A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (29 page)

As coproducer with Alex, Jim enlisted Neutrons and Moloch guitarist Lee Baker (who’d appeared on
3rd
) and local axman Mike Ladd, along with bassist and tuba player Jim Lancaster. Richard Rosebrough, who had left Ardent to work at Phillips, engineered some of the tracks, playing drums on others. Ross Johnson, a novice drummer who would also participate in various ways, had just formed a punk band, the Malverns, with Gail Elise Clifton, who stopped by the studio during the first night of recording. Afterward Alex went to Clifton’s house, where she shot portraits of him sitting in a chair, wearing “
classic jeans—that’s all he ever wore—with a big white shirt with the shirttail out, and he’s holding a joint,” she recalls.

Jim Dickinson considered the Phillips recording sessions of 1978 an extension of “Stroke It Noel” from
Big Star 3rd
: “‘
Stroke It, Noel’ is brilliant and leads right up to
Flies
. It’s almost the next moment—the beginning of
Like Flies
to me.” Just as Alex had often sprung songs on his New York band, in the studio he decided to cut numbers the players didn’t know. Jim surprised Alex as well. As Alex later told musician Epic Soundtracks:

When I conceived of doing the record, I thought maybe Jim and I and one or two other people would record, and when I turned up for the session, Jim had his whole band there! . . . I thought . . . “hmmm, well, this isn’t what I had in mind really!” . . . but I didn’t say anything. I just thought we should try it an’ see how it goes. We started recordin’ an’ I thought, ‘Man, these guys don’t know the songs . . .’ an’ I was trying to teach them, and they’d go, ‘Yeah, we know the songs,’ and then just go and play the first thing they thought of. So we were rollin’ the tape and we were doin’ all this outrageous soundin’ stuff. . . . An’ I thought ‘Man that must sound terrible.’ But when I went in and heard what we’d been doin’, man, it was just this incredible soundin’ stuff.

“
Jim has a remarkable sense of knowing when to record you, to have that tape rolling,” Richard Rosebrough points out. “He is really interested in the true psychodynamics of what is going on. He doesn’t necessarily want to get the best performance or the best sound, but he wants to get it when it’s really the most interesting.”

Working with the Cramps inspired Alex to go for a “trashy” sound, he said, which Dickinson heartily endorsed. Rather than cut pop-style songs, as he had for Elektra, Alex leaned toward some country obscurities he’d been playing in New York: “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena” was the Carter Family’s 1930s take on a minstrel song, while a more recent number, “Alligator Man,” had been a hit by Cajun artist Jimmy C. Newman in 1961. Alex also selected a few rock & roll nuggets: the Bell Notes’ 1959 hit, “I’ve Had It,” with Dickinson doing the lead vocal, and Troy Shondell’s “Girl After Girl,” from 1961. With Alex singing and playing guitar alongside Lee Baker, they cut “Boogie Shoes,” a then-little-heard B-side of a single by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, which Alex had discovered when Timothee was continuously listening to the A-side, “(Shake, Shake, Shake) Shake Your Booty,” a huge hit in 1976. (Though Alex hadn’t seen much of Timothee while in New York, he’d spent time with him since his return.) Over three nights of recording, Alex also cut a few originals: “Hook or Crook,” “My Rival,” and “Come On Baby.” The last, a song of teenage lust, would get transformed in the studio, with new lyrics, becoming the lusty “Rock Hard.” The title track also had a previous incarnation: “
We used to do the song ‘Like Flies on Sherbert,’” Chris Stamey remembers, “but it was called ‘Baby You’re Okay,’ and that was a song Ronnie Spector did—the same chords and everything. Alex rewrote the lyrics.”

Off-the-cuff takes, including false starts, sometimes with Alex breaking into laughter while warbling, were the goal. Equipment buzzes, feedback, distortion, and high-pitched electronic noises made their way onto tracks—intentionally or accidentally. Jim attacked a doghouse bass with a broomstick and pounded on a toy piano and a cheesy synth as if they were a baby grand and a Hammond B-3. “
Sherbert
was pretty crazy,” Richard Rosebrough recalls. “But it was less strained than
3rd
because all of the Big Star stuff had broken off and was history at that point.”

•   •   •

When Lesa returned from Europe, she accompanied Alex to a session one night, singing the childlike nursery rhyme “2+2 Is 4” and a slowed-down version of “Bangkok,” emphasizing the second syllable of the title. Alex also cut the keyboard-and-drum-machine-fueled “Baby Doll,” inspired by the 1956 Elia Kazan film starring Carroll Baker. (For that track, Lesa simulated an orgasm—à la Jane Birkin on “Je T’aime,” but the overdub wasn’t included on the final mix, though Jim used it years later on a Tommy Hoehn recording.) As on
3rd,
Alex recorded numerous songs and various versions—eventually he cut around twenty tracks total—planning to choose among them when sequencing the album. The mixing would not be completed for over a year, with a tug of war between Alex and Jim over the mixes.

“
So much of it was recorded at Phillips through dubious equipment that it really needed a little fixing in the mixing, and it didn’t get it,” said Jim. Alex, still smarting from his experience with
3rd,
refused to relinquish control of the tapes. Though he agreed that Phillips’s facilities made it sound as if they were “recording in a cardboard box,” Alex wanted to mix the tapes himself at Ardent. He would finally complete the mixing and rerecord some of the songs in August ’79. “Baby Doll,” like Lesa’s contributions, would not make the cut, but the title inspired the album cover, photographed by Bill Eggleston: a bedraggled doll collection posed on the hood of a Cadillac Deville. By then the title had been changed to the more polite
Like Flies on Sherbert.
The title’s misspelling of “sherbet” came from Mary Lindsay Dickinson, who spelled it incorrectly when submitting the text for the sleeve layouts. Everyone decided the mistake just felt right.

Some of the craziness during the
Sherbert
sessions was documented by a kind of guerrilla video-production company called Televista, founded by a pair of Arkansas-born musicologists who’d become Memphis provocateurs, Randall Lyon and Gus Nelson, aided and abetted by Pat Rainer. Alex knew Randall and Pat well; soon he and Nelson would become running buddies. The Televista
crew were running their cameras the night that Alex and Jim dug out artifacts from Sam Phillips’s former clients, still stored in his third-floor office. Alex donned Jerry Lee Lewis’s white blazer while Jim traipsed around in an oversized cape previously worn by Isaac Hayes.

Drinking and partying in the studio were constant. “
Alex was morally at a point of drunken debauchery and wanting to go lower,” said Rosebrough. “I don’t really know what was going on in his mind.” One of those debauched nights occurred at the Procape while Alex performed alongside Jim Lancaster, puffing on his tuba. Alex got a surprise when the daughter of an esteemed historian suddenly made a move for Alex’s fly.
She “blew Alex right there onstage while he was singing and playing guitar,” says Lancaster. “He turned red in the face a little bit, then he came, and that was it.”

Alex returned to New York City the spring of ’78 to fulfill his promise to produce Chris Stamey’s friends from the H-Bombs, bunking at Stephanie’s loft on the Bowery. Mitch Easter and Peter Holsapple, who’d driven from North Carolina to record, picked him up every day for the trip to Trod Nossel in Connecticut. “
The sessions were about five days,” says Peter, who began the project in awe of working with Alex but soon became disillusioned. “Alex spent a lot of time sleeping in the car and sometimes at the studio behind the board as well,” Peter recalls. “It didn’t strike me as what you call ‘active’ production. He was pretty hung over. It was my first experience being produced, and I wasn’t sure how to take criticism from my idol. Alex tried to get me to free up more with what I was playing. That wasn’t what I’d expected to hear from the guy who made the articulate and pristine
Radio City
. It was hard to follow his instructions, and I didn’t want to give up that much of what I’d heard in my own head for the songs. So we came away from nearly a week there with eight unfinished tracks—four of mine, four of Mitch’s—and no clue of what to do next.” Stamey recalls Alex coaxing a dramatic vocal from Holsapple by demonstrating how Peter Lorre would have done it.

Peter’s “Big Black Truck” and “Death Garage,” cut at Trod Nossel, would be completed in North Carolina and issued on Chris Stamey’s Car label in 1978. Another Car release, says Stamey, came via a suggestion from Alex: “
I remember Alex coming over and saying that Chris Bell had this song called ‘I Am the Cosmos’ and he thought it was kind of hilarious, because the self-absorbed dejected lyrics were so typical of Chris. I remember him reciting it dramatically, and he would just laugh. But Alex was promoting Chris—he clearly thought the song was great.” Stamey contacted Bell, who played him the recording over the
phone, with lyrics like
“I am the cosmos / I am the wind / But that won’t get you back again,”
and sonics much in the vein of
#1 Record
. Arrangements were made, and Stamey released the first-ever Chris Bell 45, with “Cosmos” backed by “You and Your Sister,” featuring Alex’s background vocals. Several publications would review “Cosmos” and “Bangkok” in tandem, typically preferring “Cosmos” and emphasizing how much Bell sounded like Big Star and how Chilton had clearly abandoned that style.

In April the North Carolina contingent—Holsapple, Easter, and drummer Will Rigby (who’d met Alex during a 1977 visit to New York)—decided to make a pilgrimage to Memphis to find Chris Bell, visit Alex, and possibly relocate there to start a new band. Their first stop was the Chilton home, where Alex warmly invited them in, played some of his favorite records (including, over and over, Wreckless Eric’s U.K. single, “Semaphore Signals”), then showed them around town. “
Alex was really nice,” Will recalls. “For him to hang out with us as much as he did was way beyond the call of duty, because we were just nobodies from Bumfuck.”

The next day the visitors set out in search of Chris Bell, who Alex said was managing a branch of his family’s fast-food chain, Danver’s. “We found the Danver’s in the middle of the day,” says Will, “and we walk in and say, ‘Is Chris Bell here?’ He comes out wearing his shirt and tie and his paper hat and sits with us at a table for a couple of minutes and says, ‘I can’t really talk now—I’ll meet you at the Bombay Bicycle Club [in Midtown] after work.’ We met him that night and were trying to make conversation, but the comment I remember from him was ‘I don’t know, rock & roll just kind of went dead for me.’”

They invited Chris to accompany them to listen to Alex’s playback sessions for
Flies,
and, Will says, “[it was] so
crystal clear to me how reluctant he was to go to Sam Phillips’s studio” because of the strain between Chris and Alex:
“We get to the studio and the vibe is bad. Alex was again cordial to us, but Chris Bell was really ill at ease. . . . [He] was sitting very primly by the door [in the anteroom], obviously wanting to escape as quickly as possible—and in fact, he did leave before we did.” (Years later, Rigby would write and record a song about Bell called “Paper Hat.”)

•   •   •

Neither Alex, Chris, or anyone else from Ardent knew at the time that California-based Fantasy Records, which had bought the Stax inventory of master recordings at the company’s 1976 bankruptcy auction, had just made a deal with EMI. The U.K.’s largest record company would issue
#1 Record
and
Radio City
in
England for the first time, as a double album. Coincidentally, John Fry had just inked a contract with the British label Aura to finally release twelve songs from Alex’s 1975 recordings, to be issued as
Big Star: The Third Album
. Shortly thereafter, the indie label PVC would release a different version of the LP in America (with fourteen tracks). Jim Dickinson made suggestions about the sequencing, but basically the reissue labels chose the songs they deemed most commercial. Alex was not informed about the selected tracks, nor about the upcoming releases.

He did know, however, about a new Japanese LP called
Alex Chilton: One Day in New York
, which Charles Ball, in collaboration with Jon Tiven, had licensed to the Asian label Trio. One side comprised the tracks from Alex’s 1977 Ork EP (with Tiven getting cowriting credit on all tracks); the other featured a live set billed as “Alex Chilton and the Cossacks,” recorded at CBGB with Chris’s four-track and mixed by Alex.

During the annual Memphis in May outdoor fest, Alex, unannounced, jumped onstage to front his pals Mud Boy and the Neutrons. As Robert Gordon described the scene in
It Came from Memphis
, “
their impromptu set, including a menacing run-through of Chilton’s hit, ‘The Letter,’ introduced punk rock to Memphis at large,” with Alex “wound up tight like a heart attack, stomping the stage.” Gail Clifton recalls that “people
booed him. I remember him getting off the stage and feeling bad for him. Maybe he felt bad—I think he did.”

The following week Alex got together with Richard Rosebrough and Chris Thomson, a roommate of Gus Nelson and Randall Lyon’s from Arkansas, to do a little busking at the Mid-America pedestrian mall, a shopping district on Main Street. Richard’s snare drum “sounded like a gunshot,” said Alex, who placed his brown felt hat on the ground for tips. “I kind of liked that,” Alex said later of the combo he named the Yard Dogs (and which would occasionally include Ross Johnson).

Though most pedestrians were puzzled by the off-kilter combo playing blues and rockabilly riffs on acoustic guitar and drums, the combo won big fans in Lesa Aldridge and Gail Clifton. “
My favorite era of Alex was the Yard Dogs,” says Gail. “They were my favorite band and influenced me more than any other. Richard Rosebrough once told me, ‘My snare was bouncing off the buildings downtown so loud that the cops came one day.’ Lesa and I were their only little groupies—she didn’t know that I had slept with Alex when she was out of town. So we would go down to where they were busking and just scream our heads off—
‘Yard Dogs!’
”