Alex Chilton - Alex Chilton's Lost Decade (Fan Club FC 015) (FR 1986) (Vinyl 24-96 & 16-44.1)

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Alex Chilton - Alex Chilton's Lost Decade (Fan Club FC 015) (FR 1986) (Vinyl 24-96 & 16-44.1)

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Alex Chilton - Alex Chilton's Lost Decade
FLAC | Artwork | 24Bit 96kHz: 1,11 GB | 16Bit 44.1kHz: 348 MB
Cat#: Fan Club FC 015 | Country/Year: France 1986
Genre: Rock, Garage Rock | Hoster: Hotfile/Filesonic

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Alex Chilton - Alex Chilton's Lost Decade (Fan Club FC 015) (FR 1986) (Vinyl 24-96 & 16-44.1)

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Alex Chilton - Alex Chilton's Lost Decade (Fan Club FC 015) (FR 1986) (Vinyl 24-96 & 16-44.1)

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Biography

by Cub Koda

In a business that reinvents itself at every turn, Alex Chilton thrived for four decades with a three-fold career – his early recordings with the Box Tops, the albums he did with Big Star in the mid-'70s and after the group re-formed with a new lineup in 1993, and the spate of cool but chaotic solo albums he recorded beginning in the late '70s. To some, he was a classic hitmaker from the '60s. To others, he was a genius British-style pop musician and songwriter. To yet another audience, he was a doomed and despairing artist who spent several years battling the bottle, delivering anarchistic records and performances while thumbing his nose at all pretenses of stardom, a quirky iconoclast whose influence spawned the likes of the Replacements and Teenage Fanclub.

For a guy who grew up in and around Memphis, there wasn't anything remotely Southern about Alex Chilton. Although fully aware of his surroundings, and in tune spiritually with its most lunatic fringe aspects, Alex Chilton's South had more to do with genteel Southern intellectualism than rednecks.

Chilton started playing music in local Memphis high-school combos, alternating between bass and rhythm guitar with a stray vocal thrown in, finally working himself up to professional status with a group called the DeVilles. After acquiring a manager with recording connections tied to Memphis hitmakers Chips Moman and Dan Penn, Alex and the group – newly renamed the Box Tops – recorded "The Letter," a record that sounded white enough to go to number one on the pop charts and yet black enough to track on R&B stations, too. Chilton was still in his teens, but armed with a strong conception of how pop and R&B vocals should be handled. With the hand of vocal coach Dan Penn firmly in place, the hits kept coming, with "Cry Like a Baby," "Soul Deep," and "Sweet Cream Ladies" all showing visible chart action. The Box Tops were stars by AM radio singles standards, but tours in general opened Chilton's eyes to the world and what it had to offer. And what that world seemed to offer Chilton was a lot more artistic freedom than he had as nominal leader of the Box Tops.

After a few errant solo sessions, Chilton found himself in Big Star with singer/guitarist Chris Bell. Their blend of ethereal harmonies, quirky lyrics, and Beatlesque song structures appeared to be radio-friendly, but distribution for their label, Ardent Records, spelled disaster. With Bell gone and the label hanging on by a thread, Chilton went into the studio with producer Jim Dickinson and attempted to put together the third Big Star album. These sessions, now known as Sister Lovers, are legendary in some quarters. Much has been read into this recording, primarily the myth that Chilton became a pop artist who, in the face of critical success but commercial apathy, suddenly rebelled against the system and became a "doomed artist on a collision course to Hell." Chilton himself dismissed all such romantic notions: "I think that to say that it's a fairly druggy sort of album that is the work of a confused person trying to find himself or find his creative direction is a fair statement about the thing."

Around 1976, Chilton started producing a wild cross section of solo outings for various foreign and American independent labels, all featuring his love for obscure material, barbed-wire guitar playing, howling feedback, and bands that sounded barely familiar with the material. As he plugged into the bohemian punk rock scene of New York City, Chilton's anarchic approach and attitude fit the scene like a glove. In addition to his gigging and performing schedule, Chilton also produced the debut session by the Cramps, helping to land their deal with I.R.S. Records. Chilton was getting legendary enough to end up having a song by the Replacements named after him. Through the late '80s into the early '90s, he split his time between recording, gigging overseas plugging his latest release, and playing oldies shows in the U.S., reprising his old Box Tops hits. In the early '90s, Chilton – relocated to New Orleans, his demons behind him – began releasing a series of excellent solo albums on the newly revived Ardent label and even participated in a couple of reunions (of both Big Star and the Box Tops). A studio album from Big Star appeared in 2005, although it included only Jody Stephens from the original lineup. The band also played high-profile gigs in England and America, while in 2009 Rhino issued a definitive box set, Keep an Eye on the Sky. One year later, however, on the eve of 2010's SXSW festival, Chilton died in New Orleans of heart failure. allmusicguide

In Memphis, like everywhere else, the 1970's have left their toll of lost dreams and endless disillusions. A 'Lost Decade' according to the title of this album, now available for the first time on a digital format. Originally released in 1986, this double album evidences the outstanding route of one of Memphis' prodigal son, during a decade in which he would go from universal teenage acclaim with the Box Tops to the fucked up New York hipness of the late Seventies. Being an introduction to a body of work whose legend then outreached its reality, 'Lost Decade' is a fascinating insight of a unique artist and producer's career.
Recorded right after he left the Box Tops at 1457 National, Ardent Studio's second location, « Free Again », « Come On Honey », « I Can Dig It » and « Just To See You » should have been released on Alex's first solo album.This record should have come out on Atlantic or Brother, The Beach Boys' own record label. Eventually, this album never saw the light of day on vinyl. These four tracks are now part of « 1970 », the famed 'lost album' published in 1996, a transition record between the Box Tops' blue-eyed soul/pop and Big Star's transcendent rock'n'roll. A former Lawson & Four More band member as well as a solo artist and a producer of certain Box Tops sessions, Terry Manning helps out Alex on those tracks, playing the piano and bass. Richard Rosebrough, another Ardent regular, once drummer with the garage band Four Jokers and later part of Memphis 'supergroup' Alamo, also plays on those sessions from 1969 and 1970, as well as an uncredited Chris Bell, Alex's future alter ego in Big Star. « Free Again » already demonstrates a remoteness from the music industry world. It's almost a freedom chant from Alex, already fed up with the great music circus, after he understood the whole thing when he reached the heights of the charts at age sixteen with the irresistible smash-hit « The Letter ».
In a less classic vein, « Bangkok », where Thailand's capital becomes a small Indonesian city, should have been an immediate staple of the New York punk scene. « It was a fun and spontaneous session. I conceived this piece in one day with my upstairs neighbour, Lenny Lincoln, a CBGB's bartender. And later that week I recorded that tune at Big Apple Studio, playing all the instruments by myself except for the maracas which were courtesy of Chris Stamey » remembers Alex. Following a London Cramps post-production session, he recorded « Can't Seem To Make You Mine ». This brilliant cover of the Seeds' garage anthem is still a highlight of teenage love anxiety. « I doubt that session ever got paid » soberly comments Alex. Raw and shaky, « Walking Dead » sums up the dark and troubled road followed by Alex in mid-70s Memphis, in the wake of Big Star's 1974 chaotic and moody recordings, resulting in the « Third » album. «Take Me Home And Make Me Like It », presented here in its third version, was recorded by Alex at Ardent Studio in 1975. The song supposedly finds its title in a pick-up line used by Danny Graflund, then Alex's body-guard. Legend has it that Dan Penn also wanted to use this line as a title for one of his song.
Well known for his Cramps, Tav Falco or Gories' productions, Alex Chilton had an immoderate use of Ardent Recordings facilities since 1972, a time when Big Star was recording a music too beautiful and uncompromised for the 1970's. Its in this Madison Avenue studio, often used by Stax as a studio B that Alex became producer, almost in spite of himself.
Coming from Mississippi, Sugar Blues was a white band under contract with Steve Cropper. After his departure from Stax in 1970, Booker T. & The MG's guitar player had teamed up with ex-Gentrys manager Jerry Williams in order to launch the TMI, short for Trans-Maximus, record label and recording studio. Sugar Blues probably spent hours and hours recording tapes at TMI, before this studio called it a day like Stax and most of other Memphis recording studio of the 1970's. « I was living right by Danny Jones. He used to write songs and played bass with other Memphis musicians. At that time, I had unlimited access to Ardent. That's how we ended up jamming in the studio one night. This track, my favourite one on 'Lost Decade', it was improvised on the spot » remembers Alex. The presence of incendiary guitar player Glen Cammack, the former leader of local garage band The Coachmen, might explain the incandescence of this hallucinated and almost jazzy jam. Maybe someday, unheard TMI material will surface, with bands as obscure as Acrobat, Edgewood, Washrag or Watchpocket, a band in which Danny Jones would play after the Sugar Blues episod, before he became an engineer and producer for the likes of The Neville Brothers, James Carr or Johnny Adams.
All the more informal was the recording of Larry Davis' 'Special Friend', done at the same period, circa 1973. Hailing from West Memphis, on the other side of the Mississippi River, Larry Davis was at the right place in the right time when he recorded this track at Ardent's Madison Avenue location. A Procapé Café regular, a place known for being the hub of an anachronistic mid-1970's folk-boom, Larry Davis played wiht other regulars like Sid Selvidge, Lee Baker or Alex Chilton. It was during one of those Memphis endless nights that Alex took Larry over to Ardent in order to record him in a state of the art facility. This intimist track leads us to Memphis' heart of darkness, Alex also holding back the night behind his recording deck, for want of closing up the opening door at the beginning of the song.
A mandolin player, né Weißrot, Graddy Whitehead is certainly the most exotic of these four artists. Alex met him in 1970 as a bluegrass player in Washington Square when he was still considering possible a folk career in New York City. Older than him, Alex gave Graddy his contact in Memphis. Visiting the South, Graddy called up Alex, who decided to give a try at recording him. « He could never really play in rhythm altough he was artisticcally inclined » according to Alex. None of these two tracks being released at that time, Graddy, like the other artists here, soon went back to the limbo he came from. Later, he happened to live in New Orleans, four blocks down the road from his one-time ephemeral producer, where he died in the most complete anonymity a few years ago.
A Memphis native, Scott Adams is probably the most conventional of those four artists, giving way to a good but unspectacular southern blues rock. Joined by Richard Rosebrough, a Ardent Studio veteran and John Lightman, who was at that time Andy Hummel's sub in Big Star, these recordings convey the feelings of Memphis debauchery nights. Prolific songwriter and guitar player Michael Elliott, will later make himself a name in Christian rock, playing with Whitecross in the mid-80's, years away from the intoxicated and noxious atmosphere of those four tracks. Scott Adams' honesty with lines as poignant as « the trouble is nobody cares » might also somehow have been an influence on Big Star's « Third », almost an Alex solo lp, whose sessions took place around the same time, with the same players, led by an om inevitable Jim Dickinson.
It's another page of Memphis music secret history that is written with « Lost Decade », a decade not lost for everyone, Alex Chilton reaching here a rare apex as an artist and a producer.
Florent Mazzoleni
Bordeaux 26/08/2003 lastcallrecords.com

Chilton: Lost Decade
Krisenjahre eines Genius
Von Bruno Jaschke

Wenn es an die größten Bands aller Zeiten geht, ist Big Star ein Household Name. Er fehlte denn auch nicht in einer jüngst vom Rolling Stone erstellten Liste der 500 besten Alben aller Zeiten. Für das breite Publikum ist er ein spanisches Dorf, im besseren Fall ein Buch mit sieben Siegeln: Man hat vielleicht schon über die Gruppe gehört, nichts aber von ihr selbst.

Big Star existierten nur kurz, zwischen 1971 und 1974 (mit posthumen Nachwehen bis 1978). Doch eigentlich fängt die Geschichte früher an: 1967 machte ein weniger als zwei Minuten langer Song, "The Letter", Furore und wurde mit 4 Millionen Exemplaren die meistverkaufte Single des Jahres. Das angesoulte Stück Pop, das aus der Feder des (eigentlich im Country beheimateten) Songwriters Wayne Carson Thompson stammte, war in Memphis unter dem Kommando des Produzenten Dan Penn gefertigt worden; pro forma gab's dazu auch eine Band, die Box Tops. Deren Sänger war der 16-jährige Alex Chilton.

Penn und die Plattenfirma Bell Records hielten die Box Tops, die noch weitere Hits wie "Soul Deep" oder "Cry Like A Baby" hatten, an der kurzen Leine. Wenn es sich fügte, durfte Chilton sogar eigene Songs beisteuern ("I Must Be The Devil"), doch wurde gegen seinen Willen seine gesamte Begleitband ausgetauscht und ihm vorgeschrieben, wie er zu singen habe: "hart" und "rau", ganz gegen die Natur seiner hohen, klaren, fragilen Stimme.

1969 verließ Chilton die Box Tops mitten in einem Konzert. Nachdem er sich einmal ordentlich geräuspert hatte, tat er sich mit seinem Schulfreund Chris Bell zusammen, um eine Band mit dem bescheidenen Namen Big Star zu gründen und eine Platte mit dem ebenso bescheidenen Titel "#1 Record" zu veröffentlichen. Sie wurde nichts dergleichen, nicht zuletzt deshalb, weil ihr Label Ardent und dessen Vertrieb Stax im Umgang mit weißem Pop keine Erfahrung hatten. Das zweite Album "Radio City", ohne den ausgestiegenen (1978 tödlich verunglückten) Chris Bell und wohl deshalb etwas grober als der eingängige Erstling, floppte noch stärker und als Big Star 1974 ihr drittes Album fertig stellten - das genauso gut als erstes Solo-Album des praktisch alleinherrschaftlich waltenden Chilton gelten könnte -, fand sich keine Plattenfirma mehr, die daran interessiert war. Es dauerte bis 1978, bis ein erster Release herauskam, und bis 1992, bis es in der heute als verbindlich geltenden Zusammenstellung und Abfolge (bei Rhino) veröffentlicht wurde.

Dieses fatale Versäumnis terminiert sich indes insofern selbst, als die Platte, die nicht einmal einen einheitlich verbindlichen Titel hat - die gängigsten sind "Third" bzw. "Sister Lovers" - bis heute kaum Jahresringe angesetzt hat. Ohne zu irgendwelchen formal "avantgardistischen" Mitteln greifend, präsentiert sie allein durch Chiltons extrem schwankende Stimme und seiner oft auf Crashkurs mit den Songstrukturen steuernden Gitarre ein einzigartiges Klangbild: neurotisch, aufgelöst, zerstört. "Holocaust", das eine persönliche Tragödie erzählt, ist vielleicht das beste Stück Depression, das die Pop-Geschichte aufzuweisen hat. Gleichzeitig ist es die krasseste Ausformulierung der Grundstimmung dieses dritten Albums.

Zwei Stücke, "Walking Dead" und "Take Me Home & Make Me Like It", knüpfen auf Alex Chiltons kürzlich erschienener Doppel-CD-Kompilation "Lost Decade" an "Third/Sister Lovers" an. Ansonsten be-wegt sich Chilton hier bereits in anderen Fahrwassern. Seinem Punk-'n'-Roll-Klassiker "Bangkok" dürfte Jon Spencer einiges an Inspiration verdanken, in der Cover-Version des Seeds-Songs "I Can't Seem To Make You Mine" fühlt er tief Sky Saxons Verlustangst nach, während er sich bei "I Can Dig It" komfortabel im Südstaaten-Blues suhlt.

Der Titel "Lost Decade" bezieht sich auf die 80er Jahre - und ist nicht als Verdikt von Chiltons gleichwohl für erratische Fehltritte anfälliges Schaffen zu verstehen, sondern bezieht sich auf seine teilweise miserable persönliche Verfassung in dieser Zeit. Durch Erfolglosigkeit und die üblichen Segnungen des Rock-'n'-Roll-Lifestyle (Alkohol, Kettenrauchen, Affären) auf den Hund gekommen, verdingte er sich kurze Zeit sogar als Tellerwäscher.

Völlig verloren waren die 80er Jahre allerdings insoferne nicht, als in ihrer zweiten Hälfte eine rege Clinton-Wiederentdeckung durch Prominenz wie R.E.M., die Violent Femmes oder auch die Bangles startete. Die Replacements brachten 1987 sogar einen Hommage-Song, "Alex Chilton", heraus. Chilton, der seit 1982 in New Orleans lebt und in den letzten Jahren hauptsächlich (meist stimmige) Adaptionen alter R&B-Standards herausgebracht hat, ist auch ein renommierter Produzent. Diesem Tätigkeitsbereich ist die zweite der Doppel-CD "Lost Decade" gewidmet. Leider unterschlägt sie, wohl aus plattenfirmenpolitischen Gründen, seine Arbeit am CrampsDebüt-Album "Songs The Lord Taught Us" genauso wie jene für Tav Falco & Panther Burns. Das Trumpf-As dieser Werkschau ist der schwüle, getriebene Blues von Scott Adams, der in Songs wie "Mojo Man" oder "Trouble" recht anschaulich ausstellt, bei wem er sein Handwerk gelernt hat: bei Alex Chilton. wiener zeitung