A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (15 page)

“Alex and Chris couldn’t have been more different. Chris was neat, meticulous, even buttoned the top button of his collar. Alex was loose, relaxed, a little on the sloppy side. But they were very much alike in their strong sense of self. I believe they were effective together, their strengths complementing one another.”

Michael had good subjects. The guys looked like a band, a gang, yet each with his own style: Alex wore flared jeans and tight proto-glam sweaters, Chris stuck to mid-’60s preppy, Andy went for a kind of biker-rocker look, and Jody wore facets of all three. The four were rock-star lean, and except for Chris had hair to their shoulders. All were attractive and charismatic, and blue-eyed Jody could pass for a teen idol.

For the album-cover image Carole conferred with Alex, both enamored of the neon stars outside Joe’s Liquor Store on Poplar. They also wanted to give a nod to the band’s name. John Fry knew the owner of the Big Star grocery chain, who okayed their use of the name but didn’t want the group to use the logo, a five-pointed star with the words
BIG STAR
spelled out inside. The band needed an artist to devise its own logo. One of the Memphis College of Art’s professors, sculptor Ron Pekar, had lived in the house on Court Street where Alex and Suzi had an apartment. He and Alex had become friendly, and Alex had bought some of his neon sculptures. Ron agreed to create a neon sculpture for the band; his version had
BIG
spelled out in yellow neon tubes, surrounded by a glowing white five-pointed neon star. Carole photographed the eye-catching structure mounted on a black backdrop. Voila! the perfect cover, conveying mystery, artfulness, and electrified pop (which would come to signify “power pop”).

For songwriting credits, Chris very much wanted to emulate the Beatles, listing Bell/Chilton as author of the tracks. But Andy got sole credit for “The India Song,” and when Chris called Tom Eubanks to ask him to relinquish his cowriting credit (but not his copyright) to “My Life Is Right,” he didn’t get far. Tom
told Jovanovic, “I said, ‘Chris, I came up with the idea. . . . So if you don’t want to put my name on it, don’t use the song.’” Carole Manning and Cenotaph were listed as the album’s cover designer; John Fry was cited as executive producer, the sole production credit listed. As John recalls, “Somebody said, ‘What about your credit?’ and I said, ‘Put John Fry, Engineer.’ They said, ‘Oh, no, that won’t do. That sounds ordinary, and we want something that sounds better than that—we want it to be Executive Producer.’ And I said, ‘Fine.’”

Once John had the test pressing, he and Chris summoned the band and their friends to Studio A for a listening session. With the state-of-the-art speakers blasting the layers of textured guitars and shimmering harmonies, a rush of excitement swept over everyone in the room. Alex sat very quietly, listening intently to the songs; he squirmed at some of the lyrics and wasn’t sure about the sound of his vocals. Yet he knew that the words he’d written were honest. Years later Alex had an epiphany: “
Looking back at
#1 Record
, I realized something about my own personal development. I had quit school at sixteen to be in the Box Tops. So here I was, traveling across the country, surrounded by all these businessmen and older influences. I had left my own peer group completely, and in a way, I never really advanced past that. [In Big Star] I was twenty-one . . . but I was writing like I was sixteen or seventeen. So what I was writing about on that first Big Star album was just going back and trying to catch myself up.”

After spending what Alex recalled as “three nights a week for a year” on the album, the band members awaited its planned release in September of ’72.

Chris and Andy had finished their sophomore year at Southwestern, turning in copies of music they’d recorded and footage they’d shot for class assignments. By the time the masters shipped to the pressing plants in mid-June, their friendship was frayed. Chris’s “compulsiveness about [
#1 Record
] is one thing that ultimately drove us apart,” Andy remembered about the breach. “He became so intolerant and demanding that I just couldn’t handle him anymore. I was too far the other way; I just wanted to raise hell and party.”

In Alex, Andy found a partner in crime, carousing in bars like Trader Dick’s and the recently opened T.G.I. Friday’s, the first outpost of the New York City nitery. Though Alex and Andy were involved in relationships, it didn’t stop them from chatting up cute eighteen-year-olds, bowled over by the musicians’ charisma and bravado.

Andy’s girlfriend, Linda Schaeffer, had been Vera’s close friend since their days at Miss Hutchison’s, and the two decided to apply to college in Denver, where they hoped to transfer from Memphis State. Vera was still crazy about Alex but wanted to make a life for herself. “
Vera was not in the background,” Bob Schiffer recalls. “She was equal. Alex was always attracted to strong women.” Since their time in New York, Vera had known that monogamy was not for Alex. “He said he didn’t want to get married again,” says Vera. “It was pretty much understood that there was not going to be any wedding. And, of course, at my age and my experience, marriage wasn’t something I really dreamed about at that point. It never seemed to come up or to be an issue.”

Alex liked to drop by Ardent and flirt with Diane Davis Wall, the studio’s
office manager and the daughter of longtime Memphis session player Watson Davis. The beautiful brunette had married Gentrys drummer Larry Wall, had a child, and had recently been divorced. One Ardent employee remembered that nearly all the guys who worked at Ardent had a crush on Diane, who had large, luminous eyes and could converse with anyone about music.

Diane had functioned as a sort of nurse-cum-referee during the most stressful Big Star sessions. “
They were so volatile, especially Chris and Andy,” she remembers. “Even though my father was a jazz musician, he never cursed at home, so I had to get used to this constant cursing. [One time] Chris takes his guitar and smashes it against the plate glass, breaks the glass, cuts himself. . . . I’m hysterical. They take him to the doctor, and he got stitched up. So then, after that, we got so used to their tantrums that I kept a little medical kit in one of my file drawers. I would be typing a contract and hear a
crash, bang
, and one of them comes up, and there’s screaming, yelling, cussing. Blood is dripping all over the desk, and I’d say, ‘Get away from my contract,’ and I’d just reach over, get out the tape and scissors and supplies, and throw them on the desk. . . . We were constantly bandaging them; there was so much breaking glass, crashing, breaking instruments . . .”

“
They were all kids—eighteen to twenty-one years old—doing stupid things and maybe having petty jealousies,” Richard Rosebrough theorizes about those fraught moments. “I can remember one occasion where Andy lost it . . . but Alex just laughed and said, ‘He’s acting like a child—now he’s off pouting somewhere.’ I don’t know exactly what the problems were in Big Star—maybe there was a little jealousy, or maybe a little power play to be the leader of the band.”

One day as Richard sat waiting for his appointment at his psychiatrist, he ran into two Ardent employees there, on their way out of the office: “
Then when I came out, Chris Bell is seated, waiting to go in. It’s a mindfuck. It was crazy. A lot of crazy situations, competition to make the record company go, people vying for control. A lot of us really had some serious psychological problems from time to time, and being poor little rich kids, it was almost considered cool in our group to be labeled a little crazy. One day I realized we were all going to doctors. . . . We were young and immature and really not ready to take responsibility for our actions and take control of our destiny. Chris was moody a lot of the time. You never really knew what he was thinking or what was going on. He drank a lot. We were all drinking . . . taking downs.”

By the summer of ’72, Chris had started relying on various barbiturates to chill out; getting prescriptions for Valium, tranquilizers, and downers of all
types was easy in the town where Elvis’s notorious physician, Dr. Nick, thrived. Occasionally Chris picked Alex up for a game of tennis; on the court there was no hiding the pair’s competitiveness, as each thought he was the better player (their friends agreed that Alex could outplay Chris). John Fry and Chris, who were very close friends, also spent time together at John’s home, and John sometimes piloted them to the Caribbean in his plane.

Alex occasionally jammed with local blues-rock guitarist Robert Johnson, who’d been touring with Isaac Hayes, alongside bassist Roland Robinson and drummer Jerry Norris. “I was the only white guy in the band,” says Johnson, who hung out at Alex’s when in town. “We’d get stoned in Alex’s bedroom and listen to some T. Rex records I’d brought back from London. Jerry and Roland came over and the four of us rehearsed together at Alex’s for three or four days. We were playing acid rock—a cross between Cream, Mountain, and Curtis Mayfield. Alex liked playing with these really great black musicians.” Johnson recalls that one day Chris Bell stopped by and got huffy when he discovered his Big Star partner jamming with another band.

To promote
#1 Record,
Big Star needed to book concerts to coincide with the album’s release. John bought the band a P.A. system and some high-end amplifiers—Hiwatts, the kind favored by Pete Townshend. “Ardent had the notion that ‘Well, we need to set these guys up so they can tour [and] promote the album,’” Andy recalled. “We got ourselves all ready to play.” They also hired an old friend of Chris and Andy’s from MUS, John Dando, an electronics whiz, to serve as their equipment manager on the road. Jody got a new drum kit, an oversized Ludwig. Yet Chris, in particular, seemed reluctant to accept bookings he deemed unworthy of the band’s stature. “We thought we were the Beatles and weren’t playing live anymore,” Alex joked.

After former Icewater drummer Steve Rhea finished college in Dallas in May, John Fry hired him as Ardent’s promo man to help get airplay for the label’s releases. In school, Rhea had worked at the campus radio station. “
Chris persuaded John that I needed to be aboard, because we were all going to be a success,” Steve remembered. “If I couldn’t be in the band, I needed to be there, and he would like to have somebody focusing on Big Star all the time.”

•   •   •

The decision was made to issue a Big Star single prior to the album’s release. For the A-side, they chose “When My Baby’s Beside Me”; the flip side was “In the Street,” but rather than use the same track as on the album, Chris wanted a different version, to make the 45 special. They returned to the studio to recut the
song live, this time with beefed-up drums: Richard Rosebrough and Jody each playing a kit simultaneously. “This was just one of those ‘Why don’t we’ ideas,” Richard says. As Terry Manning recalls, “Chris was trying to do everything at once, all live—trying to get away from deep production.”

John had also signed to the label another act recording at Ardent: Tulsa’s Cargoe. Consisting of bassist Max Wisley, keyboardist Bill Phillips, guitarist Tommy Richards, and drummer Tim Benton, the band centered its sound on close-harmony singing (all four were vocalists) but played a more Southern-style pop-rock, with frequent soloing and a heavier keyboard sound than Big Star’s. The group’s upbeat “Feel Alright”—a recut version of a song originally recorded for Dan Penn’s financially strapped Beautiful Sounds label—became the debut Ardent release that spring and began getting national radio airplay, with Cargoe’s self-titled album soon following. Around its release, the group performed a concert at Ardent, engineered by Terry and broadcast in stereo by WMC, aka FM100, Memphis’s hot FM station.

“
That live recording was one of the very earliest FM simultaneous broadcasts—simulcasts—in stereo,” says Max Wisley. “FM was still in its infancy then.” Gradually, FM stations were gaining listeners regionally as underground rock and album tracks became the preferred music of the counterculture (as had been the case for years in San Francisco and New York). In addition, Terry and Carole Manning had shot a promotional 16 mm film of the band performing “Feel Alright.” All this attention on Cargoe undoubtedly angered Chris, who had wanted Big Star’s record out first and didn’t like Ardent focusing on another group. He and Terry Manning had been good friends for years but started getting into heated arguments around this time, including a fistfight in the Ardent parking lot.

“As for a relationship among the members of the two bands, none really developed,” according to Cargoe chronicler Frank Gutch. “We really didn’t talk a lot with Big Star,” Max Wisley told him. “They . . . came off like snotty rich kids, . . . better than everybody. . . . I’d hear weird stories about how somebody would be recording in one of the studios and get everything set just right and then Alex would come in at night and change all the mixing settings. They’d come in the next morning and find he’d changed everything on the board.” There was some interaction, though. Cargoe keyboardist Bill Phillips played piano on the live version of “In the Street,” released on 45. (Years later Alex would sometimes cover “Feel Alright” during his solo performances.) The band, who’d been among Tulsa’s first hippies, had settled communally into a Midtown house,
and Suzi Chilton, with son Timothee in tow, moved in to live with drummer Tim Benton.

Cargoe was the first rock band to be distributed by Stax in the new agreement signed with Ardent. A special section on the Memphis music scene in the June 3, 1972,
Billboard
featured a story on Stax’s expansion into rock and country, genres outside the R&B and soul singles market it was known for. The article’s focus was on Isaac Hayes’s many successes, such as winning a Best Song Oscar for his “Theme from
Shaft
,” and included plugs for upcoming releases, including the Cargoe LP, with a photo of the band. Big Star was not mentioned.

Soon after, however, teaser advertisements featuring the Big Star LP cover’s neon star, with spare text, began appearing in
Billboard
and other trades. Gigs were finally booked, too, though Chris remained reluctant about the September and October dates being set up. Alex looked forward to playing some shows with the band, as did Jody and Andy. But “
Chris was too high and mighty to bother with gigs,” Alex said. “In many ways, Chris was a snobby person who would disdain a lot of things kind of frivolously that maybe on reflection he wouldn’t disdain at all. I think gigging was sort of like that.”

The first pressing of
#1 Record
in September would amount to approximately four thousand copies—much fewer than the members of Big Star had hoped for, expecting their debut to live up to its title. “For Chris it was
100 percent certainty that this thing was going to take off,” Steve Rhea remembered. Yet the modest pressing was typical of debut albums of the era, according to Sire Records cofounder Seymour Stein. “
Some of the larger independent labels that had independent distribution might have shipped a greater quantity to drive up billing and make themselves look good,” says Stein. “I’m referring to companies like Paramount Records, ABC, etc., that were owned by larger entities and would have wanted things to appear better than they were.”

The “FM Action” column of the August 26 issue of
Billboard
plugged the forthcoming album, recommending all its tracks to programmers, but mentioned just a pair of FM stations, in Memphis and Austin, that planned to play it. The issue’s “New Radio Action:
Billboard
Pick Singles” feature also recommended “When My Baby’s Beside Me.” Ardent/Stax placed a full-page color advertisement for the album in the issue. The following week
Billboard
ran another full-page ad, next to a similar spot for Cargoe. “FM Action” reported that two more stations in New Orleans and Georgia had added
#1 Record
to their playlists. The September 9 issue featured an album review that crowed:

Each and every cut on this album has the inherent potential to become a blockbuster single. The ramifications are positively awesome. Led by ex–Box Topper Alex Chilton, their sound is full of attractive contrasts and just below the surface subtleties. If favorites must be chosen, then let’s mention “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” “Don’t Lie to Me,” and “The Ballad of El Goodo.”

Chris bristled at the idea of Alex’s getting credit for
his
band but realized it was necessary for publicity’s sake. Steve Rhea worked the phones at Ardent, calling some fifty radio stations a day to encourage them to add Big Star to their playlists, and by mid-September multiple stations in thirty-four states had done so. Yet “When My Baby’s Beside Me” and
#1 Record
failed to chart, while Cargoe’s “Feel Alright” made it into the lower rungs of the
Cash Box
and
Record World
Hot 100 surveys.

Halfway across the country, in Minneapolis, music fan (and future artist manager and label executive) Peter Jesperson recalls his discovery of
#1 Record
, after being hipped to it by a record-collecting penpal in London. He happened upon it in the discount, or cut-out, bin downtown at Music City. “
All of a sudden there’s the big neon star—the cover caught me right away,” Peter recalls. “It was laminated and looked like an import. They must have had a dozen, and it was ninety-nine cents. I grabbed one for my friend in London, and at first it didn’t occur to me to buy one for myself. But in the checkout line I kept looking at it, thinking, ‘What a great-looking cover.’” He went back and plucked out another copy and went home and played it. “I remember gripping the arms of my chair and going, ‘Oh, my God,’ when I got to track four, ‘Thirteen.’ It just hit me right where I live. That song opened the floodgates, and I just went absolutely bonkers over the band. I turned everyone I knew on to the record, but it was very hard to find. Those copies at Music City disappeared, and you couldn’t order it. People tried to special-order it and were unsuccessful.”