A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (18 page)

The record was nearly done when Alex stopped by the studio with Andy late one night and began playing the Yamaha grand piano in Studio A. John Fry and Andy liked what they heard and set up microphones. “The
piano went through a compressor, which we turned up as much as it would go,” Andy recalled, “essentially eliminating the dynamic range of the instrument—a very cool piano sound. The decay of the notes is as loud as when they’re first played.”

“Maybe we can do something with this,” John said. Alex came up with brief, cryptic lyrics and a title, “Morpha Too,” overdubbing the vocals in his highest tenor:
“Kitty asked me to read her stars / I had liked her from afar / Going to play with your heart.”

Another short composition, seventy seconds of hope, followed: “I’m in Love with a Girl” returns Alex to the boy in “Thirteen,” strumming a sole acoustic guitar, with youthful sentiment the opposite of that in the jaded “Life Is White.” Here, wonder has returned:
“I didn’t know I could feel this way.”

John Fry again used his majestic touch to mix the album. This time, Alex stayed by his side throughout the process, with Andy and Jody stopping by. “We would get on average a mix a day,” John told Eaton. “Probably start at ten in the morning and be out of there [by] seven or eight o’clock.” As on
#1 Record
, Alex, who found mixing tedious, was pleased with Fry’s work: “
John would spend an hour or two getting his mix down—the basic drum sound and the ambient things going. To me, sitting around twiddling my thumbs waiting for this to happen—it seemed like a long time but I’m sure it wasn’t that long. It would take an hour or two or three—getting his little echo effects and reverb effects, and then after that it would go fairly quickly. John is just a genius of reverb and ambient effect . . . a genius at mixing sound. He made us sound great.”

For the title of the album—filled with what Ardent’s optimists predicted were hits—the band chose
Radio City
. Like
#1 Record
, it was a hopeful reference to the LP’s future. And Big Star,
#1 Record
,
Radio City
all worked together. “
You would tag things with ‘city,’” Jody recalls. “If you’re in a rock & roll band—‘rock city.’ If something bad happened, it was ‘drag city.’ We all thought this was a radio-friendly album, so—
Radio City
.” Carole Manning and Alex wanted a cover image as striking as the previous record’s, so they contacted the Chiltons’ longtime friend William Eggleston, whose often disturbing color photographs documented Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. His provocative body of work was beginning to draw attention from arbiters of fine-art photography who had previously shunned color images. The following year he would be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and publish
14 Pictures
, a portfolio of dye-transfer prints. Eggleston was a regular at Overton Square, often accompanied by his youthful paramour, Marcia Hare, and friends like Mississippian Vernon Richards, who assisted him in capturing raucous nightlife scenes with his camera.

The band visited Bill’s studio, and for the front cover Alex selected “the light on the ceiling pic,” according to Andy. “We all loved it, and I thought it fit perfectly with the sort of avant-garde nature of the LP.” That photograph has become one of Eggleston’s most iconic images. Entitled
Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973
but better known as
Red Ceiling
, it depicts a room in a house belonging to a debauched dentist. The focal point, a vivid red ceiling, pops due to Eggleston’s use of the dye-transfer printing process, a technique then more associated with commercial advertising than with fine-art photography.

“When you look at a dye-transfer print it’s like it’s red blood that is wet on the wall,” Eggleston has said. “It shocks you every time.” The bare lightbulb and exposed wires convey eroticism, further alluded to by the Zodiac sex positions
poster partially showing at the edge of the image. Perfect for the cover of an album that oozed sex and bloodletting, Eggleston’s photograph eventually would be exhibited throughout the world, including shows in New York at the Museum of Modern Art and the Met. “
I wanted the design for
Radio City
to resemble the classic look of Bill’s photos as they were displayed in his home, with white mats and silver frames,” said Carole Manning. “So I kept the design as simple as possible. We had the slicks laminated with a gloss to duplicate the English [LP cover] look.”

“
We drank a lot, stayed out all night, and took all manner of drugs,” said Andy about carousing with Eggleston and company. “We wound up at the TGI Friday’s on Overton Square one Monday night, which was Rock and Roll Night. It was a major hell-raising scene. A DJ would play old 45s, and just everyone came and stuffed the place. That was the back cover.”

The candid shot depicts Jody, Andy, and Alex decked out in their nighttime finery, surrounded by partiers, clearly enjoying themselves. With a gleeful smirk Alex points right at the camera, an image that vividly captures his nocturnal M.O. Gail Elise Clifton, an eighteen-year-old cocktail waitress who worked at the Overton Square nightspot Godfather’s, met Alex one night after being introduced to him by their mutual friend, Clifford Hill. She took him home to her apartment down the street. Gail remembers that a few days afterward, Alex “
pointed at me and introduced me to Andy and Carole as another ‘September Gurl.’” Gail and Alex’s liaison was short-lived; she’d recently had a fling with Todd Rundgren following his Memphis concert and was still carrying a torch for him when she slept with Alex. “He had a temper tantrum when I didn’t know who he was, that he’d been in the Box Tops,” says Gail. “He got down and beat his hands on the floor.”

•   •   •

John Fry and Alex reconvened to sequence the album, which ran just over thirty-six minutes (a common running time in ’73, excluding two-disc concept LPs). The songs fell into roughly the order in which they were finished; thus “September Gurls,” which certainly sounded like a hit, was buried on the second side near the end, followed by “Morpha Too” and “I’m in Love with a Girl.” “There might be a sort of chronological thing to the sequencing,” Alex told Eaton. “‘September Gurls’ was one of the later tunes I composed. I think probably at the end several of us sat down and said, ‘This will be the running order,’ and we saved some of the weird, offbeat stuff for towards the end just so as not to put people off too early.”

As the mixing and sequencing wrapped in the fall, Andy registered for his senior year of college. Since
#1 Record
had already slipped into obscurity, he was cynical about prospects for
Radio City
. “I began to become
more than a little disillusioned,” Andy said. “Plus, I was getting very nervous about finishing school and getting on with life instead of continuing with what was more and more becoming a loser activity. Also Alex was getting frustrated looking for material to fill out the LP and began venturing into more radical solo-type stuff like ‘Morpha Too,’ ‘I’m in Love with a Girl,’ ‘Mod Lang.’ By the time they were mixing the LP, I was pretty well out of the picture.”

John King began planning promotional activities for
Radio City
to parlay Big Star’s previous good press into advance praise for the new album. He secured a two-night stand at Max’s Kansas City in New York for December 17 and 18 (a Monday and Tuesday), with CBS offering promotional support, and began booking commercials on the city’s prestigious WNEW FM radio station. During a meeting at Ardent with John King and John Fry to discuss an early-1974 tour, to commence around the record’s February release, a conflicted Andy stormed out, refusing to commit to the idea. “I rather impatiently and ungracefully told him he needed to just make up his mind about what he wanted to do,” said Fry. “He told me I was a fool.” Finally Andy agreed to play the Max’s dates but announced that he would quit afterward. “I could either finish college and go lead a more or less normal life,” said Andy, “or I could drop out and go on tour with a band I’d been in for several years that had yet to make a red cent. Tough choice! I was tired of being broke.”

When
Radio City
was mastered, on December 3, the band’s future once again seemed in doubt. This time, though, Alex had put enough of himself into the project that he didn’t want to see the group disappear before the record had a chance. Looking for Andy’s replacement, he stopped in at various clubs to check out bands’ bass players and discovered John Lightman. Chatting afterward, Alex asked Lightman his birth date, and when he realized that John was a Scorpio, Alex offered him a spot in Big Star.

For the New York gigs John King reserved two suites for the band at the Plaza Hotel, boosting morale and giving the appearance that Big Star were, actually, big stars. John Dando and John King accompanied them to New York, and the party began en route. Alex, Jody, and Andy flew in the day of the first gig at Max’s, and Alex invited Bob Schiffer, Keith Sykes, and Karin Berg to the show. Monday night, attended by CBS brass, was planned as a press event, and Billy Altman and Nick Tosches were among the numerous music critics at the bar.

Feeling sleep-deprived and nervous about their lack of rehearsal, Big Star started tentatively, with Alex going onstage first, alone with his acoustic, for “El Goodo” and “Thirteen.” “Chilton’s aura of fragility was perfect for those songs,” wrote
Billboard
critic Sam Sutherland, “one an anthem of self-realization, the second a bittersweet but loving re-creation of true teen love that is parenthetically a eulogy for the innocent vitality of rock in the early ’60s.”

When Andy and Jody joined Alex, the band plugged in and played a mix of songs from both albums, as well as obscure T. Rex, Todd Rundgren, and Kinks covers, to rapturous applause. Throughout the set John King would check in with critics, buying them drinks and making sure they liked what they heard. The next night, attendance was sparse, with some journalists returning, as well as a few fans, but Big Star attacked their two sets with more energy and focus than they had during Monday’s show.

In a review that ran in
Zoo World
, Jon Tiven described the band’s appearance:

Alex is the littlest guy in the group, and onstage it’s even more obvious. But not in the Steve Marriott ‘I’m 5'2", obnoxious, brassy, and I’m going to sing my
baa-aa-aa-aals a-a-aw-aw-awf’
way of being small, but in a rather humble, friendly, and (although I hate to put it this way) cute manner. Andy’s the typical unconcerned bassist, off to the side staring at his fingers in a very John Entwistlian way, knowing that the audience should be focusing their attention upon the lead singer. Then there’s Jody, staring off into space, occasionally cracking a smile, while he flares away solidly at his drum kit. They’re all good-looking in different ways, so girls, it’s time once again to bring the instamatics out of the closet and worm your way up to the front row.

At one point Andy’s bass amp went on the fritz, which Alex blamed on John Dando, embarrassing him from the stage. “
Alex could be pretty cruel with things that he would say,” Dando recalls, “and we had a pretty sharp exchange at Max’s Kansas City. He said something pretty rotten to me over the microphone, and I fired something back at him. I remember people said, ‘You can’t say that to him, he’s Alex Chilton.’ And I said, ‘The hell I can’t!’”

Fueled by a few rounds of drinks, the band encored with “The Letter,” which impressed Tiven: “Alex handles the guitar parts onstage with perfection. He’s relaxed, assured of his ability, and ready to make use of it, shooting from the hip every time.” Alex approached it with more irony each time he performed it.

After two sets, which alternated with a comedy routine by actor Ed Begley Jr., the band’s party continued at the hotel. “
I went to Max’s, and Alex said, ‘Why don’t you stay with us tonight?’” recalls Bob Schiffer. “I ended up staying with them at the Plaza. We were living like the Beatles there. It was a beautiful night with light snow, and you’d look out at Central Park, and it was glorious. They thought they were going to make it then. Except for Andy, who was a worrier and was already contemplating a second life in terms of school.” Keith Sykes, also joining the party at the Plaza, remembers, “Alex was really up about the new record.”

Celebrating with a suiteful of friends, the band ordered up bottles of booze from room service. “
Stax didn’t have any control over us—we’d just turn in receipts,” says Dando. “We were on our own and were just running wild. We had carte blanche. There was just an outrageous bill.”

Still sore about his altercation with Alex, John Dando quit as equipment manager after the band returned to Memphis, and the expensive trip did not go over well at Stax or Ardent. Steve Rhea decided he’d had enough and left his job as Ardent’s marketing man. But everyone’s mood improved the week before Alex’s twenty-third birthday when
Billboard
ran its positive review of the Max’s show, in which Sutherland singled out Alex as “composer of the band’s best material.” Sutherland cheered Big Star on, promising “strong new material on the way” and stating that “as a trio, the departure of the band’s second guitarist and writer has provided a new coherence to the act, which centers logically around Alex Chilton. . . . The set was a triumph, covering some exciting bases with the new tunes.”

In time for
Radio City
’s impending release, hundreds of music writers, disc jockeys, and music industry people received a unique Christmas card, courtesy of John King and Carole Manning. It featured on the front three sinister-looking rascals, one wearing a star on his sweater, threatening, “Please play our records—or we’ll burn your tree.” When the card was opened, it revealed a charred stick with branches.

The year 1974 began promisingly for Alex: Over the holidays, he’d gotten involved with the ravishing eighteen-year-old Lesa Aldridge, home from Sarah Lawrence after attending as a freshman. The two had briefly met the year before, when she dated Andy Hummel, but Alex had been too caught up in his back-and-forth relationships with Vera and Diane to act on his attraction to the flirtatious blonde (though she may have inspired lyrics he was writing).

Just before Lesa left for college, she’d spotted Alex at a Midtown watering hole, Yosemite Sam’s. That night he was wrangling a messed-up female friend. But something about Alex tugged deeply at Lesa. “That was it,” she says. “Time stood still, like in a movie, and light shown down on us. But he didn’t see me. He was too busy with this girl who was ODing or something.” Lesa’s pal Karen Chatham was also attracted to Alex, and when she offered her help, he was rude. Afterward, Lesa and Karen went to the home of William Eggleston, Lesa’s second cousin. “Later that night Karen was crying over Alex,” says Lesa, and as she consoled her friend on a couch, Eggleston photographed the pair. (The striking image would eventually be featured in magazines and on museum walls.)

Lesa’s socially and politically liberal parents, William Aldridge, a Presbyterian theologian and dean of the Memphis Theological Seminary, and Elizabeth, Eggleston’s first cousin, who hailed from Sumner, Mississippi—Elizabeth Aldridge came from old money, “aristocrats of the Delta,” as Rosa Eggleston liked to call them—were permissive with their five children. Their second daughter, Lesa, was born in Mississippi on May 28, 1955—a Gemini Goat, according to the Chinese astrology Alex had begun studying (he was a Capricorn Tiger). “Apparently it’s a terrible combination,” Lesa later said. Her astrological sign characterized her as “a lusty bitch,” Alex told her.

Lesa’s looks—high cheekbones, an upturned nose, wide-set eyes, and flowing honey-colored hair—were marred only by her discolored teeth, a result of her mother having taken tetracycline while pregnant. “
Lesa didn’t want her teeth fixed,” says Gail Elise Clifton, soon to become her friend and later her bandmate. “I was like, ‘That is punk.’ Your mother’s a millionaire, you got charcoal-colored teeth, you don’t even want to get them fixed. I loved her for that.”

The Aldridges had moved back to Memphis in 1972 (Lesa completed her senior year at Central High), having left in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King. Bill Aldridge marched with King during the sanitation workers’ strike leading up to King’s murder. His conservative church, outraged by his pro–civil rights stance and progressive politics, planned to fire him, so he took a position in Princeton, New Jersey. There the family embraced the counterculture. “
Lesa’s mother was extremely liberal,” says Amy Gassner, who spent time at the Aldridges and, when younger, had Lesa as a babysitter. “She sort of had a free-love philosophy. We just adored her! All of us teenagers migrated to their house—I lost my virginity there!” “
You really had to do a lot to rebel at my house,” Lesa says.

•   •   •

Petite, high-spirited, and keenly intelligent, Lesa glowed in Alex’s presence. Though Alex and Karen had started dating while Lesa was at Sarah Lawrence, he soon made his intentions known to Aldridge. “
They’d been hanging out together,” says Lesa, “but I wouldn’t say it was like I stole him from Karen. It was obvious that he liked me—the way I had when I’d seen him that night. There was definitely a spark.”

Their first date was to an Arthur Murray dance class. “Alex had gotten a coupon for a free lesson, and he picked me up in his little white convertible with red seats and we waltzed for an hour,” Lesa recalls. “I was classy and intelligent and I think he liked that about me. I was no run-of-the-mill kind of gal.” She did not return to college, spending her time with Alex, who often stayed over at the Aldridge home.

Smitten, the two liked to watch old James Dean movies. Lesa had bought an acoustic guitar with money she’d earned babysitting, and Alex showed her a few chords and encouraged her to write songs. “A lot of what we did together was based around music,” Lesa says. “
I don’t think I’ve known anything quite as fine as when he was being sweet and dear to me. My heart just skipped a beat.” She realized soon after they met, though, that “the most beautiful man” could also be jealous and insecure, dark emotions that would grow over time.

Lesa’s sister Holliday, a high school senior, began dating Jody, who eventually moved into the Aldridge house. “
Her parents were pretty remarkable,” says Jody. “They changed my life in terms of reassurance and giving me support and encouragement. I had such incredible respect for them. Elizabeth was a really smart lady who was very individualistic with her own thoughts about cultural things and women’s roles, and a definite sense of direction for herself.”

•   •   •

Shortly after meeting Lesa, Alex also started spending time with twenty-five-year-old John Lightman, the bassist whom he’d hired for Big Star the previous November. Born on October 31, 1949, John played a jazz-tinged style with impeccable timing, perfect for the three-piece Big Star. His well-to-do East Memphis family owned the Malco movie theater chain and Park Bowling Lanes. He’d been to several colleges but primarily worked around town as a musician and at the family bowling alley. (One of John’s three brothers, Alan Lightman, is the physicist and best-selling author of
Einstein’s Dreams
and other books.)

To teach John the Big Star songs, Alex tried to pick up a copy of
#1 Record
at Ardent, but the album had all but disappeared. Even Poplar Tunes no longer stocked it. Finally, when John visited the Chilton home on Montgomery, Alex gave him one of the family’s copies and also played him
Radio City
. “
When I was learning the songs, Alex wanted me to invent new bass lines, more suited to a three-piece format,” John recalls. Alex also encouraged him to improvise as they started rehearsing with Jody at Ardent for an upcoming gig at Lafayette’s.

“Alex would introduce me to people as his new best friend,” says John. When one acquaintance asked Alex about the quality of John’s playing, he said, “I like him so much, it’s hard for me to judge.” But when John mentioned to people that he’d joined Big Star, he got troubling feedback: “Everybody was like, ‘We need to warn the new guy.’ Everybody that I would talk to would get this look on their face like, ‘Oh, man, you’re going to need a shrink, becoming a part of that band!’”

As
Radio City
’s release date approached, all concerned hoped it would fare better than Big Star’s debut. The PR department at Stax was still pushing the story that the label was thriving as it ventured into music other than R&B. A January 13 article in Memphis’s
Commercial Appeal
,
STAX EXPANDS WITH POP, C&W, GOSPEL
, stated that numerous personnel had been hired to help with the label’s new releases in other genres, and quoted Stax cofounder Jim Stewart as saying, “You have to always be creative and look into the future. There is no way to stand on what you have done in the past.” The reality, though, was that to
expand and increase its staff, release an increasing number of albums, and renew its contract with megastar Isaac Hayes, the label had had to take out large bank loans. In addition, since CBS had begun distributing Stax, its releases had not reached the market as they should. Columbia Record executives did not like the terms Al Bell and Clive Davis negotiated, and as a result, rather than distributing Stax’s product, CBS began warehousing the company’s releases, pressed in ever-larger quantities by Stax. Basically, CBS could put a stranglehold on Stax, not selling the thousands of records the Memphis label had financed.

“
The distribution never worked,” according to Stax historian Robert Gordon. “It never engaged. There was a vision between Al Bell and Clive Davis that could have made it work, but it was a tango only they could do. Clive’s firing totally scotched any chance of the Stax-CBS deal.”

John Fry had grown to regret that he’d signed with Stax and realized that things had only gotten worse since CBS entered the picture: “
You know how it is when new people come in, and there’s been this power struggle, they decide, ‘Well, if we didn’t like the guy, maybe we don’t like his deals.’ So then you get all the nonsense from the companies, and the whole thing just never did work for Stax, and if it’s not working for Stax, it’s not working for itty-bitty Ardent, and there you go. It wasn’t just awful for us. It basically took Stax off the playing field.”

In February Ardent issued a press release and artist biography to accompany the copies of
Radio City
it sent to hundreds of press and radio contacts, which explained the fate of its predecessor:

A month after release, Stax Records, Ardent’s distributor, reshuffled its entire operation in order to join forces with Columbia Records.
#1 Record
died in the shuffle. The album was re-released in March, but by this time Chris Bell had become disillusioned and left the group, leaving a threesome unable to perform at such a critical time. . . . Big Star reorganized itself and decided to continue as a trio.

Not mentioned, of course, was the fact that when Columbia Records executives first saw
Radio City’
s cover, some demanded that the Eggleston photo be replaced, due to its “pornographic” imagery, that is, the fragment of the sex poster seen on the red wall. John Fry went to bat for the cover, and Columbia backed down.

As it was, the ongoing problems between Stax and Columbia resulted in
very spotty distribution once again. Big Star fan Peter Jesperson, then working at Minneapolis’s major indie record store Oar Folkjokeopus, recalls that the shop couldn’t get shipments of
Radio City
and had to resort to buying copies in a chain store that had a handful. Other fans found the record in the discount bins or through mail-order several months after its release. Due to Ardent/Stax’s cost-cutting measures, print advertising for
Radio City
was at a minimum. And rather than issue a single to elicit AM radio play, the label execs waited to see if LP tracks were picked up by FM stations. Ardent eventually released two 45s.

Regardless, there was celebration in Midtown for
Radio City
’s February 1974 release, and more good reviews poured in. In the
Village Voice
Robert Christgau called the album “brilliant, addictive, definitively semi-popular, and all Alex Chilton. . . . The harmonies sound like the lead sheets are upside down and backwards, the guitar solos sound like screwball readymade pastiches, and the lyrics sound like love is strange. . . . Can an album be catchy and twisted at the same time?” Jon Tiven raved about
Radio City
in
Fusion
and
Zoo World
(“the album of the year is upon us”); in
Phonograph Record
Bud Scoppa described it as a “spellbinder, an ever-deepening work that is at once funny, sad, and frightening.” The trades all weighed in positively as well.

To take advantage of the buzz, on March 13, Big Star flew to New York to play a live concert on WLIR, in Hempstead, Long Island, followed by a string of gigs at Max’s Kansas City. With John Dando again working as their equipment manager, the group drove straight from LaGuardia to Hempstead’s Ultra-Sonic studios for a quick rehearsal before the radio broadcast. The band ran through mostly
Radio City
songs, with Alex improvising guitar leads on “O My Soul” and “She’s a Mover.” After the rehearsal the guys wanted to leave for lunch, but the radio producer didn’t want to risk their being late for the live broadcast.

When DJ Jim Cameron asked Alex on air about the new record, quoting Tiven’s
Zoo World
pronouncement, a cranky Alex, who was tired and hungry after a long day of traveling and rehearsal, retorted, “Yeah, that’s, uh, nice—I hope it sells,” later mumbling that the first record was nowhere to be found. Cameron then pushed on, asking him what it was like touring with the Box Tops as a teen. “Pretty scummy,” said Alex, “about as scummy as now.” When the DJ then wondered if Big Star’s Anglo-tinged pop was “anachronistic,” Alex paused to weigh the question, this time answering with sincerity: “I haven’t decided yet—it just sounds melodious to my ears.”

Though the band felt underrehearsed and nervous, they performed a tight and energetic set, opening with “September Gurls.” Alex played muscular
guitar, filling the space with his chordal leads, and his vocals were strong. He made the occasional quip in his song intros, introducing “O My Soul” as “our religious number.” Jody, who was second up with “Way Out West,” remembers, “
When Big Star got onstage, a lot of the energy came from being nervous. It was always kind of a scary, neurotic experience—I think it’s evident on the live broadcast,” a tape of which later circulated as a bootleg before being released on CD eighteen years later. The rhythm section took a break midset for Alex’s solo acoustic numbers. He introduced “Thirteen” as an “anachronistic” tune since it “was written about when I was thirteen.” His version of Loudon Wainwright’s “Motel Blues” was one of his best solo performances yet, and “El Goodo” and “I’m in Love with a Girl” were also inspired. When the band returned, they finished the broadcast with “In the Street,” followed by the moody “You Get What You Deserve” and “Daisy Glaze” and uptempo “Back of a Car” and “She’s a Mover.” Exhausted, Alex stretched to hit the high notes.

The first stop on the drive to Manhattan was a liquor store, where Alex bought a bottle of booze, which he proceeded to polish off. This time, to cut costs, the band was booked at the budget Gramercy Park Hotel, a faded old beauty fallen into disrepair, which Alex nicknamed the Gram Parsons Hotel. That night Alex and John Lightman, who shared a room, took a taxi to see blues songwriter and bassist Willie Dixon perform at a Village club. John Dando and Jody split a room, and while they were out, it was burglarized, and Dando’s expensive new portable radio was stolen. With the police investigating in the next room, a drunken Alex tried to get their attention by making a racket, attempting to dislodge the TV and throw it out the window, à la Led Zeppelin. Since it was bolted to the stand, he only managed to tear down the curtains, and the cops left without noticing his antics. “I thought he was
going to get a hernia,” Lightman remembers. “I was exhausted and collapsed on the bed, lying there on my back looking at him rant and rave, running around the room trying to be a bad boy.”