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

by George-Warren, Holly

  The Box Tops also met up in Manhattan with Dan Penn, in town to supervise three Coca-Cola commercials the band was recording for ad agency McCann Erikson. For years the Atlanta-based soft drink giant had been commissioning pop stars—the Bee Gees, the Who, the Troggs, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, and more—to record custom jingles. Penn wrote the lyrics for three ditties that would segue into the “Things Go Better with Coke” slogan. Each capitalized on the sound of “The Letter” but with words that Alex could supposedly relate to, like, “See the pretty girls as they go walking by / I wonder if their pretty throats are dry/I’d like to buy ’em a Coke one after the other.” Danny Smythe recalls that Penn was impressed by how much the group had improved since they’d last played their instruments in the studio in Muscle Shoals: “We did all three commercials in one session. Those things were hot. We’d been playing a bunch of one-nighters and had gotten tight real fast.”

  The Box Tops triumphantly returned home to prepare for their upcoming November tour with more heroes: Stax recording artists Wilson Pickett and Carla Thomas, along with the Staple Singers (soon to record for Stax), the Esquires, Harvey Scales and the Seven Sounds, Laura Lee, and Mickey Murray. This tour was one of the Box Tops experiences that would stay with Alex forever. Just as the skinny white boys showing up at black radio stations shocked the DJs expecting them to be black, they also surprised the predominantly black audiences in Knoxville, Tennessee; Greensboro, North Carolina; and other stops in Virginia and the Carolinas, many of whom had bought the band’s debut 45.

  According to Gary, segregation in the South prevented the musicians from mingling with their fellow artists on the road. “We stayed in different motels, and we never went out together and ate at the same restaurants,” he recalls. “We only saw them at the gig.” And though the band became more and more exposed to drugs via venues like the Cheetah and the Fort Worth fest, Gary remembers being taken aback when he encountered dope smoking by Pickett’s band. “I was just so conservative and had never been anywhere or done anything,” he says, “and all those tours were like culture shock. I remember going into the men’s room near our dressing room one night, and Wilson Pickett’s band was in there and they were smoking so much pot I could hardly see. It’s really amazing that those redneck cops didn’t catch them and put them in jail.”

  Alex, more than anyone, was having a blast with readily available weed and women. His frequent roommate Danny Smythe indulged occasionally as well. “The first time I ever smoked a marijuana cigarette was with Alex,” Danny says. “He brought back to our hotel room a little manila package filled with marijuana and said, ‘Let’s try this. I got it from Wilson Pickett’s guitar player.’ We didn’t have any rolling papers, so we took the tobacco out of a cigarette and stuffed the marijuana back into it and smoked it that way.” When he or Alex had a female guest, the other—usually Danny—would have to vacate the room. “The thing about Alex,” says Danny, “was he had girls lined up outside of his hotel door. They would be waiting in line to sleep with Alex. And he was so ugly back then—he had bad acne. But it didn’t matter, he was the star of the show.”

  “Though Alex was the youngest guy in the band,” according to Gary, “in a way he was the oldest. He was probably the only guy who was smoking and doing drugs and having sex when he was sixteen.”

  “Neon Rainbow,” released in early November, slowly ascended the charts, but it was becoming clear it would not enter the Top 10, finally reaching only #22. The debut album’s sales remained modest as well. Thanks to Sidney Chilton’s negotiation with Roy Mack, as lead singer Alex earned $300 a week, whereas the rest of the band made $150 each. In early December, when the Box Tops received their first royalty check for their work on “The Letter,” Danny decided he’d had enough. Worried that he’d be drafted and sent to Vietnam if he didn’t return to college, he registered at Memphis State, where, inspired by the Mary Chilton Gallery, he planned to major in art. “By the time I quit, I wasn’t having fun because the band wasn’t getting along,” Danny says. “We didn’t have any time off. Roy Mack was sometimes booking us three gigs a night in three different cities. Plus we were getting robbed. We weren’t getting money from these gigs that we were supposed to.” Danny used his earnings from “The Letter” to put himself through college.

  The Box Tops were already booked to finish the year touring Canada and the West Coast, and they needed a pro. Danny’s replacement was Thomas Boggs, a local drummer a few years older than the others, who’d begun his career in the Memphis combo Tommy Burk and the Counts and toured nationally with Flash and the Board of Directors. Buddy Alfonso had quit “because he couldn’t handle dealing with Alex,” according to Danny, and Boggs was originally hired as the band’s road manager. He’d been jockeying to play drums in the band, and with Danny’s departure, he got the job.

  By year’s end “The Letter” would be named Song of the Year by Cash Box. In just nine months’ time, Alex had gone from suicidal teen “with everything in shambles,” as he later described it, to pop star. Nothing had prepared him for this dramatic turn of events, and as he began living the “sex and drugs and rock & roll” lifestyle, he didn’t slow down to process what had happened to him. There was no time—the Box Tops were booked solid for the next year. Alex would be spending his seventeenth birthday on the road.

  CHAPTER 8

  Nonstop

  “People talk about 1968 and how affected they were by it. I understand what they’re saying, but I probably played 250 dates in 1968,” Alex reflected forty years later. “Whenever I wasn’t doing that, I was in the recording studio.”

  In the new year, the Box Tops were one of the most sought-after combos in the country. They had ended 1967 touring Canada, then zigzagging over to San Bernardino, California, to perform at a New Year’s Eve multiband concert (including a cobbled-together version of Them) produced by radio station WFXM, which had chosen “The Letter” as “Heaviest Hit of the Year.” Billboard named it second-biggest song of 1967, behind bluesy U.K. vocalist Lulu’s “To Sir with Love” at #1. International sales also boomed. Eventually the single sold more than four million copies worldwide.

  With his first royalty check of $4,518.11 (approximately $31,000 today) for the single alone (though $430.84 was deducted for the debut LP’s recording expenses), Alex bought himself a birthday present: a new guitar, this time of his own choosing, a custom Telecaster with the original paint stripped off.

  In early January a Showtime magazine profile focused on the fashion sense of the Box Tops (“Unlike most pop groups, they don’t wear coordinated costumes onstage”), two of whom were now gone: John Evans, fed up with constant touring and bickering, and, after playing on “The Letter,” being excluded from recording sessions, had followed Danny Smythe’s lead and quit. To replace Evans, Roy Mack hired Rick Allen, a young Memphis musician who’d played in the garage band the Coachmen and also had been a replacement member of the Gentrys, joining after “Keep On Dancing.” A multi-instrumentalist, Allen played keyboards, bass, harmonica, and trumpet—which for the first time would enable the band to perform some of the horn-heavy numbers the Box Tops recorded.

  Referring to the band’s second single, “Neon Rainbow,” which in January had begun falling off the charts, Alex told Showtime, “Our style is not having one. We just like to be ourselves. We don’t want to be rut addicts.” He later said of the song, which he would perform on acoustic guitar on MTV twenty years later, “There had been some really good things about ‘Neon Rainbow.’ I learned a lot from doing songs like that.”

  Dan Penn had vacationed over the holidays in Mexico with his wife, Linda, along with Wayne Carson and his spouse; there Dan heard that “Neon Rainbow”—his choice for the group’s second single release—had not made a big commercial impact. “‘The Letter’ was upbeat, and Bell had wanted another ‘Letter,’” Dan recalls, “but I don’t do sequels, no way. So I’d said, ‘Neon Rainbow.’ Then I got the call, an
d they gave me the sad news that we’d only sold half a million. Of course, I didn’t have to be told that wasn’t cool. I had called a loser, so I’m back sitting around in Memphis, waiting for Wayne to give me a song. I know I’ve got to go up-tempo, but nothing was happening, so I called Spooner [Oldham] and told him we had to write the next Box Tops hit.”

  Thanks to the success of “The Letter,” Uttal had already rewarded Penn with his own label, Pacemaker, plus a heftier recording budget for the Box Tops’ sophomore effort. Dan put together a session at American to get started on the next album for Bell, beginning with its lead-off single. “Dan called me one day and said, ‘Spooner, would you help me write a song for the Box Tops? People sent me some songs, but I don’t really care for them, so will you help me try to write one?’” Oldham recalls. “I said, ‘Sure, I’d be happy to.’ We got together at the studio one evening, and I brought my ten best titles and he brought his ten best titles, and they were all going in the trash can pretty quickly. As the night rolled on, we didn’t have anything, really.”

  Dan picks up the story: “Alex and the musicians were booked to come in at ten that morning. Spooner and I didn’t have anything. I knew we eventually were going to get it, but maybe not by 10 a.m. So, here it is, 4:30 in the morning, I’m tired and he’s tired, and I said, ‘Spooner, let’s just go over there and eat something and then go home.’ He was glad to go, so I shut down everything and we go across to a little twenty-four-hour barbecue-type place. We ordered some food and we’re sitting there, just staring at each other.”

  Spooner: “I was frustrated, feeling for him as a producer—I had no pressure for myself, necessarily, but I felt for him, trying to deliver a follow-up when they’d been calling him from the record company for about three weeks, ‘Where’s our record?’ . . . I laid my head on the table and said, ‘I could just cry like a baby.’ And he said, ‘What did you say?’ I raised my head and looked at him and said, ‘I could cry like a baby.’ And the weirdest thing came out of his mouth . . .”

  Dan: “I said, ‘Spooner, that’s it!’ He looked at me so puzzled, and I said, ‘That’s the song!’ and then I saw his eyes flash. All of a sudden, all that coffee we drank cut right in, and I just flipped the guy some money and said, ‘Keep the food, keep the change!’ We left and headed back across.”

  Spooner: “It turned my brain around quickly, and we had about a verse written walking across the street, just talking.”

  Dan: “We already had the title, ‘Cry Like a Baby,’ so I knew we’d figure the rest of it out. By the time we got to the door, I was already singing the song, ‘When I think about the good love you gave me, I cry like a baby.’ We were there when I put the key in the door. I said, ‘Spooner, you get the organ going again. I’ll get the tape recorder up, grab my guitar, and we’ll write.’ I can hear that organ, and I get a piece of tape and put it on the tape recorder, and finally I said, ‘Tap on that mic,’ and he tapped on the mic, and I punched RECORD, and we went out and we wrote it in about thirty minutes.” It was such a groove, it just melted you. I said, ‘I ain’t leaving this building, Spooner.’ And he said, ‘I ain’t, either.’ We went in and washed our faces, drank a little more coffee and smoked more cigarettes and kind of just hung. So this was seven o’clock—we didn’t have but three hours to wait, so we just fooled around. Finally, here comes Reggie and Alex and all the guys. I couldn’t wait. I said to Alex, ‘Come with me, boy,’ and we went right into the control room. . . .”

  Spooner: “Dan played Alex the little demo that we’d made. I was so flustered, tired, exasperated, I didn’t know what to think of what we had—if anything. Alex heard it and he just reached out his hand to me and said, ‘Thank you.’”

  Dan: “I said, ‘Alex, learn it. You’ve got thirty minutes.’”

  Jerry Wexler had unwittingly helped provide the signature sound for what would become the Box Tops’ next hit when he’d earlier sent American’s Tommy Cogbill a newfangled electric sitar. Guitarist Reggie Young recalls, “It was laying around the studio, and Dan said, ‘Reggie, why don’t you pick that guitar up and see what that thing sounds like?’” Dan remembers telling Reggie to make the instrument “cry like a baby.” “Dan just loved it!” says Reggie. “He kept turning it up [in the mix]. I remember that, later on, Chips Moman walked in the control room when they were mixing and said, ‘Dan, you think you have that sitar up a little loud?’ So Dan just turned it up that much louder.”

  Spooner’s opening organ sound segued straight into Reggie’s distinctive sitar riff. “Back then, you tried to have an identifying lick at the beginning of the song,” according to Reggie, “so you’d know exactly what the record is from the start.” Says Dan of the Memphis Boys: “When they got a real good song, they were quick as lightning. As I remember, it went down in about three takes, and here’s Reggie Young playing a lick that had been played around the studio for a few years, but it wasn’t on a record. So he put it through the sitar. [At one point] Spooner made the wrong change. There was this beautiful take, but it had this glitch on it, and I said I’d take care of the mistake. So Wayne Jackson and Andrew Love played trombone, and when we got to that place, I said, ‘da da da!’ but if it hadn’t been for Spooner’s mistake, that wouldn’t be on there. So Mr. Magic strikes again—there was a mistake that I had to cover up that made the record!”

  Reggie’s sitar lines would start a new trend for pop-rock records, with Joe South’s “Walk a Mile in My Shoes” and other hits featuring the unique sound. Previously George Harrison had played an Indian sitar on “Norwegian Wood,” but the electric instrument had rarely found its way into the pop charts until the Animals’ “Monterey,” where it appeared in late ’67 as an accent, rather than carrying the song, as in “Cry Like a Baby.” Also crucial to the song’s up-tempo thrust were Gene Chrisman’s expert drumming and Tommy Cogbill’s walking bassline. Gary Talley, who’d stopped by the studio and watched the Memphis Boys and Alex cut the song, became smitten with the electric sitar and bought himself one. He knew the track would be added to the band’s live repertoire and that it would take some work to get it together.

  Mike Leech again contributed string arrangements. The horns and strings for “Cry Like a Baby” were cut at another upstart studio, Ardent, at 1457 National, in Midtown. Its owner was a well-heeled twenty-one-year-old recording engineer, John Fry. Used by Stax as well as American for various projects, the studio was becoming renowned for its superior equipment and sound. “Ardent had a brighter sound that was good for horns and strings,” according to Leech.

  As for the vocals on “Cry Like a Baby,” Alex sang the song with energy and passion; his soulful sound was complemented by gospel-tinged backup vocals overdubbed by the Sweet Inspirations, the New York–based session singers led by Cissy Houston (Whitney’s mom), who were most famous for backing Aretha Franklin and had just cut their own record at American.

  As soon as the song was finished, they knew it would be a smash. The single would be released in early February, around the time it was announced that the Box Tops and “The Letter” were nominated for two Grammys: Best Performance by a Vocal Group and Best Contemporary Group Performance. In the just-launched magazine Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs would later write that “Cry Like a Baby” has “a certain yearning bluesy quality that sounded quite refreshing in that gross Blue Cheer spring of ’68, with its funky electric sitar, girl backup vocal group, and the sad, restrained wistfulness of Alex Chilton’s singing.” There was no doubt that “Cry Like a Baby” would also be the title of the next Box Tops album.

  It was a powerful start to an LP that Jim Dickinson later called “Memphis pop production at its best, on par with the great Dusty in Memphis, recorded by the same cast of characters in the same period. Those two records were as good as it gets.”

  The flip side of the “Cry Like a Baby” 45 was a Penn-Oldham weeper, “The Door You Closed to Me.” With Spooner’s almost funereal organ, Cogbill’s
rumbling bass, and Chrisman’s drums his only accompaniment, Alex berates the gal who done him wrong. He sounds like a soul man at least twenty years his senior. “He had more depth of mind than I would associate with someone that young,” Spooner said of the seventeen-year-old vocalist.

  Following the title track on the album was the moody “Deep in Kentucky,” which took the instrumentation a step further via a prominent oboe in the mix. Spooner’s keyboards—organ, Clavinet, and electric piano—are featured on “I’m the One for You.” The Penn-Oldham wrong-side-of-the-tracks song “Fields of Clover” would be revived by Alex and the reunited Box Tops thirty years later. Dan and Spooner’s songwriting predominates on the album, including “Every Time,” with Penn on background vocals; Dan’s solo composition “Trouble with Sam,” which sounds like it could have been a Patty Duke movie’s theme song; and the upbeat “727,” which furthers the aeroplane-take-me-home theme of “The Letter”—with no jet sound effects but trombone, clavichord, and Reggie’s sitar again making an appearance. Reggie’s sitar also opened one of the album’s most compelling songs, “Lost,” which featured an emotive Hammond B-3 and the Sweet Inspirations’ backups countering Alex’s vocals. The haunting number, with the refrain “We’re all lost in a world of hurt,” was the work of songwriting newcomers Mark James and Glen Spreen.