If you ever got to see Alex Chilton perform, chances are pretty good that you saw him do something wacky.
A couple that I was there for:
During a Panther Burns show at the Peppermint Lounge in NY I watched him spend a whole song trying to take his jacket off without undoing his guitar strap. The jacket won that particular battle.
At Maxwell’s in Hoboken he was doing a version of the Shangri-Las “Past, Present and Future” and just when he said “Shall we Dance” and the band crescendoed he popped a string on his guitar, screamed “Awwww SHIT!” and (if I remember correctly) stopped the song. After changing the string he and the band started back up at exactly the point in the song that they had left off.
For wack-factor nothing will ever top his performance at a club in Brooklyn in the early 80s, and I hesitate to even write about it because it probably represents a low point in his career. The fact that he was ultimately able to rise from these ashes where so many before (and after) couldn’t makes this a testimonial to his intelligence and resilience.
The show was going to be about a block from where I was living, and so I called everybody I knew telling them that they had to see this guy. I probably got around 25 or so people rounded up – my sister came from Malone, my cousins from Connecticut, and lots of friends from Brooklyn and New York showed.
It looked bad right from the start – when we got there Alex wasn’t backstage somewhere, but slumped in a wooden chair on the stage wearing an old smoking jacket and dark glasses. For the half hour or so before the show actually started he just sat there rummaging through the pockets of his jacket looking for something (a cigarette? guitar pick? matches? a note?) he never found. My ex-girlfriend Joan wondered what was going on and actually went up there to talk with him but he was unable or unwilling to engage in any way.
The band finally walked out and it was a good one: Jim Duckworth on guitar and the amazing Jim Sclavunos on drums. They launched into “Bertha Lou”, Alex got out of his chair, walked over to the mic (no guitar) and started singing.
This was not the Alex Chilton I’d seen so many times before. There was no interaction with the audience or with the band – it was just some shell of a guy trying to get through a night of rockabilly covers without doing too much damage, and by the end of the show the club had emptied except for the people that I had brought and about a dozen others.
For good or for ill, those of us that were left called for an encore and I guess we got one. Alex went over to Duckworth, said “Gimme that,” grabbed the guitar and put it on. Without so much as a glance at the band he started playing “The Letter”. As soon as the rest of the band had caught up with him (“Anyway” at the end of the first chorus) he stopped, dropped the guitar on the floor and walked off stage.
As theater it was one of the most incredible shows I’ve ever seen but it was very sad, confusing and painful to watch. My sister, cousins and friends knew that they had just been through something, but weren’t sure what and didn’t want to talk about it. My cousin Walter though, would ultimately get every album he could get his hands on that was connected with Chilton in any way – Alex at 10% was still compelling enough through the haze to win over at least one new fan.
I’d see Alex again a few years later – clean, coherent, funny, playing guitar and dancing (the Bangkok Walk!) – so obviously this story has a happy ending of sorts.
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