Alex Chilton: a career that ran in reverse

Originally published in Uncut Take 274 [March 2020 issue]. Alex Chilton hit No.1 at 16 — then spent a lifetime sidestepping fame. Friends, bandmates and collaborators recall the strange, singular path of The Box Tops and Big Star leader

Alex Chilton had the perfect career in reverse. He hit the top of the American charts at the age of 16 with the Box Tops, followed by commercial frustration with Big Star and finally a lengthy arc as a solo artist underneath the mainstream radar. He retreated to New Orleans, venturing out occasionally to play short tours or record solo material. In later years, he agreed to reform Big Star, toured with the Box Tops and recorded new albums with both.

Since his death in March 2010, Chilton has been the subject of several books, documentaries and tribute concerts. The man himself would likely have hated most of the attention.

“We do these Third album shows around the world,” says Big Star drummer Jody Stephens. “I’ve no idea what Alex would have thought of them. I gave up a long time ago trying to second guess what Alex was thinking…”

“They were playing ‘The Letter’ among Beatles, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett songs”

THE BOX TOPS
The Letter/Neon Rainbow
BELL, 1967
The Box Tops’ debut, built around No 1 single “The Letter”, propelled Chilton to stardom

BILL CUNNINGHAM (bass): I knew Alex from elementary school. He asked if I would play with this band he was singing with, but I said no. I was doing some stuff with Chris Bell. But Alex said they were ready to do some recordings, so I said I’ll try it. I didn’t know anyone apart from Alex, even though Gary [Talley] lived right behind me; he was two years older.

GARY TALLEY (guitar): When I joined the band it was still called The Devilles. I’d first heard Alex sing at the Central High School talent show – which is where The Devilles also heard him sing and that’s how he got the job with them. They were playing “The Letter” among Beatles, Sam & Dave, Wilson Pickett songs. The first radio station that played “The Letter” was in Knoxville, TN. They broke the single and it was quickly picked up by others. It was mind-blowing, like a dream-come-true thing.

CUNNINGHAM: It was an odd time. The old band was falling apart and a new band was coming together. The first couple of recordings were a bleed over of old and new band members.

TALLEY: We had a bunch of great songwriters right there. Wayne Carson, Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham were writing these great songs and we got them. Penn was calling all the shots and deciding what songs to do and how to do them.

TERRY MANNING (engineer): Dan Penn would bring basic tracks over to Ardent, where I would engineer for them and we would overdub the vocals. Alex and I were acquainted, we sort of bonded. Alex would make faces at any authority, and in this case Dan was the authority. So the two of us felt as if we were together against the boss.

“Every song had something special going on”

ALEX CHILTON
Free Again
ARDENT, 1996
Recorded on Chilton’s return to Memphis after leaving the Box Tops, but not released until 26 years later…

TERRY MANNING (producer, bass, keyboards): One day, Alex mentioned that he was planning on leaving the Box Tops so would I be interested in producing a solo album, 1969? [Titled because] the decade was just about over, so many world-changing events had happened. Later [Ardent owner] John Fry got scared about the ‘1969’ name; he thought that since Alex had still been under contract it would be better to call it 1970.

I brought in Richard Rosebrough on drums and the three of us would do the basic tracks. Then Alex and I would overdub vocals and guitars together. I also brought in Jeff Newman from Nashville to play steel guitar and banjo on a few of the songs. We would start in the afternoons and go as long as we wanted. The whole thing was a lot of fun. Every song had something special going on. Alex was hilarious on “All I Really Want Is Money” with his little authority digs, and also very funny on “I Wish I Could Meet Elvis”.

The Box Tops had been on tour with The Beach Boys and Alex had become good friends with them – especially Carl Wilson. Carl said their label, Brother Records, would be interested. So Alex and I went to California to talk about it. I remember borrowing some money from John Fry to buy a new pair of tennis shoes so I would look OK. Brian and Carl were interested, but it never went far enough to be signed.

The first real mix was done in 1994 at my Compass Point Studios. I was stunned when I first heard the masters again on the big speakers. Listening to us talking between takes, not to mention the music itself, it sounded so good.

“There were disagreements sometimes”

BIG STAR
#1 Record
ARDENT, 1972
Chilton/Bell masterpiece that didn’t get the commercial success it deserved. “The Ballad Of El Goodo”, “Thirteen” and “In The Street” are among the highlights.

JODY STEPHENS (drums): Chris, Andy [Hummel] and I had a band together. Alex came to see us in February 1971. He joined and we rehearsed in a little building next to Ardent. I’d been in a covers band and it was exciting for these songs to appear out of nowhere.

MANNING: Chris was in charge the most, for sure. But Alex took some charge over his own songs at times. I recall one day after we had moved the studio to Madison Avenue, Alex asked me to help him with the lead vocals on “When My Baby’s Beside Me”. He wanted a Beach Boys vibe on the vocals and asked me to sing with him to sound as much like Carl or Brian Wilson as possible. So the two of us did the lead vocal, me joining him on the choruses.

STEPHENS: John Fry put on an engineering class but I didn’t last long. He was such a thorough guy and he started off with sound waves!

MANNING: Only on some tracks was anything like the whole band playing at one time. There was so much overdubbing, and it was done over such a long period of time. There were disagreements sometimes – almost fistfights! – but then there was total harmony at other times. It was very much like a family.

STEPHENS: We figured out that records weren’t getting into stores, though we were on the radio. I was having a great time, enjoying the moment and being part of the creative process.

MANNING: [We knew] it deserved to go much farther than it did. Hard to tell about Alex, he was always so cryptic, but of course he was disappointed.

“It spoke to a lot of people”

BIG STAR
Third
AURA, 1978
Bell departed the band shortly after the release of #1 Record, though they continued with Radio City (1974) and finally Third, with just Chilton, Stephens, producer Jim Dickinson and assorted Memphis musicians…

STEPHENS: We went back in the studio, just two of us. Alex threw about Sister Lovers as a title for the two of us, as a band. Even though there were dark moments on Third, it was amazing to see Alex draw these songs out of thin air basically, and so I stayed around for the experience. It was a real cool creative moment and I guess you can get addicted to that. I knew Jim Dickinson a little bit already and I had a tremendous amount of respect for him. It was comforting and reassuring knowing he was there because I had such faith in him. I could go out and do a part and come back and say, “What do you think, Jim?” If he was OK with it, I felt really great about it.

I remember Alex being out in the studio singing the parts to the backing singers. He’d make some weird noises in the background of the vocals. John Fry was able to find these places for them in the mix. It was experimental. Jim would hit a deflated basketball with a drumstick. Jim actually played drums on “Kangaroo”, “Femme Fatale” and “O Dana”. Alex had sent Jim a tape of himself on acoustic guitar with a note saying, “Produce this, Mr Producer!” So Jim built the tracks around that. It all worked so brilliantly, even his wacky drumming played around Alex’s vocal. Alex was such a free spirit that he could take these fanciful flights with his vocals, which I though was pretty amazing.

I wasn’t involved in the day-to-day business of trying to sell it, but I heard there were negative responses to the album. The next thing I knew, I was in London in 1978 and I ran into Nick Kent who had a bootleg copy of the album. I thought, ‘That’s cool, this stuff is sneaking out and people are paying attention.’ It spoke to a lot of people. Musically, it was a profound reflection of where Alex was at the moment.

“That was a rare occurrence for him”

ALEX CHILTON
Like Flies On Sherbert
PEABODY, 1979
Continuing on the path started with Big Star’s Third, Chilton again working with Jim Dickinson

ROSS JOHNSON (drums): Alex asked me to play on the initial weekend sessions in February 1978 at Phillips Recording. But I really couldn’t play drums ‘properly’ until the spring of that year, when I purchased a used four-piece, blue-sparkle Ludwig drumkit. So the late Richard Rosebrough played drums on those first sessions.

I was again asked to play on the final session for the album at Ardent on August 16, 1979, which was the second anniversary of Elvis’s death. I’d been doing spontaneous spoken-word rants at early Panther Burns shows, when Tav [Falco] broke a string, and Alex thought I might do one that day. “Baron Of Love Part II” was the result. It was loosely about Presley. It appeared as the lead track on the first 500 copies of the original Peabody Records pressing.

This last session was just Alex, the late engineer John Hampton and me. Jim Dickinson was supposed to be there, but couldn’t make it. Alex was quite pleased by Jim’s absence since that allowed him to produce the session. We recorded about 11 tracks with Hampton. A few takes remain unreleased – I think “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Theme From A Summer Place” and some others. The session went very fast and Alex enjoyed being in charge, overdubbing various instruments at lightning speed. The atmosphere at the sessions I attended or played on was very relaxed and quite fun. Alex knew exactly what he was doing. I only recall him as almost joyful at the sessions – and that was a rare occurrence for him.

“The out-of-control nature of the first night”

ALEX CHILTON
Bach’s Bottom
LINE RECORDS, 1980
A fractious collaboration with Jon Tiven, released just as Chilton retreated to New Orleans

JON TIVEN (producer): Alex and I had been in regular contact through most of 1975. I chose to spend a little time in Memphis, which just happened to be the city in which Alex could get ‘free’ studio time. It wasn’t quite as free as I thought it was going to be. The first night was pretty much of a disaster. It was very dark, as if the evil forces of Memphis were gathering. Alex was jacked up. It was pretty dramatic, culminating in a member of Alex’s entourage urinating on the wall of Ardent.

I know Alex preferred the out-of-control nature of the first night, but in the light of day the excitement didn’t transfer so well to being documented. You had to have been there to appreciate how fucked up it was, and as it was the first professional record session I produced, I went with it.

I tried to give Alex points of reference. I don’t remember all of them, but I know when he sang “All Of The Time” I told him to think of what Bryan Ferry would have done with the lyric. He loved Roxy Music, so he appreciated that tip. When it was time to sing “Every Time I Close My Eyes”, he said he wanted to do it like Leave It To Beaver and I said go with that. I wish I could have found a home for the album quickly, someone who would promote it properly and pay us. Things might have ended up quite differently. It’s been released six or seven times already and at the time I was convinced it was a failure. All of my failures should do so well!

“He was quite compatible with those legends”

BIG STAR
Columbia: Live at Missouri University
ZOO, 1993
An unexpected comeback concert, with help from The Posies’ Jon Auer and Ken Stringfellow…

KEN STRING-FELLOW (bass): There had been some interest from time to time about Big Star re-forming. The call would always go into Jody and he would ask Alex and Alex would decline, pretty much automatically, and that became a routine.

STEPHENS: I hadn’t played drums in a while. I said, “If Alex agrees, I’ll agree.” I think Alex’s line was, “I’m not doing anything better that evening.”

STRINGFELLOW: Jody reached out to Jon Auer but didn’t know I could play bass. At SXSW about a month before the show, I cornered one of the organisers and basically said, “If you take Jon but not me, I’ll kill your family.” Zoo Records wanted to do a live record and that gave us a budget so we could get Alex and Jody out to Seattle for rehearsals.

It was the first time we met Alex, having had his legend loom large and having heard he could be a bit prickly. He was quite compatible with those legends – but also quite different. He was precise and would eliminate anything that was superfluous, including small talk. So he had no problem just standing there and saying nothing. One could say the word laconic was invented just for Alex.

STEPHENS: It was such a shot in the dark. It was an outdoor show in a tent, subject to the weather. On the day of the show there were thunderstorms, but they passed over and it all worked.

STRINGFELLOW: I was very nervous and feeling I was barely up for the task. It was monumental to be joining this band that meant so much to me. I think we rose to the occasion as best we could, we didn’t overplay and allowed Alex and Jody to be the centre of the thing – which was how it should be. I think we accomplished the mission.

“Nothing had changed!”

THE BOX TOPS
Tear Off
LAST CALL, 1998
Thirty years on, the original members reunite. An album and live shows follow…

TALLEY: Bill [Cunningham] called us all out of the blue and asked if we would like to record. I said, “Sure, but I bet Alex won’t.” Bill said, “I’ve already talked to Alex and he said he’ll do it.” Which really surprised me.

CUNNINGHAM: I called Alex and said “Do you want to go back into the studio? I’m curious what it’s like now.” He said, “Sure, who else should we get?” So I rang all the original guys, Gary [Talley], Danny [Smythe], John [Evans]. We hadn’t seen each other for years but within a couple of hours it was like we were all teenagers again. Nothing had changed!

TALLEY: There wasn’t a producer. We went to Easley Recording in Memphis and basically Alex produced the record, although we all chipped in. He was the main decision maker, he’d produced other albums. We all suggested songs but we definitely didn’t do any songs that Alex didn’t want to do. Fourteen songs made it to the album.

CUNNINGHAM: Dan Ackroyd called us to play at his House Of Blues. We also had a series of shows at the World Trade Center, up to the summer of 2001. They were lunchtime shows and were always packed out.

“Alex came in and handed out sheet music”

BIG STAR
In Space
ARDEN, 2005
The final Big Star album, recorded in 14 days…

STRING-FELLOW: In 2001, we were on tour in England. We were about to play “Patty Girl” – which was a favourite of Alex’s – and he introduced it as being a song on our new album. We all exchanged looks and it was like, “Oh there’s going to be a new album then…?” But that was the last we heard of it for a couple of years. In 2003, we were at Memphis. Alex was not happy, he felt the set was getting stagnant. He said it would be more interesting to record a new album and then we could have all kinds of new songs. Alex said he wanted everyone to contribute.

Jody sang some things into Jon’s voicemail and said, “What do you think of these?” I wrote “Turn Your Back On The Sun” as I knew Alex had spent time with The Beach Boys in his Box Tops days.

One day, Alex came in and handed out sheet music. Jon was absolutely terrified – he had no idea how to read music! It was a group process and we did one song a day. We’d arrange the song and record it that same day. Two seven-day sessions to get the album.

STEPHENS: Alex didn’t want to do more than one or two takes. He wanted it to be loose; he said the charm is in the raggedness. If we’d played it perfectly it would have been mundane, so it worked for me. Alex said about In Space, “You might not like it now, but you’ll like it in 30 years.”