Big Star: The Story of Rock’s Forgotten Band - Rob Jovanovic

Скачать книгу

decided he wanted the sound of a jet plane at the very end to tie in with the singer’s request for a ticket to fly away. He sent out to the university record library, got hold of a recording of a plane and overdubbed it onto the end of the recording. When the band heard the finished record they didn’t quite know what to make of it, it was so different from the recording they had heard when they left the studio.

      ‘We were eager to please Dan because he had produced some hit records,’ recalls Smythe. ‘He seemed to take us under his wing, especially Alex, although I suspected that he preferred country music. At dinner one night I was talking about drummers, and he said if he had it his way, he wouldn’t even use drummers on records. That pretty much shut me up! I’ve read over the years that he liked us, but was under contract to work with the studio musicians, and there was resentment when he didn’t use them.’

      On completion the track sat on the shelf for a couple of months until Penn had the chance to play it to representatives of Bell Records. They bought the rights to it on the spot, asking for a B-side so they could issue it as soon as possible. Since the original recording Russ Caccamisi had been offered a college scholarship and had left the band, as had Richard Malone, whose family had moved to southern California. In an effort to find replacements, John Evans went back to his old band, the In Crowd, and managed to recruit nineteen-year-old Garry Talley. Talley’s parents were also musicians (his mother was a church pianist and his father a guitarist) and he signed up with the Devilles as lead guitarist. And Bill Cunningham, who remembered Chilton from his brief stint with the Jynx a year or so earlier, was brought in on bass.

      Penn and Oldham wrote a B-side, ‘Happy Times’, and recorded it with the American house band. Chilton was called in to sing over a pre-recorded backing track. Bell put the new single on their Mala label out of New York, a label that specialised in black soul music. With the single ready to go, Penn thought they should come up with a more modern-sounding name. He suggested the ‘Yard Children’, which is an Alabama term meaning ‘illegitimate children’. Mack vetoed the idea and suggested ‘The Mail Boxes’ but when that sounded too twee he came up with ‘The Box Tops’. His reasoning was that as a box top was something that you cut out and sent through the post (usually for a breakfast cereal promotion) it would tie in with ‘The Letter’. Because he chose the name of the band, Mack felt as though he owned it. As he saw it, it was his name and if you didn’t like the way he did things he could replace you.

      John Evans’ mother and Alex Chilton’s father came in to negotiate the contracts and the single was issued in July 1967. ‘The Letter’ was a prototypical slice of chugging blue-eyed soul and took those who had actually seen the band by surprise. Chilton’s gravel-voiced delivery and the style of the song made listeners assume it must be a black band. This trick helped the record to cross over onto the black stations and soon the record was streaking up the pop charts. Mixing a pounding bass and drum combination, Penn’s skilful production and overdubbing and some subtle effects like the underlying keyboards, the whole song was over and done with in less than two minutes, which apparently made it a convenient fill-in for DJs. Another theory for the song’s success is that it caught the zeitgeist of the US in 1967, a year that saw thousands of American soldiers die in Vietnam. The B-side, ‘Happy Times’, was even more succinct, clocking in at just one minute seventeen seconds. It was a jaunty little number that also benefited from string overdubs.

      With the single starting to show signs of promise, Mala offered the band a contract for an album and Chilton’s parents agreed that, bearing in mind his recent academic achievements – or lack of, Alex could take a year off school. (He never did go back, but eventually passed his GED and enrolled at Memphis State University.) Mack obtained a set of garish, and for 1967 very unhip, uniforms and they set off to promote the single in as many places as would have them.

       4 ‘All the way to Philadelphia to play on top of a hot-dog stand’

       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

Скачать книгу