Читать книгу Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band - Rob Jovanovic, Rob Jovanovic - Страница 8

Memphis, TN. August 1966 to July 1967

Mid-1960s America was obsessed with radio and TV talent shows. George Klein’s Talent Party was the local Memphis staple and on a national scale it was The Original Amateur Hour that broadcast to millions on a Sunday afternoon. In August 1966, an eighteen-year-old Memphis drummer, Danny Smythe, filmed his drum solo routine for the show. When it was screened that autumn, he won three weeks in a row. It was an act that typified the times. He played his drums barefoot (having taken off his shoes to warm-up before the show, the camera crew convinced him to play the actual set like that) while smiling and chewing gum. Back in Memphis, Smythe soon became a regular on the circuit and was involved with Alex Chilton’s first real band.

‘I got my first set of drums on my fifteenth birthday’ says Smythe. ‘I was raised on rock’n’roll but found that the drums in most songs just kept a beat, so I started listening to big bands from the 1930s and 1940s. That’s where I discovered drum solos. That’s the music that really turns me on. I had no desire in high school to join the marching band, so I formed a three-piece instrumental garage band and as time went by we added three singers, a bass and keyboard.’

The original band was christened The Devilles. ‘A lot of drummers had crests painted on their drum head,’ explains Smythe. ‘My father had a Cadillac DeVille and I liked the way the crest looked.’ Playing at parties and dances around town, the band soon built up a small but loyal following. ‘The guitarists were Mike Wright and Ron Carnie,’ recalls Smythe. ‘They were best friends and popular at their school, so we had connections for playing parties. Within a few months we acquired Fred Schaefer on bass and Mike Mosley on keyboards.’ The joint lead singers were Steve Joudren and Ronnie Jordan. Within a year, the guitarists were replaced by better musicians: Bill Fargie on lead, Richard Malone on rhythm and Russ Caccamisi on bass.

With seven members, practice was hectic at best. ‘It was really hard to get everybody to show up at the same time,’ laughs Smythe. ‘Not everybody had a car, so a lot of the time you were depending a ride from a buddy. Once there, it was the most fun thing in my life. Everybody in the neighbourhood gathered to listen. The biggest hurdles back then were conflicting schedules with everybody’s girlfriends. There were always ultimatums to quit the band or break up with your girlfriend. At first it was exciting for them to go to the gigs, but as more school dances and parties were missed because of a gig their resentment grew. We called them the band widows.’

By 1966 there were at least a hundred bands playing regularly in and around Memphis and the Devilles were one of the most popular. They had also released a string of singles (‘Oh Love!’, ‘Tragedy’, ‘Last Date’ and ‘Cindy’s Carousel’) that had a reasonable amount of local success. ‘In two years, we became one of the better bands in Memphis. We played every weekend. One of the singers sang R’n’B, and the other sang all the British stuff. I leaned toward the R’n’B because those drum beats were the ones that got everybody dancing. Ronnie [Jordan] was cute and had a Beatle haircut, he looked like Peter Noone, and his uncle, Roy Mack, was a top DJ in Memphis.’ Because Mack had Memphis connections to gigs and recording studios, he became the band’s manager. As Ronnie Jordan became the star of the show, Steve Joudren and the other backing singer quit. Mack was friends with local producer Chips Moman, then working at American Studios, so as Mack was happy to play Moman’s records on his radio show, Moman agreed to take the Devilles into the studio. These sessions produced their early singles and when the records were released it was under the new band name of Ronnie and the DeVilles.

In January 1967 Jordan quit to join a rival band, The Honey Jug, with local producer Jim Dickinson. Most people remember that Jordan could have been a real star if he really wanted to be, but he just wanted to have a good time. He later went on to become a successful DJ. With Jordan gone, the band virtually disintegrated leaving just Smythe, Malone and Caccamisi. ‘Bill [Fargie] had to join the army reserve so he had to quit,’ explains Smythe. ‘Mike’s [Wright] girlfriend made him quit, and Ronnie [Carnie] went off to broadcast school. But we still had some gigs on the books.’ Reinforcements arrived in the shape of eighteen-year-old keyboardist John Evans from another local band, The In Crowd. All they needed now was a singer. Everyone asked around and Evans mentioned to his friend Jimmy Newman that the band was looking for a white boy who sang as if he was black. Newman told Evans about a kid he’d seen at a Central High School talent show singing Bobby Hebb’s ‘Sunny’, Alex Chilton – the same boy that had declined to join the Jynx almost a year earlier.

William Alexander Chilton was fifteen and in the tenth grade at Central Memphis High School. He’d been born on 28 December 1950, which made him a Capricorn, a fact that would be important to Chilton in later life. He was born the youngest of four children (Reid, Cecelia and Howard Jr were the others) to Howard Sidney Chilton and Mary Evelyn Reid. Howard, known to everyone simply as Sid, was a graduate of the University of Mississippi who had spent time in the 1930s working as a travelling musician. He played saxophone and piano in various Big Bands before the Second World War. Chilton married native Mississippian Mary Reid in 1937. They started a family in 1941 and while the children were growing up Sid set up a stage lighting company, supplying lighting to schools and theatre groups.

It was Alex’s older brother Reid who inadvertently introduced his youngest brother Alex to rock’n’roll. ‘I remember the first record that I really became aware of was “Youngblood” by the Coasters, with “Searchin”’ on the other side,’ says Alex Chilton. ‘My oldest brother had a copy of that, and I remember him hanging around the house with his girlfriend at night one time while my parents were out, playing that record over and over again. I was maybe six years old digging that record. I remember that really well and then my dad was a big jazz fan and player and I became a fan of his Glenn Miller records first, and then I went on to Ray Charles and Mingus, Dave Brubeck. I became a big fan of Chet Baker and that was when I first really wanted to sing. He first inspired me to sing.’

The happy family was devastated in 1958 when Reid had a seizure, banged his head and drowned in the bath, at just seventeen. Alex, who had idolized his brother, was hit hard and never really came to terms with the loss. The family moved as swiftly as they could from the scene of the tragedy but the experience permanently marked seven-year-old Alex.

The Chiltons had been living out in the suburbs but their new home was a large house at 145 North Montgomery Street in Midtown. And as the pressures of rearing children lessened, Mary Reid Chilton opened an art gallery on the ground floor while Sid ran the lighting business from his office in the back. The opening of the gallery in November 1962 made the local paper. ‘Dozens of men and women were coming out of the Mary Chilton Galleries at 145 N. Montgomery carrying large paintings, pottery, statues and other art objects,’ reported the Memphis Press-Scimitar. ‘A passing police car stopped in case a robbery was in progress as seventy people attended the opening of the ‘Own-Your-Own-Art’ show.’ It reported that business was brisk and potential bargains included a Picasso woodcut for $18.50 or an original Cézanne etching for just $26.

It was an unusually liberal and open-minded family atmosphere and Alex grew up surrounded by art, music and social gatherings. Family friend Bob Boelte recalled the Chiltons’ holiday festivities: ‘Every New Year’s Eve a group of musicians would gather at the Chiltons’ home for a jam session. The musicians were doctors, businessmen and others who loved jazz. It was always a large, convivial crowd, and we all probably drank too much in those days. Those were the do-your-thing times.’

‘When I got to be eleven or twelve, I started listening to the radio a little bit and things like “Johnny Angel”,’ says Alex Chilton. ‘The Ronettes I remember pretty well. Then there are other things from that time that I didn’t really get caught up in. The rock scene, and of course Elvis and Jerry Lee back in the mid and late fifties. I was aware of them, and I was given a copy of “Great Balls of Fire” for my seventh or eighth birthday, but I really wasn’t much of a fan. By 1959 Elvis was syrup and Jerry Lee was pretty much gone, and the rockabilly thing was sort of over so I didn’t get really caught up in the rock scene until the Beatles came along.’

Cecelia also played a part in Alex’s musical education when she got into the folk movement in the early 1960s. ‘I thought The Kingston Trio were much more vital than Frankie Avalon,’ says Chilton. By the time Cecelia was old enough to leave home, Howard senior had started having people over to the house to play music more frequently. ‘He was starting to have a lot of musician friends come around to jam,’ says Alex. ‘Many times I would come home in the afternoon from school and there would be an electric guitar, bass fiddle, drums and my Dad on piano in the living room. That was when party time really began for my Dad. Every night musician friends would drop by for drinks and record playing. I would fall asleep to the sounds of jazz bands downstairs.’

Like everyone else, and despite the flood of rock’n’roll, folk and jazz that he’d been subjected to for most of his life, it was the Beatles that made the difference. ‘I remember walking into school the day after the Beatles had been on The Ed Sullivan Show and someone shouted, “Here comes Ringo!”’ Soon afterwards he asked for a bass guitar as he thought it would be easier to learn, but was given an electric guitar and an amplifier instead. He tried, unsuccessfully, to play along with ‘She Loves You’, but settled instead on working out the bass lines to ‘All My Loving’.

‘I really loved the mid-sixties British pop music,’ says Chilton. ‘All two and a half minutes or three minutes long, really appealing songs. So I’ve always aspired to that same format, that’s what I like. Not to mention the rhythm and blues and the Stax stuff, too.’ By the mid-1960s Alex was starting to see bands in the three Memphis nightclubs that catered for teenage audiences. ‘The first concert I ever attended was Bobby Bland,’ he says. ‘I also saw Jackie Wilson, B.B. King and many more [including the Rolling Stones in 1965] and I don’t know how many white people were there. I went alone and it wasn’t a problem.’

Having given up on the guitar for now, Alex concentrated on singing. He’d played in a couple of unnamed garage bands, mainly with friends from Central High and was talked into singing a couple of songs at a school talent show. He stood up to do ‘In The Midnight Hour’ and ‘Sunny’ and although he didn’t win the contest he went down well, catching the eye of Jimmy Newman. So, when John Evans asked Newman if he knew of any good singers, he recommended Chilton despite his being four or five years younger than the departed Ronnie Jordan.

Chilton’s initial reaction to being asked to audition for the job of the Devilles’ lead singer was not positive. ‘I didn’t care for them,’ he says. ‘They had made a few records and I didn’t like them. They were pretty lame, really bad ballads that might’ve had some country appeal, but they were one of the big bands around town that made some money.’ The fact that they actually made some money convinced Chilton to give it a go. ‘I was failing my tenth grade royally and here I was just hanging around, drinking, smoking grass, meeting girls and looking forward to a very uncertain future. They said we’ll give you 200 dollars a week, which I liked fine.’

The musical grudge that Chilton held against the band was not their only difference. The band dressed in button-down shirts and penny loafers, which was quite a conservative, preppy look for a band in 1966. Chilton’s audition took place in Danny Smythe’s bedroom at his parent’s house on Vaughan Road. ‘I was kind of taken aback by his [Chilton’s] clothes,’ recalls Smythe. ‘He wore a black T-shirt, nobody wore those, and torn jeans.’ Chilton also wore a denim jacket and had a long scarf around his neck, more of a hip look than any of the band members had ever really seen. ‘Ronnie was cute, but Alex had an edge,’ continues Smythe. ‘I think the first song we tried was “Mustang Sally”. I knew instantly we were going to be a soul band.’ And, despite the initial shock of his appearance, it took just one song for Chilton to be offered the job. He took it and they started practising at the Chiltons’ large house on North Montgomery. For the first month they practised, played shows at the weekend and earned a little bit of money.

In January 1967, just after Chilton had turned sixteen, Roy Mack stepped in and said, ‘We’re gonna have to send you boys in the studio to see what the new singer sounds like.’ With Mack still keenly playing Chips Moman’s American Studios output on his WMPS show Moman agreed to give the new line-up some studio time. He also agreed to get a demo tape of some new songs from a songwriter called Wayne Carson Thompson.¹¹

The timing couldn’t have been better. Moman had been at Stax but fell out with the hierarchy there. After some to-ing and fro-ing he had co-control of American Studios by 1964. Moman put together a formidable house band that played most of the music for the acts that used the studio. Generally then the band’s singer would come in and sing over their recorded backing tracks. The American Studios house band of Reggie Young, Bobby Wood, Bobby Emmons, Tommy Cogbill, Mike Leach and Gene Chrisman played on the likes of Dusty Springfield’s classic Dusty In Memphis, Elvis Presley’s ‘In the Ghetto’ and ‘Suspicious Minds’ and in memorable sessions with Neil Diamond, Dionne Warwick, the Sweet Inspirations and Wilson Pickett. Chips Moman was ambitious and hard working and American Studios were about to go places – putting 120 songs in the charts between 1967 and 1970.

In early March Mack took Chilton over to American Studios at 827 Thomas to collect the three-song demo tape and also to give him the chance to take a look around a recording studio for the first time. With tape in hand Chilton went to meet the rest of the band and listen to the three songs they’d been presented with. They were to pick one, practise it that Friday night, then go into the studio the following morning to record it. The first song on the tape was called ‘White Velvet Cat’, which failed to catch the band’s imagination. Then came a second, now long forgotten, track and the tape was rounded out with a song called ‘The Letter’. They agreed it would need changing a bit, but that it was the best of the three.

They settled down to work on an arrangement that they were happy with but around 10.30 Chilton decided he’d had enough and slipped off to meet some girls. He didn’t get home until the very early hours of Saturday morning, a little the worse for wear having spent the night smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. As he’d also gone out without a coat he was starting to feel the effects of a cold but he managed to drag himself out of bed and get to the studio for ten o’clock.

Everyone had arrived on time, but Chip Moman was conspicuous by his absence. It transpired that he hadn’t thought much would come of the session and so had handed the production duties over to his associate and rival Daniel Pennington, aka Dan Penn. As the Devilles had worked with Moman before, they were a little taken aback when Penn arrived to take the session. Penn and Moman had a stormy and competitive relationship in the studio. If one said something was bad, the other would build it up. If one of them said he liked a sound, the other would carefully explain all of its faults. Aged twenty-six at the time, Penn was a recognised writer (with his partner-in-crime Linden ‘Spooner’ Oldham) and arranger but was just cutting his teeth as a producer. He had made his name by penning classics like Aretha Franklin’s ‘Do Right Woman’ and James Carr’s ‘Dark End of the Street’. Starting out at Fame Studios and then Muscle Shoals Studios, he moved to Memphis. He was soon to make his mark on the impressionable young band standing uncertainly before him.

After a few warm-up passes, the band, with Chilton singing live on every take, set about trying to get the backing track honed to perfection. Eventually Penn started to concentrate on Chilton’s vocal delivery. ‘Penn really concentrated on Alex more than the band,’ says Smythe. ‘If we messed up a take, he would just say “Again”. I’m sure he saw Alex as the real sound, more than the rest of the band.’ Chilton had started out by singing the song in the same manner as the singer of the demo tape, an understated softly presented paean about getting home to his girlfriend. Penn let Chilton try this for a few takes, then came out of the control room and asked him to completely change his style of delivery. Penn wanted a very soulful rendition, which spelled out the word ‘aer-o-plane’ in three distinct syllables. Chilton took Penn’s directions on board and it changed the song forever. In all, there had been over thirty takes but by one thirty in the afternoon the track had been nailed and the band went home.

Once the band had left, Penn got to work on overdubs, first adding trombone and a string section. He thought that the ending was a little weak and then in a flash of inspiration decided he wanted the sound of a jet plane at the very end to tie in with the singer’s request for a ticket to fly away. He sent out to the university record library, got hold of a recording of a plane and overdubbed it onto the end of the recording. When the band heard the finished record they didn’t quite know what to make of it, it was so different from the recording they had heard when they left the studio.

‘We were eager to please Dan because he had produced some hit records,’ recalls Smythe. ‘He seemed to take us under his wing, especially Alex, although I suspected that he preferred country music. At dinner one night I was talking about drummers, and he said if he had it his way, he wouldn’t even use drummers on records. That pretty much shut me up! I’ve read over the years that he liked us, but was under contract to work with the studio musicians, and there was resentment when he didn’t use them.’

On completion the track sat on the shelf for a couple of months until Penn had the chance to play it to representatives of Bell Records. They bought the rights to it on the spot, asking for a B-side so they could issue it as soon as possible. Since the original recording Russ Caccamisi had been offered a college scholarship and had left the band, as had Richard Malone, whose family had moved to southern California. In an effort to find replacements, John Evans went back to his old band, the In Crowd, and managed to recruit nineteen-year-old Garry Talley. Talley’s parents were also musicians (his mother was a church pianist and his father a guitarist) and he signed up with the Devilles as lead guitarist. And Bill Cunningham, who remembered Chilton from his brief stint with the Jynx a year or so earlier, was brought in on bass.

Penn and Oldham wrote a B-side, ‘Happy Times’, and recorded it with the American house band. Chilton was called in to sing over a pre-recorded backing track. Bell put the new single on their Mala label out of New York, a label that specialised in black soul music. With the single ready to go, Penn thought they should come up with a more modern-sounding name. He suggested the ‘Yard Children’, which is an Alabama term meaning ‘illegitimate children’. Mack vetoed the idea and suggested ‘The Mail Boxes’ but when that sounded too twee he came up with ‘The Box Tops’. His reasoning was that as a box top was something that you cut out and sent through the post (usually for a breakfast cereal promotion) it would tie in with ‘The Letter’. Because he chose the name of the band, Mack felt as though he owned it. As he saw it, it was his name and if you didn’t like the way he did things he could replace you.

John Evans’ mother and Alex Chilton’s father came in to negotiate the contracts and the single was issued in July 1967. ‘The Letter’ was a prototypical slice of chugging blue-eyed soul and took those who had actually seen the band by surprise. Chilton’s gravel-voiced delivery and the style of the song made listeners assume it must be a black band. This trick helped the record to cross over onto the black stations and soon the record was streaking up the pop charts. Mixing a pounding bass and drum combination, Penn’s skilful production and overdubbing and some subtle effects like the underlying keyboards, the whole song was over and done with in less than two minutes, which apparently made it a convenient fill-in for DJs. Another theory for the song’s success is that it caught the zeitgeist of the US in 1967, a year that saw thousands of American soldiers die in Vietnam. The B-side, ‘Happy Times’, was even more succinct, clocking in at just one minute seventeen seconds. It was a jaunty little number that also benefited from string overdubs.

With the single starting to show signs of promise, Mala offered the band a contract for an album and Chilton’s parents agreed that, bearing in mind his recent academic achievements – or lack of, Alex could take a year off school. (He never did go back, but eventually passed his GED and enrolled at Memphis State University.) Mack obtained a set of garish, and for 1967 very unhip, uniforms and they set off to promote the single in as many places as would have them.