photo of Alex Chilton outside CBGB's circa 1977
taken by Mark Godlis (click on this to see a full-size image)
EDIT: Terry Manning emailed me today and said he spoke to Alex Monday Sept 5 by phone and that's he fine and out of New Orleans.
I found this posted on the New Orleans CraigsList Friday night:
Date: 2005-09-01, 3:42PM CDT
Alex Chilton, musician, missing since August 30, 2005, New Orleans. Last was heard from Monday, Aug. 29, at 2 pm on the phone, alive at his house in New Orleans after the winds passed. Family and friends seeking to learn he survived the flooding. He lives near the French Quarter and Esplanade area of New Orleans. We also saw a photo on cnn.com today that looked like it possibly was him sitting on a sidewalk with his hand in front of his face to avoid the camera, next to many other New Orleanians waiting to be rescued. It looked like it might have been taken in the French Quarter -- are they going to rescue people there? They are running out of food and water. Please contact if you have seen him since Tuesday. His sister and friends in Memphis want to know if he is alive.
Right now there's nothing but rumors, but my friend Steve Wynn passed on the story that Alex sent friends to Memphis in his car on Sunday. By Tuesday, Alex's apartment in the 9th Ward was flooded with nine feet of water and still he refused to leave. No one's heard from him since.
If you get me to speak on the record, I officially maintain the following things: The Rolling Stones are the greatest rock band of all time. Led Zeppelin is a close second. Ronnie Van Zant is the most underrated songwriter and frontman in history. The Gun Club's Fire of Love and The Dream Sydicate's The Days of Wine and Roses may be the two most unappreciated records of the Eighties. R.E.M. between 1981-1985 were the greatest live band I've ever seen, but Echo & the Bunnymen on a good night could be a close second. There's more truth in Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers' "Listen to Her Heart" than in Bruce Springsteen's entire catalog. George Jones is the greatest living singer now that Frank Sinatra is dead.
But, if you get me late at night fortified with a few slugs of bourbon, I'll tell the truth: I believe that Alex Chilton knows the secret of the universe and, while he'll give us a few glimpses of truth from time to time, he's going to keep that classified information for himself. My relationship with both him and his music over the last 25 years has been so complicated that I'm not sure I know where to begin.
Well, actually, I do.
Jan 17, 1982. Sunday. Noon. Kirkland House, Harvard College.
I'm a freshman and, not only have I already managed to get my own show on WHRB, they made me the station's Music Director. I got the job in spite of the fact that my punk rock credentials were slightly suspect: I was already opening and closing each of my shows by playing one side or the other of the R.E.M. Hib-Tone 45 ("Radio Free Europe" would open the show and "Sitting Still" would close it and then I'd alternate the next week).
I should have been studying for finals after a particularly disastrous first semester, but I was avoiding the inevitable doom of Tuesday's calculus exam. After breakfast with one of the upperclassmen who ran the station, he took me back to his room and said (I think partially in disgust for my questionable taste), "You'd probably like this. It's Southern. They're from Memphis."
And he played "September Gurls" from Big Star's Radio City. And I can remember everything about that moment. What the winter light looked like coming through the window in his room. How the needle on his overpriced turntable dropped on track 5 of side 2 and the spinning blue Ardent label. The aftertaste of milk, institutional waffles and syrup in my mouth. And every single second of the first time I heard that song. By the first chorus, I gave my life to rock and roll and never looked back.
I remember the first time I heard "September Gurls" as vividly as I remember the last kiss from my first love on a beach in Lake Charles, LA. Both left scars. Good scars, but scars nonetheless.
The album itself was like some Holy Relic. Printed on heavy cardboard, the cover shot was an impenetrable image of a bare white light bulb against a red ceiling and the hint of three blacklight posters demonstrating sex positions in the bottom right corner. Both the cover image and the band image on the back were printed with an otherworldly, hypersaturated color that matched the transcendence of the song I'd just heard. And heard again. And again.
(click on this one, too)
I was 18; I didn't know anything. But both photographs were shot by William Eggleston and the album was released before his wildly controversial 1976 Museum of Modern Art exhibit, the one that first established color photography as a fine art. (My relationship with Bill's photography has become as intense as the one I have with Alex's music but we'll get back to that in something else I'll write soon).
Radio City was long out of print by this point, but there was a rumor that Looney Tunes Records in Boston still had a few copies. So on Monday morning, instead of studying for exams, I got on the T and bought the store's last four copies for $3.99 apiece. At this point, I wanted to own every copy of Radio City on the planet and just spread them out on my floor so I could stare at them.
(Note to Mom: if anyone ever gave you access to the Wayback Machine, this would have been the time and place where you might have saved me from my fate. I still might have turned into a productive attorney or investment banker but after this 2 minutes & 49 seconds, I was lost forever).
Within a couple of weeks, I'd managed to get a copy of Big Star's first album #1 Record via mail order. Some days it was just as good as Radio City. Other days it was even better.
There were a lot of things I had to learn: Alex had been the lead singer of the Box Tops when he was 16 and enjoyed huge chart success in a band that he didn't control. I already knew "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby" but the heartbreaking Alex vocals on the Big Star records sounded nothing like gravel-voiced R&B growl on those Box Tops singles.
He'd toured the world, hung out with Dennis Wilson and Charles Manson in LA and walked away when he realized that he was just the frontman in a band masterminded by its producers. After kicking around New York for a while, he landed back home in Memphis and joined Chris Bell's new band Big Star.
What I instinctively understood was that Big Star was a Southern band playing British Invasion music. All the dirt and grease and funk of Memphis gave their music a despair and groove that all other Beatles-influenced bands just couldn't touch.
I've always hated the idea of Power Pop. No matter what girl's name they use in the lyrics, power pop bands are just writing love songs to their Beatles records. Women never like power pop because they don't recognize themselves in the music. Big Star wrote about real sex and real women with all the thrills and despair of a flesh-and-blood relationship.
My college career eventually recovered in spite of the fact that, over the next 3 1/2 years, I devoted just as much time to tracking down every scrap of anything related to Big Star and tramping around the Northeast to see every possible R.E.M. show as I did to my studies. My friend Sally bought what were apparently the last two copies of Chris Bell's "I Am the Cosmos" 45 for $1.99 each at Venus Records in NYC and most generously gave one of them to me. I found a copy of the JB Records "Box Tops" single at Harvard Coop parking lot sale, the record where Alex recut the lead vocals to his biggest hits with his mid-70s vocal style. I never found one of the legendary white label test pressings of Big Star 3rd, but I wore out several copies of its official release on JEM Records.
By this point, Alex had completely renounced Big Star and wanted nothing to do with the band. He was relentlessly tortured by a small band of Big Star Losers who asked endless questions about albums that had failed ten years earlier.
After a short-lived stab at a solo career in NYC, Alex returned to Memphis and confounded everyone by reinventing himself as the guitarist for Panther Burns, a primitivist rockabilly band fronted by performance artist Tav Falco. Some right-minded critics thought the band was a big joke that Tav wasn't in on, but Behind the Magnolia Curtain is a kind of cracked masterpiece, a record that asserts that feeling is more important than time and that "good musicianship" has nothing to do with rock and roll.
Alex makes this point even more clearly on the 1980 solo album Like Flies on Sherbert. Depending on your perspective, the album is either a distressing document of an artist in free fall or a thrilling deconstruction of all pretense that rock had somehow become an acceptable middle class artform. Imagine the Stooges' Fun House performed by Jerry Lee Lewis. Even in the punk rock era, it was a startlingly confrontational record and a huge Fuck You to anyone waiting for another Big Star record.
Everyone (ok, all 847 Big Star Losers) had a theory: Big Star was really Chris Bell's band and Alex wanted to distance himself from a sound he didn't really create. Or, because the band had been a commercial failure, Alex saw no point in revisiting a sound that hadn't make him a dime. And, most popularly, quite a few believed that everyone in Memphis was in such a lazy drug haze that the entire city was completely disconnected from reality.
My Trip to New Orleans, or How I Narrowly Avoided Becoming a Stalker
By 1984, Alex had dropped out completely. There were rumors that he was a dishwasher in New Orleans or that he swept the floor at a bar called Jimmy's in the French Quarter.
My parents decided that we should take a last "family vacation" to the Louisiana World Exposition the summer before I finished college, so I came home from Cambridge and we set off for New Orleans in August 1984. Of course, I had a totally separate agenda: my college friend Kate was home for the summer and I was going to convince her to drive me around until we found Alex.
The trip was a huge success. Kate took me to a used record "store" that was actually an ancient, crumbling New Orleans house crammed floor to ceiling with record shelves and huge stacks of unsorted vinyl on the floor. I left with a minty copy of X-Ray Spex's Germ-Free Adolescents LP and ALL of the original Big Star 45s on Ardent. Plus Echo & the Bunnymen & the Fleshtones played a mind-blowing show on the riverboat SS President that resonates with me to this day. (Props to whomever uploaded a bootleg of that show to the old EZTree bittorrent site earlier this year; I listen to it all the time and, yeah, it really was that great a show).
But Kate truly delivered the goods. She'd heard rumors that Alex was now playing covers with a pickup band weekday afternoons in the French Quarter. So, ever so tentatively, we went looking. And we found him. There were maybe six tourists in the room and Alex's band was playing the songs that make the people sway and rock and clap their hands to the beat: "Rock With You" and "Three Times a Lady" were definitely the highlights of a set I couldn't believe I was watching.
Even more unbelievable was this: Alex's bass player was René Coman. Kate had gone to Benjamin Franklin High School with René and, miraculously, he had been my roommate in summer school when we were 12. Not only did I get to meet Alex, I was introduced as René's friend from camp rather than what I actually was: a crazy kid who had come all the way from Boston to bug him about Big Star.
Alex was notoriously cruel to earnest little acolytes who just wanted to hear about how he wrote "Back of a Car." I felt like I'd won the lottery: for the next twenty years, he was always nice to me because knew me as René's friend rather than the Big Star Loser I was in real life.
The Return of Alex
Sometime in 1985, Alex decided he wanted to make a record and used the band I saw in New Orleans with René on bass and Doug Garrison on drums.
By this point, the Big Star legend had grown to the point that hipsters were ready to accept just about anything from Alex. What they got was Feudalist Tarts, a one-take R&B EP that sounded like Big Star never happened. He quickly followed with the "No Sex" single, which teased fans with a Big Star-style guitar riff and incredibly, uh, provocative lyrics about the coming AIDS epidemic. The most commercial song he'd released in years, Alex made sure he'd get absolutely no radio play by making "Come On, Baby/Fuck me and die" the hook line in the chorus.
Me? I had a college degree and no real plans to do anything productive. I was managing bands in Boston, promoting records to college radio stations and angling for a job with Big Time Records in Los Angeles.
Big Time was home to Alex, Redd Kross and the Dream Syndicate. There could be no better place on the planet to have a job.
Somehow, I managed to get hired and moved myself to LA in 1987, where I got to be Alex Chilton's A&R man. Which mostly meant I was the guy he talked to on the phone about where to send the master tapes for the High Priest album and what we were going to do with the artwork. He did agree to add Feudalist Tarts and "No Sex" to the CD version of High Priest, thus creating the world's first "value-added" CD. Of course, I think he only agreed because none of us owned a CD player and none of us thought people would actually ever buy a CD. Plus we made totally bitchin' retail posters for the album and an amazing promo 12" for "Make a Little Love," a song that radio wouldn't play, either. So even though I wasn't doing A&R in any real sense, I had the coolest job in the world.
As Big Time unraveled, I quit and moved to Atlanta to become a rock manager. But I remember Alex's late 80s/early 90s shows as some of my favorites of all time.
Confronted with crowds of kids who knew him from the Replacements' song "Alex Chilton," he steadfastly refused to acknowledge he'd ever heard of Big Star aside from the occasional performance of "In the Street," always dropped into the set with no fanfare and no admission that it was a Big Star song.
What always blew me away about these shows was the band's groove. René and Doug had an unbelievable chemistry and later played together in the beloved New Orleans roots band The Iguanas. They gave Alex the freedom to play some of the most mind-bending guitar I've heard in my life, a transcendent style that somehow managed to combine Ernie Isley, Pete Townsend and ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons.
Sure, Alex's vocals could be indifferent and the sets were full of covers like "B-A-B-Y" and "What's Your Sign Girl," but Mr. Chilton had become one of those old Memphis bluesmen: pay me my money and I'll give you a show.
I'm not sure everyone left the concerts as enchanted as I was, but I learned most of what I know about soul and feel in rock music from watching those shows. And every time I go into a recording session, I think about those grooves and aspire to capture that chemistry on tape.
Big Star reunion
Sometime in 1993, a bunch of college kids at KCOU, the University of Missouri's radio station decided to ask "Big Star" if they'd play their outdoor spring concert and contacted Big Star drummer Jody Stephens at Ardent Studios (where he was the studio manager) and asked if they'd do it. Jody asked Alex. Alex said yes.
Word spread like wildfire: One-time only Big Star show in Missouri. Jody's always told me that he didn't think of asking Ken Stringfellow and Jon Auer from the Posies to fill out the band until the last possible moment, so the band that played on April 25, 1993 had barely rehearsed and had no plans to ever play again.
I was under contract to Zoo Entertainment as an A&R consultant and strongly backed Zoo A&R man Bud Scoppa's idea to make a deal to record the show and release a live album. Of course, Bud had reviewed #1 Record for Rolling Stone magazine and attended the legendary "Rock Critic's Convention" in Memphis that was conceived to launch and promote Radio CIty, so he was probably even more of a paid-up Big Star Loser than I could ever be.
I was able to maintain cover on that trip because I managed Drivin N Cryin and they played Farm Aid in Iowa City the day before on April 24. Since I was working for Zoo on the side anyway and it was only 200 miles to Columbia, it only made sense to go check in on the first Big Star gig in almost two decades, right? Yeah, sure.
You can hear what happened for yourself on the Columbia record. Jody Stephens has a magically deep pocket to his drumming and he brings something to these songs you could never get without him. But, overall, it was mostly about the thrill of being THERE and actually getting to see Alex sing some of these songs he'd refused to play for years.
There were about 250 people milling around a field and I'm sure most of us had traveled halfway across the country to be there.
Alex, Jody, Jon & Ken have since made a career as Big Star Mach 2 and played regularly all around the world over the last ten years. I've seen them play a half dozen times and never fail to enjoy the show but Alex never seems as into it as he was playing R&B covers with Doug and René.
Bud's Big Idea
My last (and favorite) big encounter with Alex happened late that summer. Bud (and Zoo) had just enjoyed a surprising hit with Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend album, a record that owed a huge debt to Big Star. Bud just knew it was time for Alex to make a Big Star-style record for Zoo and finally get the recognition he'd always deserved.
Since he knew I got along with Alex, Bud drafted me to come to New Orleans with him to make the pitch. We arrived in town and Alex took us out for the evening to some of the city's less prestigious drinking establishments. It was miserably hot in that oppressive south Louisiana way where you sweat out a beer by the time you've finished drinking it.
The next day, we went to Alex's house for the Big Meeting. He was incredibly gracious and polite and ready to talk. Bud really had it together. He knew exactly why NOW was the time to make the classic Alex Chilton record at Ardent and Zoo would pay a handsome advance and he'd finally get played on the radio. Alex listened, smiled and nodded in assent.
But, at some point in the conversation, he said, "Hey, do you mind if I put on this movie while we talk?" and shoved a tape into his VCR.
On came The Big Knife, a 1955 Robert Aldrich film based on a Clifford Odets play that starred Jack Palance and Rod Steiger. Palance plays a matinee idol desperate to get out of his film contract but Steiger is the evil studio boss who knows Palance's dirty secret and uses it to crush his ambition to make more artistic films.
As Bud talked, I started to sort the plot and get the message. Alex just kept smiling and said it was all very interesting and that he'd think about it.
Once we got back to the hotel, Bud was amped. "That went great!" he said. "I think Alex is going to finally do it."
I was laughing so hard I choked. "Bud, didn't you notice the movie? He gave us his answer already. You'll never hear from him on this again."
That was the Alex I knew: ornery, hard-headed and brilliantly passive-aggressive.
Lately, I've heard stories about shows that Alex has played at Indian casinos and on cruise ships with the reunited original Box Tops, the band that played live but wasn't allowed to make the actual records. People who've seen them talk about how passionate Alex is about playing the old songs and how amazing his guitar work has been.
There's a new "Big Star" record coming out in a few weeks on Rykodisc. When I did a panel with Jody Stephens at the Atlantis Music Conference last month, he enthusiastically described the recording and actuallly made me look forward to the record.
Before I got the news from New Orleans yesterday, I got my copy of Big Star In Space in the mail. I'm not sure I'm ready to listen to it yet. Part of me just wants to put on Loose Shoes and Tight Pussy and listen to Alex sing "Lipstick Traces" or the "Oogum Boogum" song one more time.
Last Sunday night, just a few hours before Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, I saw a screening of Michael Almereyda's unreleased film Happy Here and Now at the Egyptian Theatre here in Los Angeles. Set in the underside of New Orleans that Alex knows so well, it's an almost unbearable meditation on connections lost with other people. As I watched it, I knew that almost every location in every frame would be wiped out within 24 hours.
What I didn't imagine is that Alex would be so stubborn that he'd stay in New Orleans and not find a way to get out. I worried for my friends and their families but, honestly, I never worried about him until I saw the posting on Craigslist.
Furry Lewis
If Alex is gone, I'll mourn his passing for the rest of my life. I always imagined seeing him grow into Furry Lewis, still contrary and playing whatever he wanted at 85 years old.
Of course, if he's safe or makes it out alive, I've just totally outed myself. Yeah, Alex, I am one of those guys. I always have been. Thanks for being so polite to me for the last twenty years; it's been fun not being a complete dork around you.
But, if you are still here, keep doing whatever the hell you want. I learned that from you and, while I haven't always paid attention to the lesson, it's something I always aspire to do.
Your music (all of it, even "Volaré") has given me nothing but faith my entire adult life. And tonight, I pray you'll be around to give us a lot more.
Here's hoping you're safe, a little drunk and just don't feel like talking to anyone. I just hope you call somebody soon so we can all stop worrying.
And I promise: I'll never ask you any annoying questions about "Thirteen" or "Daisy Glaze." Really.
Thank you.
I hope you have nothing against me linking to this brilliant and honest post.
I'm sure he will turn up.
I've never met him (I'm in Sweden). But his music has meant A LOT to me.
Posted by: Sebastian | September 04, 2005 at 10:23 AM
Hey Jim-
Check out my blogs-
www.scopitones.com
www.spikepriggen.com
http://bedazzled.blogs.com/bedazzled/
Spike
Posted by: Spike Priggen | September 04, 2005 at 02:42 PM