Driving endless hours, getting on each other’s nerves, never staying anywhere long enough to see anything except a hotel room. We were booked so much that we were on the road constantly. [Although] we had an hour’s worth of songs and that was it.’
Within a few short weeks of ‘The Letter’ being released, the Box Tops went from being an unknown southern band to a nationwide smash that everyone had heard of. The success of ‘The Letter’ got the band an opening slot for a series of Beach Boys shows at the request of Brian Wilson. The first night was in front of 15,000 Beach Boys fans in Indianapolis. With no time to mentally prepare himself, Chilton just closed his eyes and sang his heart out. In the autumn of 1967 a further tour was booked through the Carolinas as part of a black revue which included Wilson Pickett and Carla Thomas. The Box Tops were the only white act in the show, but the audiences included lots of white kids because soul music was now cool.
At the end of the year ‘The Letter’ was nominated for two Grammy awards, alongside the Beatles’ ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ and the Monkees’ ‘I’m A Believer’, but in both cases (Best Performance By a Vocal Group and Best Contemporary Group Performance, Vocal Or Instrumental) the winner was the 5th Dimension’s ‘Up, Up and Away’.
Mala now needed an album to follow up on the single’s success so they sent the band to Rick Hall’s studio in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. It was of course the new line-up, not the one that had recorded ‘The Letter’, and it just didn’t work. After a single session Penn called a halt to proceedings. The Box Tops’ version of ‘Break My Mind’ was used from the Muscle Shoals session but Chilton was the only band member to perform on the rest of the album as he sang it live with the house band. By now he’d discovered Hendrix and Buffalo Springfield and was already losing interest in his own output.
‘We found out later that on the Musician’s Union contracts that were filed for our record sessions, our names were purposely omitted,’ says Gary Talley. ‘The studio musicians at American Studios were under contract with Chips Moman, and they got paid for every Box Tops session that was booked, whether they were there or not.’
The debut album, imaginatively titled The Letter / Neon Rainbow after the group’s first two singles, included three Wayne Carson Thompson songs. As well as the two title tracks, Thompson’s ‘She Knows How’ made it onto the album, featuring a funky melody and another gravelly Chilton vocal. The tight rhythm section of house band was augmented by the Stax-like horn section and more soaring strings reminiscent of ‘The Letter’. The debut single was also hinted at in the cover of Bacharach and David’s ‘Trains & Boats & Planes’. Reminiscent of ‘The Letter’, this track starts off with a sound-effects overload as first a night train’s lonesome wail, then an ocean liner’s deep roar and then another jet plane zipping by gives forty seconds of intro before the vocals start. ‘Break My Mind’ is a country-tinged, pedal-steel singalong. A cover of ‘A Whiter Shade Of Pale’ lacks the atmosphere of the original.
The album also features a trio of Penn-Oldham songs, ‘Everything I Am’, ‘I’m Your Puppet’ and ‘I Pray For Rain’, and a brace of Bobby Womack tracks, ‘Gonna Find Somebody’ and the excellent ‘People Make The World’ with stunning backing vocals from the Sweet Inspirations. The other outstanding song on the album was ‘Neon Rainbow’, which despite a title that hints at psychedelia sounds like nothing of the sort. While some complained it lacked the verve and immediacy of its predecessor, the band’s second single has aged very well. It was considered a flop at the time because it sold ‘only’ a half-million copies, partly because many people didn’t link it to the same band that had sung ‘The Letter’. But it was actually a perfect piece of mid-1960s pop, after an understated first verse, bursting into life in the chorus. Overall The Letter / Neon Rainbow was a diverse record that has stood the test of time very well against its contemporaries like Paul Revere and the Raiders, the Righteous Brothers and the Young Rascals. At the time Chilton told the Memphis Press-Scimitar: ‘Our style is not having one. We just like to be ourselves. We don’t want to be rut addicts.’
In December 1967 Chilton received his first royalty cheque, for a very healthy 11,000 dollars. But December also saw Danny Smythe and John Evans play their last shows with the band; they quit within a couple of weeks of each other. ‘I’d dropped out of college that fall and lost my draft exemption,’ explains Smythe. ‘That December I decided I had to go back or I would end up in Vietnam. The record royalties put me through college and I became a graphic artist. I was heavily influenced by Alex’s parents, who ran an art gallery out of his home, [where] there were paintings floor to ceiling in every room.’ Smythe had also become disillusioned with the way the band was managed and suspicious about where all the money was going. ‘[Mack] got a lot more money than we did. He talked us into a bad contract. He said he had control over the name “Box Tops”, and could replace anyone who didn’t go along with what he said. We never got a clear accounting of the money from the royalties or the gigs. We were paid an allowance and told the rest would come later. In some instances we were told that he never got paid for some gigs, and we had no way to follow up on it. It was all so frustrating.’ Evans also went to Memphis State but didn’t enjoy it and ended up serving in Germany with the US military. He was replaced on keyboards by Rick Allen, who’d played with the Gentrys, the Coachmen and the Yo-Yos, while the drum stool was taken by Tom Boggs, a veteran of the Counts and the superbly monikered Flash and the Board of Directors.
To keep the wave of success fresh in the minds of the record-buying public, a second album was recorded in early 1968 and speedily released in April. It marked a return to commercial form. The next single, ‘Cry Like a Baby’ (also the name of the album), peaked at number two in the US chart.
The song had come to Penn and Oldham in a flash of inspiration. The pair were frantically trying to write a hit single for the band but were getting nowhere. They decided to take an early lunch break and headed over to a local diner. At the end of the meal, discussing his writer’s block, Oldham slumped forward saying, ‘I’m so frustrated with this, I could cry like a baby’. It was a eureka moment for Penn, who rushed his writing partner back to the studio where they knocked out their song in record time. The compulsive beat and the perfect blend of pop and soul pushed the single to sell over a million copies.
The album Cry Like a Baby was a rather more hit and miss affair. ‘Deep In Kentucky’’s undercurrent of horns and counter melody never really got going, ‘Weeping Analeah’ was a powerful waltz provided by Dan Folger and Mickey Newman, who had also written for Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs, and ‘Trouble With Sam’ could be the Kinks mixed with Scott Walker. Unfortunately these highlights were tempered by the overly slushy ‘Good Morning Dear’ and ‘727’, which is basically a poor man’s ‘The Letter’ (it expresses the same sentiments: ‘727 take me to heaven / 727 take me home / I gotta see my baby’ [Penn-Oldham]).
It even has the same solo drum ‘tap-tap-tap-tap’ that opened ‘The Letter’ buried mid-song; and the closer, ‘You Keep Me Hanging On’, is a sludgy version of the song made famous by the Supremes (and later a hit for Kim Wilde). It’s not even saved by an impassioned Chilton vocal. The sloppiness even spread to the album cover. When Gary Talley was ill for the photo shoot, the designers got a stand-in to go at the back of the group, then drizzled water over the window the band was peering through to disguise the fact that the guitarist wasn’t even there.
Buoyed by the success of ‘Cry Like a Baby’ the band went back on tour, first with the Beach Boys and later at festivals with the likes of Fleetwood Mac, Canned Heat and the Turtles. They also did the rounds of TV shows with appearances on Tonight With Johnny Carson, American Bandstand and The Merv Griffin show. Local music fan, and later writer and friend of Chilton, Ross Johnson recalls their TV appearances. ‘They did Talent Party, which is where my mother noted Alex’s all-too-visible unease at being in front of the cameras,’ he says. ‘I seem to recall them playing live on a show or two, as opposed to simply miming as they did on Talent Party, and they sounded surprisingly good.’
The third Box Tops album, Non-Stop, hit the shelves in July 1968 and was the first to lack a bona fide hit single. The album relied heavily on previously used song-writing templates and it offered