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

by George-Warren, Holly

  All four Chilton kids attended Memphis public schools, and in 1961, when Alex was in fourth grade, thirteen black children were permitted for the first time to attend the all-white elementary schools, as a sort of compromise in lieu of large-scale desegregation. Even this tiny ripple of it was enough to cause some white families to pull their children from the schools. Only one black student of the original thirteen would attend Bellevue Junior High, where Alex matriculated in 1964. Most had returned to black schools after being bullied and ostracized by their white classmates. Alex’s ninth-grade class at Central High included just two African Americans.

  Bill Eggleston fondly recalled that the Chilton parties, held in the evening as well as on Sunday afternoons, were filled with Memphis’ minority of social and political liberals, including doctors, lawyers, and musicians, as “a gathering of mutual friends, quite smart people.” Pup and Lee McCarty frequently attended, and Rosa Eggleston sensed that the two couples were very close: “Lee was a fun person to be around, very much an upbeat person, with a good sense of humor and a good observer of people. Pup was extremely lively. If she walked into a room at a party, she would stand out. She was very attractive—she caught your eye.”

  When the Browns visited from Jackson, it was clear their old friends had moved far left of center, both politically and socially. “Alex’s mother, compared to other people’s moms, had a dramatic, bohemian, artistic flair about her. She wore dramatic kinds of clothing,” recalls Adele Brown Tyler. As for Alex, “He was definitely one of those boys—the kind I had crushes on—who were a little nerdy, kind of intellectual looking, skinny, lanky, artistic. As I remember him, he was already just like he always stayed the rest of his life.”

  Dale Tuttle, whose own family was conservative and well-to-do, was a frequent visitor to the Chilton home and loved the freedom that came with being there: “They were laid-back parents, free spirits, and they let Alex do what he wanted.” Years later, Alex put it this way: “Neither one of them pressured me to do anything. They were permissive, and the liberality of their state of mind fed into it.”

  Alex frequently ate dinner at the home of Calvin Turley, whose family numbered among Memphis’s blue-blood set. “There wasn’t a whole lot of structure in Chilton’s household,” Calvin recalls. “So when he would come to my house after school, he definitely wanted to hang around for dinner. He got along well with my parents, and he really hit it off with my spinster aunt, who lived with us. At six thirty on the dot, we would sit down at the table. We’d be dressed appropriately for dinner and have a served meal, with a blessing and everything. I think Chilton kinda liked that, because they had no such thing that I could recall at his house.” Dale Tuttle agrees: “I don’t remember a cooked meal at the Chiltons’—only cereal, strawberries, and maybe a sandwich.”

  Alex was also drawn to the Browns’ more traditional life in Jackson: “I think Alex liked my family and my parents, because we did seem to have this kind of normal, stable life,” says Adele. “He seemed to be crazy about my mother, but I think part of him sort of craved a little bit more of that. And he certainly had all that in his background—that southern gentleman upbringing. . . . He could turn it on and off.”

  As he became an avid music fan, Alex enjoyed turning his friends on to his musical discoveries. “We’d go over to Alex’s house and stay up all night listening to records,” Dale remembers. “They had one of those Magnavox console stereos.” Favorite platters that Dale recalls include the jazz instrumentals of the Howard Roberts Quartet, the Hammond B-3 organ of Jimmy Smith, and the jazz songcraft of Mose Allison.

  Alex had developed an eclectic taste in music. On Saturday nights he sometimes tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast on Nashville’s 50,000-watt WSM radio station. On Memphis’s WDIA, the nation’s first all-black-staffed radio station, he heard R&B by local heroes Johnny Ace, Bobby “Blue” Bland, and B.B. King—himself a former WDIA DJ. Among the first live performances Alex attended was WDIA’s Starlite Revue, presented at the brand-new Mid-South Coliseum and featuring Bland, King, and national star Jackie Wilson. “I don’t know how many white people were there,” Alex remembered. “I went alone, and it wasn’t a problem.”

  By the early ’60s Memphis’s pioneering rockabilly scene had faded, though many of its originators, including Sun’s owner, Sam Phillips, and Sun engineer and guitarist Roland Janes, were still on the scene and would start new studios as the decade progressed. “I was given a copy of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ for my seventh or eighth birthday,” Alex said. “By 1959 Elvis was syrup and Jerry Lee was pretty much gone, and the rockabilly thing was sort of over.” Still, Elvis’s influence was pervasive on Memphians, and sightings of the King could be exciting. “You couldn’t listen to the radio without hearing Elvis,” Alex told journalist Parke Puterbaugh. “He was influential on everyone in my environment. He happened to live not too far away, and you often saw him driving down the street in a Cadillac.”

  Alex listened to the Top 40 stations WHBQ and WMPS, where DJs like George Klein and Jack Parnell (whose son Chris would later star on Saturday Night Live) catered to teenage tastes. “When I got to be 11 or 12, I started listening to the radio a little bit and things like ‘Johnny Angel’ [by actress Shelley Fabares],” he recalled. “The Ronettes I remember pretty well. Then there are other things from that time that I didn’t really get caught up in [like the early-’60s teen idols]. . . . I thought the Kingston Trio were much more vital than Frankie Avalon.”

  Alex, occasionally joined by Calvin, Dale, or Paul Jobe, another friend, would hang out on the top of the stairway and listen to the jazz action downstairs. Dale remembered various well-known musicians stopping by later in the decade, including Herb Alpert and Domingo Samudio (leader of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs). “They’d be playing when we went to bed, and when I left the next morning, they’d still be playing,” according to Dale. Alex recalled New Yorker Marian McPartland and the Preservation Hall Jazz Band from New Orleans partying at his parents’ when they were in town. Though Cecelia thought her dad was “bigoted about music—if it’s not jazz, it’s not worth listening to,” Dale remembered Sidney’s turning the boys on to Bob Dylan in 1963: “He was playing ‘Talkin’ New York’ for Alex and me and saying, ‘Y’all need to follow this guy, he’s going to be a star someday.’”

  • • •

  When Alex entered Bellevue Junior High in 1963, he took up a new interest: running track. “Though he was thin, he was very, very athletic,” Dale remembered. “He was a high-hurdle jumper—it was really difficult.” Alex also started playing tennis, a lifelong pursuit. He began attending ballroom dance classes for seventh- and eighth-graders—a sure way to meet girls—at Memphis’s long-standing private girls’ school, Miss Hutchison’s, on Union Avenue. Carole Ruleman, a pretty brunette whose family lived in Midtown, noticed Alex at the Hutchison gymnasium. “All the girls were standing in a line, and the boys were supposed to stand directly across from us,” she remembered. “The dance teacher said, ‘Stand with your toes on the line, your hands down by your side, and keep still and don’t say anything.’ I looked up, and the boy across from me was kind of going in a circle, sticking his feet out, and waving his hands in the air—as if he were conducting a marching band. I thought, My god, how can he possibly be doing this more wrong? I turned to the person next to me and said, ‘Who is that?’ She said, ‘His name is Alex Chilton.’”

  Thus began a friendship that would blossom into a brief romance. Alex also attracted the attention of another of Miss Hutchison’s thirteen-year-old students, Louise Leffler, a self-described “nice Catholic girl from a conservative family,” when he showed up for dance class with his pockets full of firecrackers. “We were all awkwardly standing around waiting to be asked to dance,” Louise recalls. “A loud noise came from over by the door to the back of the gym. It turned out to be Alex, of course. Not just one firecracker, but a string of them.” She adds, “He was funny and go
od-looking. He had a swagger and held a Camel like no other.” Soon after they met, Alex gave her a snapshot of himself standing in his dad’s office behind his father, whose left hand holds a phone to his ear as his right grasps a cigarette. Sidney smiles for the camera while young Alex, hand on his hip, smirks. By the following summer, Alex was a fixture at Louise’s house.

  A group of kids would often hang out on the side porch of the Rulemans’ North Avalon home, where Carole and her older sister Madelyn held court. Carole remembered that Alex pretty much followed the preppy dress code of the day: button-down Oxford-style shirt, navy-blue V-neck sweater, and khaki pants. “His legs were really highly developed, ’cause he ran in the track team at Bellevue,” Carole said, “so his pants were tight. I can just picture him sitting there: his legs crossed, holding his Camel unfiltered cigarette, with his head back and laughing.” With light brown hair, Alex (who in later life resembled his father) looked remarkably like his brother Reid.

  Alex also found a partner in crime in Dale Tuttle, who shared classes with him at Bellevue. “Alex and I were prone to get in trouble,” Dale remembers. “We figured out a way to have two lunch periods by skipping out on art class. More than once we were hauled into the principal’s office, and back then, they’d make you pull your pants down and you’d get paddled with a wooden paddle with holes drilled in it. Alex was always a bit of a rebel. I believe he tested as a genius when they gave us the IQ test at Bellevue.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Thirteen

  “When the Beatles came along, I got swept up in it,” according to Alex. “I remember walking into school the day after the Beatles were on Ed Sullivan [February 9, 1964], and somebody pointed at me and yelled, ‘Here comes Ringo!’ All the teenage bands immediately gravitated toward the Beatles. That was where the itch began, seeing the Beatles and suddenly saying to myself, ‘Gee, I wish I could do that!’” Thirteen-year-old Alex started growing out his hair and combing his bangs down, going for his own Beatle ’do.

  In 1964 makeshift rock & roll bands began sprouting in Memphis like mushrooms after a summer rain. “There were maybe half a dozen high schools in Memphis, and there were probably fifteen or twenty garage bands in each one of them,” says Russ Caccamisi, who played bass in several of the groups. “In Memphis in the mid- to late ’60s, if you weren’t in a band, you weren’t breathing.” In backhouses and garages, according to one published account, more than five hundred bands formed there in the 1960s.

  After school and on Saturdays, Alex began spending much of his spare time at Poplar Tunes, Memphis’s best record shop, either alone or with friends like Calvin Turley, Dale Tuttle, Paul Jobe, Carole Ruleman, and Louise Leffler. “We’d usually walk to Pop Tunes from Alex’s house,” Dale recalls. “It was a local institution about a mile away on Poplar at Danny Thomas Boulevard. Back in those days, you could listen to records before you bought them.” (Vinyl could be popped onto one of the store’s many turntables.) “My musical taste and knowledge all came from Alex,” says Paul, whose friendship continued over the decades. “I had very limited taste, but Alex and I would sit around for hours and listen to music. Alex would introduce me to different music, as well as various musicians and bands. And a lot of it I still listen to.”

  Sidney was not taken with rock & roll and made no bones about it. “He was a big Duke Ellington and Count Basie fan,” Alex said. “But he was also a big fan of Ray Charles, and I began to love those records. The first record I ever bought was the What’d I Say album.”

  Alex spent much of the summer of 1964 hanging with friends, most of whom lived in the upscale Central Gardens district. His parents had become friendly with a widow whose children, Donovan and Day Smith, joined her at the Sunday afternoon gatherings at the Chiltons’. “When I was twelve or thirteen,” Alex said, “somehow my set of friends began to be people who went to the private school in Memphis—Memphis University School—and the girls’ school that was just across the athletic field, Miss Hutchison’s. That group of people were kind of wealthy.”

  Alex would frequently start the day at Louise Leffler’s Harbert Avenue home. He was her first love. “Mother would call upstairs, ‘Alex is here!’” Louise remembers. “I felt close to Alex, and he sort of looked after me and stood by me like he was ‘my guy.’ . . . We would wander aimlessly, or go to Barksdale Sundry to buy Alex’s cigarettes.”

  Alex gave Louise gifts, including an autographed photo of Little Stevie Wonder that he’d bought at the fourteen-year-old Motown star’s concert at Ellis Auditorium. “It said, ‘Love and Kisses to Louise from Stevie Wonder,’” Louise recalls, “and at first I didn’t believe him. I asked Alex how Stevie could write if he’s blind. Alex insisted he signed it.” (Wonder used an X as his signature, so Alex or someone else must have forged it.) Alex also got her a present from his mother’s gallery: a clunky handmade ring. “It was very crude in design and made of iron,” Louise remembers. “It was huge, a glob of iron in the shape of a ring. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t remember wearing it very much.”

  Much of Alex’s time at Louise’s house was spent in the basement family room. “We’d sit on the couch and listen endlessly to pop songs on George Klein’s radio show,” she recalls. “I would watch Alex’s face as he listened so closely to the music. He wouldn’t say much, but you knew he liked all the songs. He was consumed with music.” He rhapsodized about listening to WDIA at night and hearing songs like “Back Door Man” by Howlin’ Wolf, “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” by Muddy Waters, and Bobby “Blue” Bland’s “Farther Up the Road,” as well as tunes by big-voiced soul singers. Alex also got a kick out of the raunchy black comedienne Moms Mabley.

  When not with the more sheltered Louise, Alex hung out with Carole Ruleman, whose older sister or brother chauffeured her and Alex to teenage soirees. “There was quite the extravagant little party circuit,” said Alex. “Every week there would be one, two, or three of these nice little pool parties or indoor parties. And they would hire a teenage band to play at these things.” At one gathering he met a couple of musicians, Christopher Bell, a guitarist and Beatles fan from a wealthy family in nearby Germantown, and Bill Cunningham, a bassist and keyboardist who’d attended Sherwood Elementary a grade ahead of Alex. Bill and Chris had been playing in bands and were putting together a new combo called the Jynx. Both boys would play an enormous role in Alex’s music career.

  Booze flowed freely at the teenage bacchanals, and Alex began indulging, chugging down bourbon, scotch, Southern Comfort, and beer. Carole remembered that, after one particularly rambunctious party, “my brother was driving us home in his jeep, and Alex started singing ‘Louie, Louie,’ doing the real words that were kinda X-rated. He was pretty drunk, and it was funny. Even my straitlaced brother was laughing.”

  Abundant revelry took place at the backhouse behind Paul Jobe’s Central Gardens home. “When you’re a young teenager, you can’t drive to the park and drink your beer and smoke cigarettes,” says Paul, “so my backhouse kind of sufficed for that. For some reason, my parents never came out there, so we could do what we wanted. I was getting visitors throughout the night—it was kinda crazy.” The teens found a neighborhood woman who worked as a domestic to buy them six-packs of Colt 45.

  Alex and Paul, occasionally joined by Calvin and Dale, started making the scene in Midtown teen clubs to check out live music, including the Tonga Club, a nitery on Madison, and the Roaring 60s, on Jackson Avenue, with a ten-foot-high stage. Former and current Messick and Central High School students played in bands like Flash and the Casuals and Tommy Burk and the Counts, which had begun adding British Invasion hits to their R&B-tinged repertoire. In addition to entertaining drunken teenagers at parties and teen clubs, bands performed at YMCAs and skating rinks. A few local acts even won bookings to support touring groups; Alex and Paul saw Randy and the Radiants and the Counts open for the Dave Clark Five at the Mid-South Coliseum in December ’64.

  Another
favorite nightspot was the Bitter Lemon, a funky Midtown coffeehouse where keyboardist Jim Dickinson, singer-songwriter Sid Selvidge, songwriter-producer Don Nix, and many other future luminaries performed. “They had some really good music at the Bitter Lemon,” says Paul. “Blues, rock & roll, folk. Alex and I would hitchhike to the Bitter Lemon or ride our bikes there, then home at one in the morning.”

  It was during his thirteenth year, with all this musical stimulation surrounding him, that Alex decided he wanted to be in a band, too. He later told Cub Koda:

  It all seemed really complex to me, and I thought the only way I could participate in something like that was maybe on an instrument as simple as the bass, where I didn’t have to play six notes all at the same time. Just one at a time, that I could handle. I asked my dad to get me a bass for Christmas. They took that under their consideration, and when Christmas came around, I got an amp and a guitar, not a bass. My dad said, ‘Hey, most bass players start out on the guitar anyway.’ Well, I knew it wasn’t for me. But what could I do? It was this purple Hagstrom guitar with the Naugahyde on the back, the plastic on the front and the little stove switches on it. I looked at it and said, ‘That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I will never touch that!’ So it was that and an Alamo amp. The guitar kinda sat around, and I’d hear things like ‘She Loves You,’ where it goes [sings] ‘and you know it can’t be bad, blang-blang-blang’ on the guitar, and I’d go, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful!’ But they’re playing three different chords, six notes each, all in rapid succession, there is no way I’m going to be able to do that! So that was really kind of hopeless for me. But what I did do off of a Beatle record on my guitar was learn the bass part to ‘All My Lovin’,’ which I thought was really cool.