A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (30 page)

Alex had helped Gail put her words to music for the Malverns, and Lesa and Gail’s sister Marcia (now dating Lesa’s former beau drummer Bernard Patrick) had started talking about forming a band. Soon Gail would join what would be Memphis’s first all-gal punk band. Alex helped come up with their name: the Klitz. A few months later, when they decided they needed a bassist, they enlisted Amy Gassner, who’d just returned to Memphis after living in San Francisco. Amy had harbored a crush on Alex since meeting him years earlier when hanging out at the Aldridge home.

Peter Holsapple and his girlfriend Melinda Pendleton moved to Memphis that summer, and between working long hours at a T-shirt silk-screening company, he sought to make a record at Phillips. Alex reintroduced him to Richard Rosebrough, whom he’d met at the studio in April when Richard had taken Peter aside and said of the
Sherbert
sessions, “This will either change the face of pop music as we know it—or fail miserably.”

Richard got Peter reasonably priced studio time in off-hours, and he cut several songs, with Richard on drums. One night they stopped by the Chilton home, where Alex was sitting around with an acoustic guitar. “
He was playing something by the Seekers, and it was just beautiful,” Peter recalls. “I was astonished, because it didn’t seem like that was what he was up to at the time. I think he really delights in confounding people.” A few nights later Alex dropped by the studio and cut a few tunes with Peter, including a ditty Alex called “Tennis Bum,” a “Woolly Bully” soundalike and clearly an ode to Chris Bell. “Martial Law” was Alex’s response to the curfew imposed in Memphis after a fire department and police strike in August. Two days later, fed up with scraping by in Memphis, Peter moved to New York. Around this time, when Mary Lindsay Dickinson saw Alex with his mother en route to Goldsmith’s department store, Alex told her, “I have three records out, and my mother still has to buy me shirts.”

With the release of Big Star’s albums in Britain and subsequent rave reviews, talk turned to a possible Big Star reunion. The U.K. music papers were abuzz with such gossip, some reporting that the members had agreed to play together until—depending on which paper you read—either Alex or Chris backed out. In reality, Jody happened to be traveling in Europe then, and Andy was busy in Fort Worth, where he worked as an engineer designing aircraft for Lockheed. After complaining that EMI hadn’t even bothered to send him the LP, Alex told
Sounds
, “
It wouldn’t be a bad idea temporarily to play some dates and see how good we could get together. At first I didn’t feel like I should get together with Chris and Jody, but after a while I started thinking about it, and Chris was
coming around here asking me to play . . . but as soon as I say yes, Chris has just disappeared. We’re both ready to do it, but I’m not sure he can get along with me. . . . I don’t have much money, so if EMI wants to back a tour, that’s good, but otherwise it’d be whatever I can scrape together on my own.”

When a U.K. tour didn’t materialize, Alex traveled to New York for a pair of shows over Labor Day weekend, September 1 and 2, 1978, at Max’s Kansas City with Chris Stamey and, on drums, Will Rigby. Chris was now vocalist and guitarist of his own band, the dB’s, which Will had moved to Manhattan to join, along with North Carolina bassist Gene Holder. (Holsapple would eventually join as well, adding to the band’s repertoire the songs he’d just recorded in Memphis.) Alex arrived the day of the performance, so there was no rehearsal or even a sound check. But on some songs the trio locked in and played two lively though uneven sets each night. One of the most amusing segues was when they played Sleepy John Estes’s “President Kennedy,” followed by the Beach Boys’ “Caroline, No,” with Alex quipping at the end, “Okay, that’s enough of the Kennedys.”

Big Star fan Doug Hagedorn tracked down Alex on the phone, and the two discussed bringing him to Austin to participate in a Big Star reunion gig in early November at Austin punk club Raul’s. Jody, who had just returned to Memphis, had agreed to participate, but when Andy Hummel begged off, Doug brought in bassist Mark Eby, another Big Star acolyte, from Oklahoma. Alex arrived a few nights before the gig and hung out with Stephanie Chernikowski, in town from New York. He also became acquainted with a couple of University of Texas students and music fans, Donna Rose and Susan Bunn; the four, who bonded over their mutual admiration for Brian Eno, spent an evening drinking at—and getting ejected from—a kicker bar before going with Alex to KUT Radio to appear on Neil Ruttenberg’s late-night show, “Rock of Ages.”

Sounding as if he (and Neil) had crashed a pajama party, Alex entertained the gals, who joined in singing Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas” (a recording he said he’d finally found after three years of searching), “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” and “Lorena” and clapped along with the Cramps’ “The Way I Walk.” Tipsy, Alex at one point excused himself to go to the bathroom. When asked why Big Star broke up, he slurred, “Chris Bell is a homosexual,” to which the DJ replied, “An omnisexual?” and Alex said, “Yeah,
omni
, an omnisexual.” There was much chat about Big Star (“that band changed a lot of people’s heads”), his forthcoming record (“I’m releasing it all by myself”), the Box Tops (“
I
am the man who sang ‘The Letter’”), and Memphis—“the home of rock & roll,” Alex said proudly.

At one point in the broadcast, playing the churlish punk, Alex performed a song so distasteful that Jim Dickinson had erased the tape after Alex recorded it at Phillips: “Riding Through the Reich,” sung to the tune of “Jingle Bells,” featured lyrics that Alex said were found among the papers of mass murderer Frederick Cowan, a white supremacist who collected Nazi memorabilia and shot and killed coworkers in New Rochelle, New York, in 1977:
“Riding through the Reich, in a big Mercedes-Benz / Killing lots of kikes, making lots of friends.”
The radio station’s switchboard went crazy as he sang it and “another Nazi number,” “Lili Marlene,” with the girls harmonizing.

“Who needs money when you have love?” Alex asked as they signed off at 2 a.m.

Alex also made an appearance early one morning in the American Studies classroom of Professor Jerry Dean at the University of Texas, where he performed three of his most provocative songs—“Rock Hard,” “Riding Through the Reich” (before which he apologized in case he should offend anyone), and a twangy version of “Lorena.” Alex was subdued, thoughtful, and earnest while questioned by Dean about his career, punk rock, and the independent music scene. On the success of “The Letter”: “It was just
the same old trip that rock & roll’s always been, of white people trying to sound like black people, it always works. I don’t know that we were trying to sound black, but it succeeded.” On punk: “The punk thing was right where I wanted to go, because these were people who were going crazy, and it seemed to be real rebellion against . . . [what] the seventies have represented, like the late fifties with the payola scandals, without the scandals. The corporations have control over what the radio plays, they make hit records out of trash, . . . and the punk scene represented to me the backlash against the corporate milquetoast that’s been served up to the public.” On music journalism: “The rock press has always been the best part of the system. They’ll accept anything if it’s good, and they’ll write about it and they’ll tell their friends. I still think that most records are really sold by word of mouth, people telling their friends about it, and playing the record.”

Alex’s first solo gig south of Memphis came on Friday and Saturday nights, November 3 and 4, at Raul’s, nearly the only game in town for punk. As much as he professed to go for the chaotic, sometimes-atonal M.O. of punk, at gigs he still concerned himself with the acoustics, and the appearance at Raul’s was no different: “I can’t hear—is the sound all right?” he asked the audience. The gig started with a straightforward presentation of Big Star songs spanning all
three albums, opening with “Jesus Christ” and following with “In the Street.” Jody played his distinctive drum parts, and Alex delivered close replicas of his solos from
#1 Record
and
Radio City
. The bassist clearly knew Andy Hummel’s parts. The songs were high-energy and tight, with Alex singing earnestly and hitting the high notes. Things deteriorated the next night; after increasingly crazy sets, a discouraged Jody left, considering their performance “miserable” and “horrible.”

Alex, though, was still striving toward his punk ideal, as he had described it to Dean’s class: “Good rock & roll started from the rockabilly singers of the fifties. It has always been wild and out of control, and you had a real chaotic sense, and the punk thing has brought that back pretty strongly. To me, it’s just good rock & roll. Rock & roll is supposed to be out of control, and it’s crazy and it’s supposed to drive you crazy.”

Returning home, Alex continued to work on mixing and adding to
Flies
. He disliked the sequencing, song choices, and certain performances on
Big Star 3rd
,
and this resentment added to mounting tension in the studio with Jim and Richard: “
My friendship with Alex really bit the dust,” says Richard. “Alex would do things that he knew would piss people off—his confrontational thing.”

But those problems paled in comparison to what happened in the early-morning hours of December 27 when, at a rehearsal-turned-party at Tommy Hoehn’s house, Chris Bell washed down Mandrax with bourbon. “
He was fucked up,” Tommy recalled, “walking around talking about how in this world you have to become a superman, an existential Nietzsche type, to make it in the music business. You have to be all this stuff that is virtually impossible to be. He was clearly frustrated and clearly fucked up.”

Chris got a ride to where his car was parked, near Ardent, and then, while he was racing east on Poplar, his Triumph struck a utility pole, which fell on the car, killing him instantly. He was twenty-seven years old. His funeral was held on Alex’s twenty-eighth birthday.

Alex was stricken. “
I walked into Trader Dick’s,” Ross Johnson remembers about the day of Chris’s memorial. “Alex was in there, and he was very drunk and looked just ghostly pale, sick, very fucked up, and had on a suit and tie. He looked angry. Anger is what I saw on his face.” Alex didn’t go to the funeral. Ten years later, when a journalist asked him about Chris’s death, Alex still sounded devastated: “It made me sad. Kinda scared me or something. I felt bad about it. Really bad.”

Later that evening Alex hung out with his friend Paul Williams, a DJ on the free-form Memphis radio station WEVL. “
We only listened to two records all night long,” says Paul. “Alex just kept playing them over and over and over. One was “Train Kept a-Rollin’” on an album by Johnny Burnette’s Rock ’n’ Roll Trio, and the other was ‘My Way’ by Sid Vicious.”

As the last year of the decade approached, Alex, reeling from Chris’s death, came to a decision: He was going to make some changes in his life.

Although the transition had started the previous fall, Chris’s sudden death spurred Alex to drastically reappraise his life and work. He started moving away from the spotlight and into the background of music making, as a sideman, a “mentor,” a backdoor man of sorts. “
With Chris is where Alex had begun his own individual journey,” said their friend Randall Lyon. “When [Chris] died, Alex began a period of transformation. It was a crisis.”

“
I feel like there’s a lot of character growth that I can do now, rather than writing songs,” Alex explained. “In the end, that’ll help write the songs.” That period of growth would take several years before real changes occurred in Alex’s personal life. Meanwhile, for the most part, he moved out of the spotlight and into the shadows onstage.

Three months before Chris Bell’s death, Alex had attended a concert that made as much of an impact on him as the Sex Pistols had on Jim Dickinson. The October 1, 1978, gig, at Beale Street’s venerable vaudeville-era Orpheum Theatre, was a Dickinson production. A takeoff on the Band’s 1976 “Last Waltz” concert, it was organized as a “farewell” concert for Mud Boy and the Neutrons—a con, since Jim knew full well that the band would continue to play for years. In addition to his band, Dickinson enlisted members of his collaborative performance-art troupe, the Big Dixie Brick Company, which included burlesque-inspired dancing girls, and notified the Televista crew and their role model Bill Eggleston that filming possibilities were limitless.

Just prior to the concert’s start, Televista ringleader Gus Nelson, as “Eugene Baffle,” a member of the Dixie Brick’s pantomime troupe, approached Dickinson to see if he could perform a song—a first for him. “Sure, we’ll be happy to back you,” Jim told him. “No, I’ll accompany myself,” replied Gus, who looked
like a down-on-his-luck Errol Flynn, in a vintage tuxedo with tails and fingerless gloves (“a little ratman costume,” according to Jim). When his moment arrived, Baffle/Nelson approached the mic, strumming an out-of-tune Silvertone guitar, which he didn’t know how to play, and began caterwauling Lead Belly’s “Bourgeois Blues.” Then, as the song reached its climax, he loudly blew a police whistle, grabbed a plugged-in electric saw, and began cutting the guitar in half, with piercing shrieks, metallic buzzes, and all kinds of sparks flying around his head. “
The audience went completely berserk,” Gus recalls. “Everyone was up screaming, hysterical. Then I passed out.”

No one was more enthralled by the performance than Alex.

A few weeks later Amy Gassner telephoned Alex, who heard a noisy racket in the background. “When he found out it was ‘Eugene Baffle,’ playing yet another Silvertone at his home on South Cox Street in Midtown, Alex invited himself to the party. At the soiree, Alex started picking the host’s guitar. “
He played effortlessly and had fun singing songs like put-on charades,” Nelson recalls. “In his hands, golden tones poured from my Silvertone. . . . He had long, sturdy fingers like Chuck Berry’s. . . . In the face, Alex looked like a cross between the actors Robert Morse and Marlon Brando, only more impish and gleefully maniacal in expression.”

When Alex discovered his new friend’s birth name was Gustavo Falco, he suggested he use that rather than Gus Nelson, given him by his adoptive father. Gustavo “Tav” Falco stuck. An artist, writer, photographer, and student of blues culture, Falco had graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1964, a classmate of poet and provocateur Randall Lyon, “
the Oscar Wilde of Memphis,” according to Tav. “We were great friends in Arkansas for years. He introduced me to a lot of people in Memphis when I came down, and that’s how I met Dickinson. Pretty soon, I started working with Eggleston as his assistant, so I had access to his photo lab, and therefore I was able to process my own pictures and go out and shoot things. This is how we became connected with Jim’s Big Dixie Brick Company, which we always performed with.”

Alex and Falco soon became constant companions and decided to form a band, consisting primarily of nonmusicians, to perform blues and obscure rockabilly tunes. Falco had told Alex about a hamlet in Mississippi where a notorious panther had prowled a nineteenth-century plantation, killing chickens and frightening the residents; after failed attempts to capture or shoot the big cat, the locals finally trapped the animal and burned it alive. Its haunting screams resonated in the villagers’ minds and prompted them to rename their town
Panther Burn in its memory. The tale inspired the combo’s moniker, Tav Falco’s (Unapproachable) Panther Burns.

From the group’s inception, Alex told Tav that he’d play guitar and sing a few songs but that Falco would be the front man and “lead guitarist.” Once the band got off the ground, Alex would be moving along.

“
I was interested in looking at a little country blues, and that was [Tav’s] thing, so I started going over to his house,” Alex recalled. “I was studying a lot of country blues players. I learned Lightnin’ Hopkins’ style, John Lee Hooker’s style, Jimmy Reed’s style, and Fred McDowell a bit. I began showing [Tav] some rockabilly stuff, and he was interested in that. I said, ‘I know a drummer,’ and we called up Ross Johnson and we were a band, bingo.” They would also add an art student friend of Falco’s, Eric Hill, who borrowed a synthesizer with which to experiment.

“
When the Sex Pistols hit, Alex was really excited about what they were doing, this complete abandon in rock & roll,” says Tav. “With Panther Burns, he entered a musical environment where you had untrained musicians—or people who didn’t know how to play their instruments. This was happening, too, in the East Village in New York. You had various musicians from the visual arts picking up instruments and playing them without any knowledge or any tradition particularly. Although I did come from a tradition in the blues, and I knew enough about it that I could bring something to our relationship that was interesting to him. He saw the genuine quality of this music in our relationship, and then was able to rediscover music that had been around him all his life.”

For Alex the group was a return to his earliest days as a fledgling musician, discovering and performing someone else’s music for the pure joy of it, with no real demands on him. As for Falco, he considered Panther Burns a continuation of the work he’d been doing as an artist, photographer, and filmmaker. “
When I got with Alex, I was ready for it, because I was already frustrated as a photographer and a filmmaker, so I started this as another art action—a very anti-establishment art action, very against the grain,” says Tav. “We were radical in our viewpoint, and in the people we aligned ourselves with and the theories we had. When it came to rock & roll with Alex, I approached it in the same way, from a radical viewpoint, as just another form [through which] to express what I’d been doing for a long time already. I was just a radical artist.”

Alex and Tav experimented as a duo one night as guests at a Sid Selvidge performance, with a very loose “Red Headed Woman” and a “fractured tango,” “Drop Your Mask.” “The audience was
a bit bewildered and seemed not to really
want to look . . . yet they could not avert their eyes either, which I thought was a good sign,” Falco recalled. “There was no applause, which I thought was an even better sign.”

Alex had been working with other musical newcomers as well: “
Alex helped get the Klitz started,” says Lesa. “He was very cute about it, and he wrote us our first seven songs,” one of which was “Hook or Crook,” which he’d recorded for
Sherbert
. “We were just trying to be a rock & roll band,” according to Lesa, “but we were so loud and so simplistic that we got labeled as punk by other people. So what to do? We embraced it. But we didn’t go into this as a punk rock band.”

Alex coached the girls during rehearsals. “
Alex and I would sit between band practices and get in these hour-long conversations about astrology,” says Gail Clifton. “One night we recorded Alex singing ‘Cocaine,’ right when the Klitz were first getting together, with me singing background vocals and my sister playing pots and pans. That’s how the band got started. We were all just kind of hanging out.” The white powder had become popular in Memphis, and Alex was not immune to its allure.

Eventually Alex, and later Jim Dickinson and indie-label entrepreneur Jim Blake, recorded the Klitz—first at the Sounds of Memphis Studio, and then at a new operation called BR Toad, opened by Barry Shankman, who’d bought the Stax recording equipment at the bankruptcy auction. Alternating lead vocals, the Klitz primarily cut deconstructed versions of songs by the Stones, Beatles, Zombies, and Kinks. The Cramps became so enamored of the band, they later invited the gals to open a show for them in New York, with Tav Falco also on the bill.

The Klitz turned out for Panther Burns’ first gig, on February 11, 1979, at a former cotton-grading loft at 96 South Front Street that Tav had rented for $50. To advertise the event, he silk-screened handbills promising “RnR” plus free beer (a few kegs) and records (obscurities donated by a friend) and illustrated with his design for the band’s logo: a snarling black panther with red flames streaming from its head. Nothing, however, could have prepared the audience for the audacious debut of Panther Burns, featuring Alex, Tav, Ross, and Eric Hill, “a fashionable gay blade [who] played the mini-Korg with his knuckles and had that intuitive
je ne sais quoi
touch to bring Panther Burns over the top,” says Falco.

“Tav came on and he was reading lyrics off notebook paper while he was singing,” Dickinson recalled. “At this point, he could play in one tempo, sing in another tempo and have them both be wrong. Eric had no idea what he was doing, he’d just push down keys and turn knobs.” Sid Selvidge had lent Alex a
beautiful 335 hollow-body guitar, which he played while surrounded by squall. “Alex had a Fender Super Reverb amp and a big Gibson jazz guitar that was all souped up—it sounded like a million bucks,” Tav recalls. “He could get feedback out of that thing and play unbelievable sounds. That was the hottest guitar sound ever to come out of Alex. It just jumped out at you in Alex’s hands.”

One spectator that night was bassist Ron Miller, who’d met Alex in New York when both lived in the same tenement building on Ninth Street. Classically trained but primarily a jazzman, Ron had moved to Memphis, where he played in the symphony orchestra; dressed in a tux, he’d just come from a performance, intrigued by the Panther Burns posters wheat-pasted around town. He arrived in time to see Alex taking a piss off the side of the stage. “Things were so disorganized,” he recalled, “that at first I thought that Chilton and a bunch of drunks were just screwing around as a warm-up to the band’s first set, but it was actually the whole band I was seeing.” Invigorated by the primal energy and recklessness he’d witnessed, as well as the blues and rockabilly repertoire, Ron chatted with Alex a few days later, offering his services as bassist. He joined the band, still playing with the symphony, then changing clothes for a late-night Panther Burns set.

Alex also continued working toward finishing
Flies
; after Jim mixed the record, Alex retrieved the masters to remix it himself in fits and starts at Ardent. Meanwhile, starting in early 1979, reviews harshly criticizing the recently released
3rd
began appearing in U.K. music magazines. Nick Kent, champion of such artists as Iggy Pop and Syd Barrett, wrote, “
Like its creator, this album sounds like a mess—a mess that all of Chilton’s subsequent solo work has only helped perpetuate. It scarcely deserves to be released at all as it does a mighty disservice . . . and will repel those attracted to the band by their first two [LPs]. What once bore all the fine traits of strong, emotive rock action no way deserves to be spotlit at this stage by the latterday sloppy, maudlin self-indulgence of the group’s wasted leader.” One of Big Star’s biggest U.K. supporters, Max Bell, wrote, “The danger zone of the rock world, its temptation to commit irreparable self-abuse, finds absolute summation in the career of Alex Chilton.”

The U.S. album, on PVC, featured extensive liner notes—a long appreciation of
3rd
and Big Star by New Jersey–based Pete Tomlinson. The mainstream U.S. press mostly ignored the album, though
Trouser Press
’s Jim Green, a power-pop aficionado who’d trashed the “Bangkok” 45, called it “a brilliantly introspective, if often disturbing, work which, for all its lack of bombast, has more to say than most of the records put out since it was recorded.” In
Creem
Robot Hull said,
“Chilton’s genius was in allowing the songs to remain untouched, a decision that intentionally reflected his confused state. Because they tend to reveal little more than the artist’s mushrooming ego, personal albums usually make me sick. But this one just happens to be a haphazard masterpiece.” And in
New York Rocker
, Ken Barnes defended “Big Star’s finally-released third album [as] stronger than I would have expected, nowhere near the chaotic shambles I’d seen it reviewed as, and quite possibly stronger overall than the overrated
Radio City
(which apart from the perfection of ‘September Gurls’ is a messy affair).”

When college student Doug Hagedorn invited Alex back for another gig in Austin for March 22 and 23, 1979, Alex asked Ross and Tav to accompany him. Since Ron Miller was unavailable, he enlisted Chris Stamey in New York, without mentioning their prospective bandmates. Stamey, now making a name for himself in New York as leader of the dB’s, was billed on the show poster with Alex and was not prepared for the band he’d be joining at the seedy Rome Inn. “
I got down to Austin, and Ross Johnson was on drums,” Chris recalls. “He had mastered the art of playing drums with only one hand while drinking a beer with the other. Ross and I hit it off, but Alex and Tav were kind of cocooned. I was probably jealous—Alex had been my buddy, and they were pretty drunk. I had assumed that we were probably going to rehearse that afternoon, but we never did.”

Randy Reeves, a college student who met his future wife, Donna Rose, at the gig that night, remembers the vibe was tense even before the show started. “
Donna told me that in ’78 everything was really cool, really laid back,” says Randy, “but when Alex came back a year later, after Chris [Bell] had died, he was a different person. The previous year Alex had a great time, there was zero concern for money. Alex didn’t care if he went home with fifty bucks in his pocket. . . . But this time, once they got to thinking about Doug having spent money on a plane ticket for Chris, while they had to drive in, they started bitching and squabbling about money. They just had a real snotty attitude and didn’t want to socialize much with people.”