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New York, NY, 1977

  1. Memphis, TN, Atlanta, GA, and New York, NY, 1970

In early 1977, New York City was gripped by panic about the Son of Sam murder enquiries, and punk rock and new wave were about to start meshing down in the Bowery, all of which formed a fitting backdrop to Alex Chilton's return to the city to relaunch his career. Jon Tiven's peddling of the 1975 Memphis sessions had finally paid some dividends as Ork Records agreed to put out a five-track, seven-inch EP, Singer Not The Song, for which the title track plus 'Free Again', 'Take Me Home And Make Me Like It', 'All Of The Time', and 'Summertime Blues' were drawn from the debris and helped give Chilton a New York presence.

Ork Records was owned by Terry Ork and Charles Ball. Terry was at the centre of the New York music scene, living in a loft with Richard Lloyd and financially backing and managing a new band Lloyd played guitar in called Television. "I knew the scene pretty well," he recalls. "I knew Seymour Stein and Sire records. Ork Records was a way to make some money. I did the first major show outside CBGB at the Village Gate with The Heartbreakers and Patti Smith, and I managed The Feelies after Television."

Ork had also recorded Lydia Lunch's first single, as well as "a lot of material [that] never came out because people wouldn't sign anything long term". Chilton was happy just to have an EP out, but Ork was also interested in a new song he had written called 'Bangkok'. Ever the entrepreneur, he invited Chilton up to New York to play a couple of shows in support of the new EP, arranging for Chris Stamey to play bass and Lloyd Fonoroff (from folk-rockers Death & The Lady) to play drums for the shows.

"He called me up and said, hey, you want to come up to New York and play some gigs?" Chilton recalled. "I said, yeah, sounds good, who would I play with? They said, we know a bunch of people up here, maybe you can find some that would be fun to play with. So they introduced me to Chris Stamey, and Chris and I got along fine and had a good time. He's a good musician, so we worked together all that year."

The new trio opened at the Ocean Club on February 21 and 22. After just three rehearsals, the first night was unsurprisingly a little shaky, but the second went really well. The New York rock press had been alerted to the shows and held up Chilton as a returning prodigal son. To most music fans he had fallen off the radar in 1974 after Radio City flopped, but now, three years later, he'd become a shadowy, cult figure. The enormous hype around the shows was exacerbated when Chilton walked onstage in a custom-made T-shirt with the slogan 'Alex Chilton at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club'. Fans and critics alike loved it. His anarchic, hell-raising, and sloppy performances might not have had a place in Memphis, but the hipster punk crowd in the Big Apple lapped it up. Punk was cool; rough edges were cool; Alex Chilton, most definitely, was cool.

"I guess I first realised that we had had some effect in 1977," he recalled. "I went to New York to play a gig and the place was packed. That's when it first hit me that we had succeeded in some way." Three days after the second Ocean Club show, Chilton played again at Max's Kansas City. On the day of the show his return to the spotlight even made the New York Times beneath the headline 'Alex Chilton, Rock Legend, Back'. The reporter had witnessed the earlier shows and concluded that Chilton "had difficulty staying in tune and ensemble precision was rather raw. But this was still most exciting rock'n'roll".

Chilton decided to hang around for a while. "Alex stayed at my place for a couple of months," Ork recalls. "He had a drinking problem and was very depressed. We'd already helped out Iggy Pop when he was on drugs and Alex was paranoid about things-that this wasn't going to happen or that wasn't going to happen. I didn't know Big Star so well but I knew he'd been burned by the industry and, combined with the alcohol, it was sometimes difficult getting him onstage."

Although New York was a massive city, the music scene had a decidedly small-town feel, with most things taking place within the couple of blocks between Max's Kansas City and CBGB. Everybody knew everybody else. "Everyone ate together," says Ork. "Everyone did drugs together, and as it was pre-AIDS, there was a lot of sex." Despite this communal atmosphere, the club audiences were sceptical about anyone coming into their circle who had had any kind of success before. But any worries about Chilton's credentials were soon washed away by his demeanour and sarcastic stage presence. He fitted right into the new wave crowd. "He would make humorous, sardonic comments about my homosexuality," Ork continues. "I had suspicions that he'd had a broken romance."

Jon Tiven was also living back in New York and, with the release of the Singer Not The Song EP, he and Chilton were bound to cross paths. "Terry Ork had booked Alex to play at the Village Gate," he recalls. "The opening act had not showed up, and it was close to show time. I had talked about having a band called The Yankees, but never done anything about it. Also, there were Doug Snyder, a high-school friend of mine who played bass, and one of Terry Ork's boyfriends named Gorgeous George, who aspired to being a singer. As it got nearer to start time, Terry was panicking. I said I'd open the show with my band The Yankees, and Terry was glad to have anybody entertain the troops who were waiting for Alex. So Doug, George, and I took our posts and Alex played drums for the New York debut of The Yankees. All I remember is that we closed the set with 'Honky Tonk Woman'." The last face-to-face meeting of the two men occurred soon afterward. "One night at CBGB I was with a group I produced with Andrew Oldham called The Werewolves," Tiven recalls. "Charles [Ball] grabbed my arms behind me, restraining me against a chair, while Alex tried to burn my face with a lit cigarette. I broke free and kicked the shit out of the both of them. That was the last time I saw Chilton."

Chilton continued to play shows with Stamey and Fonoroff (and occasionally with Fran Kowalski on keyboards), sometimes under the name Alex & The Cossacks. In March they played three nights at CBGB supporting Talking Heads; after that, whether he liked it or not, Chilton was lumped in with the new wave scene. Despite being less than complimentary about Blondie and Television, he liked the Ramones and took to playing a punked-up version of 'California Sun' reminiscent of their take on the song. "The Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads were all coming out of that scene and were already too big to get close to or be friends with," Chilton recalled. "Richard Hell was omnipresent. Richard Lloyd was all over the place; The Dead Boys lived right across the street and I enjoyed their company. The night Devo played 'Audition Night' at CBGB was a hoot; they blew everybody away and sounded better than they've ever sounded since!"

Chilton seemed right at home. His chip-on-the-shoulder attitude to the music industry, plus his heavy drinking and falling out with Jon Tiven, all contributed to the development of what is widely known as the Chilton persona. Onstage, he debuted some new material he'd written while playing an eclectic mix of Sky Saxon's 'Can't Seem To Make You Mine', old Big Star and Box Tops tunes, punk takes on classics like 'My Way', and straightforward takes of 60s singles like The Beach Boys' 'Wouldn't It Be Nice'.

Having decided to hang around in New York, Chilton moved out of Terry Ork's apartment and into a place of his own on Ninth Street. The Ork Records connection allowed Chilton and Stamey to do some recording during 1977, with new songs including 'Little Fishy', 'Windows Hotel', and 'Shakin' The World'. "We recorded at least 80 different tracks over two years or so [with different bands]," says Ork. "Alex fitted the mould and Charles [Ball] became his kind of existential manger. We decided that 'Bangkok' was the perfect Ork single. It had humour, it was political, and it was fascinating lyrically." Ork pressed up 5,000 copies of 'Bangkok', possibly Chilton's best solo song. It's quick (under two minutes), and Chilton seems to having a fine old time playing everything, even if he does need to brush up on his geography at times. At the start Bangkok is in Indonesia, then it's in Indochina; later he sings about learning to make love "the Japanese way" in Hong Kong. It's hard to gauge what it's all about, but who cares? It's a great little single. "Whenever I don't have much of a recording budget and don't have enough money to pay any musicians, I play it all myself," Chilton recalled. "And I like the way I play all those instruments, you know? There's a real single-minded inspiration at work on that sort of recording that I enjoy doing. Sometime I'd like to do a whole album of something like that."

While the singles and EPs Chilton made for Ork were fun and brought in a little money, New York was an expensive place and he was still keen to get a major label contract. Karen Berg, who had long been a fan, helped fund a set of demos for Elektra Records. Chilton promptly recorded 'My Rival', 'Little Fishy', 'She Might Look My Way', 'Windows Hotel', 'Can't Seem To Make You Mine', and 'Shakin' The World' but they failed to secure a deal.

"[They were] bullshit things that I was doing at the time," Chilton said. "Just because I thought I'd better get something straight for a real record label so they wouldn't think I'm totally crazy. They were things that I was just doing to make people think that I wasn't completely crazy. I hadn't met anybody who hadn't thought I was crazy in about three or four years. I just assumed that everybody would [think I was] if I really did what I wanted to do." Around the same time he was also turned down by Arista. "My songs sound like hits to me," Chilton noted at the time. "I've got people in the street calling me, really seeking me out and finding me, and saying, hey man, what are you doing? Nothing? You're kidding, that's absurd. But then I approach the industry people, and if you can't massage their egos and get them in the right frame of mind in their offices and tell them: baby, this is it! I mean: that seems to be the essence of what you have to do, and I can't do that."

And so Chilton turned his attention to production work. He'd already produced Stamey's 'Summer Sun' single, and he hooked up with The Cramps after Lesa Aldridge introduced him to them. "I became a big fan of theirs and would go and see them play any time they were playing in the city," he recalled. "They rehearsed in the basement of a friend of mine's building, and one day I went over to her house and there they all were in her apartment and so we started talking. I said, look, we ought to do some recordings together. We can do it for free, and when it's all said and done you can have the tapes and do whatever you want with them. They said OK, so we did it."

Within a few weeks Chilton and The Cramps were at Ardent producing demos for what would become their debut album. Amazingly, Chilton was still allowed to use the studio for free late at night. Ork Records was also interested in The Cramps and shelled out over $20,000 to fly Chilton and the band to London to record at Olympic Studios in December. Sounds sent a writer to report on the sessions and described him as "well known to the cultural elite" after finding him wandering around barefoot. The cult of Alex Chilton was spreading. "I'm really into the sound you make when you go into the studio spontaneously and have a kick-ass wild evening," he told Sounds. "I've got a lot of tapes in the can in Memphis of total craziness. It sounds great, really alive."

Late in 1977, Chris Stamey managed to land a support slot for his friend Peter Holsapple's band, The H-Bombs (featuring future Let's Active leader Mitch Easter), to open for Chilton's band at Max's Kansas City. Holsapple was excited about the opportunity; he'd been a Big Star fan from the word go. "A number of us kids in Winston-Salem had heard one of the college DJs play stuff from #1 Record on a late night program called Deaconlight on the Wake Forest University radio station WFDD-FM," he recalls. "I'm pretty sure Chris Stamey was the first person to actively seek out a copy of the record. My high school band Little Diesel played a bunch of songs from that album, too. You could say that my friends and I had pretty rarefied tastes, even at 15 to 17 years old. We lived in a town in the midst of Allman, Marshall Tucker, Skynyrd mind-set. Our band's song lists had a lot of what we wanted to play, but we had to know 'Midnight Rider' in order to play a lot of places. So we were pretty pumped to find out about an actual Southern band playing actual Beatles-style pop, and not jamming endlessly."

Will Rigby was another member of the Winston-Salem gang who had visited New York to see Stamey and ended up playing drums with Chilton's band for a couple of shows in 1978. "The first thing Alex ever said to me was not hello, it was: what day were you born?" he recalls. "That's all he said. Later that night, I was sitting behind him at a nearly empty CBGB watching a Dead Boys performance, and Alex was keeping his joint to himself. Then at one point he turned around and said our charts say we should get along well. That was more or less all he said to me on that trip!"

By the end of the year, Chilton had had enough of New York and returned to his parents' house in Memphis. "I don't think Chris wanted to work with me any more,' he recalled with a laugh. "He had decided I was totally unreasonable, and I guess that I was a drunk at the time, and I'm sure that I wasn't the easiest person to get along with in the world!"

The allure of Chilton to these fresh young musicians from North Carolina was understandable if you knew his story, but to most people Chilton was almost completely unheard of, although they would probably have recognised 'The Letter'. His growing cult status was the first trickle of recognition for the Big Star legacy-a trickle would later become a flood. As time went on, Chilton would become increasingly famous for not being famous.

The late 70s were not a time when information was easy to come by. Chilton fans had to get by on word of mouth, local radio, and a passion for hunting out the obscure. "I was one of the few who bought the first Big Star record when it was new in 1972," says Will Rigby. "Phonograph Record magazine had a giveaway of their single 'When My Baby's Beside Me'. All you had to do was send them your address and they sent you one. I remember Peter Holsapple and Bob Northcott, who was the singer in our high-school band, coming over to my house after school to hear it after I told them how good it was."

Before he'd left for college in New York, Stamey and Rigby had formed a band, The Sneakers, and in 1976 they put out a six track EP on Carnivorous Records. A subsequent review marked the first time a critic had cited Big Star as an influence on another band's music. It was the first time, but it certainly wasn't the last.


"He was rather nonplussed to be sought out wearing a paper hat."

 



London, England, and Memphis, TN, 1975 and 1976 | Memphis, TN, 1978

Memphis, TN, and beyond, August 1967-January 1970 | Knoxville and Memphis, TN, 1967-70 | Memphis, TN, Atlanta, GA, and New York, NY, 1970 | Memphis, TN, February 1971-May 1972 | Memphis, TN, and beyond, June-December 1972 | Memphis, TN, 1973 | Memphis, TN, and beyond, December 1973-September 1974 | Memphis, TN, September 1974-January 1975 | Memphis, Milan, Paris, London, 1973-74 | Memphis, TN, 1975 |

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