Clarification: Chris Bell was a founding member of the band Big Star. His first name was omitted from this story.
Rock ’n’ roll is filled with strange stories, and Alex Chilton’s is up there with the strangest.
Born in Memphis, Chilton was a pop star at 16 - the gruff voice behind The Box Tops, who topped the charts with “The Letter” and “Cry Like A Baby” in the late 1960s.
In his early 20s he was a member of Big Star, whose three gorgeous albums would influence R.E.M., Teenage Fanclub, The Replacements and Matthew Sweet, and play a part in building the foundation of alternative music.
An autodidact and a gifted guitarist who knew music theory, Chilton spent time as a sideman in amateurish groups and recorded tuneless, deconstructed versions of songs that were alternately odd and exhilarating. He was a skirt-chasing Southern gentleman with a mean streak who could be charming and obdurate. He believed deeply in astrology.
A lifelong avoider of sound checks, he was often lazy in live performances, though there were occasions of transcendence. He recorded an album of torch songs and produced psychobilly pioneers The Cramps. He tried to ride out Hurricane Katrina in his New Orleans home but had to be carried to the Superdome by helicopter before fleeing to Houston.
Chilton’s story is now told in A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton From Box Tops to Big Star to Back Door Man (Viking, $27.95), an illuminating biography by veteran music journalist Holly George-Warren, who first met Chilton in New Orleans 1982 not long after she’d discovered the early ’70s Big Star recordings.
But don’t think that her relationship with Chilton, who died in 2010 at age 59, means she has written some starry-eyed hagiography. Exhaustively reported and authoritatively written, A Man Called Destruction pulls no punches, making the case for Chilton’s deserved standing as a rock ’n’ roll original, a gifted songwriter and musician while detailing the nightmares with which he struggled and behavior that ranged from odd to dangerous.
“Alex could tell some whoppers,” George-Warren says. “But deep down, he was an honest person. I think he would appreciate that I told the whole story.”
Chilton’s parents, Sidney and Mary Evelyn, were Memphis bohemians. Sidney, who sold lighting equipment, played in jazz bands; Mary Evelyn ran an art salon out of the family’s midtown home. Photographer William Eggleston was a family friend and an early mentor to Alex (Eggleston’s photograph Red Ceiling was the cover of the second Big Star album).
“It wasn’t unusual for Alex to be in his room and have someone come walking through looking for art,” George-Warren, who also wrote Public Cowboy No. 1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry, says.
He was the youngest of four children, Chilton’s childhood would be marred by the death of oldest brother, Reid, who died after having a seizure and drowning in the bathtub.
“Alex would never fully recover from the tragedy,” George-Warren writes.
He was only 15, bored with school, getting into trouble and just discovering music when he was asked to join a Memphis band made up of older kids called The Devilles, which would evolve into the hit-making Box Tops.
The details George-Warren shares of Chiltons’ first Devilles practice are an indication of her reporting and flair for storytelling.
“When they knocked on the Chilton’s door, a slight young man with acne-spotted cheeks and long brown bangs and hair covering his ears opened it. Barefoot and dressed in cutoff blue jeans and a faded black T-shirt, Alex grabbed a denim jacket and wrapped a scarf around his neck, saying, ‘I’m ready to go!’”
The Box Tops would land a deal with Bell Records and “The Letter” would send the group through the pop charts stratosphere in 1967.
At just 16, Chilton was a star, constantly on tour and befriending, among others, the Beach Boys (Chilton wanted George-Warren to collaborate on a memoir of his Box Tops days that was going to be called I Slept With Charlie Manson, which came from the time when, while staying with Beach Boy Dennis Wilson, Chilton awoke on a couch next to the Manson Family leader).
George-Warren wonderfully details the rise and fall of The Box Tops, whose interchangeable members rarely played on their recordings and whose songs were chosen by Bell Records and producer Dan Penn. It wasn’t long before Chilton began to bristle at the star-making machinery and constant touring. In the end, popularity fading, he bailed.
Chilton would never see the success of The Box Tops again, although he probably wasn’t interested anyway. The albums he made with Big Star, whose first two shows were in Mountain View and Eureka Springs, were critically praised but woefully distributed by Memphis soul label Stax Records.
George-Warren captures the hazy, late-night clubhouse feel of life around John Fry’s Ardent Studios, where Big Star recorded, hung out, got high and practically lived, and the wild feel of midtown Memphis in the mid-’70s, where sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll were abundant, and Chilton partook in it all. She also details his long, tumultuous relationship with Lesa Aldridge, depicting her as muse, enabler and a victim of his abuse.
And there are those baffling Chilton career choices.
He hooked up with Gurdon native Tav Falco, playing guitar in the untrained, avant-roots band Panther Burns. Chilton’s solo album, Like Flies on Sherbert, was a puzzling and sometimes brilliant mess of deconstructed pop and covers ranging from “Waltz Across Texas” to “Boogie Shoes.”
He mostly lived at home with his parents, having spent his Box Tops earnings, and would eventually end up driving a cab around Memphis for a while.
By the late ’80s, Chilton moved to New Orleans and had mostly dried out. He worked as a dishwasher and tree trimmer and formed a trio and toured a bit. A new crop of college kids were discovering Big Star, and The Replacements paid tribute to their hero (who also produced a Replacements session) in the song “Alex Chilton.”
It wasn’t long before he was able to earn a living through music again, touring with his trio and reluctantly joining a re-formed Big Star (with members of The Posies taking the place of Bell, who died in a 1978 car crash, and bassist Andy Hummel, who didn’t rejoin the group) and The Box Tops. He also continued to record and produce.
After his near-miss during Hurricane Katrina, things were still looking up. Chilton married Laura Kersting in 2009 and was set to appear with Big Star at the 2010 South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, when he died of a heart attack March 17.
Though you know how it ends, his death still hits a little hard in this invaluable, powerful and hard-to-put-down account of an American and Southern original.
Style, Pages 49 on 03/30/2014