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Monday, December 05, 2005
SLEEPWALKING
Modest Mouse
Building Something Out of Nothing
Up : 2000
[Buy It]
DREAM GIRL
The Feelings
Especially For You
Darla : 1996
[Buy It]
DREAM LOVER
Big Star
Third/Sister Lovers
Rykodisk : 1992
[Buy It]
Interviewer: Do you think you could have achieved more? Alex Chilton: Perhaps, but what would I have achieved it for? I can't think of any reason to achieve anything. The first time Alex Chilton entered a recording studio, he was the new singer for a Memphis garage band called the Box Tops. The first song they cut together, "The Letter," entered the pop charts in the summer of '67, stayed at number one for four consecutive weeks, and beat out records by the Doors, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles to become Cash Box magazine's best-selling single for the year. Chilton was sixteen years old, and about to flunk out of the tenth grade.
The Box Tops hit six more times, but had problems collecting the royalties. The band's producer, Dan Penn, didn't allow them to play on more than a handful of their own recordings, and Chilton wasn't allowed to contribute more than a couple of his own songs. He stormed off stage midway through a 1969 performance, moved to New York, and spent a year playing guitar in Washington Square. "The Box Tops are only marginally my records," he said a quarter of a century later. "I listen to them and I hear Dan Penn. I don't hear me."
When I play "The Letter," I don't hear Chilton either. His voice is roughened by thirty takes and a night's worth of drinking - it has none of the upper-register strain, and none of the sweetness, that makes his later work so memorable. In the early 1970s, Chilton's vocals were translucent - he sounded remarkably young. On "The Letter" he sounds much older, but nothing like his older self. What his two voices have in common is that both strain hard at the seams.
"Get me a ticket on an air-o-plane," Chilton sings. "Ain't got time to take a fast train/Lonely days are gone/I'm a-goin' home/My baby, she wrote me a letter." But Chilton's determination never translates into action: The ticket agent never responds. The reunion never takes place. Nothing really happens, and by the song's end we're still standing at the counter, begging for a seat. We never learn why Chilton scorned the girl, or how he managed to win her back. "Listen, mister, can't you see/I've got to get back to my baby" is the closest he comes to an explanation, before cutting himself off with a gruff, ambivalent "anyway."
His next band, Big Star, had a different trajectory: It was a spectacular failure in its own time, and a tremendous posthumous success. The adolescent indifference Chilton's "anyway" hinted at turned genuine, and painful. He spent a decade shuttling between New York and Memphis, worked as a lumberjack, and eventually took a job washing dishes in a New Orleans restaurant. By then a dozen hero-worshiping bands had claimed his indifference for their own, and turned it into a pose again -a stand-in for the indie-rock strategy of self-sabotage as preemptive strike (against, among other things, the very market forces Big Star had unsuccessfully courted). That Chilton himself had never chosen to promote aesthetics of beautiful failure was a central irony of his career. But perhaps because Chilton really was ambivalent, and always had been, his career wasn't really made up of choices.
* * *
Big Star's first record was released in 1972, but despite glowing reviews, it was barely distributed by the Stax label, which was then on the verge of collapse. It sold only 4,000 copies, and quickly disappeared from print. "This is off our first album, called #1 Record, which can't be found anywhere," Chilton told a radio audience a few years later.
Chilton's immediate response was to resume his aborted solo career, then abort it again by allowing himself to be talked into a one-off Big Star reunion. Despite the absence of founding member Chris Bell - who'd also quit, and never did return - that performance went over so well that Big Star re-formed and released a second record, called Radio City (1974). This album won another round of rave reviews, but was hampered by the same distribution problems and sold even less than the first. The band broke up again, re-formed again (now an informal two-piece), and made one last record - Third/Sister Lovers (1974) - which continued the process of attrition by failing to be released at all. (A bowdlerized version was issued, semi-officially, in Europe, four years later.) As far as today's mainstream audience is concerned, Big Star's greatest success came twenty-five years after the band's break-up, when the producers of "That 70s Show" looked to Cheap Trick to record the sitcom's theme song, and Cheap Trick re-recorded #1 Record's "In The Street" as "That 70s Song." Chilton, who receives seventy dollars every time the program airs, took to calling it "That 70 Dollar Show."
It's Third/Sister Lovers that Chilton is best remembered for. "He was enjoying it to the extent that he would commit himself," the album's producer, Jim Dickinson, told me when I asked about the album's genesis. "Alex was an artist who'd been screwed really badly, twice, and you had to understand the 'fuck you' aspect. Which was: 'OK, I have proof that I'm going to be exploited and that I'm not going to be paid, and ten-to-one, whatever I do is going to get fucked up. So I'm going to be the one who fucks it up.'" The melodies on Third/Sister Lovers stopped just short of unraveling; isolation and escape were recurring themes: "Get me out of here/I hate it here" ("Nightime"). "This sounds a bit like goodbye/In a way it is, I guess" ("Take Care"). "Nothing can hurt me/Nothing can touch me/Why should I care/Driving's a gas/It ain't gonna last" ("Big Black Car"). In "Downs," a hymn to barbituates, Chilton sang, "Isolated as far as you go, I'm well versed in the walls of worst."
Big Star had feigned disinterest on its earlier albums; it's not hard to trace Kurt Cobain's anthemic sense of anhedonia back to the "I loved you/Well, never mind" of Radio City's "September Gurls." But on Third/Sister Lovers, the songs themselves seemed cobbled together, catch-as-catch-can. Chilton wrote the lyrics for "Jesus Christ" by turning pages in the Broadman Hymnal, and taking a line from every page; he wrote "O, Dana," for a girl he had a crush on, followed around for a week or so, but never really talked to. One of the best songs, "Stroke it Noel," was rewritten at the last minute, when a friend arrived at the studio with a string quartet. "They say we're lazy men," Chilton sang in the revised, semi-improvised lyric: "Drinking our white wine/We could go right insane/'Cause we can buy the time." But the record was less haphazard than it seemed: Listen to the way the interweaving of vowels in the first line (thEY sAY we're LAzy men) - and the heavy, staccato beat of they, say, we're, and 'ay - cut against the grain of the almost unstressed second line: The juxtapositions expressed the exact opposite of Chilton's lyric, and putting sound and sense together, you were left with: "I can do this, and choose not to."
* * *
These days, the Box Tops records (which are well worth listening to), #1 Record and Radio City (which are available on a single CD), and Third/Sister Lovers (which was finally released, in something approaching a definitive version, on Rykodisk in 1992) are the only example of Chilton's work you're likely to find in your local megastore. But Chilton, who lives semi-reclusively in New Orleans, and continues to play and record, did release one more masterpiece.
A bookend, of sorts, to Third/Sister Lovers, Like Flies on Sherbert (1978) was made with the same producer, Jim Dickinson, and featured many of the same Memphis studio musicians. It, too, was a ramshackle affair; according to Robert Gordon's excellent history, It Came From Memphis, Chilton had spent a good many hours hanging out at CBGB's during the club's mid-seventies glory days, and like the punks he'd met and mentored there, he was drunk and contentious throughout much of the recording process.
The editors of the New Trouser Press Record Guide said that the result sounds "like a bunch of drunken louts running amok in a studio with no producer to restrain or guide them." The record as a whole "painfully confirms the degradation of a once-major talent." But if Chilton had wrecked himself, he'd done so gloriously: Like Flies on Sherbert drew upon slave songs and Sun Records rockabilly, scraped away the refuse, and forced a dark, anarchic vein of Southern music through the narrowest of apertures - punk rock, as it was played by the Ramones/Modern Lovers/et al. The album returned Chilton to his garage-band roots, and helped subsequent generations reach back towards the roots of rock itself.
You hear clear traces of Sherbert in groups like the Cramps, who are alleged to have stolen a car and driven to Memphis to record with Chilton; the Gories, who were also produced by Chilton, and sparked a Detroit rock revival which culminated in bands like the White Stripes; and the Replacements, who wanted to record with Chilton (and were, in fact, produced by Jim Dickinson). Like Flies on Sherbert was the first record to take Big Star's collapse as a starting point, and to set about the difficult task of building again. And it was Chilton's rawest, roughest, most revealing work.
But only in the past few years did the record become widely available--the version released in 1998, on Memphis's Peabody label is preferable to the poorly sequenced and incomplete album released in Britain last year. Like Chuck Berry's best songs, it's a rock and roll Rosetta Stone, and well worth seeking out.
Come Friday, I'll try to post a sampling of the songs mentioned above. In the meantime, here are a few songs about dreaming, and dream girls, building up to Big Star's own, epic "Dream Lover." Chilton told Dickinson he only played ""Dream Lover" thrice in his life: Once when he wrote it, once when he played it for his girlfriend, and once when he played it in the studio. "One of those times was one time too many," he said. As is, it's a spider-web of a song: You're never quite sure if Chilton's lover is the woman of his dreams, or the kind of woman you only meet in dreams. Which, I suppose, is party the point....Labels: alex, holidays
posted by Alex
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