Alex was also listening closely to the records made locally at Stax, the independent studio and label on East McLemore, in a predominantly black neighborhood in South Memphis. Owned by banker and country fiddler Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, Stax started out as Satellite Records and was renamed when they moved it from Brunswick, Tennessee, to Memphis. Axton ran the record shop that sold the discs cut at the studio, including “Gee Whiz,” a huge R&B and pop hit by WDIA DJ Rufus Thomas’s daughter Carla Thomas.
“The Stax records from Memphis were really great,” Alex said in 1996. “Listening to the Beatles, I somehow couldn’t figure that out with a guitar in my hands, but when I listened to [Stax session guitarist] Steve Cropper, and not knowing anything about playing guitar, listening to him play, somehow I had a feeling ‘I can do that—that’s what I wanna sound like.’ Learning Steve Cropper licks was the first thing I ever did.” Cropper had played in a couple of local bands with bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn; both were classmates of Cecelia Chilton’s at Messick High. Starting out as the Royal Spades in 1957, Cropper and Dunn’s group changed its moniker to the Mar-Keys and cut their first record on the fledgling Satellite label. “Last Night,” cowritten and produced by Chips Moman, shot to #3 on the Billboard chart in 1961.
Sidney Chilton also helped Alex by getting his son a lesson with legendary Memphis guitarist Sid Manker, best known as the composer of and lead guitarist on the Bill Justis hit “Raunchy.” Manker, who’d done time at a penal farm for heroin possession in 1961, sometimes stopped by the soirees at the Chilton home. Not long after he showed the rudiments of guitar to Alex, Manker dropped out of sight. Forty years later, though, Alex would tell Bruce Eaton, “One of my dad’s musician buddies was Sid Manker in Memphis, who played a lot of recording sessions and was a great jazz guitarist. . . . The only guitar lesson I ever took was from [him].”
In the fall of 1965, fourteen-year-old Alex enrolled in ninth grade at Central High School. Earlier in the year he had joined a loose-knit garage band formed by his Central Gardens buddies Paul Jobe, on drums, Preston Wilson, on electric piano, David Goolsby, on guitar, and David Francher, on bass. Calling themselves the Moondogs, the boys gathered at Paul’s backhouse to listen to Alex’s records and learn how to play them. “Alex kinda took control,” according to Paul. “We started with cheap mics and everything else that we’d buy at a pawn shop, and we got together and started playing.”
As the group’s vocalist, Alex quickly learned lyrics. “I really wasn’t getting anywhere on the guitar, so I just kinda put the guitar away,” Alex said. “I would go and hang out with my friends who had cooler guitars and drums and stuff and I knew I could sing, right? So I would participate in that way. I could be the singer because I had already practiced so much with Chet Baker and Ray Charles. So to do ‘Gloria’ or ‘Louie, Louie,’ it just wasn’t that much of a personality stretch for me to get to any of those tunes.”
He continued to dig the Beatles, as well as Billy J. Kramer, Herman’s Hermits, the Kinks, and “the melodic groups,” he later said. “I really loved the mid-sixties British pop music. All two and a half minutes or three minutes long, really appealing songs. I’ve always aspired to that same format.”
The band thrashed through various covers of them all, along with Motown and R&B hits, including numbers by Sam and Dave, the Temptations, the Four Tops, and Otis Redding. Rehearsing with the Moondogs at Paul’s backhouse sometimes brought out Alex’s dark side. “He was a moody guy to start off with,” Paul remembers, “and if someone hit the wrong chord or the wrong note or if I wasn’t doing something correctly on the drums, he would get real pissed off. He had a really bad temper.” Alex would guzzle Colt 45s at rehearsal until he was tipsy, also getting buzzed before the Moondogs’ occasional shows. “It sort of freaked us out,” says Paul, “when he’d get quasi-drunk before going onstage, but then he always seemed to carry it off. He just had this vision that he was kind of like [Mick] Jagger—especially when he’d had a few beers.”
When the Browns visited the Chilton home in 1965, Adele noticed that Alex had taken to wearing dark blue or black T-shirts and Levi’s rather than the preppy clothes most guys in Jackson wore: “All the other boys at the time were wearing madras plaid pants and button-down shirts. Alex stood out. He was very content to be marching to this other drummer and didn’t want to be lumped in with all those other people. I was intrigued, because he seemed to care a lot less than I did about what everybody thought about him. He was much more willing to be an individual. He already had this outsider image of himself, and he sort of wore it like a badge.”
Neither did Alex’s parents follow Southern protocol when it came to supervising fourteen-year-olds. “Back in those days, girls did not go into boys’ bedrooms,” Adele explains. “My mother would never let me have boys come upstairs to my bedroom and hang out. But when we got to the Chiltons’, they were like, ‘Oh, Adele, go on upstairs, Alex and his friends are up in his bedroom.’ I thought, ‘Wow, that’s fun—there are guys up there, and they’re musicians!’”
Calvin Turley introduced Alex to another boy who would remain a lifelong friend. Michael O’Brien, whose parents were divorced, lived in east Memphis but spent much of his time at his grandmother’s in Midtown. “Alex was nothing like my other friends,” says Michael. “He had a well-defined sense of himself and was already a bit defiant. He knew who he was, what he wanted to do, and what he wouldn’t tolerate. And that never changed as long as I knew him. Hanging out with Alex involved listening to music that he wanted you to hear. It was like a class, with Alex as teacher and us—his friends—as his students. Alex would pick, say, one of his dad’s Ray Charles records and point out a certain vocal phrasing and play it again and again and again—while smiling approvingly. We listened obediently.”
Another frequent visitor to the Chilton home was a thirty-year-old portrait painter who’d moved from California to Jackson, Mississippi, after meeting influential art patrons the McDavids, who then introduced him to the McCartys and the Chiltons. The youthful-looking Bill Buffett quickly became a successful society portraitist in Jackson, primarily painting the daughters and wives of the city’s upper crust. On his first visit to Memphis, Bill headed to the Chiltons’ to discuss exhibiting his paintings in the gallery. Mary Evelyn invited him to stay over—on a chaise longue in Alex’s room, where he spent the next few nights.
“Alex had a big four-poster bed with posts that looked like cannons,” Bill recalls. “We hit it right off, because we both loved music, black music in particular. He had a great record collection.” Then and on subsequent visits, the two spent hours listening to albums, though Alex would sometimes slip out at night to ramble about the neighborhood. With his increasing cigarette habit, his track-running days were behind him, though he continued to trek for miles around Midtown. “He was a fleet runner, and he’d go all over Memphis on foot,” says Bill. “He had big, strong thighs, like [the figures] on a Greek vase. He was a night person even then. He’d go out and run all the way up Poplar Avenue for miles and visit with somebody and shoot the breeze and kick things around and then come running back home around eleven thirty or midnight and get up and go to school the next day.”
• • •
During the summer of ’65 Alex fell for the Rolling Stones’ “Satisfaction,” and on November 17 he and Paul saw the group at the Mid-South Coliseum, during their second U.S. tour. “We stayed up all night listening to the new Stones album over and over,” Paul recalls. “I remember Alex also talking about how he thought Brian Wilson was a genius.” Alex soon caught a Beach Boys concert in Memphis; three years later, he’d be touring with them. When Bob Dylan’s first electric hit, “Like a Rolling Stone,” climbed the pop charts that July, the Moondogs added it to their repertoire.
At some point that year, Alex also discovered marijuana, probably turned on by Howard, visiting from college. Though not prevalent in Memphis at the time, pot could be
procured over the counter at a handmade-sandal shop a few blocks from Beale Street. Older musicians in town were known to have connections as well. Alex managed to scrounge the occasional joint, and weed would become nearly a lifelong companion. “Alex was the person who got me into pot,” Paul Jobe relates. “We’d go down to his parents’ basement and smoke.”
Alex continued to make the rounds at teen parties. At one of them he ran into Chris Bell and Bill Cunningham, whose band, the Jynx, was performing. Inspired by the Kinks, the combo covered the band’s material, as well as Beatles tunes, and a tipsy Alex got up and sang a song with them. Impressed, Bill and Chris invited Alex to their next rehearsal to prepare for cutting a demo. He played with them for a few weeks, but when it came time to record at Roland Janes’s Sonic Studio, Alex didn’t show. Nevertheless, like other garage bands in town, the Jynx made a professional-sounding recording thanks to Janes’s expertise.
The finished product was used as an audition tape for DJ George Klein’s Saturday-afternoon television show, Talent Party, where local groups would lip-sync along with their recorded tracks. Klein had made a deal with Janes: Janes would record the teen bands inexpensively and tip Klein off to the most talented. “He had the kids come by on Saturday morning, and for $12 he would cut one or two sides on them,” says Klein. “What was really cool is that he would sweeten up the recording to make it sound a little bit better than it actually did.”
It seemed every teenager in Memphis wanted to play music, including Carole Ruleman, who’d been studying piano and wanted to switch to guitar. Alex accompanied her to a music store on Union Avenue to buy her first acoustic. Though Alex was still a novice on the instrument, he tried to show her a few things. His efforts led to an argument one day when the two sat on the staircase in Alex’s home. “He was trying really hard to pick out a song, and he couldn’t play at all,” she remembered. “We were listening to a record playing upstairs, and he said something like ‘This is where the chord change comes,’ and I said, ‘No, that’s a modulation. I know ’cause I’ve taken piano and been in the choir.’ His face got red and he said, ‘You’re wrong! I know this is a change because my father is a professional musician!’”
On February 10, 1966, Alex invited Carole to go with him to see Bob Dylan at Ellis Auditorium. Her sister drove the fifteen-year-olds to the show. At the five-thousand-seat venue, which wasn’t even half full, Dylan performed solo acoustic for the first half and electric with the Hawks during the second. Alex was floored by the performance, which he and Carole saw from the cheap seats high up in the balcony.
As Alex became more rebellious, some of his friends’ parents began putting a stop to his “bad influence” on their kids. By tenth grade Calvin Turley had been sent to the Webb boarding school, Dale Tuttle was enrolled at Christian Brothers High, and Paul Jobe had transferred to the tony Memphis University School (MUS). Carole Ruleman, meanwhile, had started dating MUS student Chris Bell; Alex’s face had broken out with acne, and Carole didn’t want to kiss a boy with pimples. Louise Leffler’s mother made her end her relationship with Alex. “Alex and I were amorous for a while,” says Louise. “I was a virgin, and he may have been, too. My mother thought the relationship was getting out of hand. I think she freaked and realized she couldn’t control me. I couldn’t control me, either. But nothing ever happened at that time ’cause she broke it up. At that age he was ready to have a sexual relationship. I think he went to Central High and found whatever he wanted, but I was a late bloomer.” At one point Louise tried to rekindle things with Alex, but he literally pushed her away. “By that time he could be really cruel,” she remembers with sadness. “It was a very bad scene.”
Alex had completely stopped caring about school, and his grades showed it. He began arguing with his father over his poor performance, and one day he decided to run away from home. With a bottle of whiskey and not much else, he caught a bus to Jackson and found his way to Bill Buffett. “I was renting a tiny, two-room house, and he just showed up,” Bill remembers. “I didn’t drink much, but he had this bottle, and we drank some of it and got pretty lit and went for a walk. We walked through a cemetery and jumped over gravestones and started stripping off our clothes and acting like a couple of fools.” Afterward the two happened upon an empty fire station, where Alex helped himself to ham sandwiches from the kitchen and donned one of the firemen’s hats. Bill had to talk him into leaving it there.
The next day, when she got home from school, Adele Brown discovered a still-drunk Alex sitting on her steps. He tried to talk her into running away with him. “I kind of had a crush on him, so part of me thought that was great and exciting, though I thought he was getting a little too wild,” Adele remembers. “He ended up hanging around Jackson for a week or so. My mom adored Alex. She always tried to mother him.” Her parents notified the Chiltons that he was there and safe. Bill Buffett recalls Alex returning a couple more times, and on one occasion, after Bill had rented a larger house, some of Buffett’s young female friends stopped by after school. “I remember Alex sitting in the branches of an enormous mimosa tree in the front yard, up there strumming a guitar,” according to Bill. “Of course, they thought he was pretty cute.”
During the fall of ’66, “one of the guys got it in his head that we were gonna play the Central High talent show,” Alex remembered of the Moondogs’ first performance at his own school. Allotted two songs, the Moondogs chose Wilson Pickett’s “In the Midnight Hour,” recorded at Stax in 1965, and “Sunny,” a huge hit the summer of ’66 by Nashville-born Bobby Hebb. Paul Jobe’s brother Edward, a junior at Central, had to fill in for Paul on drums, since Paul now went to MUS and Central allowed only current students to participate. Alex had perfected a soulful vocal style that worked for both numbers. Onstage he projected confidence and sang with bravado and grit.
“We lost out to some girl singing some schmaltzy kinda something,” Alex remembered. But in the audience that night was Jimmy Newman, a musician pal of John Evans and Danny Smythe, members of a popular Memphis combo, the Devilles, who’d just lost their lead singer. The group had put out the word they were looking for a new vocalist, one who sounded black. When Jimmy heard Alex Chilton, he leaned over and said to a friend, “Hey, the Devilles should get this guy!”
CHAPTER 5
From Moondog to Deville
“The first time I ever saw Alex, he was smoking a cigarette and looked like a little punk,” Gary Talley remembers about his fifteen-year-old future bandmate. The nineteen-year-old guitarist had also been in the audience for the Moondogs’ performance at the Central High talent show. When he heard Alex sing, it reminded him of Eric Burdon of the Animals, “definitely a soulful kind of sound,” he recalls. Afterward he spotted Alex puffing on a Camel outside the school.
Like Alex, Gary would in 1966 join the Devilles, one of the hottest garage bands in Memphis. The group had formed in late 1963, but after three years, the only original member was drummer Danny Smythe. Vocalist Ronnie Jordan joined in 1964; an attractive teen with a big voice and a forceful personality, he quickly moved from backup singer to front man. It didn’t hurt that his uncle was Roy McElwain, professionally known as Roy Mack, a popular DJ and later program director at WMPS, who began managing the group. By 1965, as the Devilles’ lineup continued to evolve, the band appeared on such TV shows as Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour and George Klein’s Talent Party. The Devilles signed with booking agent Bill Chapman, who put them on as the opening act for three Yardbirds concerts during the group’s first U.S. tour, in 1965. Alex had seen their September 10 shows, and while impressed by the Yardbirds, he didn’t care for the Devilles.
By the fall of ’66, the group, now calling themselves Ronnie and the Devilles, played constantly around Memphis, as well as in Mississippi and Arkansas, and had cut some records at Chips Moman’s American Recording Studios, home of local garage band the Gentrys’ 1965 smash “Keep On Dancing.” Their first single was an original, “Oh
Love,” which Devilles bassist and cowriter Russ Caccamisi describes as “sort of a Herman’s-Hermits-meets-a-Southern-accent.” It was backed by a version (with lyrics and vocals added) of a 1960s instrumental, “Last Date,” by Nashville session keyboardist Floyd Cramer. Another 45 was a soggy 1959 cover of the Thomas Wayne ballad “Tragedy.” Alex considered both covers “kinda schmaltzy.” Those, plus another original, “Cindy’s Carousel,” came out on Moman’s independent Youngstown label; when Mack added the singles to the WMPS playlist, they became quite popular.
But the group’s behavior at the sessions had not sat well with Moman. “Ronnie was incredibly arrogant,” according to Russ, “to the bandmates and quite often to the crowd. He was an asshole in the studio. Chips hated working with him.” The last straw came in October 1966, when the group got into a fight at a frat party in Oxford, Mississippi: Ronnie quit, leaving the rest of the group—Smythe, Caccamisi, and guitarist Richard Malone—high and dry. Mack had cosigned a loan so the Devilles could buy a PA system, and he threatened to take it back and sell it if they didn’t reorganize the group within thirty days. First onboard was guitarist/keyboardist John Evans, who’d played with Russ in an earlier combo called the Chantelles, coincidentally a favorite local band of Alex’s. The search began for an R&B-styled front man. First they approached Evans’s former bandmate Jimmy Newman, lead singer for the In Crowd, a band that also included guitarist Gary Talley. Newman turned them down, but after seeing Alex at the Central High talent show, he called Evans and recommended his discovery, saying, “He sounds black as hell!”
When Evans rang up Alex, he tried to entice him to audition by mentioning, “We’ve got ‘Sunny’ worked up!” Alex agreed to come, but when Evans gave him Danny Smythe’s address for the tryout, Alex surprised the nineteen-year-old by saying, “Can you pick me up? I’m only fifteen, so I don’t have my license yet.” The next day John and Russ borrowed Mrs. Caccamisi’s Impala and drove to North Montgomery to collect Alex.
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 5
