Meanwhile… I'm Still Thinking

This’ll be the last one…

Alex Chilton’s death is a difficult one to get a handle on. Grief takes on a life of its own, and sometimes you really don’t know what it is you’re grieving about.

In the 70s Alex’s music re-wired my mind in ways that no other artist did at the time – at first the songs were bright and shiny, but with words that conveyed yearning and confusion. Later on the music became messy and confused and the words, desperate. It was exactly like real life, and maybe the reason this hits some of us so hard is that we watched this guy get knocked to the mat over and over and still manage to get back up and keep going.

It just seems that (like all of us) he deserved to someday be old and happy, and he didn’t make it to the finish line because his body gave out on him. His artist life reflected our private lives in so many ways, and it’s a little scary to think that we can have so many ups, downs, struggles and successes, loves, hopes, satisfactions… and then nothing.

He already wrote about the nothing part, so in a way I guess he’s prepared us a little for that, too.

My kids have “I’m In Love With A Girl” on their iPods (thanks, House) and can sing along to “In The Street”, and we will have an Alex Chilton appreciation night soon – wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if another generation got re-wired the same way we were.

Built up and trusted, broke down and busted
They’ll get theirs and we’ll get ours if we can just…

Hold on

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.

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Brrrrrriiinngg

“Hello?”

“Hey Shane, it’s Joan. Guess what? I just met Alex Chilton!”

“Wow, I can’t believe it! What did you talk about?”

“Nothing much, but he asked me out.”

“Well, you gotta go.”

“You’d be OK with it?”

“Absolutely! It’s Alex Chilton!”

“Well I already said yes.”

“Oh.”

So my girlfriend went out with Alex Chilton. She didn’t have much to say about it afterward except that he was a really nice, funny and sincere guy who was quite sure that it mattered that she was born in September. They never went out again, so I guess the December Boys thing must have been tough to shake on a first date.

Back in 1977 I went to see Alex Chilton at CBGB in New York. The band at the time included Chris Stamey and a drummer (can’t remember who it was) and Alex walked on stage with a fanzine in his hand that said “Big Star” on the front cover. He then played a wonderful set that included “My Rival”, “Shakin’ The World” and (I think) The Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”, which Stamey seemed to not want to do. After the show I got up the nerve to ask him if he needed or wanted a keyboard player in his band and he said he’d give me a call, which he did.

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