ALEX THE GREAT
The Box Tops
The Letter/Neon Rainbow
(Sundazed)
The Box Tops
Cry Like A Baby
(Sundazed)
The Box Tops
Nonstop
(Sundazed)
The Box Tops
Dimensions
(Sundazed)
Alex Chilton
Set
(Bar/None)
During the 20th century, two great White Negro voices arose from the South, and specifically, Memphis: Elvis Presley and Alex Chilton. Elvis was a relatively unsophisticated redneck mama’s boy. Alex, the lead singer of the Box Tops, was something else: a mannish boy with a hangover. His craggy, precocious voice, immortalized on 1967’s chart-topping “The Letter” (recorded when he was 16-years-old), was at least partially due to being fucked-up.
“I think I contributed to that roughness in my voice,” Alex explains in Jud Cost’s liner notes to Sundazed’s essential reissues of the Box Tops’ complete oeuvre. “I’d been up all night the night before, drinking a bit and hanging out with this girlfriend of mine. And we went into the studio at 10 a.m. on Saturday.”
The session’s producer (and the Svengali behind the Box Tops) Dan Penn thought Alex was singing too softly and chided him to be more assertive. “Like Bobby Blue Bland?” Alex asked. Exactly.
Later, when the song became a monster hit (followed by subsequent smashes “Neon Rainbow,” “Cry Like A Baby” and “Choo Choo Train”), deejays refused to believe that this pretty Southern Caucasian was the possessor of that “obviously-black” voice on the Box Tops’ records.
But Alex, then and now, is not easily categorized. If you examine photographs of the Box Tops, the rest of the band looks like geeky fraternity boys. Alex seethes with intensity, seducing the camera: James Dean with bangs.
Among the seductive oddities on the Box Tops discs are the covers: Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Trains & Boats & Planes,” Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham’s “I’m Your Puppet” (a hit for James and Bobby Purify), Bob Dylan’s “I Shall Be Released,” Holland-Dozier-Holland’s “You Keep Me Hanging On” (a hit for the Supremes and Vanilla Fudge) and Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale” (wherein Alex’s twang causes him a bit of trouble with the pronunciation of “vestal virgins”). Of course, these selections were producer Penn’s choices—Alex was merely biding his time until he was of legal age: “Some material that Dan chose wouldn’t have been my choice. But I could see that if I got out of line I was gonna have to go back to high school, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. So I stayed in line until I turned 18, and then I said, ‘To hell with y’all!’” When the Box Tops ceased to exist, Alex was a ripe old 19.
Approximately 30 years later, on the evening of February 21, 1999, Alex (now a resident of Treme) entered a New York studio and recorded Set in a single session, featuring himself on voice and guitar, backed by drummer Richard Dworkin and bassist Ron Easley. A collection of cover tunes, obscure and familiar, Set is the masterpiece of Alex Chilton’s brilliant idiosyncratic career. His guitar playing is impeccably distorted and his singing has never been rendered with such ruthless passion. When Alex declares that he’s “Never Found A Girl” or that “There Will Never Be Another You” or that “You’ve Got A Booger Bear Under There,” one does not detect any traces—lipstick or otherwise—of irony. He means it.
When he reincarnates Allen Toussaint’s “Lipstick Traces” and croons, “Every memory lingers—with me yet,” the thought of Alex creating a shrine out of his ex’s lipstick-tainted cigarette butts is not inconceivable. Benny Spellman’s original version was adolescent puppy-love compared to this. On Set, Alex Chilton enters the mature, psychologically-complex domain of Frank Sinatra. Except Frank could’ve never re-fried Brenton Wood’s “Oogum Boogum” with such hip audacity. Go on with your totally bad self!!
