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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

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