A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (10 page)

Though Alex got along well with Dan and the others in the studio, it rankled him that he had no say in the choice of the album’s songs. He had pitched Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle” (previously a hit for Koko Taylor and later for the Pointer Sisters), to no avail. “Dan said, ‘Oh no, we can’t cut that, that’s about razor totin’ and carryin’ guns,’” Gary recalls. (Thirty-plus years later, the reunited Box Tops made “Wang Dang Doodle” a highlight of their live sets.)

Privately Alex began to disparage the Box Tops’ material: “
Dan didn’t have his finger on the pulse of teenage pop/rock taste that I knew. I was listening to
Hendrix and Buffalo Springfield . . . British rock, and soul music, but what Dan was doing was this very strange blend of country and soul, and it wasn’t quite my cup of tea. . . . You had music going this way and that way, and the Box Tops were going the wrong way.” (Years later, though, Alex would look back at some of the Penn tracks with much more admiration.)

As Alex became a worldly pop star, he occasionally broached financial matters with the guys in the studio. “
He and I always got along,” recalls Mike Leech. “He would ask me for advice from time to time, mainly about money. I advised him to be very careful, that his career might be short-lived, as most artists’ careers are, and to save as much as he could.” Alex may have taken Mike’s words to heart, but when he was home, he enjoyed treating his old friends to dinners and movie tickets, generously spending his money.

•   •   •

Soon after the new year, the Box Tops jetted off to California to appear on
American Bandstand
, which aired on January 13, 1968. “
Dick Clark seemed really interested in you when he was talking to you,” Gary recalls. “He had a way of focusing on you. He was very friendly.” The band also performed on a local L.A. TV program called
Boss City
to promote their upcoming San Diego Sports Arena gig, their most prestigious bill to date, with Buffalo Springfield, the Byrds, the Stone Poneys (featuring Linda Ronstadt), the Turtles, Brenton Wood (whose “Oogum Boogum Song” Alex would record in 1999), Sonny and Cher, and others.

Alex continued to meet plenty of women on the road but kept thinking about Suzi Greene in Dallas and flew to Texas for visits between tours. One night at a bar there, after getting into a brawl with an undercover cop who hated hippies, he was thrown in jail for disorderly conduct and assaulting a police officer. Later, the charges were dropped.

“Cry Like a Baby” was gradually climbing the charts, and the band’s schedule was packed with television appearances and concerts. Memphis guitarist Jerry Riley filled in for Gary, who’d been hospitalized for severe headaches, the result of impacted wisdom teeth. Bell scheduled a photo shoot for the new LP cover, using Riley. “
They placed him way in the back of us,” says Bill Cunningham. “Then they drizzled rain over the window [behind which the group stood, along with a miniskirted model clutching a teddy bear] to distort his face, so people wouldn’t realize he was Gary’s substitute.” The decision emphasized to Alex’s bandmates how replaceable they were.

Liner notes for the album were penned by Mark Lindsay, vocalist of hitmakers Paul Revere and the Raiders, who’d been recording at American. Lindsay
was a big fan of “The Letter” and wanted to work at the studio where it originated, as he explained:

The Box Tops, with lead vocalist Alex Chilton, record their unique commercial sound in Memphis, Tennessee, in American Sound Studios (which, according to the “big boys” on the East and West Coasts, supposedly has limited facilities). This is just not so. . . . Besides being the “soul center of music,” it is becoming a focal point for contemporary Top 40 as well.

“
For years I tried to cut a song that could get it all done in 1:58 [like ‘The Letter’],” says Mark. “I never could match the time of getting the whole song in a compressed, precise way without feeling that something was left out. ‘The Letter’ was great acoustic theater. It came, said everything it had to say, and left.”

Awards dinners for the tenth annual Grammy Awards were held on February 29 at regional gatherings in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and Nashville. Some segments were filmed for a May TV broadcast. The 5th Dimension and their hit “Up, Up and Away” (written by Jimmy Webb) swept four categories, beating the Box Tops in two of them.

In March Alex was called back to American to start work on the next album, even before
Cry Like a Baby
was released. The lead single, “Choo Choo Train,” a kind of prodigal son–themed number, was written by a pair of Muscle Shoals songwriters: Eddie Hinton, who’d played guitar on the Box Tops’ debut LP’s “Break My Mind” cut at FAME, and Donnie Fritts, who’d later tour with Kris Kristofferson, in addition to recording solo albums. A reference in the lyrics was made to “The Letter”—
“Choo Choo Train, I know you’re not a jet aer-e-o-plane”
(this time pronounced in four syllables), which Alex kicks off in his raspiest voice. In general the third album, which would be entitled
Nonstop
, was instrumentally sparer, with few strings, but more diverse in the songwriting. Among the eleven tracks, another was penned by Hinton-Fritts, with only two by Penn-Oldham: the small-town snapshot “People Gonna Talk” and the gospelly “I Met Her in Church.” The latter featured pedal steel guitar; such C&W sonics also appeared on several other cuts, including a cover of the Hank Snow classic “I’m Movin’ On.” Among the album’s standouts are a funky version of an obscure 1967 R&B single by Clifford Curry, “She Shot a Hole in My Soul,” and a loose-limbed “Rock Me Baby.” For the first time, a Box Tops LP included a Chilton composition: “I Can Dig It,” a gritty blues number, fueled by the Memphis Horns and Spooner’s B-3. Undeniably catchy, it shows promise as a first effort, with lyrics
focused on picking up a hot chick. Months after its July ’68 release,
Nonstop
was belatedly noticed by such rock pundits as Robert Christgau and Lester Bangs, the latter of whom hailed it as “quite authentic as rock & roll, as self-expression.”

On April 4, not long after
Nonstop
’s completion, the unthinkable occurred in Memphis: the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., who had been in town to lend support during a citywide sanitation workers strike. Places like Stax and American, where black and white musicians had worked together for years, began to feel a strain. “Something seemed to change,” says Reggie. “People seemed to be more aware of race. There was a lot of anger.” Never again would the Box Tops play in an all-black revue.

Alex was on the road when King was murdered and caught only glimpses of the coverage on hotel room TV sets: “In many ways,
I was just too busy for 1968. . . . I could look over and nod and say, ‘OK, that’s happening,’ but I didn’t have time for it.” April saw the Box Tops return to the Top 10 with “Cry Like a Baby” and also brought the return of Gary, recovered from his health problems. The group spent weeks on the West Coast, appearing on television shows and playing large venues, such as the Anaheim Convention Center (on a bill with Country Joe and the Fish and Canned Heat) and the Long Beach Arena (with the Rascals). Much of May was filled with gigs in the Northeast. A big fan of girl groups, Alex relished a Moravian College gig with Motown’s Marvelettes (“Please Mr. Postman”) on May 3.

Around the time the band’s sophomore LP was released, “Cry Like a Baby” peaked at #2, where it stayed for two weeks (kept from the top spot by Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey”). More TV appearances were booked in New York, including a spot on
The Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson. While the group was in Manhattan, Roy Mack arranged a choreography lesson from master dance instructor Skip Cunningham, who’d worked with Motown artists on their stage moves. It was a disaster, with the band telling their manager in no uncertain terms that they’d not be doing synchronized stage moves. They did, however, agree to go to a New York tailor, who outfitted them in matching blue double-breasted suits, flowing silk paisley scarves, and Italian leather shoes. The outfits would be seen on the cover of
Nonstop
, which was shot by Joel Brodsky, who’d famously photographed the Doors (including the bare-chested Morrison). Brodsky took the boys to Ringoes, New Jersey, and posed them on various train cars at the Black River & Western Railroad.

In the meantime, on their own, Alex and the guys shopped downtown in the East and West Village for funkier apparel. By now Alex’s hair had grown into a
long shag. He’d learned how to pout for the camera and flaunt his good looks, which Brodsky captured for new promo photos (though all five guys are broadly smiling for the album cover). Alex had become a bona fide teen idol—yet he kept hoping that he’d be taken more seriously than being asked what his favorite color and foods were. He was now playing guitar onstage, sometimes switching to bass.

Photo ops abounded in New York as the Box Tops were feted at the nighclub Arthur by Bell Records. The band was awarded its second gold record by label head Larry Uttal, who told the group that “Cry Like a Baby” was heading toward two million in sales. The plan was to not let up the momentum, and the label was ready to release “Choo Choo Train” while “Cry Like a Baby” still resided in the Top 10. During a May 17 performance at the Broadway nightspot Space, the Box Tops played “Choo Choo Train.” According to a
Billboard
review, “Alex Chilton, the quintet’s dynamic lead singer, almost was overpowered by the amplification system at first, but the force of his personality helped carry such numbers as ‘You Don’t Know What I Know,’ ‘The Letter,’ and ‘I Don’t Want Anybody to Lean On.’ . . . The Box Tops’ steady rhythms proved infectious as they almost demanded dancing from their listeners.”

In late May
Billboard
reported that “riding the crest of the demand for the new Box Tops single ‘Choo Choo Train,’ Bell Records shipped more than 400,000 singles during the week of May 6–10, breaking all previous sale marks of the firm. Larry Uttal, president, said ‘Choo Choo Train’ accounted for 150,000 of the sales.” It was clearly a marketing ploy that didn’t convince the DJs and record-buying public, and “Choo Choo Train” would move fewer copies than “Neon Rainbow,” reaching only #26 on the pop chart. The same article, however, noted that the
Cry Like a Baby
LP had sold more than 100,000 copies in seven weeks.

Regardless of sales figures, the Box Tops were booked for numerous summer events and television programs, including
The Dick Cavett Show
and a return visit to Johnny Carson, with George McGovern among the other guests. Gigs ranged from a televised Grand Ole Opry appearance with Tammy Wynette, who’d just crossed over to the pop charts with “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” to a California festival with a new “psychedelic soul” group, Sly and the Family Stone, who’d just scored their debut hit, “Dance to the Music.” When
Nonstop
was released, in July, its title described perfectly the band’s lifestyle. They were about to join the Beach Boys once again, for their most extended tour to date, taking them, from early August until fall, across Canada and the United States.

“
Here I am at the top, doing something I don’t understand and don’t really have any feeling for and getting really famous for it.
Gee!
” That’s how Alex remembered being a seventeen-year-old pop star. “But it’s good to find that out when you’re young: Fame can make you money, but it’s a big pain in the ass. There are real advantages to being unknown.”

During those rare moments when Alex was back in Memphis and not in the studio, he visited with friends like Michael O’Brien, who was heading off to the University of Tennessee in Knoxville that fall. There he’d major in philosophy, inspired by Howard Chilton’s studies. (“The Chilton family had a big influence on my life,” says Michael, whose high school graduation gift from Mary Evelyn was a two-volume set by Kierkegaard.) “
I remember being amazed at how unfazed Alex was with all of it,” recalls Michael. “His fans were always clamoring, and he became famous, all at sixteen, yet it didn’t seem to affect him. Alex was not surprised or impressed by any of it.”

“
I don’t know that anybody’s prepared to handle fame,” Alex ventured years later. “But then again, I think it would’ve made a lot more difference if I’d been a true believer in my own fame, too, but as it was, [I was] doing the bidding of producers and recording songs that were not [my] own. It was sort of a job to me. I wasn’t such a great fan of our group that I was really caught up in thinking that I was a tremendous great artist or anything.”

Alex’s old buddy Paul Jobe had moved into the Chiltons’ backhouse, “restless,” as Paul put it, and preferring the laissez-faire atmosphere there to his family’s home. When Alex would make a brief appearance on Montgomery Street, he would usually work on honing his guitar chops, as well as the craft of songwriting. He’d played a few songs for Dan Penn, who had discouraged him,
recommending he stick to singing professional writers’ songs. Paul encouraged Alex’s efforts, however. “
We’d get together in his backhouse, play guitar, and stay up all night,” says Paul. “He’d gotten a little more serious about music. He didn’t particularly like the Box Tops’ music that much. But that was his bread and butter, so he didn’t resist.” Paul, as usual, agreed with Alex’s musical judgment: “I saw the Box Tops twice, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with them.” In addition to music, Alex and Paul occasionally found time to play tennis, which, to Paul’s amusement, Alex managed to do with a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Alex also started frequenting a ramshackle Midtown party house on Madison. Occupied by a trio of art students, it was a magnet for hippies-in-waiting looking for a place to smoke dope, hang out, and listen to music. One of the residents, a Jackson, Mississippi, native named Gordon Alexander, had moved to town to study at the Memphis Art Academy the previous year. “
It became the main hangout in Midtown for artists, musicians, and other hippies, ’cause we had a cool house,” says Gordon. “Everyone knew that our house was the place to come for drugs. We may as well have had a neon sign out front. Some friends would go to Mexico, buy pot, and bring it back.” Also a musician and writer, Gordon met Alex at one of the house’s frequent free-for-all parties, and the two hit it off.

One day that summer of ’68, Alex stopped by with some surprising news. He’d just returned from Texas, where he’d seen Suzi Greene, whom he’d visited a few times since their meeting the previous September. During their emotional reunion she informed him she was pregnant with his child, due in December. Alex nonchalantly told Gordon that Suzi was moving to Memphis to live with him. “
I’d only known Alex a few months before this,” Gordon recalls, “but I always thought he didn’t really want to get married. He was so young. But with her being pregnant, he felt like he was obligated.” Sidney and Mary Chilton, extremely upset by this turn of events, told old friends like the Browns that they were devastated by the repercussions of their seventeen-year-old’s reckless lifestyle and what they suspected was his increased drug use.

As usual, though, Alex’s Box Tops commitments kept his mind occupied, and he looked forward to reconnecting with the Beach Boys for the monthlong tour. They would be flying to many of the dates in the Californians’ DC-7.

The string of shows began August 2, at the new Civic Center at Lansdowne Park in Ottawa, Ontario. On the road Alex mostly hung out with Carl Wilson. “
This was when I was really starting to get serious about playing the guitar,” Alex remembered in 1992, “and I learned more at the hands of Carl Wilson than
I learned from anybody else. He taught me a fuck of a lot of guitar playing. That man is a good guitar player. Carl’s a good man and he’s just so much fun to be around, too. I was like Carl’s puppy dog. I was just with him all the time.” For decades to come, Alex waxed nostalgic about the group: “Believe me, I spent over a hundred nights of my life with those guys, and in some ways they were like my own family.” In 2007
Alex told one friend that if he’d had three sons, he would have named them Carl, Dennis, and Brian, after the Wilson brothers.

Neither group was riding the top of the charts that summer—the Box Tops’ “Choo Choo Train,” featuring Alex at his throatiest, had made it only to #26 in July, and the Beach Boys had peaked that month at #20 with their latest, “Do It Again.” The tour dates were packed, with venues ranging from concert halls to high schools. The intense schedule sometimes required the bands to play an afternoon show in one town and an evening performance in another. On August 8, for example, they played a matinee at the Pittsfield Boys Club in Massachusetts, then that night at the New Haven Arena. From there they performed a three-day residency at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City before moving on to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During the last leg of the tour, they were playing venues like a Boise, Idaho, high school auditorium on August 24.

The bands managed to find fun on the road via drugs and girls, as Gary Talley recalls. “They were all doing acid—tripping a lot. Dennis was always the one getting into trouble and having the girls chase him. The tour was just littered with his castoffs. . . . He couldn’t be with all of them, so we adopted some of his followers. And Alex was definitely the stereotypical rock star, lead-singer guy: He always had lots of girls all the time.” Drummer Tom Boggs remembered of the tour, “
I’d never seen that many groupies before, and the stuff they did . . . it kind of blew me away for a while.” Alex later recalled his first LSD trip with Dennis in an Atlantic City hotel room. At one performance, high on acid, Alex became paranoid about falling off the ten-foot stage and stayed as far from the edge as possible. “Another time, when he was really out of it, we got on the plane after being up all night,” says Gary. “The stewardess was saying something about the seatbelt, and he started undoing the belt to his pants and taking his pants off, and she was saying,
‘No! Not that belt!’
”

After the tour finished, in early September, Alex flew out to California with Dennis and Carl and got acquainted with Brian. As he told Cub Koda:

I stayed at Dennis’s house, and we would go over to Brian’s sometimes when they were recording, and that’s when I met him. We’d go over there,
and they’d be messing around with some tapes. I remember listening to a song over and over again called “(We’re)Together Again.” I don’t know if it ever got released. I remember going out and playing volleyball. Brian had a beagle that loved to fetch—we were just hangin’ around Brian’s house. One night Brian and I went out in his XKE and went up to the Whisky a Go Go, just the two of us, and Albert King was playing. After sitting there for some period of time, Brian started doing pushups in the booth opposite me. So maybe Brian was a little flaky and not all there, but who was I to criticize anyone’s personal behavior!

During his stay at Dennis’s house, in Pacific Palisades, Alex met someone much stranger than Brian Wilson. “After [I was] there a couple days,
the whole Manson family moved in,” Alex said. Wilson had picked up a hitchhiking Manson follower, Patricia Krenwinkel, and soon Manson and the others appeared at Dennis’s hillside home. Dennis eventually paid for Manson to record his songs and introduced him to producer Terry Melcher. “They completely took over the household, like, sixteen girls and this Charlie guy hanging around, whom I barely noticed,” Alex remembered. “With all these girls running around with short dresses and no underpants, why am I gonna notice this guy?”

Soon Alex had to take notice of Manson, whose control over his young hippie harem became obvious. Dennis’s house overlooked the ocean, high above the Pacific Coast Highway. Alex still didn’t have his driver’s license, so he decided to walk down the steep hill to the grocery store one day. A Manson girl “
got wind of that,” Alex recalled:

She brought me a big, long shopping list of things that they wanted me to get—and no money to get it. So I said, “Well, it’s all right.” It being the sixties, and California, I thought I could spring for some groceries. I had to carry all these groceries back up the hill. That was kind of tough. When I got back, some of the girls met me in the driveway before I ever got to the house. They looked at the grocery bag and they said, “Well, you forgot the milk!” I said, “Aw, gee, I’m really sorry I forgot the milk—too bad.” They went on in the house, and I sort of ambled on behind them. By the time I got to the front door, they were standing in the doorway, blocking the door. And they said, “
Charlie says, ‘Go get the milk
.’” The vibes were kind of weird.

Alex decided it was time to leave when he woke up one morning after a late-night party and discovered asleep next to him on a large sectional couch none
other than Manson. Years later Alex told the story to a friend, who suggested he write a memoir and call it
I Slept with Charlie Manson.

•   •   •

Back in Memphis that September Alex’s life was about to change again. Suzi, then twenty-one, arrived from Texas, and the couple found a small, upstairs apartment at 2160 Madison, next door to Gordon Alexander’s hippie house in Midtown. Gordon drove them to the Volkswagen dealership out near the interstate, and Alex paid cash for a blue Karmann Ghia. Since Alex didn’t have his license, Suzi drove them home.

Soft-spoken and unassuming, Suzi was interested in art, photography, and, of course, music. “
Suzi was laid-back, earthy, and cool, with a real Southern drawl,” says Paul Jobe, who visited the pair. “
I never saw or heard them argue” during the early days of their relationship, says Gordon. “I used to go over to their apartment and listen to records. . . . It was a great time for swapping music.” Alex never put Box Tops records on the turntable, however.

“The only time I ever saw the Box Tops play,” Gordon remembers, “was when Suzi and a friend of hers and I drove up to Chattanooga and they were playing on a bill at the Chattanooga city auditorium with Andy Kim—just terrible. I remember all the girls screaming at the concert and Alex looking just bored to tears, going through all the hits and hating it. But then Alex said to the audience, ‘Hey, you don’t want Andy Kim to get away without doing another number, do you?’ And Andy Kim came out and did another song, and Alex was backstage just laughing.” Alex clearly felt he’d earned the right to ridicule other performers he considered bubblegum pop.

Though his interest in the band was waning, Alex returned in October to American Recording Studios for another session, a follow-up single to the gospel-tinged “I Met Her in Church.” The last 45 off
Nonstop
, “I Met Her in Church” had stiffed (peaking at #43 in September), though Alex later called it “the real high-point production of the Box Tops’ career.” The new single would be a baroque little number about prostitution, “Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March.” Reggie Young still has a visual image of Alex showing up barefoot to record, with a pregnant Suzi alongside him.

In addition to the newly recorded 45, to be released at year’s end, Bell planned to issue a compilation album—the third Box Tops LP in ’68,
The Box Tops Super Hits
—to capture some holiday sales.
Nonstop
had sold fewer copies than the first two LPs, not even making an appearance on
Billboard
’s Top 100 album chart. Its studio costs—many of the overdubs were “outsourced” at the
more high-tech Ardent Studios—were greater than the profits. Feeling the pressure, Dan Penn quit his position as staff producer and songwriter for Moman. The following year he would open a recording studio, Beautiful Sounds, on Highland and start his own publishing company.

Bell’s Larry Uttal kept pushing for another winner from the Box Tops, so recording got under way at American for more singles and an eventual LP for 1969. This time Alex would be working with Moman and, as coproducer, Tommy Cogbill. “I told Alex Chilton, ‘Larry owes me about $100,000,’” Chips related to author Roben Jones. “‘Part of that’s yours, but he won’t pay you until he gets another Box Tops album.’ Alex said, ‘I’m game.’ We cut that [material] just so I could collect royalties. I’ve always thought a lot of Alex for doing that.”

With Moman and Cogbill in charge, members of the Box Tops were allowed to play on some of the sessions, and Alex got the green light to submit songs. He had already signed a publishing deal with Moman’s company, Press Music. By the time the
Dimensions
album was assembled the following year, three of the ten tracks were composed by Alex, with another, Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” suggested by him. “
Chips Moman came in, and he was all for sorta encouraging me,” Alex said, “and he always put a tune of mine on the B-side of whatever the single was.” Perhaps in self-defense—the originals had little commercial success—he added, “But the way they’d do it was, they gave me the worst engineer [referring to a younger, junior engineer], and gave us an hour to finish the song—so i
t wasn’t that good.”

Among Alex’s originals, “I See Only Sunshine” was chosen as the B-side to “Sweet Cream Ladies,” marking his first composition to grace a Box Tops 45. Surely penned while feeling positive about his relationship with Suzi, the lyrics look toward a rosy future for the pair:
“I see our lives together / I see our love forever.”