A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (14 page)

Others sometimes stopped by during late-night sessions. Ardent engineer Terry Manning had recently married Carole Ruleman, Chris and Alex’s old friend, and she’d been hired by John to create Ardent’s graphics and advertising layouts. An Anglophile like her husband, Carole started a design company called Cenotaph, named after a place she discovered on a London street map. Vera recorded some Tammy Wynette–style songs with Alex and Grant Weisbrot, who had taken a Greyhound down from New York. Alex also cut a couple of Weisbrot’s off-key songs. “
We were doing our own thing in the studio,” says Vera. “They were having fun with it, because they were playing around with
echoes and overdubbing and using every trick in the book to make my voice sound better.”

One night Vera, Alex, and Chris stepped outside Ardent to smoke a joint in the evening air. They started pondering various names for the band. Across the street facing them was a Sweden Kream drive-in, where they sometimes picked up burgers and fries, and next to it a supermarket, part of a Southern chain. “There was the
Big Star grocery store,” Vera remembers, “and they just tried that name out, and it sounded good, and they decided that’s what it was going to be.” As Alex later recalled, “
Chris and I were smoking a joint outside the studio, trying to think of a name, and he looked across the street and said, ‘Big Star,’ and I said [snaps fingers],
‘That’s it.’
”

When they told Andy and Jody, “I remember
feeling really uncomfortable—like we were jinxing ourselves,” says Jody. “It was so pretentious.” That night, though, they all agreed it sounded cool, though they laughed at their audacity—all but Chris. He knew that the name captured what they would become.

Chris felt strongly about the songs’ arrangements and production as they entered the studio. “It was pretty much Chris’s vision,” says Jody. “Alex obviously played a major role, and we all felt like we had an equal share in this thing. To an extent it was a democracy, but it was Chris’s vision, and we all deferred to that.”

“
Chris was really into recording,” Alex said. “He didn’t want the rest of us fooling around in the studio. That was his business. John would record the basic tracks with the whole band playing live and then just sort of left it to us after that. We had three, four, five sessions with John recording the basic tracks.” Two Rock City tracks, “Feel” and “My Life Is Right” (which Chris cowrote with Tom Eubanks), were adapted, with new parts added. Veterans of the Box Tops sessions Andrew Love and Wayne Jackson had already overdubbed horn parts on “Feel,” which would kick off the album.

Also among the initial tunes they recorded was one Alex had worked up in New York, now called “The Ballad of El Goodo”; Andy came up with the title while “sort of mocking the tune,” according to Alex. The lyrics were partially inspired by Alex’s brother Howard’s attempts to be classified as a conscientious objector. In the song’s beautiful melody line, Alex spelled out his thoughts on the draft:
“They’ll zip you up and dress you down, stand you in a row / But you know you don’t have to, you can just say no.”
(Alex on the song: “The music is really good; the lyrics are a little strained in the verses, but the choruses kick ass.”)

Joining him on three-part harmonies for the choruses are Terry and Chris,
inspired by Beach Boys vocals. Alex’s closing guitar riff is a nod to a Doc Watson lick; the chiming, layered guitars throughout add a textured underpinning, with phaser shifting at the end giving an unexpected bit of metal to the mostly acoustic number.

“
I can remember first working up ‘Ballad of El Goodo,’” Jody says, “and it just blew my mind. Chris shaped ‘Ballad of El Goodo’ to an extent, with the background vocals and the interplay between guitars . . . the arrangements as far as the sound of Chris’s guitar and the sound of Alex’s guitar, the guitar tones and how they worked within a song, and how they played off each other. I started working on how drum fills would build through the song. There’s a certain majesty to the chorus, and the introduction to the chorus really captured what I was feeling; then the turnaround and the opportunity to do a fill and make some sort of statement, building a little suspense or anticipation. I can still hear Chris saying, ‘Play louder, hit harder,’ and that’s probably why I hit real hard now.”

When parts were not played properly during recording, Chris demanded they be redone, sometimes resulting in numerous takes; he was particularly hard on Andy, who already felt insecure about his bass playing. As the guys sometimes struggled to work out their parts, fights broke out. By comparison, Alex and Chris usually got along fine during songwriting sessions and rehearsals and in the studio. Chris really liked Alex’s vocals and guitar playing, as well as his writing. Alex was particularly impressed by Chris’s approach to arranging vocal harmonies. “
Chris and I did all the harmony vocals, and he had a brilliant mind that worked in a sort of contrapuntal way,” Alex said. “It wasn’t based so much on ‘Oh, you’re singing the root. I should be singing the third above.’ He would just sing along with the line I was singing. He was a brilliant, instinctual maker of counterpoint.”

Another of Alex’s New York songs, “Thirteen,” was also expanded by Chris when cut at Ardent. Sung in a voice even more vulnerable than that he used on “El Goodo,” Alex’s yearning ballad paints a portrait of teenage first love, with lyrics that could have been inspired by his junior high days spent with Louise Leffler.

The overlapping acoustic guitars create a textured interplay, and Chris’s instrumental bridge transforms “Thirteen” from a simple folk song into more complicated balladry. Again Alex’s vocals sound fragile alongside the fingerpicked guitar. “That’s one of
my almost-good songs,” Alex said. “I don’t know where it came from, but I made up this wild bit of guitar in fifteen minutes. You
don’t hear many twenty-year-olds doing that.” He disparaged the lyrics—“I’m good for a verse before I lay an egg”—and disliked his vocals: “I was still trying to find my voice.”

Alex’s “Give Me Another Chance” was in a similar vein, with a spare opening that gradually builds, adding instrumentation, including a Mellotron-created strings section and Terry’s electric piano. When Alex sang in his highest register, Chris told him, “It really sounds like Todd Rundgren, but that’s not a bad thing. It’s good. I didn’t think you’d be able to sing that high.” Years later Alex scoffed at the song: “
A lot of the time I was groping toward writing good songs. . . . But those maudlin ballads . . . they’re not good for anyone except for nursing their depression.”

Terry Manning disagrees: “I think ‘Give Me Another Chance’ and ‘Thirteen’
represent the real Alex Chilton. I love his soft side, just the sweetness and the purity that seem to be there. I remember telling him how much I loved ‘Give Me Another Chance,’ that it’s maybe my favorite of all the Big Star songs, and he just looked really embarrassed when I mentioned it and said, ‘Well, I never really cared for that.’ Didn’t even want to hear about it.”

Alex wrote some rockers, too. “In the Street” kicks off with the Blind Willie McTell lick Keith Sykes taught him “as the main riff,” said Alex. “We recorded the track, and then the words were written the night before the session.” Chris Bell took the lead vocals, using his Robert Plant–style tenor, with Alex harmonizing on the chorus. The lyrics perfectly capture a teenager’s interior life
—“not a thing to do but talk to you / . . . wish we had a joint so bad”
—and it’s one early original that Alex never belittled, calling it “probably my greatest success”; in years to come, it became one of his most lucrative copyrights. With Alex’s Les Paul interweaving with Chris’s 330, “In the Street” rocks hard, peppered with unusual percussion breaks.

Another rocker Alex contributed, “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” was among his favorites on the debut, along with “Feel,” and again illustrated the creative partnership between Alex on lead vocals and Chris on harmony and lead guitar (including wah-wah pedal). “It’s straightforward,” Alex said of the song, “nothing pretentious about it. It has a rhythmic thrust about it—it’s strong all the way around.” The most acerbic track, Chris’s aggressive “Don’t Lie to Me,” features near-shrieking vocals, the intensity enhanced by some out-there overdubs, including oscillators and racing motorcycle engines.

For their cinematography class at Southwestern, Andy and Chris, the latter a big fan of Antonioni’s
Blow-Up,
brought in a movie camera to film vignettes
starring their bandmates to accompany “Thirteen” and “Ballad of El Goodo.” For the latter, they captured Alex on 16 mm bopping down the avenue to the local draft board, his hair to his shoulders, his scarf draped around his neck, wearing a blazer, a ribbed sweater, and flared cords. He makes it to the elevator, then apparently decides to split and skips down the steps. They also filmed Big Star at Ardent and rehearsing at the Chilton house. Other scenes intended to accompany “Thirteen” include footage of carefree high school students strolling along a Memphis sidewalk.

The basic tracks for nine songs were complete by Thanksgiving, just in time for Ardent’s move to a newly constructed, designed-to-spec brick facility at 2000 Madison Avenue in Midtown. John Fry’s spacious “Disneyland of a studio” had two recording rooms, along with state-of-the-art equipment, including a new sixteen-track recorder. The original studio’s electronics were moved into Studio B; the new equipment was installed in the spacious Studio A. The building also had large offices for John, a receptionist area, a lounge, and rooms for graphics and storage. Once settled in, the boys in Big Star, awarded their own keys, got back to work on overdubs—Chris as usual taking the lead—pouring everything into late-night marathon sessions. By now they’d decided to entitle their debut
#1 Record:
“
We weren’t big stars,” Alex said, “and to call it
#1 Record
before it was released was a joke. But, sure, we thought it could become a big record. It was kind of like Charlie Chan’s number-one son, and it
was
our first album.”

The last few tracks were cut at the Madison studio, including a new, lusher version of the Rock City number, “Try Again,” and a brief sort of coda, entitled “ST 100/6,” which Chris primarily recorded on his own. The title was “
a mythical album number,” said Chris, who joked that if Ardent didn’t release their album in a timely manner, they’d go directly to Stax to issue it, or else bootleg it, and use that number. “
We were always threatening to bolt from Ardent to Stax,” Alex said, “and when John Fry was in the room, we’d say, ‘Oh, what about ‘ST 100/6’? and he’d say, ‘What’s that?’ and we’d go, ‘Oh, nothing . . .’”

In the middle of the night, Andy let himself in to Studio B and recorded vocals and piano on a demo of a tune he’d written, “The India Song.” “
I was depressed and very into Joni Mitchell when I wrote it,” Andy said. “It was a lame imitation of ‘Carey.’” When Alex heard it, he loved the song and insisted they record it for the album, with his vocals double-tracked alongside Andy’s.

With twelve songs completed, Chris, often accompanied by Alex and Andy, would pull all-nighters two or three times a week at Ardent. “We agonized over
everything, doing gobs of overdubs, each over and over again, trying to get the sound just right,” said Andy. For “Don’t Lie to Me” Norton motorcycles were taken into the brand-new studio, with their oil dripping all over the floor.

For the final phase of recording, John brought his know-how to the mixing sessions, which Alex would credit as being the album’s secret weapon. “
John Fry was a genius in his way of mixdowns,” he said. “We didn’t put things on tape much differently than was the standard method of doing things, but he just had so much finesse and great ears, and he was just a great, meticulous mixdown engineer and . . . producer. I don’t know what you’d call it. But he’s the one responsible for making those records sound so fucking great.”

Chris was by John’s side throughout. “Chris, who’d stay late at night and engineer the overdubs, would be the one who’d be sitting right there during mixing,” says John. “Maybe somebody else would drop in for an hour, get bored, and leave. But he was the one who wanted to be right there all the way through the project.”

Chris didn’t stop there. During the mastering of the tapes, he kept in touch with Stax’s Larry Nix, the mastering engineer, and eventually showed up at the McLemore studio to supervise Nix’s work. “
We had to really work to get that energy onto the vinyl,” Nix told Big Star biographer Rob Jovanovic. “We had to supply three different [pressing] plants and two sets [of masters], and it took a while to do that.” After the long, tedious process, John compared the masters with the original tapes before signing off. In the meantime, Chris showed up and wanted to commemorate the masters’ completion by etching into the run-out grooves (where the recording number is marked) some cryptic messages and images of stars. “I wrote the number into the master,” Nix recalls, “and then [Chris] took the tool and dropped it in the middle of the lacquer! And the master was gone! It was the last side I had to do. . . . I ran him out of there and down the hall.” The master had to be redone.

Chris ultimately etched the philosophy “The more you learn, the less you know” into the run-out grooves of the vinyl. He also included some unsavory “
improper language,” according to John, on the inner circle, to be covered by the paper label. “It was seen by a female employee in the plating department of one of the plants,” said John. “She complained, there was a big stink, and I had to send an apology.”

The band had plenty of artistic friends to help with the album cover art and publicity materials. “
I knew everyone in the band well except Jody,” Michael O’Brien says. “I was flattered they asked me to make their photographs. I knew
we were friends, but their asking validated me in my new profession. I drove back to Memphis from Knoxville and spent the weekend photographing the band. I had just become proficient with the camera and black-and-white film. We did several sessions over the weekend, mostly in and around Alex’s house and at Ardent Studios’ new location on Madison Avenue. All four had connected to the camera. They were serious, confident, and had strong feelings about how good they were. This was a wonderful time for the band. They were just finishing the album. They knew it was good, and having some photographs taken was a kind of celebration.