Alex Chilton S&D

It's fun if not as epic as I'd hoped. As always, his choice of covers is impeccable.

I kind of sometimes want to be contrarian about that, but hard to find fault really.

sequence from Sweet Soul Music thread:

Judging by "Boogie Shoes" on YouTube, most of the appeal of the Alex Chilton/Hi Rhythm live album might be insrumental, which reminds me: here they are with Terry Manning, better known as a producer and engineer at Ardent etc. but his rough-and-ready vocal approach works better with HRS live than Chilton's (comparing just one track to another):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5lyZHzReSk

(Chilton seems a bit cautious by comparison---their set was a one-off, but so was Manning's w HRS---filling in at the last minute for a no-show, and just taking the plunge, what the hell---this is the only live track on his album, and really seemed like the only keeper---according to the press sheet, he did a Box Tops Chilton parody for kicks, and was ordered to create an album around it, which mostly seemed like filler, but I didn't listen much)

However!
So Chilton does okay after all, though yeah of course Hi Rhythm Gang is the main interest, esp. horns and bass, though everybody steps up--most songs go on a little over four minutes and a half minutes; the studio originals were at least a minute shorter, but but we get more solo turns and full Section flexing, comfortably. Fave is the penultimate performance, "Hello Josephine," where a Hi man starts the vocal, Chilton coming in later: a very robust 7:12 work-out, calm as ever. Also: Motown gets the Memphis treatment on "Where Did Our Love Go," with Chilton as okay stand-in for Diana Ross, though this is one of he shorter ones, as it probably should be).Does not sing as high, loud and fast there as on "Lucille" or "Maybelline." Sounds like Pat Boone looking to go rong on "Kansas City." Any of yall heard this one? xgau sez:
On the Loose [Hi, 1976]
In which Al Green's sidemen, perhaps disgruntled at Al's unwillingness to record their material, get together and cut it. Some stickler for detail is sure to point out that the singing on side two is completely out of tune, but that's OK--so is most of the singing on side one, which I prefer to Full of Fire. One of the more carefully thought out tracks features a mildly malicious lyric about Green himself, but it's the eccentricity of the music, which sounds as if it includes a banjo, that does him in. Loose indeed. A-
Anyway, very good music for a holiday weekend, has me looking to go for b-b-q chicken.

― dow, Thursday, July 1, 2021 4:33 PM

Well, I attended the 1999 show from which came the latest Chilton live album. At the time I thought it was just a gig for him. His patented guitar sound didn't work in that context. Last time I ever saw Alex. But the live album is really good. He sings so well and easily. I used to think he sloughed off the vocals and got over on the guitar--which could also get messy. But I was wrong. I think "Live in Anvers" is his best live album and the definitive Alex one-stop.

The fact he was friends with Ray Davies when Ray Davies was living in New Orleans is pretty cool.

Right. I love Ray Davies rendition of a New Orleans accent.

There's quite a lot about their friendship in the Americana book.

*birthday bump*

Alex sounds a lot better to me, 11 years after he departed this plane for a heaven filled with Little Beaver albums, high-grade weed and lamb chops prepared by busty Commie gurls. With mint jelly. In retrospect, he almost always sang well, often better than that, and hus guitar playing sounds more original than ever. I can't think of any other guitarist who managed to be both recessive and avant-garde.Structural and expressive. I don't even hear his post-1984 work as ironic--it's a kind of love. Most of his '80s EPs and about half of "High Priest" is brilliant and while "Man Called Destruction" aspires to the generic and remains ... inert? uncommitted? unreadable?, there are 3-4 tracks that work. I can't think of another major artist who did most of his best (mature) work live. I think he was one of the few major performers of the rock era who mastered the art of relaxation. I don't think I would have been comfortable calling Alex major 10 years ago, but now I am. As major as...Tom Petty or Roger MvGuinn or Gram Parsons.

Excuse the typos. Alex also was actually literate, so I guess I need to be more careful. Also, I think the bio by George-Warren is very flawed. There's not one bit about his style or approach in a practical sense. No discussion of how he got his guitar sound. Very light on his last decade. Alex needed a very tough person who was also a discerning ear to how musicians achieve their effects, which she's just too travails-of-thwarted-star to bother with. I actually can't think of one piece or book that gets him. I've read just about every interview ever done with him and listened to every interview I can find. From that you begin to get the picture. Alex was both a synoptic student of pop and rock and a guy who actually contributed to it, fundamentally at a Sun Records level. Which is completely singular.

That was a booming post, Edd, didn't even notice the typos. Second post too.

I always find it sort of interesting to compare him to Lou Reed. On the one hand, they shared some kind of orneriness and waywardness with respect to baiting their audiences and record companies if applicable. On the other hand, Alex had this interesting approach/avoid relationship to his material and his delivery, often recording and performing in kind of a deliberately offhand manner, but at the same time working on his craft (as George Martin said of George Harrison) perfecting or at least improving his guitar playing, building on those early lessons from Dennis Wilson while creating his own skewed version of a Great American Songbook - I can still hear his Memphis drawl saying "this is my favorite song" before performing "Single Again" by Gary Stewart. Whereas Lou ultimately seemed content with the classic career path of Undertutored But Inspired Genius Becomes Sacred Monster And Goes Out Playing Grand Old Man. I guess I still will take one from column A and column B as well though.

Alex learned from Carl Wilson directly, maybe Reggie Young and Bobby Womack at American, from Cropper, Dave Davies. Alex confounds and remains underappreciated by guitar musos because he played in timespace, not in harmonic vertical space--except when he provided the essential harmonic wheels of any particular song. Rhythm guitar. Not unlike Reed but so much warmer, fonder and more rooted in Mel Bay full-bodied chording that was also always right up on the beat, because he respected the song even as he wanted to remain minimalist. A disinclination to step on the bones but a totally funky, laggy, suggestive and non-tonal dirtiness in his non-solos. I know no other guitarist like him, and very few guitarists even come close to his style. Just drastically misunderstood in a world of Dickey Betts fans. Richard Lloyd is maybe Alex's only analogue? Obviously a far more conventionally fluent player, but still somewhat similar. ?

Ugh, didn't realize I typed Dennis instead of Carl. Monday, Monday.

Richard Lloyd is a great comparison, yeah.

Alex learned many other equally valuable lessons from Dennis. Cars and gurls.

Lol

The guitar world is maybe implicitly divided up into (with some overlap of course):

• "Real" Jazz guitarists playing chord melodies with at least four voices and as many altered/color tones as possible
• Rhythm guitarists of all stripes, who vary from playing a somewhat smaller subset of chords used above to only barre chords
• Single note soloists
• Double stop Chuck Berry-style
• Folky/Flamenco/Classical acoustic fingerpickers
• Outside (Lou, Sonny Sharrock, Bob Stinson, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker etc)

Maybe I should have had a separate Drone category and put John Lee Hooker in that along with, say, Ron Asheton. Also wondering what to do with Marshall Crenshaw as he has some similarities with Alex, although he is more conventional.

Yes - Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi hill country blues guys ( RL Burnside) along with Hooker

Yes, I was also thinking of those kinds of cats (Sorry, wrong thread). I think we are all familiar with the story of those guys having to play more "legit" for certain audiences. My friend from Detroit who I often mention who you met once although I'm not sure if either of you remember that now (I wasn't there) told me that John Lee Hooker once called up his uncle to take some lessons so he could play for the college crowd.

Yeah, blues with pop appeal, in the 50s, early 60s, when he was coming up in Memphis: BB King and Rufus Thomas, who were known as DJs early on---and think Rufus continued doing that some, after "Walkin' The Dog"?---Memphis Slim: those guys knew they had to compete with Elvis and so on (and Mississippi Sheiks, with their own Memphis connections, had already gone for crossover appeal, filling the gap left by Jimmie Rodgers from the other side, raciallY)---Little Richard his own kind of shattering blues-pop (esp. as my older Black customers in the CD store used "blues" to mean anything from one of the Kings to Johnny Taylor to Lattimore [father, not son, usually] to Smokey Robinson to Nat King Cole to Aretha to Eddie Floyd to Irma Thomas to Dusty Springfield). A necessary precursor to Hendrix at his psych-poppest, on debut Are You Experienced? and Joplin too:her sound is closer to his than any female artist I can think of (Yeah, I know she got "Ball and Chain" from Big Mama Thornton, who had a deeper range than Richard or Joplin's signature sonics).
Also, of course, when Sonny Sharrock was asked what he thought of punk, he said that he'd seen Little Richard at the Apollo in the mid-50s: "You can't get more punk rock than that."
Leading back to Richard Lloyd, whose own pop proclivities emerged more clearly on solo albums (though I think some of it was there in his Television playing, incl. how it fit into Verlaine's songs). Emerged more clearly when he wrote and produced his own tracks, although the caveman bellow and offkey impulses took him in a different direction.
Can imagine that Chilton was further encouraged in the blues-pop direction by his avowed fascination with early Rundgren, who went from blooze w Woody's Truck Stop to Nazz and early solo stuff----
But wait, where and when and what did he learn directly from Carl Wilson?

Carl Wilson gave him guitar lessons when The Box Tops toured with The Beach Boys.

There's an incredible paragraph about this in the HGW book that I am unfortunately being prevented from c&p-ing right now. Maybe can type in but not at the moment.

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1139408-and-i-learned-more-at-the-hands-of-carl-wilson

And there's more where that came from.

Thanks! Had been meaning to read that, w foggy notion that some personal/career-of-sorts historical context might help me keep his long and winding discography in focus (maybe not, though)

As Edd, pointed out, it is far from perfect, but it'll have to do for now in the place of anything else, although of course there are also books about Big Star and Chris Bell for that stuff.

Yeah, I got Rob Jovanovic's Big Star chronicle when it first came out, or at least the trade pb did (latter revised & updated, I now see) around the time of In Space and Cilton's Katrina adventure ---but this one might be good as memory-comprehension aid re solo releases---?

get back, typo!

Alex's guitar style is one weird thing after another. I can't think of any other rock guitarist who was more varied while at the same time so, not limited, but consistently identifiable even when he was aiming for what I believe he was interested in: a kind of anonymity. The stealth of the rhythm guitarists he liked, which had to include Teenie Hodges, Cropper, Reggie Young, Bobby Womack, Dave Davies, John Lennon and Snooks Eaglin. And basically every R&B guitarist who played chords and a combination of those chords and figured stuff behind a vocal. Also, Little Beaver on the Miami stuff with Betty Wright and his own great Party Down album. And Johnny Guitar Watson and Carl Wilson. Also Hendrix, whom I think Alex has more than a little affinity for and with whom Alex could've easily played with. That's a very odd set of reference points for a "rock" guitarist, like he aspired to be the guy in the background on a Brenton Wood record. It's also a style that seems to disappear in front of your ears--weightless, not really "bluesy" but totally blues-oriented, not "heavy" but strange, strangulated, and decidedly off-kilter amid the standard usages he favored. However the heck he did Radio City, that stands as a monument to anti-rock rock guitar as surely as anything by Johnny Thunders or Lou Reed. Whatever he's playing underneath the lines in "She's a Mover" that go "now all night" and "she's coming from," which in cover versions just gets turned into the chords themselves, very easy shit, is completely ineffable and functions as commentary that's never over the line into embellishment, but is obviously intended as commentary. That's an extremely subtle gift, and every single thing he plays on that record is actually just about the simplest stuff you can play. Not necessarily harmonically, but certainly it never strays from the most basic things. What remains so uncanny about Radio City is, if you listen to the thing enough and then stop to remember, this is rock 1973, you begin to realize that's its just one step over and across from completely standard playing, like the fucking James Gang and Rick Derringer and so forth, but it has a totally different feel. "September Gurls" in particular is so, so simple.

Also uncanny is the stuff on the third Big Star album. "You Can't Have Me" is just like I to IV chords, yet listen carefully and he's also juicing them with subtle dissonances and wide voicings--big chords. There's the barest hint of "jangle" in one section that disappears like Windex in the heat. "Thank You Friends" is like American Studio Craft, as if it's some Ronnie Milsap record produced by Chips Moman in 1970, just the barest hint of something outside the normal I-II-IV_V progression, a suspension that hooks you in. And again, just very simple. The Chilton space is one where things are up on the beat, and rendered in a tempo neither very slow or very fast, a medium tempo that allows for reflection. I think his least effective, but still interesting, guitar playing comes in 1977, when he does indeed sound something like Neil Young or Tom Verlaine. He's barely on his marks, skidding around and making a comedy act out of making the changes, but he makes them, mostly. Again, the basics: the version of "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It" on the CBGB-recorded One Day in New York set is exemplary blues-rock guitar 101, chugging along as the rhythmic pulse and one slangy lick that anchors the turnaround, the psychology of which he totally respects even as the "solo" careers almost out of the picture, like Richard Lloyd in Tops Barbeque in Memphis. Take it down into your own thang, son, and don't forget the sauce while you're down here with us.

Marshall Crenshaw is a better guitarist, I think, obviously, but Alex and Marshall Crenshaw are almost doin' the same thing, in general, and Crenshaw's "Seven Miles an Hour" is my single favorite thing he ever did, except for a song called "Passing Through" which is as beautiful as the most melancholy Big Star tunes, and it's Alex cleaned up, more uptight, in a carefully arranged room full of white furniture and 37-year-old ex-beauty queens both Alex and Marshall wish they knew better.

Weightless guitar, Reggie Young meets Hendrix meets Mick Ronson and goes out for a grilled cheese sandwich. Pretty much how I remember his guitar playing when he was in a good mood and on it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZcZk3PYeTkk

Wow, thanks! Also,
...exemplary blues-rock guitar 101, chugging along as the rhythmic pulse and one slangy lick that anchors the turnaround, the psychology of which he totally respects even as the "solo" careers almost out of the picture, like Richard Lloyd in Tops Barbeque in Memphis. Take it down into your own thang, son, and don't forget the sauce while you're down here with us is pretty much my impression of how he fit (esp. instrumentally: vocals are also respectful enough, while slightly campy, w/o irony [of lol what am I goofy white pop-rock boy doing here] getting too underlined) w Hi Rhythm on the xpost live one-off (I'm assuming it's that, but hope he did perform with them again at some point, recorded or not).

Alex had never met the Hi players in toto, except for Charles Hodges, who played on one track on Man Called Destruction, and never played with 'em again.

Did you note the "(Theme From) A Summer Place" quotation solo at the end of the first song on that video?

Excuse the typos. Alex also was actually literate, so I guess I need to be more careful. Also, I think the bio by George-Warren is very flawed. There's not one bit about his style or approach in a practical sense. No discussion of how he got his guitar sound. Very light on his last decade. Alex needed a very tough person who was also a discerning ear to how musicians achieve their effects, which she's just too travails-of-thwarted-star to bother with. I actually can't think of one piece or book that gets him. I've read just about every interview ever done with him and listened to every interview I can find. From that you begin to get the picture. Alex was both a synoptic student of pop and rock and a guy who actually contributed to it, fundamentally at a Sun Records level. Which is completely singular.

Edd, judging from the most recent thread revive, I think you are the one to write the book on LX.

Or if that's too stressful maybe we can have you hypnotized like the guy in PKD's Time Out of Joint so that you can write the book while you think you are doing something else.

Just was moved through the ILX pachinko game from the Doris Day to the Terry Melcher thread, which led me to listen to his jaw-dropping Is It Tone Deaf Or Genius? take on “Stagger Lee” which somehow reminded me of Alex’s approach.

Edd is now one of the lobes (along with ov mastermynd---Dickinson-Chilton-inspired---thee spirit and letter, incl. covers ov "Bangkok" and "Take Me Home and Make Me Like It," also a dystopian vision of Spooner and Karen Oldham----It Came From Nashville: https://f4.bcbits.com/img/a0267189080_10.jpg

In late 2020, after figuring out that the only thing I wanted to do musically was a kind of cabaret-style retrospect of some great songs I thought other people ought to know about, I assembled a group of Nashville musicians at Sundog Recording Studio with engineer and producer Michael Esser. We recorded six songs drawn from the mists of the 1970s, and added one instrumental I wrote myself. We cut with almost no rehearsal, and trusted to the unguarded moment to guide us in our reconstructions of these timeless tunes.
...Fayetteville, Paris, Nashville, Memphis, man, it's all the same on this record.
https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/album/varnished-suffrages
https://thecontactgroup1.bandcamp.com/album/varnished-suffrages

Sorry, I meant (along with *Michael Esser*)

Also meant *"1980,"* a dystopian vision of Spooner and Karen Oldham.

Nice!

Good production job Edd