As the Box Tops’ popularity declined, some of Alex’s bandmates grew angrier that he continued to earn more than they did. Bill Cunningham defended Alex, but quarrels escalated. “There were personnel conflicts,” says Bill. “The road worked on everybody’s nerves. Management worked us so much.” “Alex was getting twice as much as we were,” says Gary, “and we were considered expendable. He was the star, and we were the sidemen. The manager didn’t really care if we were there or not. Alex was their meal ticket.” Monthly statements reporting their concert earnings fell further behind, according to Gary: “It was supposed to be divided up, but the first thing that happened was Roy Mack got his cut, 25 percent, off the top. We paid for everything, every pencil his secretary used, studio expenses—everything came out of the band’s money.” While hitless in early ’69, the Box Tops commanded concert fees averaging around $2,500 (about $20,000 today), and sometimes Alex signed the contracts when they were without a road manager.
Since 1967 Roy Mack had neither offered career guidance nor even attended their concerts or recording sessions. Instead he functioned as a financial middleman and issued paychecks imprinted with “Roy McElwain DBA the Box Tops.” He told the band he owned the trademark and if they fired him, they couldn’t legally perform as the Box Tops.
“I don’t want to put Roy Mack down,” says Wayne Carson, “but he didn’t know shit about managing. You need somebody to correlate a lot of loose ends and tie-ups, to keep everybody interested and in the game, somebody who is a correlator, not somebody who says, ‘Who do I have to screw out of this to make all the money I can make?’”
“Management totally mistreated the band,” said drummer Thomas Boggs. “The Box Tops didn’t get any respect, although not playing on the records didn’t infuriate me like it did the other members. Alex and some of the others became really disillusioned. I think that disappointment later caused Alex to want to self-destruct.”
The Box Tops’ next single, in late April, “I Shall Be Released” backed with Alex’s bluesy “I Must Be the Devil,” was their lowest seller yet, barely reaching #70 on the charts. Alex was cheered when back in Memphis, though, by spending time at John Fry’s Ardent Studios, where he had felt comfortable since he first stopped by in 1968 to sing overdubs for Box Tops songs. “Ardent was the only place in town that wasn’t already locked up with a bunch of Tin Pan Alley writers,” said Alex, “and these sterile musicians playing all the sessions.”
Fry was an audiophile and self-taught recording engineer who, as a teen, built his first studio in the late ’50s at the family home in the east Memphis suburb of Germantown. “Being fascinated with technology led me to building a little transmitter setup,” Fry recalls of the studio dubbed Granny’s Sewing Room, “and thinking, well, this could be used to record music.” To release a few local acts, he started his own label called Ardent. Fry briefly studied electronics at college but dropped out to pursue radio. With the British Invasion feeding his voracious appetite for English music, he began ordering records from the U.K. and analyzing the production techniques behind them. In 1966 Jim Dickinson brought a group of Central High School kids called Lawson and Four More to record at Fry’s studio. There they cut a Dickinson song, “If You Want Me You Can Find Me,” and it became Ardent’s first 45 in several years, also reigniting Fry’s interest in making records. “Fry had better equipment in his own home than Chips had at American,” said Jim, who began helping John engineer sessions there.
John’s wealthy parents sold their house in 1966. That May he leased a newly constructed building on National Street and began overseeing the design of a new studio, which he also named Ardent. A member of Lawson and Four More, Terry Manning, became, along with Dickinson, a staff engineer. Terry’s family had moved to Memphis three years earlier from El Paso, Texas, and soon after their arrival, Terry, a fan of the Mar-Keys’ “Last Night,” had knocked on the door at Stax and talked his way into a part-time job.
In John Fry, Terry found a kindred spirit and mentor. “We were incredible Anglophiles—Beatlemaniacs, I guess you’d say,” Terry recalls. “John was like a scientist, almost otherworldly. He sounds like Jimmy Stewart and is always immaculately dressed and coiffed. He’s very careful with his language and does everything absolutely perfectly. He had signs all over the equipment, ‘Don’t touch this, don’t do that.’ It wasn’t at all wild and dirty like Sonic and some of the other studios. It was very meticulous. He always knew everything that needed to be done; he was totally together. He was like a big brother from the beginning.”
By 1968 Ardent had become known as the most modern facility in town, with the latest advances in recording, including switching from four-track to eight-track. Stax was outsourcing some work there, and American followed suit. “I first met Alex when Dan Penn started using Ardent for some of the Box Tops recordings,” says John. “He had tracked ‘Cry Like a Baby’ at American, then he wanted to add a bunch of strings and horns and various overdubs. So he brought the four-track tape over, and we transferred it to eight-track and were proceeding to add overdubs. There was this very young guy sitting on the floor in the corner of the control room, and it finally dawned on me, ‘Oh, my, this is the artist!’ He was pretty quiet, and during those sessions we didn’t converse much.”
Alex soon hit it off with Terry, only a few years older than he. They had seen each other around at parties and battles of the bands in the mid-’60s, and Terry’s old group had once challenged the Devilles before Alex joined. An accomplished keyboardist, Terry, at sixteen, had been offered a spot in the Gentrys for a tour, but his mother wouldn’t give her permission. So Rick Allen, who’d later join the Box Tops, got the gig.
“Alex and I became friends when I was the engineer—and sometimes player—on the Box Tops’ recordings at Ardent,” Terry says. He estimates that Penn spent around fifty-two hours overdubbing Nonstop there. “Alex had become disillusioned, feeling that Dan was mostly just telling him what to do, rather than giving him much of a chance to be creative himself. On a couple of the vocal-overdub sessions, Alex was constantly making faces behind Dan’s back, and he started talking to me about wanting to do his own thing, rather than just be the Box Top Guy for his whole life.”
When Alex started pitching songs to Dan and Chips, he usually played them bluesy soul numbers, along with pop-rockers like “The Happy Song” and “Together.” But at Ardent, when the studio was not booked, he demoed some of his more confessional folk ballads, such as the upbeat “If You Would Marry Me Babe,” on which he accompanied himself on piano, and the darkly vulnerable “It Isn’t Always That Easy,” featuring fingerpicking on acoustic guitar. The latter, which he’d cowritten with Gary Talley, included such morose lines as “all I see is sadness for years to come.” On both tunes Alex used his natural tenor voice, rather than his signature rasp.
Terry saw real potential in Alex’s demos. “I commiserated with Alex,” he remembers, “listened to his songs, and agreed that he should be trying some new things.” By the spring of 1969 Alex was starting to sense the Box Tops’ impending demise, and on a visit to Ardent, he and Terry began making secret plans for his first solo album. He intended to keep writing songs and, in the fall, during a lull in the band’s touring schedule, slip into Ardent and commence recording. Terry, by then, was becoming accomplished on various instruments, even a Moog synthesizer. Terry suggested Richard Rosebrough, whom he’d met through Bill Cunningham back in the Jynx days, as a possible drummer. The thought of performing with musicians of similar sensibilities lifted Alex’s spirits.
In July Alex took off to join the Box Tops/Beach Boys summer tour, which stretched through the Northeast, including shows ranging from a Summer ’69 Festival in Gaelic Park (a football field in the Bronx) to the Baltimore Civic Center to the Troy, New York, armory and up to New England. Critic Ellen Willis, a Box Tops fan, covered the July 22 Bronx performance in a lengthy article for The New Yorker, noting that “in a less snobbish
era, [the band] would have been enjoyed thoroughly by all kinds of rock fans.” Instead, she pointed out, the crowd was “college-age and superstraight in a Jaycee way I didn’t know existed in New York. I hadn’t seen so many young people with short hair in one place, let alone at a rock concert, in five years.” In describing the Box Tops’ music, Willis called “I Met Her in Church” “one of the most sexual moments in rock and roll.” As for the band’s performance, they “played badly . . . and Chilton didn’t seem to care whether he turned us on or not. He was charming—either very ebullient or very stoned—and looked elegantly English. . . . But he didn’t put enough energy into his singing. . . . At one point, he shouted, ‘Do you like country music?’ . . . and announced he was going to do a Porter Wagoner song, ‘Jesus Lead Us to the River.’” Willis concluded that Alex “has brains, talent, and presence; if he got hold of a decent band and courted the ‘serious’ audience, with a little luck and some smart management, he could graduate from the teen circuit.”
In August, instead of playing the most talked-about event of the summer, the Woodstock festival in upstate New York, the Box Tops performed at an auditorium in Smyrna, Georgia. (With Blood, Sweat and Tears on the Woodstock bill, one wonders if Alex didn’t regret refusing to audition as vocalist in the band in the spring of ’68, after Al Kooper quit. Someone contacted Alex about auditioning, Paul Jobe recalls, but he wasn’t interested. Canadian David Clayton-Thomas got the gig.)
In the meantime, Box Tops releases continued. Bell issued Dial-a-Hit, a sampler of its groups on an LP with novelty packaging: A paper telephone dial could be turned to display the name of the Box Tops or labelmates Merrilee Rush, the Delfonics, the O’Jays, and James and Bobby Purify, among others. On tour with the Beach Boys, the Box Tops showcased their new single, “Soul Deep.” Backed by Alex’s “The Happy Song,” the record garnered more radio play than any Box Tops single since “Cry Like a Baby.” Optimistic that the band was getting hot again, Uttal told Chips the time was right to release a new album. Tommy Cogbill began assembling the Box Tops tracks recorded over the past six months for Dimensions, which Alex later referred to as Demented. By the fall “Soul Deep” would peak at #13 on Cash Box and #18 on Billboard.
That summer Bill Cunningham decided he’d had enough. Particularly disappointed that he’d still not traveled to Europe, he told the band he’d continue until fall, but then he was going back to school. Roy Mack hired Harold Cloud, a twenty-three-year-old bassist originally from the Muscle Shoals area, to take his place. Just as Cloud was beginning rehearsals with the band, Rick Allen quit as well. While Mack was recruiting a replacement keyboardist, Alex used the time to start his recording sessions at Ardent. John agreed that he and Terry could make an album, free of charge, and that Ardent would own the masters and shop the record to a label upon completion. Brimming with songs, Alex showed up around 11 a.m. one day, and Terry called Richard Rosebrough to head over to start cutting the tunes.
Alex had already published some of the songs with Chips’s company, Press Music, including the bluesy “Come On Honey” and “Just to See You,” which had been rejected as Box Tops material. On these and a stripped-down “I Can Dig It” (from Nonstop), Alex alternated between his deep, husky vocal style, though not as throaty as on most Box Tops sides, and his higher, more natural voice. He used the latter on a countrified version of “The Happy Song” (the flip side to “Soul Deep”) and a new original, “Deep Inside Me,” a Beach Boys–inspired love song: “Something deep inside your eyes saw right through me and into my heart.”
“There was little pre-production involved,” says Terry. “Richard was so fast—an amazingly quick drummer. It didn’t take much time to go over things and pick it up.” Richard recalls being impressed with Alex’s songs. During the first session, “it was really just the three of us. Alex would be on guitar and singing, me playing drums, and Terry would be in the control room with a bass plugged into the console, and that’s how we would do the tracks. Then we’d come back later, and Terry would add a guitar or a keyboard, or Alex would redo his guitar, or redo the vocal.” Terry asked Nashville steel guitar player Herb Newman, at Ardent on another project, to overdub parts on “The Happy Song” and other tunes.
At first Alex wanted to hire a session guitarist for all the tracks, but Terry convinced him that his own playing sounded just fine: “I told him, ‘No, I think the essence of this is you playing and singing.’” Richard, who would go on to work closely with Alex over the years, agreed: “Alex was on a learning curve. And in retrospect, that was a beautiful thing—to see him try and make his way, instead of getting an experienced guitar player to come in.”
Still a slight young man, about five foot nine, Alex was graced with long fingers and seemed a natural musician; the past year of playing his Telecaster had paid off, as he became an effective rhythm guitarist. His fingerpicking had gotten stronger on acoustic as well. Working at Ardent on his own material, he felt a sense of freedom he’d rarely experienced while recording at American, where tracks were repeated endlessly until perfected. “I’d learned to do things very meticulously. If I hit a bad note somewhere, or somebody did something a little off, I’d stop and do it again,” Alex said about his vocal approach with the Box Tops. Dan Penn, particularly, had expected him to follow direction and sing a lyric as he instructed, rather than how Alex felt it: “There were all these rules and formulas that the Box Tops had to live [with]. That wasn’t the way we really were.” At Ardent, working with Terry in the control booth, the approach was loose, and most songs were cut in one or two takes, mistakes be damned.
During those first sessions, Richard remembers that when not behind the mic, Alex was quiet and reserved: “He was kind of subdued and careful about what he said, maybe a little hesitant. In retrospect, I think he was a kid who had been just let out into the world and seen the world real fast and had some disappointment with what he saw. He was real cautious, just feeling the waters.”
As Alex spent more time at Ardent, he loosened up with others the way he already had with Terry. “Alex was around a lot then,” John Fry recalls, “but it was a completely different thing compared to the Box Tops sessions. He was hanging out and getting to know everybody. Those were the days I would see a lot of him, and we’d talk, and I’d occasionally go over to the house and meet his parents.”
Alex had to take a break from recording to do more dates with the Box Tops, who’d now lost all their other members but Gary. Local drummer Bobby Guidotti took Boggs’s spot, and keyboardist Swain Schaefer, who’d played in the Scepters with Danny Smythe, replaced Allen. The group began brushing up on their repertoire, adding tracks from Dimensions. As “Soul Deep” peaked, Bell released the catchy single “Turn On a Dream,” a Mark James song (which twenty years later Alex praised to a journalist, saying “it sounded like a million bucks”). With Alex’s “Together” on the flip side, “Turn on a Dream” was not included on the Dimensions LP and barely skimmed the Top 40.
The new lineup performed both singles in early December when the Box Tops appeared on The Mike Douglas Show, a syndicated afternoon program filmed before a live audience in Philadelphia. The week the Box Tops performed, Douglas’s cohost was Carol Channing. She teased the boys mercilessly after they played “Dream”—asking Alex if, prior to becoming a singer, he’d been a hog caller and inquiring what would happen when rock & roll fizzled and “they rejoined the human race.” After their “chat,” a smiling Alex, the consummate professional, sauntered back onstage and, as with “Turn On a Dream,” managed a convincing lip-synch of “Soul Deep” while doing a loose-limbed dance.
The band did have some things to be happy about. They were finally going to the U.K. for a two-week tour, with Boggs back on board, replacing Guidotti. And their records were getting some good press from a new generation of rock critics whose opinions were taken seriously, including Robert Christgau, then at Esquire and about to become senior editor and music columnist o
f the Village Voice, and Lester Bangs, an incendiary writer for Creem and Rolling Stone. Christgau wrote in Esquire that the Super Hits anthology reflected
the highest kind of rock-and-roll, a music of such immediate appeal that I regard it as a litmus elimination for phony and hung-up “rock” fans. . . . Production can only be described as exquisite. . . . Each new instrument, each pause, works to build tension and qualify meaning, yet final control seems to fall to some kind of rapacious commercial instinct that might seem pretentious if it weren’t so busy being delighted with itself.
The future Dean of Rock Criticism said of Alex, “Chilton has an ideal but in no way typical rock voice.”
Bangs crowed about the band in the December 27, 1969, issue of Rolling Stone in a review that initially seemed like a pan:
THE BOX TOPS? Are you serious? Those yokel hacks grinding out rattly pop for the tyrannical Top 40? Those squeaky-clean goons in paisley scarves and blue blazers, mugging with obscene cuteness for all the folks back home on all those corny album covers? Even their name is lame!
Jointly reviewing Nonstop, Dimension, and Super Hits, Bangs went on to rave about the band’s soulfulness and the simplicity of their songs, particularly on Nonstop, as an antidote to the increasing self-consciousness of hard-rock groups with extended jams. In fact, Bangs much preferred the short version of “Rock Me Baby” on Nonstop to the nine-minute jam on Dimensions. Of the latter album, he singled out one track:
A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Page 12
