But that happened mostly when we were done shooting. In Very Extremely Dangerous, Memphis’s real-life outlaw is battling death, and battling life itself, seeking peace, making war. Joyce demonstrated the power of love, and Jerry’s transformation was nothing less than unforeseeable. Both of them were revelatory experiences. Me and Paul, we took a thrill ride with a career criminal living his last days, and while he was someone I may not have wanted in my house, by the end, he was someone I was glad was in my life.
ALEX CHILTON
“The very same people who are good sometimes are the very same people who are bad sometimes.”
—Mr. Rogers
We’re going full circle now, back to the 1977 civic blues event where the plug was pulled on Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Alex Chilton wasn’t scheduled to play that day, but boy did he. He took the stage and set to thrashing on his guitar, igniting the fuse that would explode a few songs later when he’d introduce Mud Boy and the Neutrons. Alex had been in and out of New York, so he was familiar with the Ramones and the burgeoning punk rock scene. Guitarist Sid Selvidge sat at the piano. Pianist Jim Dickinson picked up the bass guitar. Bodyguard Danny Graflund took a vocal mic. Several months before the Sex Pistols came to Memphis, Alex Chilton pulled back the horizon and let us hear the imminent thunder.
He opened with a guttural version of the song that established the Box Tops, “The Letter.” He’d been the golden boy, the coin he generated going to someone else always, never to him. He had earned his cynicism. “I got to get back to my baby once more / anyway. Anyway! Anyway! No way!” Alex knew that what he was singing—no, how he was singing—was not what the blues audience came to hear. He reveled in their revulsion. There’s video of him dancing maniacally, luxuriating in the bad boy’s dream: a large stage, a captive crowd, a live microphone. On that video, as he begins his Saint Vitus’ dance, the audio cord is yanked from the camera. On the screen, the accompanying silence makes his antics all the wilder, especially as the down-front audience catches the fever. The music is so new, no one’s sure how to move, so they careen and flay with him.
My introduction to Alex’s oeuvre came through Big Star 3rd, when it was issued the following year, 1978 (after four years in the can). The most introspective of his work, the songs are relentlessly bleak. I was a teenager roiling in confusion and angst, and 3rd captivated me with its contrasts and discordance—the music on “Kanga Roo” begins with industrial sounding distortion out of which grows delicate and beautiful acoustic guitar. The album’s lyrics were a misanthrope’s love poem.
From 3rd I worked my way forward with his new releases, and also back, through the first two Big Star albums and then further back to the Box Tops. The way stations along his trail were fascinating: Dan Penn, Jim Dickinson, Lesa Aldridge—Alex’s muse, Tav Falco, Jerry Lawler … Chilton was a traveler and a guide.
With the Panther Burns, Alex was going in yet another direction, one that extended from his 1979 solo album Like Flies on Sherbert. When I first heard Flies, I was insulted that an artist would subject a listener to such abuse—bumping the vocal mic, keeping the distortion in the mix, leaving the songs so raw; within months, however, I’d been exposed to punk and was back at the Pop Tunes record store begging the clerk to look in the back and see if they had any more left. (He returned a long time later, having dug up the store’s sole remaining copy.) Alex, the Cramps, Tav, and Dickinson—they all influenced each other, all pushed against the edge and found the battering rams in the sounds of the past. And those past sounds were local—you think Elvis wasn’t a punk?
Lesa Aldridge, in the light of dark, 1980. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)
Alex Chilton, left, and Tav Falco. An early Panther Burns gig at the Well. (Courtesy of Dan Zarnstorff)
Like Flies on Sherbert is exhilarating, though it documents the start of a tailspin. Three years later, in 1982, Alex took a giant step outside the spotlight, moving to New Orleans to work as a tree trimmer and dishwasher. “The Letter” would come on the restaurant’s kitchen radio and no one believed that the guy with his elbows in the dish suds was the vocalist. When he next released a record, six years since Flies, he was much more reserved. Feudalist Tarts, his return EP (comeback doesn’t seem the right term) presented a midthirties white soul singer who sounded less wizened than the Box Tops had twenty years earlier; Alex simplified his sound, a bass and drum backing up him and his guitar. The horn arrangements were spare and slightly cubist in a jazzy way. In Big Star and through Flies, he’d been engaged with the recording arts, the potential offered by the studio. Through the 1970s, he’d experimented vocally, maturing into a boyish tenor from the coarse deep vocals of his youth—reversing nature, upbraiding the industry that screwed him.
Jim Dickinson, left, and Alex Chilton, during the recording of Like Flies on Sherbert, 1978. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)
After his time-out, Alex was dispassionate, embracing clean, unadorned documentation. At gigs and on recordings, he was professional, but he rarely leaned into the songs. His new model was Chet Baker, Mr. California cool. The sound of Alex’s recordings over his final quarter century didn’t really change again; his albums contained basically nothing that couldn’t be done live. There would be no soundscapes like on 3rd, no layers like John Fry and Chris Bell created on the first two Big Star albums, nothing churlish and nothing challenging. He presented a new demeanor: He’d seen it all, done most of it, and the catalog was available for purchase if you wanted to know more. Your cover charge tonight, your purchase of the recording—you get the yeoman on the yob. As prominent as anything else on the back cover of his return record was the fact that he’d only put a day into the recording. The wild man had returned to Borneo, and this Alex could be found talking to whoever ran the joint about getting his pay—in cash.
I caught an early tour after Feudalist Tarts. He came through Philly, and afterward my pals and I went out hunting for low boots with a buckle like he’d worn. The pair I found were a half size too small but I wore them anyway because he’d defined them as cool. And as before, he was a musical cartographer, his selected covers revealing deep cuts from deep artists: I knew Lowell Fulsom but not “Make a Little Love.” Willie Tee, the New Orleans musician and producer was entirely new to me. “Take It Off” by Groundhog: I’m still not sure who that was—or is. When Alex covered Dean Martin’s cover of the Eurovision hit “Volare,” it couldn’t help but be kitschy, except he did it so sincerely and it was so much fun.
Paul Westerberg, left, and Alex Chilton, at Chilton’s 1987 gig at Maxwell’s in Hoboken, NJ. (Courtesy of Ted Barron)
I moved back to Memphis in 1988. Alex’s presence on the local scene was more intimate than his new national reputation as the high priest of independent rock. Here, too many people had known him as a kid; he was aloof, but he was also one of us. He’d play the Loose End, a club that held considerably fewer than a hundred people, his trio banging out songs like the spinning of a 1969 radio dial. We’d dance like drunk guests at a wedding party, Alex revealing his pleasure with that impish grin he couldn’t hide.
Initially, we got along fine. We’d spent an afternoon playing records—he was into Dada-esque musician Fred Lane. He came to my house a couple times, we’d broken bread, had too much wine together. One topic we discussed was Dickinson—Alex was resenting that Jim’s version of their times together had become the dominant narrative, subsuming his.
One day at Ardent, Alex asked my birth date. I’d heard he was into astrology. I sort of sneered a half smile when I answered. His eyes went up as he did some mental calculations—the computation, I imagined, clicking like a beaded abacus while one of those grade school models of the solar system—metal rods with plastic orbs—divined the selected individual’s narrative. What the ciphering told him, I don’t know. But the change in how he treated me was evident.
You know how some people make you feel really comfortable? Alex was the opposite. I remarked to Dickinson how ill at ease I felt around Alex, and I remember th
e relief I found in his reply: Everyone does.
No Chitterlings Today
Memphis Flyer, March 25, 2010
Alex stuck his finger down his throat and gagged, showing me that’s how much he hated his hometown of Memphis. We laughed about it. He didn’t like me much either, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t laugh together, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy Memphis. We were aboard a flight for a European tour, and the movie showing was The Firm, shot in our hometown—he gagged again, the timeless response of a teenage boy listening to his mom. Memphis was a cloak that was hard to shake.
Alex Chilton became a public figure at the age of sixteen when, not long after he’d first seen the inside of a recording studio, a song from that session became a 1967 number one worldwide hit: “The Letter” by the Box Tops. At that impressionable age, he became a product packaged and sold, considerable talent yielding considerable profits for the band’s manager but nothing considerable for the artists. Four years later, the monkey walked away from the organ-grinder. Caught so young in the glare of Memphis’s bright lights, some part of him was like an image in a camera’s flash, frozen there, forever sixteen.
Chilton channeled the future by capturing the underground zeitgeist, three times in the 1970s alone. The audience for the clean pop of the first two Big Star records caught up to the music a decade after it was made; the third Big Star album was nihilistic and beautiful (hello, Elliott Smith and the ’90s); the shambolic Like Flies on Sherbert deemed hip the wealth and depth of Americana roots while becoming a punk rock classic. The art is canonical, and Chilton a titanic figure. The only thing between him and stardom was good record distribution. Instead of profit, he was assigned prophecy.
His career in song is a testament to his eye for precise detail, his adventuresome ear, his teenaged heart. He could evoke the maelstrom of young adulthood in a way that made listeners feel close to him, sometimes too close for his comfort. The Replacements were prescient in their tribute song. “Children by the million sing for Alex Chilton,” they wrote, but if they did it “when he comes ’round,” he’d never have stayed. Waves of admiration were an assault, and he was scornful of those who needed to make more of his songs than he did. His lifelong interest in astrology makes sense: What is colder, more beautiful, more distant than the stars?
Astrology is the province of the seeker, not the sought. Fans may have wanted to see themselves in his struggles, but Alex accepted no fellow travelers. Stories of his hostile responses to the passing compliments of strangers are legion. As are his inviting replies to the pretty female fans. He spurned most of those who approached, and if he blessed you with his gaze, he’d not hesitate to turn 180 degrees, snarl, and leave your jaw flapping in midsentence. In the same late-night late-1970s radio appearance when he achingly sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—years, of course, before Whitney Houston—he also broke into a filthy anti-Semitic ballad.
He liked friction, was sometimes a contrarian just for the sake of it. He could be, less notoriously, a sweetheart too. His mind remained curious, making its own way through politics, the humanities, and the sciences as zealously as his music mined R&B, country, classical, you name it. He stole Wilhelm Reich books from the Memphis Public Library because he said no one checked them out, and he gave them to people he thought would appreciate them. When a friend heard him explain his worldview, he chided, “You’re right, Alex, the world is wrong.” Telling me about this later, Alex added, “And, hell, I believe that. The world is wrong, I am right.”
To the end, he did it his way. His song “In the Street” was the theme for the popular TV program That ’70s Show. He liked to call it That 70 Dollar Show—Mr. Chitlins ripped off again—though according to someone involved in that deal, it earned him a considerable chunk, enough to afford health insurance if he’d wanted it. But when he was feeling ill, Alex refused to see a doctor because what did doctors know? He suffered shortness of breath but kept smoking cigarettes; he mowed the lawn in the heat, then, age fifty-nine, he died. The loss magnified by its abruptness, this meteoric musician is stilled but his great recordings live on. The eulogies will too, much to his likely irritation.
He spoke his last words to his wife on the way to the emergency room: “Run the red light.”
AFTERWORD: STUCK INSIDE THE MEMPHIS BLUES AGAIN
“What did I say to make you mad this time, baby?”
—Willie Mabon, “I Don’t Know”
It’s been more than forty years since the Furry Lewis fireworks on that liberating Fourth of July. The subject of nearly every piece in this book is dead. The magazine industry is a wasted version of its once radiant self. Daily newspapers are coupon circulars with the occasional news item inserted—written without checking facts, without a copy editor, often without any real reporting. The Internet, glorious and terrifying, projects a false democracy, allowing everyone to be a pundit on the soapbox of their own URL. But dollars continue to control traffic; the still, small voice remains still and small. Corporate narratives dominate, and the critical skills needed to sift through all this information are not taught, not enough. (You can’t get that discernment from standardized test bubbles.) The wage for a freelance writer hasn’t changed in the thirty-plus years of my practice, nor has the cover charge at the door for seeing a musician play, even as corporate CEO pay, as compared to worker compensation, has risen from nearly 30 to 1 to more than 300 to 1.
The musicians, the writers, the creative people—unemployable in any other form, compelled to grind out their inner spirit for public consumption, for both praise and derision and always for the hope of a nickel. There’s the stultifying grind of the incessant demand for the next marketable idea, and the despairing cycle that that routine, that thinking, produces. It’s impossible to anticipate the imbalance of time spent shopping ideas to find the funding to produce the work that, if you’re lucky, you get to make on a tight budget. You grind out a version of what you’ve envisioned on the mill of your own overreaching risk: the pulverizing of excitement, good intent, personal time and money so that maybe the next one will pay right. That’s not new. That’s a continuum as old as the arts.
I am often lauded for having followed my passion in life, especially by people who chose routes with more security. They project a lot of what they think they missed onto my lifestyle: unconstrained, romantic, stimulating. They don’t consider what it’s like raising a family with no guarantee of work when this article, this book, this film is completed. When someone says, I admire you, I take that to mean, I wouldn’t do what you do. The ladder that workers climb has regulated, mandated steps. Mine has rickety rungs and the poles are greased. The successes, unexpected and scarce, often invite antagonism.
Attention all people who wanted to do this but didn’t have the guts or the luck. Attention those who now work nine to five at the corporation and live in anguish for having sold your soul. Now hear this: We all sell our souls. I envy your regular job with its regular pay and its regular health insurance and its regular hours. If your spirit is crushed because you’re not living your dream, know that the greener grass is hiding the same fire ants, the same dogshit, the same shards of glass.
For example, it’s a thrill when a stranger approaches me to say they appreciate my work. But every encounter begins with trepidation, because the stranger sometimes says, You wrote about me and you got it all wrong and you’ve ruined my life (one person wanted me to phone his mother and apologize). Some people are pissed off if they’re in the story, some if they’re left out. In Memphis, where everyone is a connoisseur, where everyone has their personal and authoritative narrative and my telling has ruined their opportunity to write their book—every endeavor is laden with potential backlash. Like Willie Mabon sang, “What did I say to make you mad this time, baby?”
And it’s around this point, bitterness bubbling, when I’m losing myself in hard feelings, that I think about Charlie Feathers and I think about Junior Kimbrough and all these heroic ind
ividuals who followed the muse and cut paths of their own, persevering outside society’s mainstream, sometimes tasting the transient sweets that popularity tempts with, sometimes replying, No, thank you. Thinking of them, I experience Dickinson’s resetting of the context, see the fleeting shimmer of the treasure I’ve witnessed.
Alex Chilton hamming it up, circa 1997, at a Box Tops performance. (Courtesy of Dan Ball)
In the summer of 2016, I drove about an hour outside of Memphis to the North Mississippi Hill Country Picnic. It’s put together by Kenny Brown, who grew up in north Mississippi with bluesman Joe Callicott as his neighbor and mentor, and who recorded and toured with R. L. Burnside through much of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Approaching the field, I heard Otha Turner’s granddaughter Sharde Thomas take the stage. She was his fife protégée, and in the decade and a half since his death, she’s continued to lead his Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps. I was still crossing the fields when she started playing a familiar song from his repertoire—and my heart kind of sank. Did I want to be in this hot field listening to live music, especially recycled tunes, when I could be in my air-conditioned home laying on the comfortable sofa reading? Dutifully, I took a spot near the stage.
Sharde Thomas, middle, and her grandfather Otha Turner, at Otha’s annual picnic, 1996. (Courtesy of Bill Steber)
And quickly something changed. Sharde played the old tunes, but they were different. Another of Otha’s disciples was Luther Dickinson, Jim’s son, who’d gone from listening to Black Flag to immersing himself in the rural world at his back door. With his brother Cody, he’d formed the North Mississippi Allstars to continue the legacy of their neighborhood, personalizing it as kids who listened to punk rock and southern rock and nonrock would. Luther and Sharde, who is about fifteen years younger, had played together with Otha, had been tutored in not only his music but his wisdom (“Heap see,” he’d say, “mighty few know”), and after his death, they’d carried on his style, together and separately. They refracted Otha through different lenses to explore new sounds based on the old sound they’d been given. And as Sharde played that hot afternoon, backed by two other blood relatives of Otha’s, performing under the banner that Otha had used for decades—the Rising Star Fife and Drum Corps—a big smile crept over my face. Sharde was playing differently from her granddad. Her notes didn’t pop like his in a staccato manner. Rather, she was drawing elision from the piece of bamboo; she was moving her fingers across those holes in combination with her breath such that she was evoking her other major influence: Luther Dickinson’s slide guitar.
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