A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (41 page)

Ardent put marketing muscle behind the February 1995 release, with press materials stating that “the label is also planning to put audio samples of and biographical information about Chilton on the Internet in mid-March,” a first for Alex, who didn’t own a computer and had no interest in going online. In April Ardent also offered tour support for a six-week swing through the country, which included another late-night TV spot. This time Alex, backed by Ron and Richard, with a supplemental horn section and a pair of backup singers, appeared on
Late Night with
Conan O’Brien
, performing “Lies.” At forty-four, Alex looked good, wearing a spiffy blue vintage sport jacket and a white shirt with the collar turned up.

Even with his increased profile Alex was called a “magnificent obscurity” by Greg Kot in his
Chicago Tribune
feature focusing on the new album. Contrasting Alex’s affection for numbers like “What’s Your Sign” with his disdain for the revered Big Star canon, Kot pointed to a comment Alex made during the ’94 Big Star show in Chicago: “Chilton put a damper on an otherwise brilliant performance by referring to the quartet as a ‘70s revival band.’ Chilton says playing the Big Star repertoire ‘wears thin fairly fast. There are only three or four of the tunes . . . that still work for me. I think in general Big Star is overrated.’”

Similarly, when Big Star returned to New York for the first time in twenty-one years (in November ’95), the
New York Times
’s Jon Pareles noted that “Chilton barely smiled as he sang his 20-year-old tunes, but his voice was heartfelt and his guitar solos had a lazy aggression, sidling up to their zingers. . . . For encores, Mr. Chilton returned to other people’s songs, ending with ‘Pennsylvania 6-5000,’ the Glenn Miller band hit. Was he comparing Big Star to the Miller band, which toured long after its leader was gone? Maybe he just liked the tune.”

Alex’s new work did garner good notices: Don McLeese, writing in the
Austin American-Statesman
, asserted that
A Man Called Destruction
was

the most meticulously wrought release of his roots period. Chilton, a wonderful guitarist who can effortlessly spin out loose, juicy licks, is abetted by a sharp rhythm section, bright horn arrangements and some nifty organ playing. . . . There also has been an intimation of one more possible Age of Alex: Chilton’s 1994 Ardent release,
Clichés
, points to yet another
musical guise, this one as a singer of old jazz-pop saloon standards. Accompanied only by his own acoustic guitar, Chilton does them complete justice, infusing ballads by Cole Porter, Sammy Kahn, Ray Charles and others with radiant warmth. Replacing the typically offhanded and ironic rocker we’ve come to know in the past ten years is a passionate singer who gets caught up in fervent songs of yearning and loss. It is Chilton’s most openhearted performance since Big Star, the work of someone who has moved through disgust and amusement, and now has recaptured the capacity he had in his innocent days to be deeply moved.

Surprisingly Alex returned to Ardent in 1996 to record a new song with the reconfigured Big Star for an upcoming anthology, the
Big Star Small World
tribute album (filled with indie artists). “Hot Thing” was a catchy number the group cooked up in the studio. “
Alex was really excited about recording new stuff,” says Ken. “We got to Memphis and took a day off to record. Alex had these notebooks, and he just had these random one-liners in it. He said, ‘These are phrases I’ve always wanted to put into a song. . . .’ And that’s how the whole song was written. It’s pretty simple music—1-4-5 kind of thing, kind of a ‘Louie Louie’ progression.” The group also brought in the Memphis Horns to play on the sessions.

At around this time another aspect of Alex’s musical past came calling. Though he’d been doing Box Tops oldies shows for years, such package tours had been sanctioned by Roy Mack, who got a percentage as purported owner of the band trademark. In the mid-’90s original member Bill Cunningham, who’d served as classical bassist in the White House orchestra, investigated the trademark and determined that Mack had not registered it after all, leaving the original members legally free to work as the Box Tops. He contacted guitarist Gary Talley, drummer Danny Smythe, guitarist/keyboardist John Evans, and Alex to see if they’d be interested in recording an album and possibly performing together. To everyone’s shock, Alex happily agreed.

“
I couldn’t imagine that Alex would want to do it, because every time he mentioned the Box Tops to the press, it was negative,” Talley recalls. “He always said we sucked live.” Gary had continued as a guitarist, playing with numerous country stars and as a session player. Evans had turned to computer work, and Smythe had become a graphic designer. Nonetheless all were game, and they ventured into the Easley studio, along with the Memphis Horns, to cut a dozen ’50s and ’60s covers. Alex even tried to sing with a rough edge to his voice, as he had in the group’s heyday.

Unlike Alex, Gary wasn’t pleased with the results of the “loose and sloppy” recording. “
I didn’t like the way we played together,” he says. “I was used to playing in Nashville, where everybody’s real tight and precise. On some of the songs, we all ended at different times, and some of the tempos were off. But later on, I figured, ‘Well, it does have some kind of energy and charm to it.’” Alex wanted to call the album
Tear Off!
, a reference to an idea Howard Chilton had had for the band’s name in 1967.

In April 1997 the group reconvened to play its first gig, at the House of Blues in Hollywood, twenty-seven years after their last show together. Though they’d rehearsed a few times, they got off to a shaky start, infuriating Alex and Gary. They’d already agreed to play an exclusive party the next night at the home of Barry Bonds’s manager, which was disastrous. Still, they stuck it out and agreed to more bookings, though Alex lambasted them publicly. Gradually they evolved into a tight little combo, with John Evans eventually dropping out. Augmented by a horn section at most gigs, they played the Box Tops classics with gusto and precision—for Alex, particularly, a real dose of fun. Freed up from guitar (though he’d sometimes play bass on a song or two), he took on a joyous front man role, acting out songs, dancing around, and putting himself out there with abandon.

“The interesting thing was, in the ’60s
Alex was not a disciplined person at all,” says Gary, “just the opposite. But when we got back together and started playing gigs, he was really insistent on everything being just right, and it was so different from when he was a kid. He learned how to be a good guitar player and a good front man, and he taught himself music theory, he learned classical music. He was really a stickler about every aspect of these shows.”

As Alex spent more time playing Big Star and Box Tops dates, his trio gigs decreased. Yet Chilton acolytes still called, requesting that he share a tour. In 1998 the trio joined the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion on what would be a grueling tour through Canada and the Midwest. The Canadian leg turned out to be a nightmare due to past problems Alex had encountered at border crossings. Once ill-advised to inform Canadian authorities of his U.S. arrest record, even though he’d never been convicted of a crime and no criminal records existed for him, he’d been flagged permanently by Canadian immigration. Because there was no documentation proving his innocence, he’d been unable to demonstrate a clean record, even after hiring an attorney. At the Vermont-Canada crossing on this tour, Alex was held for hours and refused entry into the country. By the time authorities finally decided to let him in, he’d snapped, and his angry outburst resulted in his being turned back.

He didn’t need the aggravation, now that his Big Star and Box Tops tours paid well. In addition, he’d begun receiving residual checks, thanks to a version of “In the Street” being heard weekly on a popular Fox network program,
That ’70s Show
. Working for the series, Ben Vaughn had suggested it as the theme song when producers were looking for something to represent both the era and teenage ennui. “It’s the perfect song about being bored and doing nothing,” Ben says. With Alex’s approval, Vaughn hired LA musicians to rerecord the song at a faster pace, with slightly tweaked lyrics—the line
“wish we had a joint so bad”
was replaced with
“Nixon’s gone / But rock lives on.”
Alex and Ben collaborated on the change. The following year Cheap Trick recorded the song for the show’s theme, which was released on an album as well. The series also licensed several other Big Star songs, as did Heineken for a lucrative commercial.

The extra cash enabled Alex to do something he’d been yearning to do for a long time: put down roots. He’d bought a decrepit nineteenth-century center-hall cottage in Tremé for around $12,000 and began spending time renovating it. (The Hohenwald house never progressed much further than a bit of cleared land and a bit of framing.) He and Peggy had broken up, and he longed for a young artist and Tulane graduate named Aimee Toledano. She had photographed the cover for his 1999 album
Set
(in Europe it was titled
Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy
), recorded in one day at Sears Sound with his trio (and mixed at Ardent). The record documents the 1999 Chilton trio shows, featuring country (Gary Stewart’s “Single Again”), a 1920s obscurity about weed-smoking (“You’s a Viper”), standards (“April in Paris”), R&B (“Oogum Boogum”), and hokum (“You’ve got a Booger Bear Under There”). For its release he’d switched to Bar/None, the indie label owned by Glenn Morrow (aka Greg McLean, who’d reviewed Alex’s Maxwell’s gig back in 1981).

Alex’s friendship with Toledano did not progress as he had hoped. In 2000, as he approached his fiftieth birthday, he told journalist Jonathan Valania that he’d never felt more alone. Yet this solitude had helped him to focus on his songwriting. “
I’m more settled now than I’ve ever been,” he said. “Before, I hardly had a place to call my own. All through this [previous] decade I had a place, but I was living with a girl in a two-room apartment up until two years ago. Now I’m sort of living in a construction project that has quite a lot of space in it, and my piano is there, and I don’t live with anybody. So I wake up in the morning and go straight to the piano and play some music, and I hang around doing precisely what I want to do all day long, so the music is developing in a way it really hasn’t since the early ’70s. We’ll see what happens.”

Slowing down his touring schedule, Alex spent time working on his house, reading Thackeray, computing complicated astrological charts (his chart that year indicated a time of emotional austerity), and playing a new $7,000 Baldwin upright piano he’d splurged on with
That ’70s Show
funds. He enjoyed listening to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, as well as gospel, which he shared with fellow enthusiast Richard Dworkin, who occasionally visited. (“Atheists love gospel music,” according to Richard; Alex agreed: “You don’t have to believe in Jesus to like gospel.”) Alex told Valania that he’d started writing again, for the first time since 1994. The gap, he explained, had been due to “living sort of an unsettled existence.” Alex said, “
It seemed I had all the things that I could possibly deal with . . . other than music . . . and I didn’t have enough room or space or time to ruminate around with many musical ideas. But now I’m really starting to do that quite a bit. So far this year I’ve written maybe ten sets of lyrics that are really, really good. They might not all be things that I’ll use, and I’ve put music to several of them, and some of them I’m just going to try in the studio sometime—just do whatever happens musically. . . . There are a few sets of lyrics I actively tried to put some music to, and some of them turned out fairly well. I’m still a year or two away from doing another record anyway, and what makes the cut when the time comes, I can’t say.”

•   •   •

Alex’s last songwriting outlet turned out to be the source of one of his earliest: spurred on by a restless crowd at a festival where Big Star played the same set it had performed for a decade, Alex announced to the band that they were going to Ardent to cut an album. It would be a communal effort, with the four collaborating on a song a day. “
Alex was much more interested in creating the music in certain conditions as opposed to ‘I’m this songwriter and I’ve got this angst to express to you, and you have to listen to it,’” says Ken. The collaboration, which Alex called
In Space
, included pristine pop, soulful numbers, classical pieces, and R&B-tinged rock. Produced by Big Star and Ardent’s Jeff Powell,
In Space
got under way in spring 2004: Recording took place over a two-week period in March and April, with overdubs and mixing finished in May. Alex sang lead on seven tracks, with the Posies’ harmonies blending beautifully behind him. The album opener, the catchy shuffle “Dony,” features his distinctive drawl. (“
A dony is a reference to a pretty girl that you’re really taken with,” says Jody. “[The word] was originally used by Furry Lewis.”) “
We all worked on ‘Dony’ together,” Jon says, “but after I came up with most of the verse and chorus riffs, I can remember sitting there with Alex, and he was breathing down our necks, saying,
‘Where’s the bridge to this song?’ There was some actual palpable tension at that point. But it was like, ‘We’re all in this room together, let’s fuckin’ write this thing.’ That kinda broke the ice. It’s very odd how collaborative the whole thing was. We all took turns taking the lead.”

The kitschy “Love Revolution” finds Alex calling via megaphone for “platforms”—both the political agenda and the shoes—as well as soulfully crooning and using his falsetto. The sole instrumental track, “Aria Largo,” was written by seventeenth-century classical composer Georg Muffat, one of Alex’s favorites. He transcribed it for two guitars, bass, and drums. Alex also brought in Bill Cunningham of the Box Tops to cowrite the poppy “Hung Up with Summer.”

While in Memphis, Alex reconnected with his youth, getting together with his friends from junior high school and the Big Star days. He was suffering from intense pain due to a severe gum infection, which took nearly two years to eradicate, but he still seemed in good spirits. He played with Big Star at South by Southwest, where Andy Hummel and Terry Manning appeared on a panel about the band (though Alex didn’t participate). He’d seemed to make peace with the things that used to haunt him about Memphis. When contacted by a Canadian woman who claimed to be his daughter, the result of a brief liaison during his Box Tops days, he took a paternity test and learned that he was, indeed, her father. He flew to Canada to meet her and his grandchild, and they sporadically stayed in touch.