A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man by Holly George-Warren Read Free Book Online Page B

and the little stove switches on it. I looked at it and said, ‘That’s the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen in my life. I will never touch that!’ So it was that and an Alamo amp. The guitar kinda sat around, and I’d hear things like ‘She Loves You,’ where it goes [sings] ‘and you know it can’t be bad,
blang-blang-blang’
on the guitar, and I’d go, ‘Wow, that’s beautiful!’ But they’re playing three different chords, six notes each, all in rapid succession, there is no way I’m going to be able to do that! So that was really kind of hopeless for me. But what I did do off of a Beatle record on my guitar was learn the bass part to ‘All My Lovin’,’ which I thought was really cool.
    Alex was also listening closely to the records made locally at Stax, the independent studio and label on East McLemore, in a predominantly black neighborhood in South Memphis. Owned by banker and country fiddler Jim Stewart and his sister Estelle Axton, Stax started out as Satellite Records and was renamed when they moved it from Brunswick, Tennessee, to Memphis. Axton ran the record shop that sold the discs cut at the studio, including “Gee Whiz,” a huge R&B and pop hit by WDIA DJ Rufus Thomas’s daughter Carla Thomas.
    “The Stax records from Memphis were really great,” Alex said in 1996. “Listening to the Beatles, I somehow couldn’t figure that out with a guitar in my hands, but when I listened to [Stax session guitarist] Steve Cropper, and not knowing anything about playing guitar, listening to him play, somehow I had a feeling ‘I can do that—that’s what I wanna sound like.’ Learning Steve Cropperlicks was the first thing I ever did.” Cropper had played in a couple of local bands with bassist Donald “Duck” Dunn; both were classmates of Cecelia Chilton’s at Messick High. Starting out as the Royal Spades in 1957, Cropper and Dunn’s group changed its moniker to the Mar-Keys and cut their first record on the fledgling Satellite label. “Last Night,” cowritten and produced by Chips Moman, shot to #3 on the
Billboard
chart in 1961.
    Sidney Chilton also helped Alex by getting his son a lesson with legendary Memphis guitarist Sid Manker, best known as the composer of and lead guitarist on the Bill Justis hit “Raunchy.” Manker, who’d done time at a penal farm for heroin possession in 1961, sometimes stopped by the soirees at the Chilton home. Not long after he showed the rudiments of guitar to Alex, Manker dropped out of sight. Forty years later, though, Alex would tell Bruce Eaton, “One of my dad’s musician buddies was Sid Manker in Memphis, who played a lot of recording sessions and was a great jazz guitarist. . . . The only guitar lesson I ever took was from [him].”
    In the fall of 1965, fourteen-year-old Alex enrolled in ninth grade at Central High School. Earlier in the year he had joined a loose-knit garage band formed by his Central Gardens buddies Paul Jobe, on drums, Preston Wilson, on electric piano, David Goolsby, on guitar, and David Francher, on bass. Calling themselves the Moondogs, the boys gathered at Paul’s backhouse to listen to Alex’s records and learn how to play them. “Alex kinda took control,” according to Paul. “We started with cheap mics and everything else that we’d buy at a pawn shop, and we got together and started playing.”
    As the group’s vocalist, Alex quickly learned lyrics. “I really wasn’t getting anywhere on the guitar, so I just kinda put the guitar away,” Alex said. “I would go and hang out with my friends who had cooler guitars and drums and stuff and I knew I could sing, right? So I would participate in that way. I could be the singer because I had already practiced so much with Chet Baker and Ray Charles. So to do ‘Gloria’ or ‘Louie, Louie,’ it just wasn’t that much of a personality stretch for me to get to any of those tunes.”
    He continued to dig the Beatles, as well as Billy J. Kramer, Herman’s Hermits,