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to MUS was the Hutchison School for girls. Chris Bell, Andy Hummel, Steve Rhea, Vance Alexander and his friend Earl Smith (a cousin of Fred Smith) were allowed to take art classes at Hutchison and girls from there could take drama classes at MUS. Three of these girls were Carole Ruleman, Vera Ellis (Alex Chilton’s future girlfriend) and Linda Schaeffer.

      ‘Andy and I met in 1968 when he took an art course at Hutchison,’ recalls Schaeffer. ‘He was dating someone else, as was I, but we always dated each other when the other had a falling out.’ Vera Ellis also met Bell and Hummel at the art classes. ‘They were low key, not macho, not especially athletic,’ she says. ‘Chris was quiet, shy, very intelligent, with a sharp sense of humour. Andy was friendly, fun to be with, eager for new experiences.’ Carole Ruleman was the feature editor and photographer for Hutchison’s school newspaper, The Lantern’. ‘I was still dating Earl Smith,’ says Ruleman. ‘We were almost too young to call it dating. Earl lived way out east in Collierville and his mother had a yardman who would double as a chauffeur. Earl and Chris came to my house on Avalon in Midtown. Chris was standing next to, but a little behind, Earl, which was the nature of their relationship, indeed, many of Chris’s relationships. Chris was as he often was – sweet, shy and polite.’

      ‘The bottom line was we were confused, insecure children with no direction,’ adds Schaeffer. ‘We were hippies at a prestigious school that prided themselves on where they bought their clothes and what brand of shoe they were wearing. We didn’t fit there.’ Earl Smith’s chauffeur would take the trio of Smith, Ruleman and Bell cruising in the car and buy them beer and cigarettes. Then they’d spend hours on Ruleman’s side porch listening to records by the Beatles, the Who, Yardbirds, and Cream. ‘Earl was more into the Doors and American music,’ recalls Ruleman. ‘Chris and I always managed to work the turntable back to the English music. There was a classic book of photographs, Family of Man, on the side porch that we regularly studied. We used to go out to Chris’s back house and I remember that a friend had a bad LSD trip one day. He was running after Chris and me across the long stretch between the back house and the Bells’ house, saying that he was being chased by a mad dog that was going to hurt him. He grabbed me around the waist and hips and pleaded with me and Chris to help him. It really frightened me. I never took LSD, and Chris wasn’t taking any heavy drugs that I knew of for a long time. Whereas our friend went off more deeply into heavy drugs.’

      A clique developed that included Hummel, Bell, Ellis, Ruleman and Schaeffer. ‘We were cynical of everyone else,’ says Schaeffer. ‘We stayed apart from the others, thinking ‘We’re cool and they aren’t.’ The best families in Memphis sent their kids to those two schools and propriety and snobbishness were not high on our list.’

      ‘Chris and I started going out,’ says Ruleman. ‘My mother would give us a little money to go to the movies. There was an art house called the Guild several blocks from my house, and we spent a lot of sweltering summer afternoons there. We loved Morgan with David Warner and Vanessa Redgrave, and another favourite was Georgie Girl with Alan Bates, Lynn Redgrave and Charlotte Rampling. We must have seen it five or six times. First, we had to sit through these embarrassing trailers for this voyeuristic erotica called I, a Woman. The actress was nude and studying her body in a mirror to this grandiose voice-over that repeatedly boomed “I, a Woman”, “I, a Woman”, “I, a Woman”. We were such kids. We were both embarrassed. Every time we saw the promo, we’d crack up, and find ourselves sinking lower and lower into the seats. Then sliding deeper into the theatre chairs was the joke, and we’d laugh and laugh until the trailer was finally over. Then Georgie Girl came on, and we were transported to England.’

      While the meeting of Bell and Terry Manning had introduced Manning to new bands to play in, the favour was returned by Manning introducing Bell to John Fry and Ardent Studios. ‘Chris and I started hanging out at the studio,’ says Rhea. ‘Eventually, John trusted us to come in at night when no one was booking the studio and record our own music.’

      Business at Stax was booming. ‘We brought a lot of Stax business over to Ardent,’ says Manning. ‘It was sometimes overflow business and sometimes they wanted to try different things. We were known as the hi-tech place because John and I would go out and find the latest, newest thing. We were the first to get a four-track, eight-track, sixteen-track and so on. Not just in Memphis but also in the whole South or the whole US. So they would look to us for, without meaning to put down what they did, they saw us as another level of audio quality and a way to do different things.’

      With more and more new faces arriving at Ardent, Fry ran small classes in the art of recording and engineering. ‘Every time there were one or two new people around I ran the classes whenever the opportunity arose,’ explains Fry. ‘It was also selfish because if you taught the people properly it reduced the chances of them ringing you up at three o’clock in the morning to ask a question. ’ Rhea, Bell, Eubanks, Hummel and Richard Rosebrough were just some who attended.

      But for Chris Bell this flirtation with Ardent didn’t last long as he and Andy Hummel graduated from MUS in the spring of 1969 and enrolled at the University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) the following autumn. Hummel signed up at UTK as a chemistry major but soon switched to English literature; Bell planned to major in communication arts. Hummel’s parents drove him to Knoxville, a college that he admits ‘was the only place out of town I could get into, my grades were not great’, and he and Bell settled into Morrison Hall. They lived in a suite that consisted of two bedrooms with a common bathroom; Hummel describes it as the nicest dorm on campus. ‘We both took primarily basic freshman courses such as English Composition, History of Western Civilization, and the like,’ remembers Hummel. ‘We did both take an honours photography course. We were both extremely into photography. Chris also took a course in cinematography along with a friend of ours, Michael O’Brien.’ O’Brien went on to become a professional photographer and later took promotional shots of Big Star.

      The pair failed to get to grips with the academic side of student life. Hummel admits that ‘we spent most of our time getting stoned and being involved in stop-the-war politics. Suffice to say that we were pretty wild. We spent most of the fall of 1969 in an LSD haze, then in the spring after tripping out we managed to convince everyone in our dormitory that we were the world’s experts on pot and they should always bring us some to test before they bought it!’ At the Christmas vacation they managed to fit in their first trip to New York. ‘We just went on a lark with a friend of ours, Bob Schiffer. We hadn’t a dime and spent the whole trip walking the streets and sleeping in bus stations. It was our first time in the big city and we were pretty overwhelmed.’

      After returning for the winter term, Bell and Hummel started playing music together for the first time, but apart from these jam sessions they spent most of their time getting involved in the anti-Vietnam movement. ‘We were totally absorbed in the anti-war thing beginning around January of 1970,’ says Hummel. ‘It was just what was going on. We wore “STRIKE” silk-screens on our clothes and everything. I was a member of the ACLU¹⁵ and participated in a huge march on Nashville at which the radical Jerry Rubin spoke. When we’d been in New York John and Yoko’s billboard “Happy Christmas War is over” was up over Times Square. The war just dominated everything. When Kent State happened [several students were shot dead during a peaceful rally], we just figured we’d all be killed anyway so what the hell. During the Vietnam war one of the most frequent methods used to demonstrate opposition was to conduct strikes. These were days when students and many professors would boycott classes all day and instead listen to speeches, attend demonstrations and the like. Chris and I were very immersed in all that.’

      But they weren’t to be immersed in it for much longer. By the spring they were ready to cut their losses. ‘We were just miserable at Knoxville, for a variety of reasons,’ explains Hummel. ‘We didn’t have a car, which in the US is an almost impossible situation. I mean, you have got to have wheels. I had tripped out really badly in the autumn and was having medical problems as well. We had very little money. I was missing my girlfriend back in Memphis who had temporarily dumped me. We had a very difficult time playing music in the confines of our dorm. The list just goes on and on.’ In the summer of 1970 they returned home.

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