a little more about alex

By Robbie on April 17, 2010

I'm sitting here in a Memphis hotel in the general area where the late Alex Chilton, voice of the Box Tops, leader of Big Star, and mentor to many of us out here in the American popular and traditional music borderlands -- came up. It's megachurches, music, and meat-eating. Today's Memphis, with its savvy shiny Beale Street tourism and amphitheatrical sterility, is remote and adrift from Alex's 1950s and 1960s Memphis, but the three M's make for a rough continuity.

One learns from loved ones quoted in the obituaries that for the last 30 or so years Mr. Chilton considered New Orleans to have replaced Memphis as his hometown in body as well as heart. He was a well-liked personality in his neighborhood. He sometimes showed up to sit in, cutting a quiet deferential figure, at clubs around town behind guys like Snooks Eaglin. He cut his grass with a push mower. Details like these have come up these last few weeks, and they seem to suggest a person very unimpressed with himself, wearing the weight of legend lightly or indifferently. Other people, people who loved music and rock-and-roll spirit, were impressed, but not he himself; and if he had been, had swaggered about in the accepted manner, gabbing about the good old days and his majestic rank, I doubt whether his life would have been longer and feel sure it wouldn't have been happier.

As I said before, I didn't know him, never met him, so don't take any of this as grounded in first-hand experience with who Alex was or what he thought. I'm going by what's on the records and what's in the papers, like you. Those obituaries were riddled with the half-baked view that a disconnect between talent, or influence, and worldly reward is a break from the normal pattern, a bit of cosmic injustice, and somehow slightly tragic. But I don't think the normal pattern has proved very hospitable to artists of talent and influence, so I reject that view. The routine if painful lesson that, as the old song has it, "romance without finance is a nuisance," is learned by most of us early, just before swallowing hard and moving to the next problem. It's one that I'd guess Alex had under his belt the day he left Tennessee for New Orleans and started washing dishes. I prefer to file that anecdote in the Smart Musician box rather than the Another Frances Farmer Sent to The Asylum box. Washing dishes is more dignified labor than certain kinds of musical work I can think of, and the pay, if equally small, is at least reasonably dependable.

So much for the press, how about the music? I put on A Man Called Destruction last week, and it still sounds terrific -- brash and funny, sung with focus and accuracy and feeling, and rather aggressively cavernous (my wife approvingly says that it's "like listening to a band soundcheck in a big empty bar"). These latter-day records, from High Priest on, are my favorite Alex Chilton records. That's a minority opinion but it's mine. During my first session with my then-brand-new, now longtime friend Steve Albini, I brought along a copy of High Priest and asked him if he could make my recordings sound like that. We listened to "Volare" and "Dalai Lama," and Steve kind of shrugged. "I like the Box Tops," he said, "but I can't tolerate Big Star." That's the kind of blithe dismissal of hipster consensus opinion he specializes in, and in this case, I happen to agree -- I never got what was so great about Big Star, but what came before and after I found charmingly fresh and un-self-conscious and unique in voice. 

That last phrase may seem a bit of a stretch; High Priest, A Man Called..., Set, and Live In Anvers contain more covers than original songs, and anyone who thinks "bar band" is a derogatory term, or that a performance of an old song with love and zest and some kind of skill provides an artistic experience of a low order, is unlikely to be moved. But the supposedly intimate connection between composition and performance is a new and narrow doctrine. Anyone can see that, to the extent a good performance depends on a wholehearted surrender to the song, it actually helps not to have written it, at least if the singer isn't an abject monster of ego. To this listener Alex's persona is lucidly and perfectly etched on songs like "Nobody's Fool" by Dan Penn and "Volare" by Homer Q. Italian (though to get the persona best you need a group of songs, so you can hear him rounding the corner berserkly and hilariously from sexy crooning into a grunge death march, Billie Holiday into romance-language prom-rock).

I think Alex showed his ultimate devotion to the music he loved by becoming the guitarist he became. His pipes he was born with, but the flatted-13th chords came from practice and study. Listen to his versions of "Lipstick Traces," "What's Your Sign Girl?" or "Time After Time" and you can hear the honest work he put in, the love for Charlie Parker progressions and close voicings. Where now is his vaunted rawness and lazy indifference to professional standards? In his tone, that's where. You assume hearing these tracks that he showed up, plugged in, and played, content if not positively pleased with the thinness and impotent overdrive; and you wish someone like James Hunter or Buddy Miller had been on hand to furtively adjust the amp settings while Alex was out for a cigarette.

Do what you love, show some love and good humor doing it, and if you find you need to do it seven times, you probably don't know how to do it. It's a healthy attitude, and today, 33 years after the Sex Pistols, in a pop-music landscape much refashioned by Alex's own hands, a respectable attitude too. You might wonder, though, whether posterity might not fully return many modern artists' evidently blase attitude toward it. What will future listeners make of this man with the voice of a snotty 16-year-old whacking his jagged, lonely path through the jungle of midcentury R&B? For now, the records are too bound up with biography and persona to tell. Alex Chilton came into the fullness of his powers at a time when the music business, fueled by recording technologies and the maturation of America's most populous and richest generation, was madly accelerating, and humble old showmen like Snooks Eaglin looked to be fading into the dusty distance. To have been caught between these realities might appear, in some later happier time, as a provincial or meaningless problem. Right now it's not hard to understand why someone who sold 4 million records at age 16 would want to run off, be a dishwasher, work on chords, attend singlemindedly to the sounds that he first fell in love with -- all this being the oddball legacy of a thoughtful and thoroughgoing musician.