Alex Chilton
William Alexander Chilton was an American musician, best known as the lead singer of the rock bands the Box Tops and Big Star. Chilton's early commercial success in the 1960s as a teen vocalist for the Box Tops was never repeated in later years with Big Star and in his subsequent indie music solo career on small labels, but he drew an intense following among indie and alternative musicians. He is frequently cited as a seminal influence by influential rock artists and bands, some of whose testimonials appeared in the 2012 documentary Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me.
Early life and career
Chilton grew up in a musical family. His father, Sidney Chilton, was a jazz pianist and saxophonist who sold industrial lighting to support his family. A local band recruited the teenaged Chilton in 1966 to be their lead singer after learning of the popularity of his vocal performance at a talent show at Memphis's Central High School. This band was Ronnie and the Devilles, which was subsequently renamed the Box Tops. The group recorded with Chips Moman and producer/songwriter Dan Penn at American Sound Studio and Muscle Shoals's FAME Studios.Chilton was 16 when his first professional recording, the Box Tops' song "The Letter", became a number-one international hit. The Box Tops went on to have several other major chart hits, including "Neon Rainbow", "Cry Like a Baby", "Choo Choo Train", "Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March", and "Soul Deep". Aside from "The Letter", "Neon Rainbow", and "Soul Deep", all written by Wayne Carson, many of the group's songs were written by Penn, Moman, Spooner Oldham, and other top area songwriters, with Chilton occasionally contributing a song. He contributed one of Carson's song to the band called The Debuts which they released in 1968 called "If I Cry" with Jimi Jamison performing it. By late 1969, only Chilton and guitarist Gary Talley remained from the original group, and newer additions replaced the members who had departed. The group decided to disband and pursue independent careers in February 1970.
After deciding against enrolling as a student at Memphis State University, Chilton began performing as a solo artist, maintaining a working relationship with Penn for demos. During this period he began learning guitar by studying the styles of guitarists like Stax Records great Steve Cropper and Carl Wilson of the Beach Boys. Chilton began recording his own solo material in the fall of 1969 at Ardent Studios with local musicians including producer Terry Manning and drummer Richard Rosebrough, and producing a few local blues-rock acts. His 1969–1970 recordings were released in the 1980s and 1990s on albums such as Lost Decade, 1970, and Free Again: The "1970" Sessions".
Chilton was considered as a replacement vocalist for Al Kooper in Blood, Sweat & Tears.
1970s career
After a period in New York City, during which Chilton worked on his guitar technique and singing style, Chilton returned to Memphis in 1971 and co-founded the power pop group Big Star, with Chris Bell, recording at engineer John Fry's Ardent Studios. Chilton and Bell co-wrote "In the Street" for Big Star's first album #1 Record, a track later covered by Cheap Trick and used as the theme song of the sitcom That '70s Show.The group's recordings met with little commercial success but established Chilton's reputation as a rock singer and songwriter; later alternative rock bands like R.E.M. and the Posies would praise the group as a major influence. During this period he also occasionally recorded with Rosebrough as a group they called the Dolby Fuckers; some of their studio experimentation was included on Big Star's album Radio City, including the recording of "Mod Lang". Rosebrough would occasionally work with Chilton on later recordings, including Big Star's album Third and Chilton's solo record Bach's Bottom.
Moving back to New York in 1977, Chilton performed as "Alex Chilton and the Cossacks" with a lineup that included Chris Stamey and Richard Lloyd of Television at venues like CBGB, releasing an influential solo single, "Bangkok", in 1978. Influenced by the performers in New York's CBGB scene, Chilton's late-1970s recordings abandoned the multi-layered pop production of his Big Star albums and utilized a more minimalist punk and psychobilly-influenced performance style. His songs during this period were often recorded in one take and featured few overdubs. In New York, he met the members of the Cramps, a formative psychobilly group. After moving back to Memphis in April 1978, Chilton produced music by the Cramps that appeared on the group's Gravest Hits EP and Songs the Lord Taught Us LP.
In 1979, Chilton released the album Like Flies on Sherbert in a limited edition of 500 copies. Produced by Chilton with Jim Dickinson at Phillips Recording and Ardent Studios, it features Chilton's interpretations of songs by artists including the Carter Family, Jimmy C. Newman, Ernest Tubb, and KC and the Sunshine Band, along with several originals. Sherbert—which included backing work from such notable Memphis musicians as Rosebrough, drummer Ross Johnson, and Chilton's longtime on-again/off-again companion, Lesa Aldridge—has since been reissued several times. Beginning in 1979 Chilton also co-founded, played guitar with, and produced some albums for Tav Falco's Panther Burns, which began as an offbeat rock-and-roll group deconstructing blues, country, and rockabilly music.
1980s career
Chilton spent most of 1980 and 1981 living in Memphis and staying off the road, except for a trip to London in May 1980 to play two shows with bassist Matthew Seligman and drummer Morris Windsor of the Soft Boys, and guitarist Knox of the Vibrators. The second show, at the Camden club Dingwalls, was recorded, and was released in 1982 on Aura Records as Live in London. He also continued to work with Tav Falco's Panther Burns on stage and in the studio during this period.Chilton toured briefly in 1981 as a solo act, backed by a trio of musicians who played at different times with Tav Falco's Panther Burns: guitarist Jim Duckworth, bassist Ron Easley, and drummer Jim Sclavunos. The group played a string of shows in the fall in Chicago, Washington D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and New Jersey; this would be Chilton's last tour for three years.
Chilton moved to New Orleans in 1982, where he spent much of 1982 and 1983 working outside music: washing dishes at the Louis XVI Restaurant in the French Quarter, working as a janitor at the Uptown nightclub Tupelo's Tavern, and working as a tree-trimmer. He resumed playing with Panther Burns in 1983. His new association with New Orleans jazz musicians marked a period in which he began playing guitar in a less raucous style and moved toward a cooler, more restrained approach, as heard in Panther Burns's 1984 Sugar Ditch Revisited album, produced by Jim Dickinson. He moved back into playing music full-time in the summer of 1984, when he and Coman began a four-month stretch playing in a cover band called the Scores, working in four-hour shifts at the Bourbon Street tourist bar Papa Joe's, and taking requests from a printed list of songs placed on the customer tables.
After the cover-band job ended, Chilton contacted a booking agent recommended to him by the dB's drummer Will Rigby, and soon had a handful of club gigs lined up in New York, New Jersey, and Boston for the fall of 1984. He stopped playing regular gigs with Panther Burns and formed a trio with the group's bassist, Coman, and drummer Joey Torres to play his out-of-town bookings. At this point, his career was effectively relaunched, and for the next 25 years, Chilton sporadically led a three-piece touring band, recorded studio and live solo records for several independent record labels, and reunited with versions of his previous bands the Box Tops and Big Star for brief tours and recordings.
At the outset of this period, while in New York in 1985 to play a booking at Danceteria, Chilton was connected through a journalist with Patrick Mathé, founder of the Paris-based record label New Rose. Chilton's business relationship with Mathé would last the rest of his life, and New Rose released much of Chilton's solo work from 1985 to 2004 in Europe, as well as a 1998 Box Tops reunion album. In the U.S., Chilton's solo releases were released by the Big Time, Razor & Tie, Ardent, and Bar/None record labels. In 1985, Chilton began working with Memphis jazz drummer Doug Garrison, and his trio continued touring and began to record as well. Six songs were recorded at Ardent Studios for the 1985 EP Feudalist Tarts, three originals joined by songs from the catalogs of Carla Thomas, Slim Harpo, and Willie Tee. In 1986 Chilton followed this with a second EP, No Sex, which contained three more originals, including the extended mood piece, "Wild Kingdom", a song highlighting Coman's jazz-oriented, improvisational bass interplay with Chilton.
During this period in his recordings Chilton began frequently to use a horn section consisting of Memphis veteran jazz performers Fred Ford, Jim Spake, and Nokie Taylor to imbue the soul-oriented pieces among his repertoire with a postmodern, minimalist jazz feel that distinguished his interpretative approach from that of a simple soul revivalist style. Chilton forged a new direction for his solo work, eschewing effects and blending soul, jazz, country, rockabilly, and pop. Coman left Chilton's solo trio at the end of 1986 to pursue other projects, forming the Iguanas three years later with other New Orleans musicians; both would record occasionally with Chilton after departing.
In 1986, the Bangles released their second LP, Different Light, which contained a cover version of Chilton's Big Star song "September Gurls". Royalties from this version allowed Chilton, who had struggled financially since leaving the Box Tops, to buy his first new car since his Box Top days, and a piece of rural land near Hohenwald, Tennessee, where he planned to build a small house. The following year, his visibility increased in the alternative rock scene when he was the subject of the song "Alex Chilton" by American rock band the Replacements on their album Pleased to Meet Me, on which Chilton was a guest musician playing guitar on the song "Can't Hardly Wait".
With 1987's High Priest, Chilton released his first full-length LP in eight years, for which he served as producer and wrote four new songs. He was given a $21,000 recording budget by his European and U.S. record labels which allowed him to augment his band on various songs with a three-piece horn section, backup singers, piano, keyboards, and rhythm guitar. He was also able to continue the genre-mixing he had started with Like Flies on Sherbert by including soul, blues, gospel, and rock songs on the same record. He ended the album with a cover of "Raunchy", his instrumental salute to Sun Records guitarist Sid Manker, a friend of his father from whom he'd once taken a guitar lesson; this song was also a standard in his early Panther Burns repertoire. High Priest also included other covers like "Nobody's Fool", a song originally written and recorded in 1973 by his old mentor and Box Tops producer Dan Penn. While his solo career was continuing to pick up momentum, Chilton was also singing Box Tops songs during 1987 with a package tour of 1960s artists including Peter Noone, Ronnie Spector, and ?? & the Mysterians.
Chilton followed up High Priest with Black List, his third EP in four years. Black List continued to display his eclecticism, containing covers of Ronny & the Daytonas' "Little GTO", Furry Lewis's "I Will Turn Your Money Green", and Charlie Rich's country-pop arrangement of Frank Sinatra's "Nice and Easy". The EP also included three original songs.
Chilton also produced albums by several artists beginning in the 1980s, including the Detroit group the Gories, and continued producing Panther Burns albums well into the 1990s.