says Chilton. ‘I started writing the next year, 1968, or something like that, attempting to find my writing style.’ When Chilton finally did get the chance to try out one of his own songs he didn’t feel he was taken seriously. ‘It always sounded shitty the way they did it. They’d spend twenty hours working on a project of theirs and I’d get sent in with an apprentice engineer and some bad musicians for thirty minutes and get to record my song. The attitude around was, “Well, you’re just the artist, we’re the ones who come up with the songs, we’re the ones who make it sound good, we’re the musicians, you’re just the singer and you don’t know how to play a guitar or anything.”’
‘I Must Be The Devil’, which features a spiralling bluesy piano and a hypnotic rhythm section that surrounds an impassioned vocal from Chilton, was his best composition to date, while ‘(The) Happy Song’ is an upbeat country-pop effort but little more. The album closed with another glaring example of the lack of new material when ‘Rock Me Baby’, which appeared on Non-Stop, was extended from three minutes forty-six seconds to a blues jam of almost ten minutes to end side two.
The atmosphere on the final Box Tops dates during the autumn of 1969 was worsening. Conflicts between new band members, unsatisfactory live performances and falling chart placings all added to the general malaise. ‘Our financial statements were two or three months behind,’ says Gary Talley. ‘Our manager and his attorney were getting their money right off the top, so the band was paying for everything from pencils to studio time. We’d had two gold records and were getting an advance of 150 dollars a week apiece and the band was exhausted from touring.’
‘In the winter of 1969 and 1970, I’d had more than I could stand and so finally, in a huff, I just blew it off,’ says Chilton. ‘So that’s how we disbanded.’ The final straw came during a planned two-week tour of England in December. The band arrived in London three days before the tour was to begin. After checking into their hotel on Bayswater Road they prepared to rehearse but ‘our rehearsal space turned out to be in the basement of an elementary school while school was still in session,’ recalls Talley. ‘As we walked in with our guitars, we were surrounded by boisterous six-year-olds with funny accents. We were led to the basement, where our gear for the tour was supposed to be set up for us.
‘Our equipment rider had specified what amps, drums and keyboards were to be provided. What waited was quite unexpected. We were greeted by our opening act, a West Indian reggae band called King Ollie and The Raisins. Their equipment was what we were going to have to use on the tour. Instead of Ludwig or Slingerland drums, there was a tiny drum kit identical to the one I received for my birthday when I was ten. Instead of the Fender amps, there were Marshall P.A. amps, not guitar amps. The not-Hammond B3 organ was a tiny Farfisa, but it did have a big wooden Leslie cabinet. We soon learned that the loud clunking sound we were hearing came from the broken rotating speaker in the Leslie, which banged against the cabinet every time it turned.’ The band’s management’s attempt to cut costs was at the expense of things that were vital for touring success in a foreign country.
Chilton and Talley discussed the situation and agreed that the band had reached the end of the road, literally. The tour was cancelled and some of the entourage went home and others stayed in England for a vacation, taking the opportunity to visit France. There was no storming offstage as has been reported elsewhere: it was all pretty low key.
Back in August 1969 the actress wife of Roman Polanski, Sharon Tate, along with four others, was viciously murdered and mutilated in California. As 1969 drew to a close the police made an arrest and Alex Chilton found out about it during his impromptu vacation in London. ‘We were walking down the street with road manager Cleve Dupin,’ recalls Gary Talley. ‘We approached a newsstand and on the front page of the London Times was something that made Alex and Cleve turn white as two sheets. There on the cover was a guy who they had lived with for a few days at Dennis Wilson’s house in Malibu – Charles Manson!’ Manson had been arrested and was later convicted for the murders.
For a band that had started out so optimistically, and successfully, with ‘The Letter’, its gradual decline was all the more disappointing and frustrating. The final act was the spring 1970 release of a compilation Super Hits and the posthumous single ‘You Keep Tightening Up On Me’. Written by Wayne Carson Thompson and driven by the now familiar sitar-like guitar sound, it stuttered no further than number ninety-two in the US charts. By the end the Box Tops had had a total of seven US top forty hits (three had reached the top twenty in the UK) with the last being the peak of ‘Soul Deep’ at number twenty-two in August 1969. The touring version of the band had had a total of three different drummers, three guitarists, two keyboard players and a trio of bassists, but just the one lead singer.
There were rumours of a few shows put together by Roy Mack using a ‘fake’ band that didn’t include any of the previous members of the band but, apart from a short one-off appearance in 1989, it would be twenty-seven years before the original Box Tops played another show.
5 ‘We just figured we’d all be killed anyway’
Knoxville and Memphis, TN. 1967 to 1970
While most of the Box Tops’ recordings had been done at American Studios, an occasional bit of mixing or overdubbing was carried out across town at the high-tech Ardent Studios on National Avenue, owned by John Fry.
The first time Fry met Chilton was at one of these Box Tops sessions. ‘I met Alex when Dan Penn would come over to do some overdubs on Box Tops songs,’ he recalls. ‘I think “Cry Like a Baby” was the first thing we mixed for him. Sometimes Alex would come in with him to do some vocal overdubs. He wasn’t very talkative and my memory of him was his sitting on the floor in the corner waiting to do his part. Dan did the overdubs and mix at Ardent. He then went to Columbia Studios in Nashville to try another mix and brought that back to ask our opinion. It was awful; everything swimming in echo like it was emanating from the bottom of a well. We told Dan so and the Ardent mix was the one that would up being used.’
Terry Manning was an engineer at Ardent around this time and he also met Chilton during these sessions. ‘I had been working with Alex in the Box Tops and I played on “Cry Like a Baby”,’ explains Manning. ‘Dan Penn would come to Ardent and get me to engineer and mix for him. Mixing was starting to become this new thing rather than just what you ended up with when you finished recording. I also worked with Alex doing vocals for the Box Tops and I used to joke with him that I had played on more Box Tops records than any of the Box Tops!’
Ardent quickly became one of Memphis’s most sought-after studios and was always at the cutting edge of recording technology. This was a long way from the fabled ‘Granny’s sewing room’ where Fry had started recording as a teenager. Fry had been born in Memphis on New Year’s Eve 1944, his father worked in the building material business and his mother had worked as a bookkeeper. While still in junior high (at PDS) Fry had assembled his first studio at his parents’ home on Grandview Avenue. ‘There was a room on the house that had originally been the garage,’ explains Fry. ‘That was enclosed and another garage was built. The control room was in the old garage. Then there was another room attached to the new garage, about seventy-five feet away, that had originally been built for my maternal grandmother who lived with us, but she never really had anything to do with it. So that became the studio and we ran the cables out there and had the control room in the original garage.’
It was quite an undertaking for a junior-high-school student, but he already had a partner. His friendship with John King dated back to very early school days. ‘I was interested in electronics and I was particularly interested in the radio,’ recalls Fry. ‘John King was my co-conspirator in this and we’d go to great lengths to listen to out-of-town stations and we had a pirate radio station and I was into building the equipment myself. This was late 1950s, early 1960s when it was much more common to build things yourself. We were into radio and into music but I can’t play a note and the only place I dare to sing is in church where there’s about five thousand others to hide it! I learned by trial and error and read stuff