Deathblog:
ALEX CHILTON.
1950 - 2010.

Fuck I hate it when news like this comes through first thing in the morning when I get to work, when I sneak a quick look at my blogger updates bar and see the RIP posts piling up, at the exact same moment somebody’s talking over my shoulder about some rubbish, and my paycheque demands I pay attention and respond, rather than melodramatically fleeing the room.

I mean it’s not like I just got news about a family member dying, is it? It’s not like I can tell everyone I want to go home and deal with things in peace, just because, well what…? Some weirdo failed rock star nobody’s ever heard of who I’m not even related to just kicked the bucket on the other side of the world? What kind of crazy, unreliable employee would that make me for christssake? There’s shit to be done this morning, and I’ve got to be polite and friendly and coherent. Fuck it.

Give me a minute here - Alex Chilton just died. Alex Chilton, man. Just writing his name is like a cipher, saying more things to more people than any obit’s gonna reflect. I’ve spend untold hours listening to his voice, but I couldn’t draw you a picture of his face, I don’t know whether he was tall or short, what kind of clothes he liked to wear – but speaking via my earphones, he’s still blown my mind, knifed my guts, saved my soul more times than I care to remember. “Invisible man with the invisible voice”, as I think that song by that other guy that everyone else is quoting in their RIP posts puts it.

Yeah, even in his own obituaries, a line from somebody else’s song gets the last word. Truly one of the great tragic heroes of rock n’ roll – failure, reticence and self-sabotage raised to the level of the highest art. His life’s work plays like some tangled swamp full of traps and wreckage and nasty surprises, studded at intervals with some of the most staggeringly beautiful recorded music of the twentieth century. But if you think those bits are any less part of the swamp than the bits you play once and never wanna hear again, you’re fooling yourself.

Of course, as soon as you’ve got used to surly-drunken-disaster Chilton, you go accidentally pick up a record by the guy where he’s making ghastly, studio-tweaked muso blues-rock, but…that’s just the way he rolls I guess – fuck ‘em if they can’t take a joke.

Fuck perfection, fuck the industry, fuck the label – open your eyes in the afternoon, take exactly what you feel like and make it into sound, and if you’ve got it down, some of it’s gonna stick, and the people with the heart to care will care A LOT. That’s what Alex Chilton’s all about.

If the Big Star records failed to make anyone rich back in the ‘70s, the people who DID hear them went as far as to make road trips to Memphis to try to find out who’d made this music, and to form their own bands expressly to pay tribute to it.

The whole trajectory of his career has been so perverse, so subject to strange accidental forces and mercurial personal whims, it’s almost like some modern myth – the kind of thing that would make him a minor legend even without his central participation in some of the best records ever made.

If you’ve not got The Boxtops’ “The Letter” in your collection, you really should - and if you’re in any way a fan of ‘60s bubblegum or blue-eyed soul, you’ll get a hell of a kick out of their albums too. Of course, Chilton was the only “Boxtop” who actually played on those records, with sessionmen taking care of the rest, but the results are more varied and enjoyable than you might imagine, with at least a couple of nuggets to file alongside their smash hit.

It’s a rarely repeated story even though you’d expect it to be pop cultural dynamite, but The Boxtops pick-up band toured at some stage with the Beach Boys, and when the group wound up, Chilton ended up being taken under the wing of Carl and Dennis Wilson, who helped him develop his song-writing and encouraged him to take a shot at a solo career. Apparently, Chilton claimed he was staying at Dennis’s house when the Manson family moved in, and that he split for New York cos he didn’t like the atmosphere. Good move. (All of that, and most of the other questionable blather found in this post, culled from Rob Jovanovic’s Big Star book.)

Personally I’ve never been overly keen on the subsequent recordings Chilton made during his brief quest to make it as a New York folkie, but once he headed back to Memphis and Big Star got together at the dawn of the ‘70s, it’s straight down to business.

Clearly, the first two Big Star albums are some of the best rock records ever made, no question. I shouldn’t have to elaborate on that too much at this stage. If you value such things as brilliant songs, killer production, sky-scraping guitars, raw emotion … well you’re probably listening to them already.

“#1 Record” is sheer perfection, but “Radio City” just about beats it I think, just because that’s the one where we can hear Chiltonism as we’d later understand it first creeping through, that strange weight of darkness and cynicism sneaking its way gradually into the Beatles-obsessed pop romanticism, in the unbearable post-teen angst of “What’s Going Ahn”, the weird vamping on “Oh My Soul”, the slurred, buried vocals on “Daisy Glaze” and “Morpha Too”, the odd coded song titles – we’re now on the outskirts of Chiltonville. And then there’s “September Gurls”.

Christ. To think the guy who made “September Gurls” just died. I mean, if he’d never done anything else in his whole life except play that guitar solo…. what else would he need to do? It’s all there.

I don’t know if there’s a straight answer to what happened to Alex Chilton during the making of the third album, whether it was one definitive personal issue or just a slow-burning combination of disillusionment, commercial failure, girl trouble, cynicism, substance abuse and depression, but whatever it was, the results are plain to hear, captured forever on the record and the stumbling digressions of his subsequent career. Clearly Chilton was staring into some kind of chasm at that point in his life, and it sounds like he just closed his eyes and bellyflopped spectacularly.

The result is Third/Sister-Lovers/Beale St. Green/whatever else you want to call it – one of my absolute favourite records of all time, and probably the main reason I’m writing all this. I don’t know what to say about “Third”, I love it so much, I could talk about it for weeks and still not get to the heart of it – if I were to put three months aside and write the equivalent of one of those 33 ½ books, “Third” would be the one, assuming it didn’t kill me in the process.

The tracks that make up “Third”, in the form the eventually emerged from Ardent studios after initially being deemed unsalvageable, are a musical record of total collapse. Within them, you can hear the band collapsing, relationships collapsing, Chilton’s state of mind collapsing, musical syntax collapsing, communication with the outside world collapsing, the finances of their record label collapsing… they could only really have bettered things if the studio was literally collapsing around them.

There are enough strange and terrible stories about the making of “Third” to make it sound like the album-recording version of “Apocalypse Now”, but none of them can really get beneath the essence of the mysterious, desperate SOMETHING that Alex Chilton threw into the heart of these recordings. From the empty spaces where Alex allegedly broke into the studio at 3am and deleted all the vocal/guitar tracks recorded by his girlfriend after an argument, to the leering, post-trauma vocal inflections that completely twist the meaning of “Thank You Friends”, every song on “Third” tells a story, and it’s usually a beserk and ugly one, audible somewhere between the mistakes, the missing instruments, the improvised lyrics, the arcs of feedback, snare drums replaced with basketballs, random saxophone solos played by god knows who – it’s the sound of Chilton tearing his band apart from the inside out and not knowing whether to laugh or cry as he collapses in the wreckage.

And maybe we couldn’t care less thirty-five years later, only the songs he’s singing to us are so inexplicably beautiful they defy description, and the mismatched mass of noise the album presents us with carries such wordless poignancy, it’s almost unbearable. What more can I say? I should probably stop talking about it now before I embarrass myself further.

Apparently one of the last things they recorded for the “Third” sessions was a drunken, early morning jam on “Whole Lotta Shaking Going On” featuring Chilton and a crew of his drinking buddies, ending on a bummer as an unidentified wino sat in the vocal booth, weeping uncontrollably. And somewhere in that scenario, you’ve got the essence of Chilton’s whole solo career, neatly defined.

Somehow, “Third” always seems like his last stand, even though he kept going. Since then he’s seemed almost undead – a chuckling, inscrutable zombie Chilton, operating from the corners, doing his best to piss off anyone who might take an interest, even as the world starts to catch up and give him the plaudits he deserves.

“Bach’s Bottom”, “Like Flies On Sherbert”, “Lost Decade”, “Dusted in Memphis” – all an acquired taste, but all masterpieces of fucked up, belligerent, wrong-headed rock n’ roll. I guess he’d been banging out that stuff for so long, it’s hard to realize what a wonderful thing it was for a ‘60s ‘legend’ of vast songwriting/production/vocal/musical talent to just shrug his shoulders, get some brews in, and restrict his musical output to just making a bunch of utterly wasted, bad-tempered punk trash whenever he feels like it. These days, I listen to “..Sherbert” all the time, and absolutely love it. Reading the brilliantly negative review of it on AMG always cheers me up; but then I listen to all kinds of rubbish, so I wouldn’t necessarily take that as a recommendation.

You’re a braver fan than me if you want to take more than a cursory delve into his ‘80s and ‘90s output, but early solo tracks like “My Rival” and “Bangkok” are just as indisputably genius as his Big Star-era stuff – exultant proof that no matter how many terrible records might result from rounding up a bunch of guys, throwing them at some instruments, letting them make it up as they go along and releasing the first take your new single, occasionally inspiration will strike, everything will come together *beautifully*, and you’ll emerge with a jittering, misshapen Picasso of a cracked rock n’ roll song, making all the trouble worthwhile.

And like I said earlier, it’s flat out hilarious that as soon as people started to get to grips with that idea in the wake of Pussy Galore, Royal Trux and Chilton’s own work with Panther Burns, The Gories etc. (and I haven’t even mentioned that this dude produced most of The Cramps best records yet!), he changed his tune again and started making pro-tooled local bar-band rock. What a card.

I was never really much into the idea of the Big Star reunion, and I never saw them play. Seems perhaps Chilton thought similarly, as he didn’t even seem to be sufficiently bothered to turn up for press shots. Still, money in the bank right? Apparently he was reduced to washing dishes in the New Orleans hotel sometime in the eighties, so can’t blame him for that, and those Posies guys are pleasantly enthusiastic fellas whom I’d imagine were happy just to be playing great music with one of their heroes. I’m sure tunes from the first two records went down a storm too, although having seen a few of their set-lists, I know that personally I just couldn’t handle the idea of “Kanga Roo” or “Stroke It Noel” being butchered (or rather UN-butchered) by a live rock band.

I’ll really miss having Alex Chilton around, lurking somewhere in the background. I thought he was gonna be one of those guys who’d just keeping going, cockroach-style, defying the occasional rumours of his death and wondering around the Deep South with his Gretsch under his arm indefinitely, looking for trouble.

A sad fucking day, etc.

So many songs I could upload, but in case you missed any of ‘em thus far, here’s a quick highlights reel of Alex Chilton’s trip to oblivion, in roughly chronological order:

The Boxtops – The Letter

Big Star – Thirteen
Big Star – In The Street (demo)
Big Star – September Gurls

Big Star – O, Dana
Big Star – Stroke It Noel
Big Star – Nightime

Alex Chilton – My Rival
Alex Chilton – Bangkok
Alex Chilton – I Can’t Seem To Make You Mine (Seeds cover)
Alex Chilton – Waltz Across Texas

Labels: Alex Chilton, Big Star, deathblog, The Boxtops