A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (34 page)

The Maxwell’s set was repeated at Manhattan’s trendy Peppermint Lounge on Saturday night, September 19, a few hours after Simon and Garfunkel played a free concert in Central Park to a half-million people. Amid a crowd hollering at him, Alex was engaged and friendly, with diverse vocal styles—rockabilly whoops to jazzy croons to raspy blues—and introduced Johnny Mathis’s “Chances Are” by saying, “This is one you’ve never heard me do before, but I think you’re gonna like it.” At the Pep, the band was tight, and the rhythm section locked in. Before impersonating a berserk Porter Wagoner, Alex requested that the soundman turn up the reverb as high as it would go; during the song’s “psycho” climax, Alex fell over backward into the drums as though he’d lost it. “
He seemed to be drunk, but he wasn’t,” according to Sclavunos. “It was almost like he was doing Johnny Thunders, like this is supposed to be a drug-addled
wreck of a man.” A critic for
Musician
magazine was not amused, filing a scathing review that declared Alex at the nadir of his career.

The band headed out of town for other East Coast shows, including a stop in Philadelphia. “
The boys in the band, Jim Duckworth and Ron, kept him pretty merry during that tour,” Sclavunos recalls. “I think he was excited about the band. . . . He seemed quite jolly and at ease, but also a bit uncertain about himself. There was sort of an air of uncertainty about his stage persona. He seemed sometimes to be opting for clown, and other times he seemed very confident and swaggering. He wasn’t really looking at his peak on that tour, quite overweight and even a bit slovenly. He was dressing poorly; it wasn’t far removed from a pair of pajama bottoms or sweat pants. It was a super-relaxed look, and it was not becoming. He just wasn’t attracting any ladies with the look he was working.”

An exception was Lesa. When the band played the 9:30 Club, recently opened at 930 F St. NW, in downtown Washington, D.C., Lesa and a boyfriend plus Marcia and Gail Clifton, who were in town visiting, attended the show. Afterward Lesa ditched her beau and went back to Alex’s hotel with him. “
We had a really sweet night together,” Lesa recalls. The next morning they made plans for Lesa to visit him in Memphis once he returned from touring.

But first, after a couple of canceled gigs, the group headed back to New York, where there was talk of Alex, backed by the band, doing a lucrative Box Tops gig at an oldies show at Madison Square Garden. Such package shows of ’60s acts had been picking up steam. When Roy Mack heard about it, though, he claimed ownership of the name and authority over any Box Tops performances. “
We were all lined up to do it, and Chilton was definitely up for it,” according to Sclavunos, “and then word came that we couldn’t do it because somebody else, some ex-manager, owned the name.”

They did find another show at a new club tucked behind a bowling alley in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn. During an era when trendies rarely traveled to the boroughs to check out music, only a few fans found their way to the club, called the Brooklyn Zoo, whose location was also obscure enough that it was hard to find. With hardly anyone in the house, the band played a high-energy set, one of their best, with several off-the-cuff numbers. Alex grabbed Duckworth’s guitar and encored with “The Letter,” backed only by Sclavunos. The party continued afterward, and the next day, when Jim went to the Iroquois Hotel to get paid, Alex met him with bad news.

“
He sort of sheepishly opened the door,” says Jim, “and his story was that he
had spent all the money from the gigs on a bender the night before, probably coke, from the sound of it. I didn’t ask. But he said, ‘I’m sorry I can’t pay you anything. I really don’t know what to say. Would you take this drum as collateral for the work?’ It turned out to be kind of a flapjack, a rare, compact drum that jazz guys use. They’re hard to find, they look kind of like Rototoms, but they aren’t. He was giving me just the snare, and he said it belonged to his dad. I was like, I don’t know whether to believe this or not, but I have to get something out of this. I can’t go home empty-handed. So I said, ‘Yeah, okay, sure, that’s great, Alex. Are you sure you can spare the drum, it belonged to your dad?’ . . . I just decided to be gracious about it and just take the drum. His parting words to me were ‘You know, you should come down to Memphis and join my band the Panther Burns. You’d be perfect for it.’”

•   •   •

Looking back on that tour, Alex’s last one for three years, Sclavunos says, “I think Alex hadn’t quite figured out what he wanted to do at that point. You could hear echoes of Chet Baker in his vocal style, but I don’t think he knew yet how to integrate all the things he wanted to do. At that point he was coming from the production mayhem of post–Big Star
Like Flies on Sherbert
, he was also exploring the rockabilly thing through the Cramps and Panther Burns, and then there were also hints of him wanting to be a crooner, which only received proper expression later in his career. But all those elements were in there in that little tour that we did.”

What was certain: Alex enjoyed being a front man again, calling the shots and backed by ace musicians.

Before returning to Memphis, Alex, Duckworth, and Easley drove to Chicago to play a show at the Misfits Club, but the trip was mainly an excuse to visit his brother, Howard. “I remember Alex, at one point,
pointing his thumb at [Howard] and wryly saying, ‘Bubba,’” Duckworth recalls. “Alex’s nickname was ‘Butch.’ We did a bunch of coke with Howard and then we ended up in a neighborhood bar. I was putting quarters in the jukebox, playing Tammy Wynette, Patsy Cline, and Kitty Wells, and I noticed after a while that we were in a lesbian bar.” Howard had become part of a group of gay Trotskyites in Chicago, and espoused his ideas about socialism, with Alex an eager student.

Back in Memphis, true to her word, Lesa flew down for a visit, staying at Marcia’s. “
Alex was driving a cab then, and we hung out together and played tennis,” says Lesa. “After his mother and father went out of town, I stayed with him on Harbert that last night I was there. We watched an old black-and-white
movie, and he fixed me dinner and then took me to the airport the next day in his dad’s Cadillac. There was no discussion, but we obviously loved each other. When I left, I didn’t realize how final that was.” They never saw each other again. Lesa, who broke up with her boyfriend, moved to Princeton, then reconnected with Alex’s friend Tommy Hoehn, whom she’d known in Memphis; the two married in 1983, relocated to Nashville, and had three children before they divorced.

•   •   •

After taking too many extended breaks between fares, Alex lost his cabdriving job and traveled to New Orleans to visit Vernon Richards. The Chilton family friend had left Memphis to escape the constant partying with Bill Eggleston and his crew and had encouraged Alex to do the same. “
Alex’s mother loved him, but when he was living at home with them, he would sleep all day and get up late in the afternoon, and just leave the house without saying anything to his mother or dad,” Vernon recalls. “Then he’d come in the next morning when they were getting ready to leave, and that’s not ever a good situation. I’d been telling him, ‘Alex, you need to move somewhere else and get out of Memphis. You’re just walking around the same track all the time.’”

Around Alex’s thirty-first birthday, he came down with the flu and landed in bed for two weeks. When he recovered, soon after the new year, he decided that 1982 was the year to transform his life. “I’d known
I wanted to quit drinking for a long time,” Alex said. “My career was in a shambles, and my life was a mess. I’d been too sick to go to the bars, and after that couple of weeks, I said, ‘Jesus, it’s been ten years since I went two weeks without drinking anything.’ So I thought, ‘I’ll make it a month,’ and I did that.

“And then I moved to New Orleans.”

Right before Alex left Memphis, he gave his last interview for three years. “
I’m not too ambitious right at this moment except in a personal sense,” he said. “The music business doesn’t make my life or break my life, anyway. What does the music business have to do with music? Right now, I don’t have a guitar in my house. I’m not frustrated because my records don’t sell or angry that people don’t like me or do like me or anything else. I figure if I can get myself together at some point, I might have a real shot at making a lot of bread making music. But it doesn’t matter. I just want to enjoy it.”

Alex immediately fell in love with New Orleans. And spending Mardi Gras ’82 at Vernon Richards’s house on Dauphine Street in the French Quarter didn’t tempt him to reach for the bottle. “Anyone who is drinking a lot is definitely on the road down,” Alex said, “and I didn’t want to sink any lower than I had already gone.”

After Fat Tuesday Alex took the train back home, but then returned to New Orleans a few weeks later. “
I went back to Memphis and it was freezing cold and really bleak, and there were no prospects for me,” Alex recalled. “I got off the train and I said, ‘This is insane, I’m moving back down there.’ It’s just a pretty place, and the weather’s great. It’s easygoing, and people are friendly and tolerant. The music is pretty neat—but that wasn’t my main concern. I just thought, ‘Hey, I’m thirty-something years old. If I’m not going to enjoy the rest of my life, it’s not worth living.’”

Mary and Sidney Chilton were skeptical that their son had picked the right locale for straightening himself out. “
My mother said that Alex was the only person she knew who chose New Orleans as a place to get away from drugs and booze,” Cecelia Chilton says.

Alex found a cheap one-room apartment above a storefront on Frenchman, then a borderline street separating the French Quarter from the dicey Marigny. His buddy George Reinecke, who came from an old New Orleans family, turned him on to a temporary job “
working on a political campaign for a guy running for mayor,” Reinecke recalls. “We were calling people from this list and telling them to vote for this guy. The people in charge gave me and Alex shit for pronouncing the guy’s last name incorrectly, so that only lasted a few weeks.” A
friend of the Reinecke family ran the venerable Louis XVI Restaurant in the Quarter, so Alex got a job there, as dishwasher.

George’s father was a leading authority on the city’s history, and George shared historical tidbits with Alex, along with cultural arcana, like the location of Fats Domino’s home and Ernie K-Doe’s hangouts. Though Alex no longer owned a guitar, he’d go to George’s friend Stanley Adkins’s house, where there was a makeshift rehearsal studio, and give George tips on playing his Telecaster. Later Alex recommended George to Tav, who needed a new guitarist for Panther Burns; Jim Duckworth had left to join L.A.-based blues-punk outfit Gun Club. The band had a new drummer—Jim Sclavunos, who’d moved to Memphis only to discover that Alex had left town.

In May Alex returned to Memphis, for after battling heart disease for decades, Sidney Chilton, seventy, died at home on Sunday, May 23. His obituary noted that “the jazz and art enthusiast” was a member of the Musicians Union, was active in the American Civil Liberties Union, owned Stage Lighting South, and was the “father of rock and folk singer Alex Chilton, who now lives in New Orleans.”

At the memorial, held on Friday, May 28, in the backyard of a family friend, Sidney’s jazz-playing comrades gathered to say farewell. From Jackson, Mississippi, the Browns attended, along with Adele and her husband, Dan Tyler, now established country music songwriters living in Nashville. “
It wasn’t really a funeral; it was more like a big party,” Adele recalls. “There was music, and everybody was drinking, and I was thinking, ‘Well, this is a good way to go out.’ . . . It was a celebration of his life and a tribute.” Alex didn’t perform, nor did he “talk about his emotions,” says Adele. Afterward, he went with the Tylers and others to the Antenna Club to continue the revelry there. “I remember that night, when we’d just had the service for his dad, I said something like ‘Are you sure you want to go out tonight?’ and he said, ‘No, I’m fine.’ He did not seem upset—he just seemed really detached from his parents.” Though Alex drank that night, it would be his last night of drinking for at least a decade.

Back in New Orleans, Alex returned to work at the restaurant stone sober. “After drinking a lot for ten years—enough for three lifetimes—I wasn’t attracted to it anymore,” Alex said. He bought a cheap record player at Goodwill and listened to a handful of LPs, including
Chet Baker Sings
, one of his father’s records that he’d loved as a child, and played one track over and over: “Look for the Silver Lining.” His dishwashing job would last a year and a half. “He ended up
scrubbing the big pots and pans,” says Vernon Richards. “They later tried to
get him to go to the Goodwill store and buy a tuxedo and become a waiter. They told him he’d make a lot more money, but he knew enough about it then that he liked scrubbing those pots and pans because nobody messed with him. So he turned down making some money as a waiter.”

Also working at the restaurant was a beautiful twenty-two-year-old chef-in-training, Annabelle Lenderink, the daughter of a British mother and a Dutch war hero from Curaçao, in the Caribbean. Like Lesa Aldridge, she was diminutive and didn’t wear makeup. Bright, artistic, and outspoken, Annabelle began seeing Alex after work.

When friends visited from out of town, Alex enjoyed showing them around the city he had come to love. Adele and Dan Tyler spent a few days in New Orleans and took him out for meals. “
We were walking around, going to get lunch, and passed by this teenage boy on the street,” Adele recalls, “and Alex said, ‘Oh, there’s Timothee.’ We were like, ‘What?’ and he said, ‘Yeah, that’s that kid who thinks he’s my son.’” Then thirteen, Timothee had left Memphis after Sidney’s death and spent time for a while with Alex before drifting between Suzi’s home in Denton, Texas, and his grandmother’s house in Memphis. Battling severe depression, sometimes requiring hospitalization, Suzi had a hard time parenting. George Reinecke and other of Alex’s friends considered Timothee “a snarling teenager,” and Alex had to get him out of trouble when he was accused of shoplifting an Ozzy Osborne record (if it had been a Professor Longhair LP, Alex wouldn’t have minded, George joked). Timothee didn’t stick around New Orleans for long.

In December Annabelle was notified that if she didn’t leave the country, she would be deported, so she booked a flight to London, hoping to return later. Though she’d started seeing George Reinecke occasionally, Alex organized a going-away party for her at a punk club called the Beat Exchange. In her honor he decided to play some covers and invited the country-punk outfit the Undesirables to also perform. Formed by Stanley Adkins and including Reinecke, the band recruited eighteen-year-old Loyola music major and bassist Rene Coman to join them and also accompany Alex at the party. The son of a saxophonist who’d played in a high-school band with Dr. John, the classically trained bassist had been studying music since age eight, beginning with sax, then drums, piano, and bass. At the Undesirables rehearsal, he was not impressed by Stanley or George, the latter of whom he’d met when Reinecke was a “scary sixteen-year-old drug addict in a black leather jacket.”

“I remember having a
kind of personality crisis at this rehearsal, because
these guys couldn’t even tune their guitars,” Rene recalls. “They were high on dope and shooting up in the background and coming back and nodding out and falling over, and I was thinking, ‘What am I doing? Is this where my music career is leading me to?’ Everybody was talking about Alex and all the stuff he’d done, but I was not really aware of him—I remembered ‘The Letter’ but didn’t know Big Star. Alex showed up and he taught me these songs, and I learned them pretty quick. He was really into Michael Jackson’s
Off the Wall
, so we did “Rock with You” and another song from that record. I had one other rehearsal with Alex, and he was impressed that I remembered the songs he’d taught me.”

After the sendoff, Annabelle flew to London, where, in early 1983, she was joined by Reinecke. Though their relationship was turbulent, she and George got married in England. Since Reinecke had left the country, Tav Falco reached out to Alex to play guitar and enlist a bassist for a Panther Burns booking at the Uptown New Orleans club Tupelo’s on May 3, 1983. Ross Johnson had returned on drums, following Jim Sclavunos’s departure to join the Cramps, and Jim Dickinson was playing keyboards. Alex agreed and enlisted Rene.

Alex had started working as Tupelo’s janitor and was pushing a broom when Panther Burns arrived for sound check. “
I remember Tav sending me on an errand to get a keyboard for Dickinson,” says Rene. “I wasn’t liking this already. I was fairly cocky at that time, but I did it. I came back and was rehearsing with Tav, trying to play in a regular twelve-bar blues form. Alex was sweeping up and came over to me and said, ‘Just forget everything you know about music and just follow Tav as quickly as you can.’”

From Stanley Adkins, Alex had procured a $100 Mosrite guitar, autographed by members of the Ventures. Rene looked to Alex for help in figuring out the band’s M.O. “It was really very
shocking to approach music like that,” Rene says. “But I started to be good friends with Alex through that.”

As he did with all new acquaintances, Alex checked Rene’s birthdate—September 11, 1963. “He was interested in a specific kind of astrology,” says Rene, “how our two charts interact and what that means for our relationship. I remember him coming back to me, saying, ‘Our charts are really good for a student-teacher relationship,’ and at that moment we both had the understanding that the other one was thinking, ‘Oh, you want to study with me?’”

The two began spending time playing music together, listening to records and learning the songs at Alex’s apartment. Rene also joined Alex in sobriety, and the two drove up to Memphis to play the occasional Panther Burns gig. They’d spend the night at Mary Chilton’s. She had moved into a narrow,
two-story home on Eastmoreland in the same Central Gardens neighborhood. “
She was really nice,” Rene recalls, “and pretty easy-going. She smoked cigarettes all the time and watched baseball games, and every night when we were staying there she’d open the freezer, filled with Lean Cuisine, and say, ‘Okay, pick one,’ and she’d cook them for us. There was a little bedroom upstairs with twin beds where we stayed.”

In New Orleans Alex also hung out with Rene’s friend Nick Sanzenbach, a drummer and saxophonist whose rockabilly band Blue Vipers played the occasional bill with Panther Burns. Alex and Nick briefly shared a place above a chiropractor’s office in an old mansion in Uptown on the corner of Prytania and Peniston, not far from Tupelo’s. There they played jazz standards together, Alex experimenting with unusual tunings.

One afternoon while Alex was working at Tupelo’s, Dream Syndicate, on their first tour, pulled up for sound check before the night’s show. Steve Wynn was shocked to see Alex. “
Our tour manager had said to me, ‘I think the guy sweeping the floor over there is Alex Chilton,’” says Wynn. “Sure enough, it was. I went up to him and I said, ‘Hey Alex, it’s Steve, remember me?’ He was friendly, but he was faking like he recognized me. I can’t put in words how I knew, but it wasn’t anything like, ‘Oh, you’re the kid that got on the bus . . .’ It was just, ‘Hey man, what’s your sign?’ It really puzzled me. He seemed genuinely befuddled by who I was, but maybe it was like, ‘Oh, here’s that kid, and now I’m sweeping up and he’s coming and headlining the club.’”

Alex quit that job soon after and found his most physically demanding and arduous occupation: tree trimmer for Ashland Tree Cutting Company, clearing foliage from power lines. “He was
the ground man,” according to Rene, “which means he’d stay on the ground and pull all the stuff out of the tree that doesn’t fall after it’s been cut, then he’d stack it up and throw it into the chipper. There’s no part of cutting trees that’s not super-dangerous. I actually ended up doing it with him because I’d hang around with him every evening, and one day he came home from work and he said, ‘Hey, the cutter didn’t show up, so I got moved up to cutter. Do you want to be the ground man?’ So I started being the ground man on that crew.”

By that time Alex had moved to a minuscule shotgun house on Plum Street in Uptown, sharing close quarters with Tav, who’d relocated to New Orleans for a while. Then, through a waitress friend, Tav found a four-hundred-square-foot studio apartment behind a rundown mansion on Esplanade Avenue, an oak-lined thoroughfare that bordered Tremé, one of America’s oldest black
neighborhoods. When Tav decided to move, he offered the place to Alex. Owned by artist Bob Tannen, it was part of a compound occupying an entire block, with several outbuildings and lush grounds dotted with Tannen’s sheet-metal-and-cinderblock sculptures. Alex’s new home consisted of a bedroom, a living room–kitchen area, a bathroom, and a storage loft. Alex moved in with his $5 record player, his vinyl collection, the Mosrite, and some other musical equipment.

“
We’d hang around Alex’s house every evening,” Rene recalls. “He didn’t have a TV or a phone—he’d go down to the pay phone on Esplanade and tell people to call my grandmother’s house to leave him messages. He had a set of drums and a Farfisa organ that Stanley [Adkins] had loaned him, a couple of guitars and amps, and about ten or so records. He had Frank Zappa’s
Freak Out
, and we listened to it a lot, learned songs off it, and played along with it. We’d switch around—‘You play drums on this one, and I’ll play keyboards,’ and we were completely amusing and entertaining ourselves.”

Working for Ashland at $6.50 an hour, Rene would pick up Alex every morning at 7 a.m. to meet the foreman, who’d drive them to the job site, usually along River Road, “cutting trees off the power lines along the levee,” says Rene. Eventually they had a falling-out with the alcoholic foreman, who’d lost his driver’s license and then tried to sabotage their work. The experience would inspire Alex to write his first song in a long while, “Lost My Job”—a twelve-bar blues.

After not drinking for nearly two years, Alex had lost a lot of weight and was again slim and wiry. Still boyish in appearance at thirty-three, he was thirteen years older than Rene—close to the age difference between Alex and his brother Reid. To Alex, Rene had become like a younger brother he could turn on to records, as his older brother had for him. “It was definitely a time when
Alex was reevaluating everything and taking stock,” says Rene, “embracing some humility without feeling sorry for himself. He seemed to recalibrate his expectations to where anything good that happened was a plus. We had nowhere to go but up.”