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

by George-Warren, Holly

  Music was bubbling over in Memphis in the 1950s. The year Alex was born Sam Phillips opened his Memphis Recording Service, where Elvis Presley would first record three years later. The Overton Park Bandshell in Midtown featured country artists, including Elvis, whose records started appearing on the C&W charts. Beale Street had been the cultural heart of black Memphis since the nineteenth century. And across the Mississippi River in West Memphis, Arkansas, places like the Plantation Inn featured R&B bands.

  By 1955 Elvis had become a regional star, touring regularly but not so big that he didn’t perform at Reid and Cecelia’s high school, Messick, to help get Presley’s then-manager Bob Neal’s son elected to the student council. No black kids attended Messick; for the most part, Memphis public schools remained segregated until federally ordered busing in 1973.

  Reid Chilton played an active role in student government at Messick, as well as on the football team. He was a handsome young man, with the aristocratic, fine features of his father—a bone structure that his baby brother, Alex, had also inherited. Of medium height, with brown hair, Reid had a beautiful smile that lit up his face. “He was really the golden boy of the family,” Adele remembers. During his last month in high school, he brought home the Coasters’ double-sided hit 45 “Searchin’”/“Young Blood.” Decades later Alex recalled being somewhat embarrassed by the B-side’s lascivious lyrics when Reid and his girlfriend played the record over and over one night while Sidney and Mary Evelyn were out.

  Since he was about fifteen, Reid had been sporadically experiencing seizures in which he’d suddenly go stiff, then lose consciousness. A result of the traumatic brain injury he’d suffered from falling out of the tree, the seizures struck with no warning. The Chiltons unsuccessfully sought medical treatment for their son. The episodes did not stop Reid from living a normal life, however, and he paid special attention to his young brother. “I idolized him,” Alex told Bruce Eaton in 2007. “He was everything to me. He took me places.” Reid continued to participate in sports and student affairs at school and also became an acolyte at St. John’s Episcopal Church. “We were raised going to Sunday school,” says Cecelia. “But for the most part, our parents would take us and come pick us up. It was not really a part of our lives. We were kind of the poor riffraff at the church.”

  By the time seventeen-year-old Reid graduated from high school, in the spring of 1957, he’d served as senior vice president of the student council and played first-string center on the football team. He’d also been accepted at Mississippi State College, where he planned to study engineering in the fall, when Alex would be starting first grade at Sherwood Elementary. But on Thursday, June 27, 1957, just a month after his graduation, Reid suffered a powerful seizure while taking a bath. Losing consciousness, he slipped under the water and drowned. Six-year-old Alex was with his mother when she discovered Reid’s body around 7 p.m. The Mercy Ambulance Service raced to the scene, and medics, pushing Alex out of the way, worked to revive Reid with a respirator. But it was no use, and Reid was pronounced dead on arrival at Baptist Hospital. None of the Chiltons, particularly Alex, would ever fully recover from the tragedy.

  “That was a big thing in the family of course,” Alex told Bruce Eaton in a hushed tone fifty years later. “You can only imagine how traumatic that would have been,” says Alex’s friend Adele, who remembers the aftermath of Reid’s death. “I think that had a huge impact on the whole family and the drinking [by Sidney and Mary Evelyn, which escalated further] and all that. . . . I’m sure that was totally traumatizing to Alex. I always felt that he had become this stoic . . . [who built] this kind of hard shell, because he had gone through so many things [beginning with] that.”

  Cecelia, who was sixteen and out of town visiting relatives when Reid died, believes “the death had a big effect on all of us. I can’t imagine how my mother could have ever been the same.” Decades later Cecelia discovered a letter Sidney wrote to his mother in Colorado, conveying his grief. “It was just gripping,” she recalls, “because he described how he came home and the ambulance was at the house, and he described the trauma and the immediacy of it. I really just can’t imagine what it would have been like to be there at the time.”

  An enduring pall fell over the family. Sidney mailed Army and Iris Brown an unfinished thank-you note Reid had started writing them, acknowledging their graduation gift. With his parents shut down by grief, his sister a senior in high school, and the introspective Howard in his own world, Alex was usually left on his own, just when he needed someone to help him through the trauma. Sidney continued to travel, and Mary Evelyn occupied her time with bridge and gardening, struggling to keep depression at bay.

  Cecelia threw herself into religion. “I was very much into Jesus,” she says. “There was a group called Young Life, and we had a piano at home, so every week fifty or so kids could come to my house for two hours and they would sing songs and have a great time. My father was an agnostic; Alex was young enough then that they felt like he was not impressionable, but Howard was at a very impressionable age. So my father would take Howard, and they would go to the library; [Sidney] wouldn’t let Howard be in the house when that was going on, because he didn’t want Howard to be exposed to that. But they would never have told me I couldn’t do that—though it was very much not their thing. They were wonderfully accepting parents—whatever we wanted to do, we could do.”

  By 1960 close friends of the Chiltons from Mississippi intervened with a plan for lifting the family out of the deadening depression that had settled over them in Sherwood Forest. It involved leaving the suburbs behind for a mixed neighborhood in Midtown Memphis, from which many whites had fled over the past few years. “I was off to college, and the next thing I know, they’re buying this two-story house downtown,” recalls Cecelia. “All of a sudden it’s not the Bridge Club or the Garden Club; it’s artists and musicians. Everybody’s life changed.”

  CHAPTER 3

  Midtown

  Music and art filled the Chiltons’ elegant new home in Midtown Memphis, where the family moved in 1960. “It was a big old house, almost like a castle,” Alex remembered, “that we bought for a song.”

  The 4,400-square-foot limestone manse had been built around 1907 by the wealthy Schorr family, Germans who cofounded Memphis’s Tennessee Brewery in 1885. By 1960, 145 North Montgomery Street was considered part of “the inner city,” according to Alex. “That was a pretty wild neighborhood, with a lot of slum kids hangin’ around,” he remembered, “a real breeding ground for a lot of things.” Montgomery was close to commercial strips chockablock with businesses and bars. The Chiltons’ house was on a short, leafy block with a large synagogue across the street, which sometimes sponsored teenage sock hops. Next door sat a stately mansion, owned for generations by a prominent Memphis family. On the other side, the large home had been divided into offices, including, for a time, a suicide-prevention crisis center. “We joked about how comforting it was to have it so handy,” Cecelia remembered with a laugh.

  From the beginning the plan was for Mary Evelyn to open an art gallery in the spacious home’s downstairs rooms. Ceramicists Pup and Lee McCarty, about ten years younger than the Chiltons, were making a name for themselves in tiny Merigold, Mississippi, as arty potters who dug clay from the backyard of William Faulkner’s Oxford home, Rowan Oak, and molded it into designs inspired by the Mississippi River Delta landscape. Lee had first met the Chiltons when he boarded with Mary Evelyn’s mother in his youth. Now, along with another friend from Mississippi, the McCartys and Chiltons pooled their resources to turn the parlor floor of the house into a gallery exhibiting the couple’s pottery and ceramics, along with contemporary art and other regional artisans’ work.

  They covered the walls and stained-glass windows with pegboard for hanging the art, painted everything white, including the ceiling crossbeams and oak woodwork, and replaced the vintage ceiling fixtures with contemporary lighting. Just behind the
kitchen the Chiltons turned their backyard into a concrete courtyard and strategically placed McCarty ceramics throughout. The McCartys traveled to Mexico annually and brought home artwork and handcrafted objects to exhibit and sell at the gallery.

  Mary Chilton Galleries got its first press coverage in November 1962: “Dozens of men and women were coming out . . . carrying large paintings, pottery, statues, and other art objects,” the Memphis Press-Scimitar reported about a joint exhibition: a one-man show by a maker of mobiles and stabiles from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and “Own-Your-Own-Art,” featuring a hodgepodge of affordable pieces. The article reported such unbelievable bargains as a Picasso woodcut for $18.50 and an original Cézanne etching for $26, along with jewelry designed by Elsa Freund of Eureka Springs, Arkansas ($6.50), and ceramic pots made by Memphian Dodie Mann ($5).

  While Mary Evelyn concentrated on her art gallery, Sidney returned to his old love—jazz. “Around 1961 Daddy started playing music again,” Cecelia remembers. Its location, in Midtown Memphis, made the Chilton home an easy stopover for jazz musicians going to and from a gig. “When I was ten, it was party time around my parents’ house,” Alex said. “I remember countless nights of going to sleep with, like, sixteen jazz musicians playing downstairs.” Some days, as Alex returned home from school and walked up the wide stone front steps, he could hear jazz wafting out. Sidney “and some friends would be jamming,” Alex remembered. “My dad played piano and he had an electric guitar player, bass, fiddle, and a drummer.” Alex told Times-Picayune reporter Keith Spera, “Five o’clock came, and two or three musicians were over at the house drinking heavily and playing and listening to records. That was every day.”

  Each summer, with the family in tow, the Chiltons would travel to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for gatherings Sidney organized to socialize with other musicians and their families. “It was probably only a couple of years or so after Reid died when Sidney started having these summer get-togethers for musician friends from Jackson and Ole Miss,” Adele Brown Tyler recalls.

  The Browns adored the Chiltons but worried about Mary Evelyn and Sidney’s consumption of alcohol. Over the years the Browns had become more conventional: Army, a member of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, would found the city orchestra; Iris gave up her job to be a full-time homemaker. At the Chiltons’ evening gatherings, Mary Evelyn would welcome her guests holding a bourbon and OJ in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Though Sidney had heart disease, he continued to sip bourbon and smoke heavily throughout the festivities. (It wasn’t until around the time that he had triple-bypass surgery in the ’70s that he quit smoking and drinking.) In 1997 Alex, during an onstage interview at Jazzfest in New Orleans, referred to his late parents as alcoholics and remembered their salons as including “a lot of crazy people all the time. I knew they were crazy. They didn’t know they were crazy.”

  The Browns had also expressed concern about the scant parental supervision on the Chiltons’ part as early as their time in the suburbs, but now, it seemed, Alex’s parents left him to fend for himself entirely, imposing no restrictions or demands of any kind on him. “I got the feeling that he kind of raised himself,” Adele says, “and I did, too, to some degree, because I was also a much later child. Our parents had both started ten years earlier having kids, and we were at the tail end, and maybe they’d run out of energy or something.”

  Free of homework or any household chores, Alex listened to music. The Chiltons’ hi-fi sat next to a stack of vinyl that kept growing; just as he had absorbed his brother Reid’s Coasters 45, Alex devoured Sidney’s jazz discs, as he later described:

  I became a fan of his Glenn Miller records first, and then I went on to Ray Charles and Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck. . . . I was listening to a lot of records from his collection. He’d be listening to something and be fascinated with some element of a piece of music, and he would talk to me about it and describe the way it was put together. He shared what he liked with me. I might not have really understood it very well, but a lot of it stuck with me. . . . I became a big fan of Chet Baker, and that was when I first really wanted to sing. He first inspired me to sing when I was about 7.

  Sidney occasionally mentored Alex in jazz piano. “He’d come home from work and play something and talk to me about theory and chord structures,” Alex remembered, “and when I did start playing more earnestly, I remembered a lot of things he said, and I could piece together diminished scales. It was brilliant left-hand stuff. He showed me a couple of simple, good jazzy bluesy accompaniments to generally use.”

  Sidney’s impromptu soirees drew other music and art lovers to the Chilton home. Among them was a well-heeled pair of newlyweds—Memphis’s answer to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. William Eggleston, born into a wealthy Mississippi family in 1939 (the year Reid Chilton was born), had been raised on a cotton plantation, attended the Webb boarding school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and became enamored with the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eggleston would later revolutionize fine-art photography with his saturated-color images and “democratization” of subject matter, including his shot of a bloodred ceiling that would grace a future Big Star LP cover. Bill and his wife, Rosa, also a child of “old money,” were drifting from place to place when they first met the Chiltons.

  “We didn’t have a place to stay, and the Chiltons kind of adopted us,” recalls Rosa. “We were thinking about driving back to Mississippi, and Mary said, ‘Oh, spend the night here!’ We had this rapport going on. They did not seem like parents. The age gap was nonexistent.” Rosa remembers Mary Evelyn as “not really a very talkative person. She was a good listener and a very sweet person.” On afternoons in the Chiltons’ small kitchen, Mary Evelyn taught Rosa how to whip up homemade mayonnaise and to make espresso using an Italian coffee pot.

  Sidney and Mary Evelyn “were some of my closest friends,” Bill Eggleston told Robert Gordon for his musical portrait of the Bluff City, It Came from Memphis. “They were two of the most important people in Memphis from that time, the Kennedy era. Mary held what you might call a salon, and things happened in the house. . . . I don’t know who else would have fostered what they did.” The young couple stayed with the Chiltons a few nights, then rented an apartment nearby, close to Overton Park. Eventually the Chiltons offered part of the backyard carriage house (or, in Memphis parlance, “backhouse”), originally the servants’ quarters, to Bill Eggleston to use as a darkroom.

  When the Egglestons dropped by the Chiltons’, the classically trained Bill performed his favorite Baroque pieces on the Chickering. Howard, who played tuba in the Messick High orchestra, became friendly with the Egglestons, and occasionally Howard and Bill played music together. Bill showed young Alex a few things, too. “Eggleston was a fixture around our house for a few years,” Alex later said. “He played Baroque keyboards and gave me a taste for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, as did Howard.”

  Years later Cecelia Chilton told Rosa that Bill reminded her parents of Reid, though Sidney and Mary Evelyn never mentioned their deceased son to the Egglestons. No photographs of him adorned the house, either. By moving to Midtown, the Chiltons had hoped to put more than just distance between the tragedy of Reid’s death and their lives. Though Reid wasn’t discussed at home, over the years Alex would bring up his older brother’s death to friends, one of whom remembered, “When he told me that, he had a look on his face I had never seen before or since.”

  Along with the Egglestons and McCartys, Mary Evelyn’s Aunt Em occasionally stayed with the Chiltons for months at a time. So did Mary Evelyn’s old friend Peter Lindamood, who rented an apartment above the carriage house. With an oversized head and fey mannerisms, “he was real eccentric and delightful,” said Cecelia, recalling special family dinners where “Peter would help decorate the table and take pinking shears and make place mats out of construction paper and put ribbons around.” Alex’s good friend Calvin Turley remembered him as having “peach hair”
and holding court at the kitchen table: “He would just pontificate about various things, but specifically he would try to get Alex and anybody else who was around, such as myself, to learn a new vocabulary word every day.” Adele Brown Tyler found Lindamood a character, with seemingly nowhere to go but the Chiltons’: “By the time he showed up in Memphis and lived out in their garage apartment, he seemed pretty down and out.”

  In addition to becoming a haven for jazz and modern art, the Chilton home was a repository of progressive social and political thought. “A lot of the hipper people of their generation were around all the time,” according to Alex. “There was lots of music in the house and jazz musicians coming over—black and white. The color line was and is fairly strong [in Memphis], and my parents’ social world was pretty much white people—but it was not uncommon for black people to be in the house.” In a city where the Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 was largely ignored or circumvented by school boards and local officials, Sidney Chilton supported James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, his alma mater, in 1962. “In terms of social issues, my father was the most unbigoted person that you could find,” according to Cecelia. As in Mississippi, Memphis still had segregated drinking fountains and public bathrooms, as well as schools.

  Alex’s childhood pal Dale Tuttle, now a prominent Memphis attorney, recalls, “Sidney was rooting for the Army and the tanks to desegregate [the University of Mississippi]. They were liberal people back then, when there were many, many conservatives. . . . The Chiltons were definitely among the vanguard of the progressives.” Alex recalled that his father “really seemed to admire Franklin Roosevelt and was a staunch Democrat”; Sidney later became active in the Memphis chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.