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Memphis, TN and beyond. August 1967 to January 1970

The Box Tops were about to explode onto the national music scene. In retrospect, some of their later problems had their foundations at the very beginning of their career. ‘My dad said, “Well, in the circles I run in, in the musician’s union, the band members get one share and the leader gets a double share,”’ recalls Alex Chilton. ‘And he negotiated a double share for me. Well, of course, the band didn’t dig that.’

In late August 1967 the band set out to play its first shows as The Box Tops. As they drove north-east they passed through Knoxville, Tennessee, where a friend of Roy Mack’s was playing ‘The Letter’ every twenty minutes on his radio show. When they headed home a week later they heard that he was still playing it every twenty minutes, so road manager Vince Alfonso pulled over to a pay phone and called the presenter to say he was overdoing it a bit. ‘Don’t worry,’ came the DJ’s reply. ‘It’s the number one song in Tennessee!’

It had been a successful trip all round. Word of the single had preceded them to the north-east as Danny Smythe recalls: ‘We were told our record was number one in Philadelphia and Birmingham. It had never even been played in Memphis. For some reason Roy Mack said he couldn’t play it on his station because it was a conflict of interest even though the DeVille records were played. The competing radio station wouldn’t play it because of our ties to Roy. So we actually drove all the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand at a fairground. When we showed up, the promoter didn’t believe we were the Box Tops, he was expecting a black band. Alex had to sing the first few words, “Give me a ticket for an aer-o-plane”, [before] the promoter grinned and said “That’s it!”’

Their next big engagement was as part of a music festival in Fort Worth. Other bands on the bill included the Standells, Sonny and Cher and another new band called the Doors promoting its latest single, ‘Light My Fire’. The Doors had already created quite a buzz of excitement on the West Coast and it was spreading around the country. The contrast between the two bands couldn’t have been greater.¹²

‘Roy wanted us to look clean with band uniforms,’ says Smythe. ‘When we played our next big gig in Dallas [Fort Worth] that all changed. It was a week-long music festival, and the promoters had rented out the whole four-storey Holiday Inn for all the acts and all the go-go dancers and stage crew. It was my first exposure to hippie culture and I embraced it. Everyone wanted to party with Jim Morrison, but he was a total recluse. I think the Doors had a whole floor to themselves, so they were pretty isolated.’

While the punctual Box Tops were wearing double-breasted coats and yellow shirts, Jim Morrison would come on stage two hours late, hair unkempt, and in leather trousers, and then spit on the crowd. Seeing this literally changed their lives and the Box Tops knew they had to change their image. ‘Times were definitely changing,’ Smythe recalls. ‘Whenever we played New York City we would head straight for Greenwich Village and load up on the latest counter-culture fashion.’ From playing local parties in Memphis to having high profile shows in the nation’s media capital was quite a step. Smythe remembers the first time the band was mobbed for autographs: ‘I remember talking to some fans and asking, “How come ya’ll keep saying ‘Yous guys’?” To which they asked why I kept saying “Ya’ll”: it was a culture shock!’ As the record topped charts across the country, they finally started playing it in Memphis. ‘It all happened so fast, you could hardly grasp the enormity of it all.’

The constant touring was paying off and ‘The Letter’ finally topped the national charts, knocking Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Ode To Billy Joe’ from number one. Amazingly, this was the first time that a Memphis band had had the number one record on the national singles chart. The Box Tops kept the number one spot for several weeks and by the end of 1967 ‘The Letter’ had sold a staggering 4,000,000 copies.

Their relentless touring continued. One time they played three gigs in one night in three different cities in Pennsylvania via small planes. They were so late for the last show that the promoters had told everyone to go home just as the band arrived. ‘They hated us,’ recalls Smythe. ‘They were so disappointed. This was typical of our manager who we grew to hate. We had no sound checks while I was in the band. No monitors, no microphones for the drums, no roadies. Being on the road was totally boring. Driving endless hours, getting on each other’s nerves, never staying anywhere long enough to see anything except a hotel room. We were booked so much that we were on the road constantly. [Although] we had an hour’s worth of songs and that was it.’

Within a few short weeks of ‘The Letter’ being released, the Box Tops went from being an unknown southern band to a nationwide smash that everyone had heard of. The success of ‘The Letter’ got the band an opening slot for a series of Beach Boys shows at the request of Brian Wilson. The first night was in front of 15,000 Beach Boys fans in Indianapolis. With no time to mentally prepare himself, Chilton just closed his eyes and sang his heart out. In the autumn of 1967 a further tour was booked through the Carolinas as part of a black revue which included Wilson Pickett and Carla Thomas. The Box Tops were the only white act in the show, but the audiences included lots of white kids because soul music was now cool.

At the end of the year ‘The Letter’ was nominated for two Grammy awards, alongside the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and the Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’, but in both cases (Best Performance By a Vocal Group and Best Contemporary Group Performance, Vocal Or Instrumental) the winner was the 5th Dimension’s ‘Up, Up and Away’.

Mala now needed an album to follow up on the single’s success so they sent the band to Rick Hall’s studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was of course the new line-up, not the one that had recorded ‘The Letter’, and it just didn’t work. After a single session Penn called a halt to proceedings. The Box Tops’ version of ‘Break My Mind’ was used from the Muscle Shoals session but Chilton was the only band member to perform on the rest of the album as he sang it live with the house band. By now he’d discovered Hendrix and Buffalo Springfield and was already losing interest in his own output.

‘We found out later that on the Musician’s Union contracts that were filed for our record sessions, our names were purposely omitted,’ says Gary Talley. ‘The studio musicians at American Studios were under contract with Chips Moman, and they got paid for every Box Tops session that was booked, whether they were there or not.’

The debut album, imaginatively titled The Letter / Neon Rainbow after the group’s first two singles, included three Wayne Carson Thompson songs. As well as the two title tracks, Thompson’s ‘She Knows How’ made it onto the album, featuring a funky melody and another gravelly Chilton vocal. The tight rhythm section of house band was augmented by the Stax-like horn section and more soaring strings reminiscent of ‘The Letter’. The debut single was also hinted at in the cover of Bacharach and David’s ‘Trains & Boats & Planes’. Reminiscent of ‘The Letter’, this track starts off with a sound-effects overload as first a night train’s lonesome wail, then an ocean liner’s deep roar and then another jet plane zipping by gives forty seconds of intro before the vocals start. ‘Break My Mind’ is a country-tinged, pedal-steel singalong. A cover of ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ lacks the atmosphere of the original.

The album also features a trio of Penn-Oldham songs, ‘Everything I Am’, ‘I’m Your Puppet’ and ‘I Pray For Rain’, and a brace of Bobby Womack tracks, ‘Gonna Find Somebody’ and the excellent ‘People Make The World’ with stunning backing vocals from the Sweet Inspirations. The other outstanding song on the album was ‘Neon Rainbow’, which despite a title that hints at psychedelia sounds like nothing of the sort. While some complained it lacked the verve and immediacy of its predecessor, the band’s second single has aged very well. It was considered a flop at the time because it sold ‘only’ a half-million copies, partly because many people didn’t link it to the same band that had sung ‘The Letter’. But it was actually a perfect piece of mid-1960s pop, after an understated first verse, bursting into life in the chorus. Overall The Letter / Neon Rainbow was a diverse record that has stood the test of time very well against its contemporaries like Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Righteous Brothers and the Young Rascals. At the time Chilton told the Memphis Press-Scimitar: ‘Our style is not having one. We just like to be ourselves. We don’t want to be rut addicts.’

In December 1967 Chilton received his first royalty cheque, for a very healthy 11,000 dollars. But December also saw Danny Smythe and John Evans play their last shows with the band; they quit within a couple of weeks of each other. ‘I’d dropped out of college that fall and lost my draft exemption,’ explains Smythe. ‘That December I decided I had to go back or I would end up in Vietnam. The record royalties put me through college and I became a graphic artist. I was heavily influenced by Alex’s parents, who ran an art gallery out of his home, [where] there were paintings floor to ceiling in every room.’ Smythe had also become disillusioned with the way the band was managed and suspicious about where all the money was going. ‘[Mack] got a lot more money than we did. He talked us into a bad contract. He said he had control over the name “Box Tops”, and could replace anyone who didn’t go along with what he said. We never got a clear accounting of the money from the royalties or the gigs. We were paid an allowance and told the rest would come later. In some instances we were told that he never got paid for some gigs, and we had no way to follow up on it. It was all so frustrating.’ Evans also went to Memphis State but didn’t enjoy it and ended up serving in Germany with the US military. He was replaced on keyboards by Rick Allen, who’d played with the Gentrys, the Coachmen and the Yo-Yos, while the drum stool was taken by Tom Boggs, a veteran of the Counts and the superbly monikered Flash and the Board of Directors.

To keep the wave of success fresh in the minds of the record-buying public, a second album was recorded in early 1968 and speedily released in April. It marked a return to commercial form. The next single, ‘Cry Like a Baby’ (also the name of the album), peaked at number two in the US chart.

The song had come to Penn and Oldham in a flash of inspiration. The pair were frantically trying to write a hit single for the band but were getting nowhere. They decided to take an early lunch break and headed over to a local diner. At the end of the meal, discussing his writer’s block, Oldham slumped forward saying, ‘I’m so frustrated with this, I could cry like a baby’. It was a eureka moment for Penn, who rushed his writing partner back to the studio where they knocked out their song in record time. The compulsive beat and the perfect blend of pop and soul pushed the single to sell over a million copies.

The album Cry Like a Baby was a rather more hit and miss affair. ‘Deep In Kentucky’’s undercurrent of horns and counter melody never really got going, ‘Weeping Analeah’ was a powerful waltz provided by Dan Folger and Mickey Newman, who had also written for Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, and ‘Trouble With Sam’ could be the Kinks mixed with Scott Walker. Unfortunately these highlights were tempered by the overly slushy ‘Good Morning Dear’ and ‘727’, which is basically a poor man’s ‘The Letter’ (it expresses the same sentiments: ‘727 take me to heaven / 727 take me home / I gotta see my baby’ [Penn-Oldham]).

It even has the same solo drum ‘tap-tap-tap-tap’ that opened ‘The Letter’ buried mid-song; and the closer, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, is a sludgy version of the song made famous by the Supremes (and later a hit for Kim Wilde). It’s not even saved by an impassioned Chilton vocal. The sloppiness even spread to the album cover. When Gary Talley was ill for the photo shoot, the designers got a stand-in to go at the back of the group, then drizzled water over the window the band was peering through to disguise the fact that the guitarist wasn’t even there.

Buoyed by the success of ‘Cry Like a Baby’ the band went back on tour, first with the Beach Boys and later at festivals with the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat and the Turtles. They also did the rounds of TV shows with appearances on Tonight With Johnny Carson, American Bandstand and The Merv Griffin show. Local music fan, and later writer and friend of Chilton, Ross Johnson recalls their TV appearances. ‘They did Talent Party, which is where my mother noted Alex’s all-too-visible unease at being in front of the cameras,’ he says. ‘I seem to recall them playing live on a show or two, as opposed to simply miming as they did on Talent Party, and they sounded surprisingly good.’

The third Box Tops album, Non-Stop, hit the shelves in July 1968 and was the first to lack a bona fide hit single. The album relied heavily on previously used song-writing templates and it offered little to either new or established fans of the band. The opener, the appallingly titled ‘Choo Choo Train’, had Chilton growling out a lyric that not only spoke of travelling home (again) but even featured the ‘aer-o-plane’ elocution of the band’s most famous song. ‘I’m Movin’ On’ was Canadian legend Hank Snow’s classic thigh-slapping country romp, but the Box Tops (or at least Dan Penn) twisted in an electric guitar solo before settling it back into its country time signature.

Wayne Carson Thompson’s ‘Sandman’ did little to rouse the first side, though Chuck Neese and Mac Gayden’s (of Nashville band the Sliders) ‘She Shot A Hole In My Soul’ did lift proceedings. Of the two Penn-Oldham compositions, ‘People Gonna Talk’ and ‘I Met Her In Church’, it was the latter that became the highlight of the album. Originally written as ‘I Met Him In Church’ for the Sweet Inspirations, the anticipated gospel choir on the chorus lifts the song to new heights while Oldham’s glorious piano playing is a pleasure to listen to. ‘Rock Me Baby’ was a B.B. King song that did exactly as it promised – it rocked – and proved to be quite a departure from the Box Tops’ usual mixture of country, pop, gospel and soul. While not the best song on the album, one of the most notable was ‘I Can Dig It’, which was the first Chilton composition to be recorded, and which fitted well with some of the funkier Box Tops songs of the period.

The rest of 1968 was taken up with touring and then the band returned to Memphis. Chilton also returned home with a pregnant girlfriend, Suzie Green, whom he had met on tour in Dallas. The couple were married on Chilton’s eighteenth birthday, 28 December 1968, in the Chilton family living room. Soon after a son was born, Timothee. According to a friend, his parents were dismayed at his ‘taking on the responsibility of marriage at such a young age’. They were quickly proved right: the marriage was short lived, and Timothee would spend his early years going back and forth between his mother and Chilton’s parents’ care. Chilton had done a lot of growing up in a very short space of time. He was still only a teenager but had a wife, a child and was the figurehead of a million-selling band.

After a couple of tours, Chilton was invited to visit the Beach Boys in Los Angeles in early 1969. Gary Talley recalled that for his twenty-first birthday, ‘Bill Cunningham, Carl Wilson and Dennis Wilson went out and bought me a birthday cake and brought it to my hotel room. The Beach Boys and Bill sang “Happy Birthday” to me.’ Now Chilton was staying at Dennis Wilson’s house taking acid and having a merry old time until another of Dennis’s friends decided to move in for a while. ‘I was on the road meeting people like the Beach Boys, the Doors, Wilson Pickett, everybody,’ says Chilton. ‘Carl Wilson taught me to play the guitar. I was like the youngest Wilson brother, and I went to California and spent some time with them. I stayed at Brian’s house a few times, and that’s how I got to meet Charles Manson. Of course no one knew what he was really up to. We were all there together in this really fabulous Malibu beach community in Dennis’s log cabin, and suddenly this guy shows up with a harem full of beautiful girls and starts playing songs at us. Occasionally things got a little uncomfortable.’ On one occasion Chilton was sent out to fetch the groceries, much to his chagrin, and when he returned without the milk a scene was caused by some of Manson’s family. ‘[I] started thinking at around that time – hey, these are kinda strange vibes. Let’s leave. I’m not too sure about this Charlie.’

Most of 1969 had again been spent on the road. The contract for a show on 31 March shows that the band was paid 2500 dollars for two forty-five minute sets. Interestingly the contract is signed by Chilton rather than Roy Mack. ‘We turned into a road band and I was paid twice as much as anybody else in the band,’ says Chilton. ‘I didn’t want to rock the boat because all I would have to do would be go back to school if I jumped out of there. It was a very bad environment, on the road with those people that couldn’t play, they didn’t wanna play, they wouldn’t play, and so we were crummy as shit everywhere. It was hard on me, it polluted my mind, I’ll never get over it musically.’

The most newsworthy moment of the summer was the July 1969 landing on the moon. Alex Chilton had an apartment in Memphis now, and he and Suzie invited some friends over to watch the historic event. Photographer Michael O’Brien, Andy Hummel and Steve Rhea all attended. ‘That was huge to us,’ recalls Rhea. ‘It had been a major shock to us when the Soviets put up Sputnik; it made a big impression on us. Then when Kennedy said we were going to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade…’

This was the first time that Andy Hummel met Chilton. He went along as a friend of O’Brien’s. ‘We went over there the night the first lunar landing took place and dropped acid,’ says Hummel. ‘It was Purple Haze. Then we just watched the little LEM module sitting there on the lunar surface on TV. I never really got off. I don’t think it was very good acid. Nothing like the stuff we later got in Knoxville! I suppose we were a little in awe of Alex at first. I mean, he was someone who had actually made it. He was a proper rock’n’roll star and that was the ultimate thing a person could be!’

By late summer things had started to change for Chilton. The Box Tops were slowly coming to an end, he realised that his marriage to Suzie had been a mistake, he started having an affair with Vera Ellis, and then he decided to move to New York with her.

Vera Ellis had met Chilton the previous year through their mutual friend Earl Smith, who was also a friend of Chris Bell and Andy Hummel at MUS. ‘Alex was with the Box Tops, touring quite a bit at the time,’ she recalls. ‘He was very laid back, intelligent and open minded, he appeared to be confident and sure of himself but not proud to be in the Box Tops. They were too commercial; the music embarrassed him and caused him to feel he was looked down on by other musicians. He was living with his parents when he was in town. Earl and I dropped by to visit Alex and we became friends.

‘I spent many days and nights with Alex at his parents’ home on Montgomery Street. We would go to the Sharecropper, a Memphis club, to listen to Sid’s band. Alex’s family was very political, liberal Democrats, ahead of their time in Memphis.’ After Chilton and Green had separated, he started seeing Ellis and at the end of the summer they relocated to New York. ‘They [Chilton and Green] didn’t live together as man and wife very long,’ adds Ellis. ‘Suzie and I were thrown together quite often because of Timothee, and we were always friendly. My affair with Alex was not secret or hidden and he was not living with Suzie at the time.’

In September Bill Cunningham became the latest Box Top to quit and go back to college. That autumn the Box Tops became the only white band to appear in Memphis at the Coliseum in front of the all-black audience as part of WDIA’s Starlight Revue. But tensions among the band continued, morale was lower than ever as they were continually banned from playing on most of their own records and Chilton was getting double their money.

To top it all, what would become the final album, Dimensions, was not even produced by Dan Penn. Penn had irrevocably fallen out with Moman and high-tailed it to Nashville. Production duties passed to Moman and house band member Tommy Cogbill. Penn’s absence also meant a lack of song-writing material from him and Oldham, which meant both a dearth of new commercial material but also offered a chance for Chilton to get more of his own compositions on the album. The mood in the studio was quite different for these final sessions. ‘I never huddled with Dan Penn to pick the material,’ says Chilton. ‘He’d just come in and say, “Do it” and “Do it like this”.’ Dan had his agenda and he didn’t care what I thought. I was just the artist and I was there to do what he told me to do. Chips was very much more of a libertarian. He would come into the studio and say, “Well, what should we do next?”’

Dimensions was issued in September 1969 to precede yet another bout of touring. The album did include some performances by the musicians in the band and started off on a very promising note with another Wayne Carson Thompson song, ‘Soul Deep’. Sounding very much like a Neil Diamond song (and Diamond was recording at American around this time), it was possibly the best Box Tops song since their debut album and it reached the top twenty. Chilton showed vocal versatility with his gentle reading of Bob Dylan’s ‘I Shall Be Released’ (which had already been a hit for the Tremeloes) and then going from the sublime to the ridiculous he stomped through ‘Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March’ which was, yes, a march. When issued as a single, it was banned on some radio stations because of its lyric which extolled the virtues of the world’s oldest profession. The lack of Penn-Oldham songs helped Chilton to get three of his own songs included on the album: ‘Together’, ‘I Must Be The Devil’ and ‘(The) Happy Song’.

‘I started playing guitar pretty heavily around the time that the Box Tops took off,’ says Chilton. ‘I started writing the next year, 1968, or something like that, attempting to find my writing style.’ When Chilton finally did get the chance to try out one of his own songs he didn’t feel he was taken seriously. ‘It always sounded shitty the way they did it. They’d spend twenty hours working on a project of theirs and I’d get sent in with an apprentice engineer and some bad musicians for thirty minutes and get to record my song. The attitude around was, “Well, you’re just the artist, we’re the ones who come up with the songs, we’re the ones who make it sound good, we’re the musicians, you’re just the singer and you don’t know how to play a guitar or anything.”’

‘I Must Be The Devil’, which features a spiralling bluesy piano and a hypnotic rhythm section that surrounds an impassioned vocal from Chilton, was his best composition to date, while ‘(The) Happy Song’ is an upbeat country-pop effort but little more. The album closed with another glaring example of the lack of new material when ‘Rock Me Baby’, which appeared on Non-Stop, was extended from three minutes forty-six seconds to a blues jam of almost ten minutes to end side two.

The atmosphere on the final Box Tops dates during the autumn of 1969 was worsening. Conflicts between new band members, unsatisfactory live performances and falling chart placings all added to the general malaise. ‘Our financial statements were two or three months behind,’ says Gary Talley. ‘Our manager and his attorney were getting their money right off the top, so the band was paying for everything from pencils to studio time. We’d had two gold records and were getting an advance of 150 dollars a week apiece and the band was exhausted from touring.’

‘In the winter of 1969 and 1970, I’d had more than I could stand and so finally, in a huff, I just blew it off,’ says Chilton. ‘So that’s how we disbanded.’ The final straw came during a planned two-week tour of England in December. The band arrived in London three days before the tour was to begin. After checking into their hotel on Bayswater Road they prepared to rehearse but ‘our rehearsal space turned out to be in the basement of an elementary school while school was still in session,’ recalls Talley. ‘As we walked in with our guitars, we were surrounded by boisterous six-year-olds with funny accents. We were led to the basement, where our gear for the tour was supposed to be set up for us.

‘Our equipment rider had specified what amps, drums and keyboards were to be provided. What waited was quite unexpected. We were greeted by our opening act, a West Indian reggae band called King Ollie and The Raisins. Their equipment was what we were going to have to use on the tour. Instead of Ludwig or Slingerland drums, there was a tiny drum kit identical to the one I received for my birthday when I was ten. Instead of the Fender amps, there were Marshall P.A. amps, not guitar amps. The not-Hammond B3 organ was a tiny Farfisa, but it did have a big wooden Leslie cabinet. We soon learned that the loud clunking sound we were hearing came from the broken rotating speaker in the Leslie, which banged against the cabinet every time it turned.’ The band’s management’s attempt to cut costs was at the expense of things that were vital for touring success in a foreign country.

Chilton and Talley discussed the situation and agreed that the band had reached the end of the road, literally. The tour was cancelled and some of the entourage went home and others stayed in England for a vacation, taking the opportunity to visit France. There was no storming offstage as has been reported elsewhere: it was all pretty low key.

Back in August 1969 the actress wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, along with four others, was viciously murdered and mutilated in California. As 1969 drew to a close the police made an arrest and Alex Chilton found out about it during his impromptu vacation in London. ‘We were walking down the street with road manager Cleve Dupin,’ recalls Gary Talley. ‘We approached a newsstand and on the front page of the London Times was something that made Alex and Cleve turn white as two sheets. There on the cover was a guy who they had lived with for a few days at Dennis Wilson’s house in Malibu – Charles Manson!’ Manson had been arrested and was later convicted for the murders.

For a band that had started out so optimistically, and successfully, with ‘The Letter’, its gradual decline was all the more disappointing and frustrating. The final act was the spring 1970 release of a compilation Super Hits and the posthumous single ‘You Keep Tightening Up On Me’. Written by Wayne Carson Thompson and driven by the now familiar sitar-like guitar sound, it stuttered no further than number ninety-two in the US charts. By the end the Box Tops had had a total of seven US top forty hits (three had reached the top twenty in the UK) with the last being the peak of ‘Soul Deep’ at number twenty-two in August 1969. The touring version of the band had had a total of three different drummers, three guitarists, two keyboard players and a trio of bassists, but just the one lead singer.

There were rumours of a few shows put together by Roy Mack using a ‘fake’ band that didn’t include any of the previous members of the band but, apart from a short one-off appearance in 1989, it would be twenty-seven years before the original Box Tops played another show.