When they knocked on the Chiltons’ 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!” and followed them down the steps. Alex Chilton looked nothing like the rest of the short-haired Devilles, whose normal attire was Gant shirts, pressed pants, and Bass Weejuns. “There was a dress code without having a dress code, and [what Alex wore] was not acceptable in those days,” John Evans recalls. “A blue jean jacket—no one wore those except farmers, blue-collar workers, or trailer park people.”
The boys set up their equipment in Danny’s family room. Alex made no pretense about liking their band or what he considered their schlocky material. “I didn’t care for [the Devilles],” he later said. “They had made a few records, and I didn’t like them. They were pretty lame, really bad ballads that might’ve had some country appeal. But they were one of the big bands around town that made some money.” “We were as much wooing Alex as we were auditioning him,” Russ remembers, “because we had three gigs booked, starting in a few weeks. We told him, ‘We’re gonna recast this thing and come up with a whole new set of songs, whatever you want to sing.’” Alex lit a cigarette and told them he’d give it a shot. When he opened his mouth and sang Wilson Pickett’s “Mustang Sally,” Russ says, “he killed it! And he killed ‘Sunny.’ We worked up five or six songs that we all knew.” When they promised him a steady stream of paying gigs, Alex later recalled that he thought, “Wow! The Memphis big time! I can make $100 every weekend! You could support a family on $100 a week in 1966.” He broke the news to the Moondogs that he was moving on to the Devilles.
• • •
Alex had been in tenth grade at Central High for only a few months, but except for making some new pals, including a sultry eleventh-grader, Kokie Bechtold, he was miserable at school. “It was full of these enormous macho guys, and I was constantly in fear of my life,” he recalled. “I was just hanging around, drinking, smoking grass, meeting girls, and looking forward to a very uncertain future.” Another eleventh-grader he befriended was Pat Rainer, renowned as local president of the Beatles Fan Club. When the Fab Four performed in Memphis in August 1966, Alex and Pat were there. She awarded the group the key to the city, though the Ku Klux Klan led demonstrations outside the Mid-South Coliseum and someone threw a firecracker onstage. John Lennon’s infamous statement earlier that year about the Beatles being more popular than Jesus had not gone over well in Memphis.
Pat, like Alex, hung out with the few hipsters at Central High. “There was probably a group of ten or twelve of us,” Pat says. “The guys had longer hair, and the girls had straight hair and bangs and wore short skirts. We were ostracized. I hated that place—it was like being in a fucking prison.” Alex told Bruce Eaton in 2007, “All that year of ’66 and ’67 I was in tenth grade I was just demoralized about school. I just more or less slept through about every class and failed every subject royally. Vietnam was going on and ROTC—I wasn’t going with the program somehow.”
After flunking some classes at Miss Hutchison’s, Carole Ruleman had transferred to Central, where she and another music fan, Dixie Thompson, hung out with Alex. “There were cliques, and we didn’t fit into them,” Dixie remembers. “We were regarded as weirdos. Alex was failing and had to go to the principal’s office because of his grades.” Though he palled around with Pat, Dixie, and Carole, Alex’s attentions were focused on Kokie Bechtold.
Adopted as an infant by a Central Gardens family, Kokie was just as pretty as his previous girlfriends, Carole and Louise, and wore her dark hair in a trendy pageboy parted on the side. Kokie also had a wild streak; she’d already discovered pot, much to Alex’s delight. Soon she was sneaking into Alex’s room at night, or he was slipping out to meet her. It wasn’t long into their romance that Alex lost his virginity. He would fondly remember his time with Kokie—“I was getting laid, and she was the first one, and that was pretty cool”—and a decade later still compare other girlfriends to her.
At home Alex’s increasingly dark moods and aggression began to cause problems and concern. In December, when Howard returned from college, he and Alex got into a fight over who had the most Christmas spirit, according to Dale Tuttle. Alex shoved the chubby, somewhat effete Howard, who fell and broke his arm. The Devilles had discovered that Alex had “an explosive temper,” says Danny Smythe. “He could really get bent out of shape about something, but we just kind of treated it like a joke.”
The venues where the Devilles performed were much larger than any stage on which he’d previously appeared, but he adapted quickly, occasionally getting stoned before going onstage. To differentiate themselves from their previous incarnation, Russ, Danny, John, and Richard wanted to rename the group the New Devilles. Alex wasn’t so sure that was a good idea. “We told Alex, ‘When we open the show, you introduce us as the New Devilles.’ He didn’t want to do that, but we convinced him to,” says Russ, “so he walked up to the microphone, looked right at me, pulled the mic close to his mouth, and said, ‘Hello, everybody, we’re the NEW Devilles.’” That was the last time that name was ever used. And it marked the beginning of Alex’s onstage sarcasm.
From the outset Alex took to the stage like a natural. “He was a great front man, a great performer, very active and mobile,” Russ says. “He had a strut to his walk when he was onstage. He would pick out the three or four girls who were closest to the front and perform for them, and everybody else was superfluous. He later told me, ‘I’ll pick the three or four that are diggin’ on me the most, and I’ll work them, and everybody else gets the show for free.’”
By early April ’67, Roy Mack had determined that the band was ready to return to American with their new lead singer. “Let’s see how you sound on a recording,” he told Alex before booking time with Chips Moman. Georgia native Lincoln Wayne “Chips” Moman had hitchhiked to Memphis as a fifteen-year-old guitar prodigy and connected with rockabilly pioneers Johnny and Dorsey Burnette (“Train Kept a-Rollin’”), with whom he played lead on a tour to California. He then took over guitar duties for former child star Brenda Lee, followed by a stint with teen idol Ricky Nelson, replacing James Burton (who would go on to play with Elvis Presley and Gram Parsons). After some ups and downs Chips returned to Memphis and began working with Jim Stewart, for whom he discovered the defunct movie theater on McLemore that became Stax Records’ home. There he worked as house producer on the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night” and other recordings. Following the success of “Gee Whiz,” Chips fell out with Stewart over money and eventually founded American Recording Studios, taking on a new business partner, Don Crews. A boxlike, one-story brick building painted white, the studio was located at 827 Thomas Street, at the corner of Chelsea. American was one of only a few businesses in a run-down, primarily black neighborhood in North Memphis.
Moman was nicknamed Chips “due to his talent for gambling,” according to Jim Dickinson, a session keyboardist at American in 1965: “He was a curly-haired country boy. He had a conspicuous jailhouse homemade tattoo on his right forearm, a pair of dice showing snake eyes and the slogan ‘Born to Loose’ [sic]. Chips was wiry and moved like a cat. He had a winning, good-natured grin and flashing blue eyes. He could hypnotize a roomful of musicians in two minutes flat.”
Chips, as talented a songwriter as he was a guitarist and producer, had a new collaborator at American. He’d befriended Dan Penn during a Wilson Pickett session at FAME Recording Studios, three hours away in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. As a teenager, Penn, born Daniel Pennington in Vernon, Alabama, wrote his first hit, “Is a Bluebird Blue,” which scored on the country charts for Conway Twitty. Dan’s real love, however, was rhythm & blues, and blessed with a deep soulful voice, he’d fronted an R&B-tinged band, the Pallbearers, before turning his focus to songwriting. Dan had been engineering sessions at
FAME and wanted to get into producing. Chips encouraged him to relocate to Memphis, where they could write together and Dan could produce sides at American. He and Chips wrote “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” a smash for Aretha Franklin, and Dan and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, another Alabaman who started at FAME, cowrote “Dark End of the Street” and “I’m Your Puppet,” both soul classics. Chips and Dan also hit it off with songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson when he arrived at the studio from Springfield, Missouri, in the fall of ’66 to make a recording and pitch his songs.
“Everything I ever knew about R&B music,” says Wayne, “I learned from Dan Penn.” The son of Western music bandleader Shorty Thompson, Wayne—who later dropped his surname—wrote one particular track thanks to a short story his father had penned. “I had three numbers on my little demo tape,” Wayne remembers. “The first song was called ‘White Velvet Gloves,’ the second song I don’t remember, and the third one had a phrase from my dad’s story: ‘ticket for an aeroplane.’ It was called ‘The Letter.’”
Chips passed along Wayne’s tape to the Devilles with the message “Learn one of these three songs and come back into the studio on Saturday and we’ll record it and see how it goes.” He’d decided to turn the group over to Dan Penn for his first-ever production job. “I wanted to produce a hit record, and that was in my mind day and night,” says Dan. “I’d told Chips, ‘You’re a great producer, but I want to cut my own record, and I don’t even want you there. Find me somebody to cut around here.’” Enter the Devilles.
Though Russ Caccamisi remembers running through “The Letter” at American without having rehearsed it, Alex recalled the band listening to the tape at Danny’s and choosing “The Letter” over the two other numbers. “We worked out the chords to ‘The Letter,’” said Alex, “and used the same opening guitar lick that was on the original demo—just voice and guitar.” After a cursory rehearsal on Friday night, Alex took off to meet Kokie. The lovebirds stayed out until sunrise, drinking, smoking, and, according to what he later told one friend, making love under a tree in an out-of-the-way cemetery. Alex managed to get home and catch a few hours’ sleep before meeting the band at American on Saturday morning. In addition to being sleep deprived, he felt a cold coming on, bringing with it a sore throat and a raspy voice. “I was a little hungover,” said Alex, “been out in the dewy grass in my bare feet all night, and certainly wasn’t in the best shape I could have been in.”
At the studio the Devilles expected to find Chips, who’d recorded them before. Instead, twenty-six-year-old Dan Penn, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with one sleeve rolled up around a pack of Lucky Strikes, awaited them. “He was the darnedest thing to see,” John Evans recalls. “We didn’t know what to think.” He remembers being struck by the overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups strewn around the studio. Knowing that Chips had cut a hit for the Gentrys, the Devilles thought they were getting a raw deal by working with an unknown producer.
“We had a big room with some baffles where I set them up,” Dan recalls about the session. “Alex was quiet, polite—a good-looking kid—and I walked him to the mic and said, ‘There you are, son.’” He would be singing live while the band played the song.
“We set up and started running the tune down,” Alex remembered. “[Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.” Dan recalls, “The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.”
Never having recorded before, Alex started singing tentatively, “Give me a ticket for an airplane,” similar to Carson’s country-inflected style. “Punch it up, Alex,” Dan advised. Alex, whose first attempt was inspired by Chet Baker, later recalled that Dan demonstrated the way to emphasize the three syllables of “aer-o-plane.” Alex told Cub Koda:
After Dan got all the instruments sounding the way he wanted them to sound, we started running it down in earnest. I was a little bit intimidated by my surroundings and I was singing kind of softly. Then Dan came out [of the control booth] and said, “I really want you to lay into this, I want you to sing like this.” And he started rocking back and forth and started singing it . . . he is one of the great soul singers in the world of any color. . . . So Dan showed me what he has in mind for the song, and I go, “Yeah, I can sound something like that.” Sounding like a soul singer is something I prided myself on being able to do. We did it like that a few times and Dan seemed to be liking it pretty well, and as we ran through it a couple of times, my voice, considering the night before, didn’t have a lot left in it. So I was getting kinda hoarse, which fitted into things just fine.
“Alex was one of the few people I’ve ever seen that at an early age had his own voice,” says Dan. “He had something in him when he came into the studio.”
After five or six takes, “The Letter”—originally clocking in at a minute and a half—made it onto tape, using up two tracks of what would be a three-track recording. (Most recordings today use up to twenty-four tracks.) Dan set to work on some overdub ideas to fill out the sound and expand the song by twenty-eight seconds. Alex went home to take a nap, and his fellow Devilles didn’t give the recording much thought. What they had just cut, though, would become the biggest hit single ever recorded in Memphis, Tennessee.
CHAPTER 6
America’s Youngest Hitmaker
“I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I’ll ever have,” Alex mused twenty years after he recorded “The Letter.”
Producing the single, Dan Penn focused on Alex’s raspy, soulful vocals, bringing them up in the mix. He had a few tricks up his sleeve to enhance the song’s pop appeal. “When we cut it, I thought Alex was real good, but we didn’t know we were going to have a million-seller at this point,” says Dan. “We just had a track, and it was not complete.” At American, Chips had assembled a staff of talented session players—later known as the Memphis Boys—and, unique among them, bassist Mike Leech could read music. At Dan’s behest Mike wrote out arrangements for horns and strings for “The Letter.”
“My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter,’” Mike told Roben Jones for Memphis Boys, her authoritative history of American Recording Studios. “The only reason I did that was because I knew how to write music notation. . . . Dan called me to come into the studio and play some things on the [Hammond B3] organ while he listened in the control room. When I played something he liked he would tell me to ‘write that down.’ . . . After he was satisfied with the arrangement he asked me if I had other ideas and I suggested the two trombones. He liked the idea and said, ‘Do it.’ The string section consisted of two violins and one viola.”
Dan hired members of the Memphis Symphony for the string section, including Noel Gilbert, who would later participate and be name-checked by Alex in a Big Star song, “Stroke It Noel.” Gilbert had been Mike Leech’s music professor at Memphis State. This particular string section became a favorite of Dan and Mike’s and would become part of American’s signature, as would “the stateliness of [Mike’s] arranging style,” according to Jones. Dan liked the Memphis Strings because “they just had this barbecue sound.” Mike agrees: “The Memphis Strings were a little sloppy. Downbeats were a matter of opinion. But they had a soulful sound. Dan Penn loved them. The very first time I heard of a violin using a mute came from Dan.”
Mike attended the sessions with Dan while the strings were overdubbed on “The Letter.” “Everything was going well,” Dan recalls, “except there was a space on the record where Alex quit singing [near the end] and the strings are playing, and it hit me that we could put in the sound of a jet plane.” Going for what Roben Jones called a “literal illustra
tion” of the song’s narrative, Dan checked out a sound-effects LP from the library that included airplanes. A studio assistant, Darryl Carter, played the record while Dan overdubbed it onto the acetate; during the last twenty seconds of the song, with keys and strings as backing, the jet takes off and soars into the clouds. “That was a big part of the record,” says Dan. “When I finished it up, I played it for Chips, and he said, ‘That’s a pretty good little rock & roll record, but you’ve got to take that airplane off it.’ I said, ‘If the record’s going out, it’s going out with the airplane on it.’ He said, ‘Okay, it’s your record.’”
The result was perfection: It opens with the spare rap, rap, rap of a snare drum and a simple guitar riff, then Alex’s distinctive gruff voice comes in loud and clear. Accented by trombones and cushioned by strings, the vocals never lose their prominence in the mix, grounded by a tight rhythm section. The fadeout includes background “humming”—by Devilles Russ and John, as well as vocalist Sandy Posey—the strings, and the “aeroplane” sound effects. Instrumentally, there’s a key change here, the subtle modulation adding to the “liftoff” feeling of the song.
Chips had given Dan the green light to make his own deal. The next step was to find a record label to put it out. The Devilles played the song for the first time at a dance at the University of Tennessee in Martin in the spring of ’67. “We hadn’t really worked up ‘The Letter,’” Russ remembers, “and we got into the tune and didn’t know how to end it. Alex made a sound on the mic with his mouth to simulate an airplane, but the ending was a train wreck.”
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 6
