, “Theme From A Summer Place,” the soundtrack to a bad Troy Donahue movie that had been a giant hit for Percy Faith in 1960.  After the bridge, he’s right back to Eddie Floyd without batting an eye.  Later on, getting ready to close the show, Chilton hears some woman in the audience shout out, “Alex, play ‘The Letter’!”  Chilton laughs and denies responsibility, saying, “Wrong band … I didn’t write that song!”  Instead, he closes with “Alligator Man” (he didn’t write that song, either, but never mind), telling the crowd that he always liked the Greenbriar Boys’ bluegrass version – which, I promise you, is utterly unlike the crazed version that Chilton and Dickinson recorded two decades earlier on the Like Flies on Sherbert album.

Alex Chilton was in a good mood that day, playing what he wanted to play, whatever it was, and that’s why the people who knew about him liked him so much.  His last concert was in Brooklyn last November.  A self made man.