ALEX CHILTON

From Memphis To Venus And Back Again!

ALEX CHILTON

Harold Demuir

Alex Chilton can’t understand why he’s a legend. To the critics, cultists and musicians who worship his landmark early’70s work with Big Star, Chilton’s a musical godhead, his influence looming large in the catalogues of such bands as R.E.M., the Bangles, the dB’s, Game Theory and the Replacements. The latter combo even recorded a tribute entitled “Alex Chilton” on their latest album. But the unprepossessing Memphis-bred cult deity can’t see what all the fuss is about.

“Well, I mean, I don’t know, I just ignore it,” he says. “I can see why people who are learning to play guitar would like those records, but I don’t see anything that’s real great about them.” Does he feel any spiritual connection with his musical acolytes? “No. They’re all a lot younger than I am. They do things that I quit doing a long time ago.”

As a teenager in the late ’60s, Chilton fronted the Box Tops, scoring several pop-soul hits (“The Letter,” “Cry Like A Baby,” “Soul Deep”), all of them sung in a gravelly R&B growl that bears little resemblance to the reedier natural register employed in Chilton’s later work. “Our first producer, Dan Penn, was a singer himself. He would give me a lot of coaching, so most of the singing is me imitating him,” he explains. And, since progressive rock hadn’t been invented yet, the Box Tops were rarely allowed to play on their own sessions or record their own songs. Chilton hated the outside material so much that he began writing on his own.

After the Box Tops fizzled in 1970, Alex joined high-school friend Chris Bell’s band, which eventually became Big Star. They recorded three now-classic albums that merged jangly anglo-pop and adult angst to create a virtual new genre. Under Chilton’s influence (Bell left after the first LP), Big Star’s approach grew progressively more desperate, with the singer/guitarist shaping his personal demons into eloquently harrowing music. After making the final Big Star album in 1974 (it wasn’t released until a few years later), Chilton, plagued by destructive chemical habits, pursued an increasingly erratic personal and musical course—resulting in such disjointed records as Like Flies On Sherbert and Bach’s Bottom, which painfully and sometimes compellingly preserved the sound of a man falling to pieces.

Chilton spent the early part of this decade in New Orleans, drying out and working menial day jobs. “I used to drink a lot, and, because of that, I wasn’t really able to plan practical things and carry them through. After I quit drinking and taking drugs, I started getting gigs, and I’ve been working steadily ever since.”

Is he easier to work with now? “I don’t know. I could probably find you a bunch of people who’d say that I’m not. Everybody tells me how difficult I am. I don’t know. I just do things the way I want to do things, and that’s the only way I can work.”

The cleaned-up Chilton signed with Big Time and released two EPs, Feudalist Tarts and No Sex, featuring a spare R&Boriented attack that was more the work of a knowledgeable, sincere craftsman, than of a haunted genius. The new High Priest—his first full-length album in seven years—continues in a similar vein, mixing rootsy originals with covers of obscure blues, gospel and pop tunes, not to mention a run-through of “Volare”—-in Italian.

Though he confesses that he doesn’t write more than half an album’s worth of material per year, Chilton says he prefers his new stuff over his generallyacknowledged classics. “I think that I’ve learned how to write something that has a beginning, a middle and an end nowsongs that go where I want them to go, rather than where they decide to go as I’m trying to write them. I’m just doing what feels natural to me, and what I think people will like. I can’t see myself wanting to sound like the Beatles, like I wanted to in 1970.

“I think there are about four good songs I wrote before 1976—‘In The Street,’ ‘September Gurls,’ ‘When My Baby’s Beside Me,’ maybe one other one. Those are good, and I guess there’s some stuff on the third Big Star that isn’t too bad, although a lot of it makes me real uncomfortable now, because it frustrates me to hear myself groping around like that.”

Though he doesn’t get any money from the various Big Star and Box Tops reissues, Chilton seems relatively upbeat about his resuscitated career. He’s touring regularly, splitting his time between working with his own band and playing his old Box Top hits on the oldies circuit, and royalties from the Bangles’ recent cover of his “September Gurls” have helped offset the various ripoffs he’s endured over the years.

“You get over that after it happens to you 10 times. You can’t live your life staying angry about that stuff. I may be down on something, but that doesn’t mean I’ve got to think about it all the time. It’s a lot worse when you’re struggling day to day to make ends meet—then you really start thinking These bastards didn’t pay me.’ But a little money’ll grease the skids.”