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

by George-Warren, Holly

  Neither group was riding the top of the charts that summer—the Box Tops’ “Choo Choo Train,” featuring Alex at his throatiest, had made it only to #26 in July, and the Beach Boys had peaked that month at #20 with their latest, “Do It Again.” The tour dates were packed, with venues ranging from concert halls to high schools. The intense schedule sometimes required the bands to play an afternoon show in one town and an evening performance in another. On August 8, for example, they played a matinee at the Pittsfield Boys Club in Massachusetts, then that night at the New Haven Arena. From there they performed a three-day residency at the Steel Pier in Atlantic City before moving on to Wilkes University in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. During the last leg of the tour, they were playing venues like a Boise, Idaho, high school auditorium on August 24.

  The bands managed to find fun on the road via drugs and girls, as Gary Talley recalls. “They were all doing acid—tripping a lot. Dennis was always the one getting into trouble and having the girls chase him. The tour was just littered with his castoffs. . . . He couldn’t be with all of them, so we adopted some of his followers. And Alex was definitely the stereotypical rock star, lead-singer guy: He always had lots of girls all the time.” Drummer Tom Boggs remembered of the tour, “I’d never seen that many groupies before, and the stuff they did . . . it kind of blew me away for a while.” Alex later recalled his first LSD trip with Dennis in an Atlantic City hotel room. At one performance, high on acid, Alex became paranoid about falling off the ten-foot stage and stayed as far from the edge as possible. “Another time, when he was really out of it, we got on the plane after being up all night,” says Gary. “The stewardess was saying something about the seatbelt, and he started undoing the belt to his pants and taking his pants off, and she was saying, ‘No! Not that belt!’”

  After the tour finished, in early September, Alex flew out to California with Dennis and Carl and got acquainted with Brian. As he told Cub Koda:

  I stayed at Dennis’s house, and we would go over to Brian’s sometimes when they were recording, and that’s when I met him. We’d go over there, and they’d be messing around with some tapes. I remember listening to a song over and over again called “(We’re)Together Again.” I don’t know if it ever got released. I remember going out and playing volleyball. Brian had a beagle that loved to fetch—we were just hangin’ around Brian’s house. One night Brian and I went out in his XKE and went up to the Whisky a Go Go, just the two of us, and Albert King was playing. After sitting there for some period of time, Brian started doing pushups in the booth opposite me. So maybe Brian was a little flaky and not all there, but who was I to criticize anyone’s personal behavior!

  During his stay at Dennis’s house, in Pacific Palisades, Alex met someone much stranger than Brian Wilson. “After [I was] there a couple days, the whole Manson family moved in,” Alex said. Wilson had picked up a hitchhiking Manson follower, Patricia Krenwinkel, and soon Manson and the others appeared at Dennis’s hillside home. Dennis eventually paid for Manson to record his songs and introduced him to producer Terry Melcher. “They completely took over the household, like, sixteen girls and this Charlie guy hanging around, whom I barely noticed,” Alex remembered. “With all these girls running around with short dresses and no underpants, why am I gonna notice this guy?”

  Soon Alex had to take notice of Manson, whose control over his young hippie harem became obvious. Dennis’s house overlooked the ocean, high above the Pacific Coast Highway. Alex still didn’t have his driver’s license, so he decided to walk down the steep hill to the grocery store one day. A Manson girl “got wind of that,” Alex recalled:

  She brought me a big, long shopping list of things that they wanted me to get—and no money to get it. So I said, “Well, it’s all right.” It being the sixties, and California, I thought I could spring for some groceries. I had to carry all these groceries back up the hill. That was kind of tough. When I got back, some of the girls met me in the driveway before I ever got to the house. They looked at the grocery bag and they said, “Well, you forgot the milk!” I said, “Aw, gee, I’m really sorry I forgot the milk—too bad.” They went on in the house, and I sort of ambled on behind them. By the time I got to the front door, they were standing in the doorway, blocking the door. And they said, “Charlie says, ‘Go get the milk.’” The vibes were kind of weird.

  Alex decided it was time to leave when he woke up one morning after a late-night party and discovered asleep next to him on a large sectional couch none other than Manson. Years later Alex told the story to a friend, who suggested he write a memoir and call it I Slept with Charlie Manson.

  • • •

  Back in Memphis that September Alex’s life was about to change again. Suzi, then twenty-one, arrived from Texas, and the couple found a small, upstairs apartment at 2160 Madison, next door to Gordon Alexander’s hippie house in Midtown. Gordon drove them to the Volkswagen dealership out near the interstate, and Alex paid cash for a blue Karmann Ghia. Since Alex didn’t have his license, Suzi drove them home.

  Soft-spoken and unassuming, Suzi was interested in art, photography, and, of course, music. “Suzi was laid-back, earthy, and cool, with a real Southern drawl,” says Paul Jobe, who visited the pair. “I never saw or heard them argue” during the early days of their relationship, says Gordon. “I used to go over to their apartment and listen to records. . . . It was a great time for swapping music.” Alex never put Box Tops records on the turntable, however.

  “The only time I ever saw the Box Tops play,” Gordon remembers, “was when Suzi and a friend of hers and I drove up to Chattanooga and they were playing on a bill at the Chattanooga city auditorium with Andy Kim—just terrible. I remember all the girls screaming at the concert and Alex looking just bored to tears, going through all the hits and hating it. But then Alex said to the audience, ‘Hey, you don’t want Andy Kim to get away without doing another number, do you?’ And Andy Kim came out and did another song, and Alex was backstage just laughing.” Alex clearly felt he’d earned the right to ridicule other performers he considered bubblegum pop.

  Though his interest in the band was waning, Alex returned in October to American Recording Studios for another session, a follow-up single to the gospel-tinged “I Met Her in Church.” The last 45 off Nonstop, “I Met Her in Church” had stiffed (peaking at #43 in September), though Alex later called it “the real high-point production of the Box Tops’ career.” The new single would be a baroque little number about prostitution, “Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March.” Reggie Young still has a visual image of Alex showing up barefoot to record, with a pregnant Suzi alongside him.

  In addition to the newly recorded 45, to be released at year’s end, Bell planned to issue a compilation album—the third Box Tops LP in ’68, The Box Tops Super Hits—to capture some holiday sales. Nonstop had sold fewer copies than the first two LPs, not even making an appearance on Billboard’s Top 100 album chart. Its studio costs—many of the overdubs were “outsourced” at the more high-tech Ardent Studios—were greater than the profits. Feeling the pressure, Dan Penn quit his position as staff producer and songwriter for Moman. The following year he would open a recording studio, Beautiful Sounds, on Highland and start his own publishing company.

  Bell’s Larry Uttal kept pushing for another winner from the Box Tops, so recording got under way at American for more singles and an eventual LP for 1969. This time Alex would be working with Moman and, as coproducer, Tommy Cogbill. “I told Alex Chilton, ‘Larry owes me about $100,000,’” Chips related to author Roben Jones. “‘Part of that’s yours, but he won’t pay you until he gets another Box Tops album.’ Alex said, ‘I’m game.’ We cut that [material] just so I could collect royalties. I’ve always thought a lot of Alex for doing that.”

  With Moman and Cogbill in charge, members of the Box Tops were allowed to play on some of the sessions, and Alex got the green light to submit songs. He had already signed a publishing deal with Moma
n’s company, Press Music. By the time the Dimensions album was assembled the following year, three of the ten tracks were composed by Alex, with another, Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” suggested by him. “Chips Moman came in, and he was all for sorta encouraging me,” Alex said, “and he always put a tune of mine on the B-side of whatever the single was.” Perhaps in self-defense—the originals had little commercial success—he added, “But the way they’d do it was, they gave me the worst engineer [referring to a younger, junior engineer], and gave us an hour to finish the song—so it wasn’t that good.”

  Among Alex’s originals, “I See Only Sunshine” was chosen as the B-side to “Sweet Cream Ladies,” marking his first composition to grace a Box Tops 45. Surely penned while feeling positive about his relationship with Suzi, the lyrics look toward a rosy future for the pair: “I see our lives together / I see our love forever.”

  Later Alex said of his early songwriting attempts, “Back then, if I came up with a lick . . . I was amazed that I could do anything that actually sounded like music. I was experimenting, so I did everything I could.” Just over two minutes long, the joyous track is kicked off by Reggie’s airy guitar lead and propelled by acoustic guitar and keyboards, with Alex’s most earnest vocals.

  Alex’s “Together” is another upbeat love song that would become a track on Dimensions and a B-side: “You should see me walking with my girlfriend, you would swear we both were one . . . / We walk so close, you can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.”

  Reggie Young’s feedback guitar riffs give the number a heavy rock feel, with Wayne Jackson’s trumpet hearkening back to the sound of earlier Box Tops R&B-tinged cuts. Overall, though, most of the songs cut for Dimensions and subsequent singles reined in the soul-style extended horns in favor of a more rock-oriented production.

  Alex’s “The Happy Song,” a Dimensions track, seems a sarcastic description of a pop band whose only value is entertaining its fans: “Band up there on the stand singing a joyful song we can all sing too / Sing us a happy little song we can dance to.” Yet with its bouncy pop melody, the song is undeniably catchy.

  His bluesy “I Must Be the Devil” is in the vein of his first Box Tops cut, “I Can Dig It,” though this time the band got the opportunity to join in, with Bill Cunningham and Gary Talley contributing to the track, which boasts barrelhouse piano and guitar vamps. Alex seems to improvise on the vocals, going for the Bobby “Blue” Bland sound, yet the song abruptly fades out in the middle of a piano solo. “I recall doing ‘I Must Be the Devil,’” Bill told journalist Barney Hoskyns, “and [Alex] saying, ‘I’ve got a song and I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out exactly, but let’s just do a blues riff and see.’ And we did it, and it was one take and that was it.”

  Wayne Carson still remembers Alex arriving at the studio one day, singing “I Shall Be Released,” from the debut album by the Band, the groundbreaking Music from Big Pink, released that fall. “He loved this . . . Dylan song,” Wayne relates. “He said, ‘This is one of the best songs I ever heard.’” Gary was there the day they cut the song and was thrilled that Chips okayed his playing on it: “I think Chips saw that I had some potential as a session player, and he tried to give me chances whenever he could.” Alex’s intimate and folksy reading of “I Shall Be Released,” with prominent piano, has a timeless quality.

  Maintaining the album’s love-and-togetherness theme, Chip Taylor’s beautiful ballad “I’ll Hold Out My Hand,” like the Dylan song, received Alex’s softer vocal treatment, but with the addition of the Memphis Horns. Taylor had written American’s big spring hit by Merrilee Rush, “Angel of the Morning,” as well as the 1965 garage band classic, “Wild Thing,” first performed by the Troggs, one of Alex’s longtime favorite bands.

  Neil Diamond, then primarily known as a Brill Building songwriter who’d composed hits for the Monkees, contributed “Ain’t No Way.” With its rousing repetitive chorus, punctuated by horns, the number sounds like it could have been the flip side to Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline,” a hit the following summer. Here Reggie Young again turned to the electric sitar for a little extra color.

  On B.B. King’s “Rock Me Baby,” which appeared in an abbreviated version on Nonstop, Gary got his moment in the sun, playing a particularly inspired lead during the long guitar jam; the song ran over nine minutes. Yet Gary’s experience gave credence to Alex’s complaint about less-experienced engineers, who used the wrong guitar solo on the song’s master. “My biggest disappointment was when we were doing ‘Rock Me Baby,’” says Gary. “During one take, I got my Les Paul and a Marshall amp and turned it up really loud, thinking, ‘This is what all the cool guys are doing,’ and when I got done, I thought, ‘This is the best thing I’ve ever done on a Box Tops record. I’m so proud of it.’ The next morning Reggie and the other guys came in, and they were playing it back and they got to my solo, and everybody said, ‘That sounds really good!’ I was just walking on air, but then the engineer forgot to write it down or something, and that whole solo I was so proud of never got on the record. I was just crushed.”

  Gary was also invited to play on what would become the LP’s biggest single, though it was not released until late 1969. “Soul Deep” sounds more like a follow-up to “Cry Like a Baby” than Wayne Carson’s previous Box Tops hits. Chips and Tommy Cogbill liked Wayne’s demo of the song so much they used its basic rhythm tracks for the Box Tops cut. Gary and Wayne both added guitar, along with Reggie, and Alex’s tenor vocals sound heartfelt on this perfect pop-soul number.

  The intriguing “Midnight Angel,” written by Mark James, conversely features Alex’s raspy baritone and has a spooky piano intro and dynamics and sonics bordering on psychedelia, with a “heavy” guitar solo and bluesy harmonica as the lyrics describe the protagonist reaching out to his moody, depressed lover.

  • • •

  On December 19, 1968, Suzi gave birth to Timothee Alexander Chilton. Within days of the birth, Alex left for California, where the Box Tops performed at another West Coast pop festival on December 22. Six days later, on his eighteenth birthday, William Alexander Chilton wed Susan Brooke Greene in Memphis, with Judge Buford E. Wells Jr. officiating. The following day Alex flew to Florida to play the three-day Miami Pop Festival. There, he could forget his abrupt lifestyle change when caught up in the frenzy of a festival with two stages and a hundred thousand people.

  At least in the early days, Alex seemed to adapt to his new role as a husband and father. “I’d visit, and we’d sit and listen to music, and he’d have the baby on his lap,” Gordon recalls. One time, he says, “Alex was going out on some kind of tour for a week or so, and he asked me if I could come over and stay with Suzi and the baby while he was gone, because he didn’t want them staying there by themselves.”

  Meanwhile, the Box Tops’ greatest-hits album sold more copies than their previous LPs, reaching a high of #45 on the Billboard album chart, where it remained for more than six months. The new single, “Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March,” with its wacky Salvation Army–style horn parts, became controversial due to its subject matter; the resulting lack of airplay hurt record sales. While 1969 had begun introducing the burgeoning counterculture to Middle America, a pop ditty about the world’s oldest profession was nonetheless banned from radio stations across the land.

  CHAPTER 10

  1969

  The last year of the sixties brought disappointment to the Box Tops. They had been hoping to perform in Europe since 1967. Alex had recorded their hits in Italian, the group had been featured on England’s weekly TV program Top of the Pops and scored on U.K. charts, but every planned overseas trip had fallen through. Excitement ran high for their engagement at the Salone delle Feste in San Remo, Italy, but when “Sweet Cream Ladies” failed to make the Top 10, the excursion was deemed an unnecessary expense and scuttled. “Cry Like a Baby” had sold several million copies, but hadn’t reached the top tier of 1968’s be
stsellers, reaching only #18 on the Cash Box annual survey.

  Things were not going well for Alex and Suzi, either. They relocated to a roomier apartment on the top floor of an old house on Court Street, also in Midtown, but Alex’s frequent absences and the stresses of new parenthood wore on their relationship. “It was a real volatile thing,” Gary Talley recalls. “They would argue a lot, and I remember Alex smashing a guitar.” According to Paul Jobe, Alex “was not the husband or dad type. It was more like a burden to his character and creativity. He never wanted any great responsibility at such a young age. I’m sure his thing with Suzi was an accident, and what made him commit to Suzi and marry her and all that, I have no idea.”

  Alex’s parents urged him to get a paternity test after Timothee’s birth, but he refused, perhaps to spite them, because he didn’t want to endorse their distrust of Suzi. At some point, though, he did begin to question if he was in fact the baby’s biological father. He hadn’t been with her that many times before she became pregnant, and it hadn’t been the first time a paramour had claimed he’d fathered a child. “I don’t remember the details,” says Gary, “but there had been more than one paternity suit” resulting from liaisons on the road. Alex apparently had managed to wriggle out of those situations. But to Alex, Suzi was different from the one-night stands. Smitten, he’d visited her in Texas and wanted to be with her. And perhaps he thought he wanted a stable home life, something he’d never really had. Paul remembers that “Suzi pretty much had her shit together. She wasn’t a crazy teen.”

  But now the realities of being a young married couple with a baby clearly did not live up to Alex’s expectations. During their fights Suzi would get hysterical, scream, and break things. Rather than work through their differences, Alex split town with the band, leaving behind a restless and unhappy wife.

  Meanwhile Alex’s discontent with the band’s musicianship increased as he tired of playing the same hits at every show. “The morale was lousy,” he recalled. “We were just going on the road and collecting a paycheck—as little as we can do and get paid, fine. If we can have some fun and make this thing as ridiculous as possible and still get paid, then all the better. That was everybody’s attitude. Maybe not mine. My attitude was more like, hey, ‘This is pretty shitty stuff, but we might as well do it as good as we can do it.’” One Billboard review reported that “the Box Tops did their big-sellers ‘The Letter’ and ‘Cry Like a Baby’ but suffered from mike problems and lack of enthusiasm in their playing.”