Authors: Holly George-Warren
Because Stax used a system of independent distributors familiar with its typical fare—R&B, funk, and soul—there were missteps in the shipment of a white pop-rock band to record stores featuring such music. By mid-September, when
Cash Box
published another rave review—“an important album that should go to the top with proper handling”—it was becoming clear that the LP’s intial distribution had been botched. Steve Rhea would hear from radio programmers reluctant to play the record since it didn’t seem to be selling—which
of course it couldn’t without vinyl in the stores. When Chris heard this, he became furious, blaming the situation on John Fry, with the result that their relationship became frayed.
“
We were not a big company,” Terry Manning explains. “Just a few people with a very small staff in a small town in the South distributed by a bigger record company, Stax, a black music company. . . . No one involved had a lot of business acumen relating to the pop or rock music business. We were trying to go up against Columbia, Warner Bros., RCA—big names with big money and big staff, with lots of resources behind them. Yes, it can be done, and sometimes—occasionally—small labels have turned into big labels. This, sadly, was not one of those cases.”
Such was the situation when Big Star set out on their first “tour”—a handful of performances in the South, including two tourist towns in the Ozarks, Eureka Springs and Mountain View, Arkansas. The second show, held in an outdoor amphitheater, attracted fewer than fifty people. With the Hiwatt amps and Alex’s Marshall blasting the two guitars and bass, Chris’s vocals could barely be heard over the roar when Big Star opened with “In the Street.” The bad sound and lack of stage monitors gave Chris stage fright when he couldn’t hear himself sing. Alex, with years of experience in the Box Tops playing under similar conditions, wasn’t fazed.
Along with the songs from
#1 Record
, the band played a couple of new Bell tunes—the yearning “There Was a Light” and downcast “I Got Kinda Lost.” Covers included Neil Young’s “Cinnamon Girl,” the Beatles’ “You Can’t Do That,” as well as the Fab Four’s version of the Isley Brothers’ “Twist and Shout.” Alex held back onstage; rather than act as front man, as he had in the Box Tops, he didn’t say much to the audience. Andy occasionally introduced the songs.
The band then traveled to New Orleans to perform at eleven o’clock on a Sunday morning in City Park, as part of Political Rally ’72. New Orleans FM station WRNO had been playing tracks from
#1 Record
, and the band stopped by for an on-air interview the day before the gig. The free concert drew a crowd, and Alex later fondly recalled the event as being energized. Jody broke his bass drum head during the very first song. “I guess I was overexcited,” he remembers. “Then I had to scramble to replace it.”
Since Big Star was the first band onstage, they were filmed for local TV news and photographed for the front page of the September 25
Times-Picayune
, with the headline
A DAY OF POLITICS & MUSIC
. The paper reported that “members of the
rock band Big Star play their brand of music Sunday for a crowd gathered at Political Rally ’72 in City Park. Candidates joined the entertainers on the program, proving that politics and music do mix.”
Chris hated the gigs. “
I was disgusted with some of the places they booked us into,” he later complained of such venues as an old movie theater in small-town Mississippi. “There were terrible arguments in the band, and it began to get very political and less musical.” College campuses did not prove to be much of an improvement. An outing to the University of Georgia in Athens was a bust. Bob Schiffer booked his pals into the University of Tennessee for the campus homecoming festivities, to perform atop the University Center. Though no one had heard of Big Star, Schiffer promoted the show by spreading the word that the band included the Box Tops’ lead singer, plus two former Knoxville students. When the band arrived in John Dando’s Volkswagen van, Bob discovered that Chris, an introvert as a UT freshman, was noticeably gloomy. “
Chris was a very troubled person,” says Bob. “He was going through a lot, and he was very quiet about it. Alex was much more demonstrative of his feelings, while Chris would hold his back. That led to a lot of tension.”
The strains on the band only increased. Chris heard rumors about Stax’s business practices that he found disturbing. “
Chris complained about them,” Richard Rosebrough recalls, “and was eventually told, ‘Well, look, son, in this business sometimes you have to get your hands dirty.’ Chris had high morals, and he was the one in the group who ended up becoming very spiritual. Chris went that way, he wore the cross, and he made moral judgments, thinking, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ Let’s face it, you get smack-dab in the middle of the music business, it’s ugly.”
Back in Memphis, the band still met occasionally at the Chiltons’ home to work on material, finishing several new songs. But arguments broke out, with one particularly vicious altercation between Andy and Chris. When Andy didn’t get his part right, Chris ridiculed him to the point that Andy slugged him, then stormed out. As blood poured from Chris’s nose, he grabbed Andy’s newly purchased Gibson Thunderbird bass and smashed it, breaking off the neck. Later, Andy got revenge: Coming across Chris’s Yamaha acoustic guitar, he stabbed holes in it with a screwdriver, later attributing such hurtful acts to the fact that “we were a very emotional band.”
“
There were problems with friendships,” Richard Rosebrough remembers. “When you’re close with people and there are a lot of people involved—you hang out with this guy, then you hang out with that guy, and that guy hangs out
with somebody else—jealousies start to crop up. There started being competition between Alex and Christopher . . . on musical and personal levels.”
Though Chris held a grudge against Ardent for the distribution fiasco, Alex took it in stride and wanted to continue his relationship with John’s label and studio. “Ardent had a big promotion staff, and they did great things,” Alex explained. John had brought on board his old friend John King to boost the PR. King’s energy and enthusiasm for Big Star helped some with morale, and he devised new promotional angles, including getting the album into the hands of a growing number of rock critics, who were responding favorably. Robert Christgau wrote a positive review in the
Village Voice
, focusing on Alex:
Alex Chilton’s voice is changing. When he was a teenage Box Top, his deep, soulful, bullfrog whopper was the biggest freak of nature since Stevie Winwood sang “I’m a Man,” but now that he’s formed his own group he gets to be an adolescent, complete with adenoidal quiver. Appropriately, the music tends toward the teen as well, but provides brand new thrills. . . . B+
In Memphis, however, Big Star’s music was not catching on and, according to Alex, got limited AM and FM airplay locally. “
Led Zeppelin and all those bands that went into those ten-minute-long solos . . . were the big things around,” Alex recalled. “The early seventies were a trough if you grew up in the sixties liking the Beatles and that artful pop style. Our band and the Raspberries were about the only ones who had that sound going for them.” The Raspberries, a Cleveland-based group led by vocalist and songwriter Eric Carmen, scored a smash AM radio hit that year with “Go All the Way,” from its debut LP released by Capitol (featuring a scratch-’n’-sniff sticker of a raspberry on the cover).
When it became clear that
#1 Record
was a commercial flop, Chris began to slip over the edge, the lack of success “driving him mad,” according to Terry. “
Depression can come on very strongly at a time of loss,” says Chris’s brother, David Bell. “He had put such an enormous amount of effort into the band that the album’s failure was a crushing blow.” Chris tried to talk Alex and the others into leaving Ardent and looking for a different studio and label. “
He was taking some drugs—downers—around then, which make some people a little paranoid,” Alex said. “Somehow he got it into his head that we and all these other people were working against him, which wasn’t true at all.
I remember Chris coming to me and saying that he was having trouble with John, and for that reason he wanted to split from Ardent and go somewhere else and do something
else. Chris kind of presented it to me in a way that if we would follow him away from the record company that we would stay together. Chris had a way of being so cryptic and mysterious at times that I didn’t get the point of what he was talking about. . . . I was more interested in staying where we were. I hadn’t really learned much about the recording studio . . . and I was very much interested in doing that.”
The record’s failure, “along with
the emotional turmoil going on in his love life at the time, just broke him down,” said Andy, “and he became what we would now call ‘clinically depressed.’” Some of those closest to Chris thought he was a closeted gay man who may have fallen in love with John Fry or Alex at a time and place when such relationships would have been forbidden. In any case, Chris clearly felt anguished enough that by the end of October he decided to quit Big Star.
In November, after another violent argument at Ardent, Chris stormed out of the studio and began attacking John’s black Mercedes parked out back. “
He and Fry had a personal relationship that was pretty close,” Alex reflected later. “There was some bad feeling between them [because] he was leaving.” Accounts vary about whether Chris repeatedly kicked the car or used an ax or hammer on it. One witness recalled that Chris smashed a Coke bottle and carved
PIG
with the broken glass onto its hood. Worse damage, though, came that night, when he returned to Ardent, let himself into the studio, found the
#1 Record
tape, and began erasing it. “
I got a call from Richard Rosebrough, who was down at the studio,” John recalls, “and he said, ‘Chris is back up here and he’s erasing the multitrack tapes for
#1 Record
.’” After Richard stopped him, Chris, distraught, fled, then “apparently took a bunch of pills of some kind and wound up in the hospital,” according to John. “It was a sad day.” After the suicide attempt, which may have also included slashing his wrists, Chris was committed to the psychiatric ward of Memphis Baptist Hospital, then spent two more months recuperating at Mid-South Hospital.
As Alex saw it at the time, Chris’s departure spelled the end of Big Star. “Chris was gone and he had been the leader of the band,” Alex said. “There was Chris’s band, but there wasn’t any Chris. Well, okay, the band is folding.”
Though he wouldn’t admit it at the time, Alex was disappointed when Chris quit Big Star. He had come to rely on Chris’s astute suggestions and critiques; the two seemed to bring out the best in each other as songwriters.
Alex respected Chris’s skills as a writer, producer, vocalist, and guitarist, as he emphasized some fifteen years later: “
Chris Bell was somebody whose music I dug. I learned a lot from playing with him and learned a lot about recording. It was a time in my life when I made progress. Big Star was some sort of ultimate guitar band. We spent a lot of time recording . . . and tried to get good sounds out of our guitars. I don’t think that people will make a guitar band sound better than we made our band sound.”
Alex, Andy, and Jody continued to play music individually and sometimes together; with Chris’s departure, Alex looked toward Andy as a collaborator who could help him finish songs. He mainly wanted help on lyrics, later saying he’d preferred working on the music rather than the words. Or perhaps Alex was avoiding making his feelings known, which he tended to do in his lyrics. “
If you’re writing anything decent, it’s in you, it’s your spirit coming out,” Alex said twenty years later. “If it’s not an expression of how a person genuinely feels, then it’s not a good song done with any conviction.” In 1973 Alex instead produced some songs he said were “written by committee.”
The remaining members of Big Star liked the new material, some of which had benefited from Chris’s contributions before his breakdown and suicide attempt, so they decided to cut demos at Ardent. “
We had played the songs quite a bit in practice sessions, studio jams, and the like,” said Andy. “Some writing occurred with the three or four of us in Alex’s bedroom.” When Alex, Jody, and Andy returned to Ardent, they asked John to engineer a basic recording of four songs.
“We were all getting kind of sick of the conventional method of recording—close-miking everything, laying down thirty tracks before you settle on one, then millions of overdubs to get the final song,” Andy recalled, referring to the long, drawn-out
#1 Record
sessions. “Plus we were really interested in mono. So we got Fry to engineer a session in Studio B in mono, basically using one old big Neumann microphone in the middle of the room, with the whole band at once. . . . The goal was to do them all in one take. I think we came pretty close. They sounded great. They were hot, fresh, full of enthusiasm, and the mono sound Fry came up with was amazing.”
Two of four songs cut this way, “I Got Kinda Lost” and “There Was a Light,” had been primarily written by Chris, while another pair, “Back of a Car” and “O My Soul” had been composed by Alex, Andy, and Chris. For “Back of a Car,” which sounded of a piece with
#1 Record
, Alex later remembered, “Chris came up with the main melody line over the chords I was playing. We threw the first things that we could think of into that and just left it that way. . . . I think the words were mostly Andy’s, and my chord changes.”
As for the more raw “O My Soul,” Alex attributed some of the writing to Chris: “
Most of the lyrics after the first bit are his, but
I don’t care for those words. I mean,
‘You’re really a nice girl . . .’
Fuck!
I would never say that! I’d be more inclined to say, ‘You’re really a rotten person, but I like you anyway.’”
Soon after Alex’s twenty-second birthday, he, Andy, and Jody decided to tackle a Memphis gig as a three-piece version of Big Star. They’d already agreed to the booking, opening for Houston R&B act Archie Bell and the Drells, before Chris quit. Lafayette’s Music Room had become the major rock club in Memphis since opening in 1972. Named for a longtime bartender at the Memphis Country Club, it had a good sound system, with an expansive raised stage and a balcony for more seating. According to former Box Tops drummer Thomas Boggs, who managed the club, “
It was so popular we didn’t really have to advertise. Everything was just word of mouth. And we were paying some of these acts $2,000 a week, which was enormous back then. There was no other place like it.”
Big Star played its first gig without its founder in early January 1973. Lafayette’s was unusually quiet that night, with most of the sparse audience there to see Archie Bell and the Drells. Jody recalls, “We’d finish a song, and there might be one person clapping.” “
We weren’t popular in our own environment at all,” Alex later explained. “All these fledgling kinds of heavy-metal outfits and blues-playing outfits—that’s what people wanted to hear. Me having been in the Box Tops was sort of a disgrace [among hard-rock fans] at the time, too.”
Alex, Andy, and Jody kicked off the set with their single, “When My Baby’s Beside Me,” just as they had during their brief “tour.” Without Chris’s guitar the tunes were more stripped-down, and Jody admirably handled harmony vocals (except on “Ballad of El Goodo,” which he warbled off-key). Andy, sounding a bit dispirited, introduced the songs as being from their LP “that came out about three months ago.” The energy began to build, though, when the band moved from
#1 Record
tracks to the new tunes they’d recently demoed, “Back of a Car” and “I Got Kinda Lost,” as well as a batch of covers. What began a bit subdued turned into a raggedly glorious set, illustrating the players’ growing confidence onstage.
They performed again the following night, with Jody singing lead on “Way Out West,” a new song Andy wrote about his girlfriend, Linda Schaeffer, who’d moved to Colorado (along with Vera Ellis) to attend college. Andy had decided not to sing at all, so Alex took on “The India Song.” In the middle of the set, Alex fingerpicked “Thirteen” while Jody played maracas and Andy strummed the rhythm on acoustic guitar. The new “O My Soul” rocked, with a funky
chucka-chucka
guitar part and Alex boldly singing in his tenor:
“I can’t get a license to drive in my car / But I don’t really need it if I’m a Big Star.”
Some of the lyrics to that song and “She’s a Mover” were partially inspired by Alex’s new love, Diane Davis Wall.
Alex began the lyrics to “O My Soul” on a napkin and “left it at my apartment one night,” Diane says. She recalls they’d had a long discussion about spirituality while eating slices of an apple pie she’d just baked. “He had been brought up an atheist, and I was raised Catholic. We could get into these deep discussions about the soul and its meaning. We would talk for hours about what a soul was and, if it was intangible, what it meant. He was fascinated by the soul. The napkin thing was Alex being melodramatic and leaving lyrics as poetry.” Diane inspired “She’s a Mover,” Alex told her, because “we were always dancing to T. Rex.”
Other lyrics to Alex’s new songs were clearly influenced by Vera’s departure. The pair stayed in touch, and he occasionally wrote her. “
We never did have any big breakup or anything like that,” says Vera. “But Alex became involved with other people. . . . It was just something that kind of drifted away. When I went to college in Colorado, he started going out with someone else, and when I came back in town, he started going out with me instead of going out with her, and it was a big deal to her, but I was just kind of in and out of town.” Juggling relationships with Diane and Vera, both Libras, over the next six months would result later that year in what many consider Alex’s most perfect pop song.
Great news came in February, when
Rolling Stone
ran a five-hundred-word rave review of the “exceptionally good”
#1 Record
, written by Bud Scoppa, Alex’s acquaintance from the Village nearly two years earlier. As with several other reviews, Alex was singled out. Scoppa compared the band to Badfinger and the Raspberries, reporting that “Big Star shows more depth and consistency than either of those. A closer parallel is Todd Rundgren, who’s equally adept at evoking the Beatles, California rock, and 1965, but even Rundgren hasn’t made a whole album as impressive as this one.” The album’s strengths were described at length:
The first side is dominated by rock & roll while the second becomes increasingly reflective and acoustic as it winds down. In both styles, the guitar sound is sharp-edged and full; even the prettiest tunes have tension and subtle energy to them, and the rockers reverberate with power. The rock & roll tracks can be seen as a succession of imaginative guitar and vocal ideas, but . . . it’s on the slower songs that the influences are more noticeable. The oddly titled “Ballad of El Goodo,” with modal harmonies and a great McGuinn-style vocal by Chilton, may be the best song here. . . . And Chilton’s unaffected vocal style comes across to best advantage on the quietest tunes. . . .
#1
Record
is one of the sleepers of 1972.
The timing for such positive national press was perfect, since
#1 Record
was slated to be reissued in March 1973. Stax’s Al Bell had made a deal with Columbia Records president Clive Davis to distribute Stax’s releases, including the Ardent issues, and John Fry assumed that such a powerhouse company could finally get Big Star into record stores across the country. The trades weighed in with more praise after the reissue, with
Record World
proclaiming, “This is one of the best albums of the year, featuring the lead vocals of ex–Box Top member Alex Chilton. Rockers and ballads are exceptional. . . . Released several months ago to great reviews, this album deserves the major new push it is now being given.”
Alex continued making new demos at Ardent, including “Life Is White,” “You Get What You Deserve,” and “What’s Going Ahn.” With the future of Big Star in doubt, he thought he might try another solo album, though he still lacked confidence that it would go anywhere. Sung with a soft tenderness as in “Thirteen,” the demo for “What’s Going Ahn” documents a fully realized composition, with lead guitar breaks and other details played on acoustic guitar. “In those days I was very meticulous and strict and deliberate about the musical
structures we were doing,” Alex later told Bruce Eaton, who described the demos as having “a purity and vulnerability that make an immediate and deep connection with the listener, leaving one to ponder what Chilton’s future as a folk singer might have been had he not agreed to join Big Star.”
Alex also started jamming with drummer Richard Rosebrough, now a full-time engineer at Ardent, and bassist Danny Jones, Vera’s former neighbor, who’d moved into the Chiltons’ garage apartment after his marriage broke up. “A wildness gurgled through Memphis” in 1973, according to Bluff City chronicler Robert Gordon. Alex, Andy, and Richard, as well as other Ardent personnel, enjoyed whiling away the hours at Trader Dick’s, Huey’s, and Friday’s—all crawling distance from Ardent. Nearby Overton Square was “
the most popular Memphis party district since the heyday of Beale Street,” wrote
The
Commercial Appeal
’s John Beifus.
Friday’s, with its English pub atmosphere, had expanded in size, with people still lined up down the street to get in. Trader Dick’s became known as “Quaalude City,” where “hard-partying hedonists hunted for Quaaludes,” wrote Beifus. Alex, like many of his pals, soon became a fan of the drug. “Around ’73, I began taking Quaaludes and things like that and drinking more,” he told Cub Koda, “so I guess around ’73 I began sliding into alcoholism.”
“
Alex really loved his cocktails,” said John King, “especially if someone else was buying. He loved it that I had a company credit card. We’d get really drunk at Ardent, and then Fry would come in the next morning and we’d be huddled under the drum blankets.” Richard remembers similar episodes: “We often went . . . to Trader Dick’s . . . and we’d get
drunk and drugged out and go into the studio at two in the morning and record.”
One night when Alex and Richard returned to Ardent, Alex sauntered into the control room to operate the board while Richard played drums on “She’s a Mover.” With Alex’s talkback and a cowbell starting the track, Richard played a swingin’ bouncy beat. “That was the very first session I ever engineered,” Alex told Bruce Eaton. “I set Rich up out in the studio and I don’t know how many mics I gave him but however many mics I was running on the drums, I . . . did the most extravagant amount of compression one can do on a set of drums. It was not the normal way people did things at all.”
At one point Alex asked Richard, “What’s this Dolby fucker do?” referring to the state-of-the-art sound-enhancement system John Fry had installed at Ardent. Hence, “Dolby Fuckers” became the name Richard jotted down on the tape box. Alex was pleased with the results and taught the song to Danny Jones,
who joined him at Ardent for another middle-of-the-night session to add bass to the recording. “
Alex was a perfectionist at everything he did,” according to Danny, “but the very last thing he wanted to come across as was a perfectionist. What did Van Gogh say? ‘Avoid the obvious,’ and he left it at that. Chilton would probably say the same thing. He wanted it to be so spontaneous and so free and loose. That’s why he came up with some really cool recording techniques. That’s just what he lived and breathed: You don’t want to overproduce anything. Alex ran the board, and everything was one take—Alex wouldn’t do more than one take. His stuff was already down, and I was playing bass, and we’d already rehearsed it, so what’s the use of doing it twice?”
Alex was so happy with that track that he made plans for a formal session, with John Fry engineering, to cut “What’s Going Ahn” with Richard and Danny, now jokingly referred to as the Dolby Fuckers. Danny and Richard had heard Alex’s acoustic demo and arrived at Ardent ready to go. “
We cut that at Studio A,” Richard remembers. “John Fry did not engineer too many live sessions, so it was a blessed event.” After opening the song sparely on acoustic guitar, Alex sings forlornly about saying goodbye to a lover,
“I like love but I don’t know, all these girls come and go / Always nothing left to say.”
Alex would continue to work on the lyrics, changing one line from
“I’ve forgot everything”
to
“I’ve resigned everyone”
to
“I’ve foresaked everyone / ever since I was young.”
Later criticizing “What’s Going Ahn” as “too earnest” and a “terrible” song, Alex said, “I was gettin’ really intense, wonderin’ just why I was so unhappy. I’d learned to write all these confused nonsensical lyrics from Chris and Andy.” In “You Get What You Deserve,” he wrote,
“Too bad, such a drag / So much pain down the drain.”
Was Alex still looking back at his brother Reid’s death? He never said.