A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (28 page)

Alex had one last thing to do before leaving town. He’d written a catchy new tune with a psychobilly sound and twistedly funny, topical lyrics, called “Bangkok.” Lesa’s mother was moving from France to the Thai capital, and the pair’s talk of the city’s seamy side had inspired the song. Charles got the money together for Alex to cut it at Big Apple Recording Studios in Manhattan. Alex decided to play all the instruments himself, with Chris joining in on maracas. “Bangkok” and the Cramps were the ticket that would soon take Alex across the ocean to London, but first home to Memphis.

Alex relished the idea of bringing punk rock to Memphis. Though the Cramps didn’t consider themselves anything other than rock & rollers following in the footsteps of high-octane rockabilly and garage bands from the ’50s and ’60s, the black-clad combo caused a stir just walking down the street (something most car-addicted Memphians rarely did) in late 1977.

Sidney and Mary Chilton had sold their home on Montgomery Street while Alex was living in New York and moved into a smaller house on Harbert in the Central Gardens neighborhood, not far from Midtown. Alex’s son, Timothee, nine, had been living with them for a while (upon Suzi’s request), but they made room for Alex and some of the Cramps. Ghoulish guitarist Bryan Gregory hit it off with Mary, and the two enjoyed sipping cocktails, chain-smoking, and watching TV together. Sidney had started his own theatrical lighting business, continued to play piano, and belonged to a jazz ensemble that performed on Sunday afternoons at Trader Dick’s. Some of the Cramps stayed with Lesa, now residing in an apartment across from Ardent.

The Cramps’ time spent recording at Ardent was brief. With engineer John Hampton, Alex quickly captured five songs played live, trying to re-create what the Cramps did on CBGB’s stage: the Trashmen’s “Surfin’ Bird” (already borrowed by the Ramones for their third LP), extended with a rave-up coda; Roy Orbison’s “Domino”; Ricky Nelson’s “Lonesome Town”; Jack Scott’s “The Way I Walk”; and best of all, Lux and Ivy’s “Human Fly.” Not every idea panned out. “
One day Alex wanted to make the biggest noise that’s ever been recorded,” says Hampton, “and I said, ‘Okay,’ and he said, ‘Got any folding metal chairs?’ I stacked up a bunch of those and made this big pile of stuff in the middle of the
room and I had a couple of mics on it, and Bryan threw a cinder block at it. . . . Well, it just went
‘bonk’
—that’s what ended up on tape.”

Alex arranged for the psychobilly band to perform at Memphis State and appear on the Southwestern station WLYX. Alex told everyone the Cramps were “the greatest band I ever heard,” and he was particularly fond of “Domino” and “The Way I Walk.” Ironically, the New Yorkers were intimidated by the Memphis locals. “
There were guys with guns, man . . . all kinds of crazy things,” Lux later told journalist Nick Kent. “He’s a real Southern boy, is Alex. He believes in the Lord, and the Lord sure as hell takes care of him.”

“According to Lux, Chilton had made many enemies in Memphis through his unrestrained behavior, and death threats from irate good ol’ boys who had lost their women to him were delivered daily,” Ian Johnston reported in
The Wild Wild World of the Cramps
. The band also met
3rd
’s producer, Jim Dickinson, who whisked the Cramps into Sam Phillips’s studio on Madison, opened in 1960 after Phillips moved out of the original Sun building at 706 Union. Screaming the lyrics like a madman, “Jimmy” Dickinson, backed by the Cramps, cut a fast-and-furious version of Sonny Burgess’s “Red Headed Woman.”

Ork wanted to release the Cramps records, and Terry had been negotiating with David Bates at London’s Phonogram Records about distributing those and other Ork projects in the U.K. Ork and Phonogram financed a trip to England for Alex, Lux, and Ivy; the plan was to mix the Cramps recordings and to have Alex cut some tracks, including the flip side to “Bangkok” for his upcoming single. Before jetting off, Alex played at Max’s Kansas City in early December with opening act the H-Bombs, another North Carolina band of Big Star acolytes, including songwriters and guitarists Peter Holsapple and Mitch Easter. “That show signified the beginning of the end of our band,” says Fran Kowalski. Afterward Alex agreed to produce tracks for the H-Bombs at Trod Nossel in a few months for possible release by Ork.

Charles Ball, Alex, Lux, and Ivy flew to London soon after. The first order of business was for Alex to mix the Cramps’ Memphis recordings. “
To this day I will swear to what happened,” Charles Ball recalled almost thirty-five years later. “Alex mixed most of the Cramps tracks with his stocking feet. We were in Olympic Studios, where the Stones and everybody had cut their records—though we weren’t in the best room. Nevertheless, just to watch him use his toes there was amazing. He was masterful in the studio.” Alex also cut “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine.” He played all the instruments, except drums, which were handled by Chris Merrick Hughes (who would go on to produce and drum for
Adam and the Ants and Tears for Fears, for whom he cowrote “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”). Inspired by Lux’s histrionic vocal style and the obsessive protagonist of the catchy song, by the Seeds’ Sky Saxon, Alex emoted like a deranged stalker, backed by noisy guitars. He got a charge out of working with engineer Phil Chapman, who’d mixed Brian Eno’s
Here Come the Warm Jets
, one of Alex’s favorite LPs.

Within a music scene ruled by punk bands like the Sex Pistols and the Clash, Alex was interviewed by U.K. publication
Sounds
about his career history and future plans. The journalist Sandy Robertson found him at Olympic “
wandering around with no shoes, musing over the idea of overdubbing a snare drum onto a newly recorded track.” Alex told him of the Seeds song he’d just cut: “When I first heard that [original] record, it was like my first reaction to [? and the Mysterians’] ’96 Tears.’ I said, ‘God! This is the worst thing I’ve heard!’ But now ‘96 Tears’ is one of the most powerful rock & roll records ever made.” (And in fact Alex had added it to his live repertoire.) Asked if he intentionally tried to
not
sound like Big Star, he replied, “I don’t have to try. . . . I feel like I cover a lot of different styles, but the people in that band were very strictly into one style, like English rock in the ’60s. . . . Every band I’ve been in, I always felt like I’ve been working on about one-third of my own talents. . . . There’s a whole lot of black music that I’m into, and country music, old jazz. . . .” Whether or not he realized it, Alex had just described his musical blueprint for the next three decades.

As for the possibility of recording for Phonogram, “Record executives tend to panic around me,” Alex told Sandy. “It’s what I do. When I say, ‘That’s good,’ it scares ’em, ’cause they don’t understand. I’m really hot on the idea of getting on TV with just an electric guitar and no band . . . loud and feeding back and doing a couple songs real outrageous, just like I had a band behind me. . . . I’m into the sound you make when you go into the studio spontaneously and have a kickass wild evening. . . . I’m trying to steer clear of business arrangements.”

Not surprisingly, Charles’s meetings with Phonogram’s David Bates came to naught, and other tracks Alex recorded were left behind at Olympic, with both Ork and Phonogram refusing to pay for the tapes. Back in New York, “
Terry [Ork] and I just did not see eye to eye when David Bates decided he didn’t want to make an Alex Chilton album,” Charles recalled. Ork and Ball acrimoniously parted ways, and lawsuits ensued, halting sales of Ork releases. “
Terry ‘Orkus’ is a big fat queer in New York who haunts the avant-garde circuit and keeps Richard Lloyd in the junk when he can,” Alex later told his friend Gordon Alexander for an article in
Dixie Flyer
magazine. “You know, I like Terry Ork,” Alex
continued. “I suppose he is a scoundrel. But he’s about to get his scene cleaned up and start again. With that many young boys to milk records out of, it’s a perfect situation.” Ork’s next label venture would also crumble, with creditors left unpaid and Terry going into hiding.

On his own, Charles Ball launched Lust/Unlust to issue “no wave” artists like Lydia Lunch’s band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks. The Cramps decided to release their singles themselves; in April “The Way I Walk”/“Surfin’ Bird” would be issued on their own Vengeance label (Master #666), with “Human Fly”/“Domino” following in November. As for Alex’s “Bangkok”/“Can’t Seem to Make You Mine,” Ball cooked up the Fun imprint, its label mirroring the classic Sun logo. For the single’s sleeve, Alex wanted a photograph by Godlis, one of a series of portraits the two had worked on. “
We’d had a drink, and Alex said, ‘Let’s go out on the street and try to do one of your pictures,’” Godlis recalls. “I had no idea at the time, but he was trying to get a shot for his 45. . . . I think it was his idea to go out to that median strip on the Bowery and shoot the shot that ended up being the ‘Bangkok’ cover. It was the third time we tried, and I remember him saying, ‘How’d it go?’ and I said, ‘We got it.’ I developed the film, and there was a raindrop on the lens, and it spread the light in such a way that it didn’t fuck up his face. It looked perfect.” (An outtake is on the cover of this book.)

Ball pressed up a few thousand copies of the record, generating reviews in the now proliferating independent music magazines, like
New York Rocker
(which preferred
the B-side
)
. The record also caught the attention of Tom Waits, who loved it. Under the sway of Lux Interior, Alex’s insinuating vocal style is Memphis-drenched rockabilly, backed by blasts of twang-punk guitar.

Bleecker Bob’s—Alex’s old haunt and now a major carrier of indie 45s—barely stocked the record. A few months earlier Alex had spent a lost weekend with Bob’s girlfriend, so he wasn’t keen on carrying the single. When Charles discovered that “Bangkok,” as well as his label’s other 45s, were not represented in the store’s bins, he infuriated high-strung Bob even more. “
We always had problems,” Charles said, laughing at the memory. “I came in there and he was out of all my records, and so I pulled a pair of scissors out of my pocket and I cut his telephone line. He never forgave me for that.”

Those kinds of antics had angered some of Alex’s bandmates all along, primarily Fran. “
I’ve stayed in the music business ever since, and I don’t think I’ve ever met a more inept person,” Fran says of Ball. “He didn’t impress me as a businessman, he didn’t impress me as a person, and he only had one way of acting, and it was purely emotional. I can’t remember anything good he ever did,
and he tried to push me out of the band at one point. I remember having a conversation with Alex, and I said, ‘There has to be somebody better, don’t you think?’ And Alex said, ‘No, you’re going to see—they’re all equally bad.’”

Directly after returning from London, a jetlagged Alex took his band to Philadelphia’s Hot Club for a sparsely populated Tuesday-night gig, during which he introduced two songs he’d soon be recording in Memphis, “Hook or Crook” and “Come On Baby” (later retitled “Rock Hard”). “
We never rehearsed the new songs,” says Fran. “Alex would just turn around and say, ‘In the key of C,
1-2-3-4
!’ and launch into it. We’d go through two or three verses and he’d just look back over his shoulder at me and say, ‘Take it!’”

By the second set Alex was sloshed, and the band struggled to keep up, sometimes not bothering to accompany Alex at all. They’d grown accustomed to improvising on his impromptu song selections, but when the set ended with “a medley of every song we’ve ever heard,” as Alex gleefully announced, the anarchic dissonance irked Chris and Lloyd, while Fran merrily played along, regardless of key or tempo. “
That was the end of a chaotic period,” Fran reflects. It would be Fran and Lloyd’s final set with Alex, and Chris’s last show with Alex for nearly a year.

Alex still had his derelict apartment on East Ninth Street, which now had no electricity. He hadn’t paid rent in two months and was about to be evicted, so he packed his duffel bag once more and headed back to Memphis in time for his twenty-seventh birthday. A week later the Sex Pistols played their second show in America, on Friday, January 6, 1978, at the Taliesyn Ballroom in Memphis. The venue was a nineteenth-century mansion on Union Avenue that had once housed an intellectual center for progressive women of the Gilded Age who participated in socially conscious civic activities. The Sex Pistols’ promoter had sold 900 tickets to the first bona fide U.K. punk concert in Memphis, though the venue’s capacity was ony 725. Arriving early, Alex helped set up equipment, along with his pal Robert Johnson, and tuned Steve Jones’s guitar for him. A small riot ensued outside the venue when the room filled and the remaining ticket holders weren’t allowed in. Sid Vicious got “lost” while trying to score drugs, and when the band finally hit the stage, around 11 p.m., Johnny Rotten sneered, “I hear you all listen to Dolly Parton down here. Are you still celebrating Elvis’s birthday?” When audience members began to throw things at the group, Rotten informed them, “I’m not here for your amusement, you’re here for mine. So behave yourself and don’t throw things at me. I don’t like it.”

Alex never talked much about the concert, but Jim Dickinson later told writer
Joss Hutton the Pistols gig “was
entirely life-changing for me. . . . I got an entirely different picture of it than everybody else I talked to but I loved it! . . . What Sid was doing was one of the best acts that I’ve ever seen in my whole life—musically as well. I mean, it wasn’t just a visually defined thing, what he was doing with that instrument was [laughs] unbelievable! He was jacking the bass off with both hands, oh, that I could’ve recorded it—he must’ve been making a beautiful sound. Everyone else in Memphis abhorred it and I just thought ‘shit, yeah, bring me some more of this!’”

Jim was in the perfect frame of mind to produce Alex’s next album, with the working title
Like Flies on Shit
. The recordings came together via an arrangement with Sid Selvidge, who’d started his own label, Peabody, in 1976 to release his LP,
The Cold of the Morning
. Like his friend Bill Eggleston, Sid came from a wealthy background, and after growing up in Greenville, Mississippi, and going to boarding school in Tennessee, he attended Southwestern at Memphis. He and Dickinson began playing together in a jug band of sorts; their New Beale Street Sheiks cut a 45 in 1964. Sid’s dulcet tones graced a solo release on Stax’s Enterprise subsidiary in ’69; he also guested on Jim’s
Dixie Fried
and sang in Jim’s raucous roots combo Mud Boy and the Neutrons. After Alex sat in with Sid several times at the Procape, the idea for an album on Peabody “
turned into a discussion that evolved from there,” according to Sid, a university anthropology instructor.