A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

could do.”
    By 1960 close friends of the Chiltons from Mississippi intervened with a plan for lifting the family out of the deadening depression that had settled over them in Sherwood Forest. It involved leaving the suburbs behind for a mixed neighborhood in Midtown Memphis, from which many whites had fled over the past few years. “I was off to college, and the next thing I know, they’re buying this two-story house downtown,” recalls Cecelia. “All of a sudden it’s not the Bridge Club or the Garden Club; it’s artists and musicians. Everybody’s life changed.”

C HAPTER 3
Midtown
    Music and art filled the Chiltons’ elegant new home in Midtown Memphis, where the family moved in 1960. “It was a big old house, almost like a castle,” Alex remembered, “that we bought for a song.”
    The 4,400-square-foot limestone manse had been built around 1907 by the wealthy Schorr family, Germans who cofounded Memphis’s Tennessee Brewery in 1885. By 1960, 145 North Montgomery Street was considered part of “the inner city,” according to Alex. “That was apretty wild neighborhood, with a lot of slum kids hangin’ around,” he remembered, “a real breeding ground for a lot of things.” Montgomery was close to commercial strips chockablock with businesses and bars. The Chiltons’ house was on a short, leafy block with a large synagogue across the street, which sometimes sponsored teenage sock hops. Next door sat a stately mansion, owned for generations by a prominent Memphis family. On the other side, the large home had been divided into offices, including, for a time, a suicide-prevention crisis center. “We joked about how comforting it was to have it so handy,” Cecelia remembered with a laugh.
    From the beginning the plan was for Mary Evelyn to open an art gallery in the spacious home’s downstairs rooms. Ceramicists Pup and Lee McCarty, about ten years younger than the Chiltons, were making a name for themselves in tiny Merigold, Mississippi, as arty potters who dug clay from the backyard of William Faulkner’s Oxford home, Rowan Oak, and molded it into designs inspired by the Mississippi River Delta landscape. Lee had first met the Chiltons when he boarded with Mary Evelyn’s mother in his youth. Now, along with another friend from Mississippi, the McCartys and Chiltons pooled their resources to turn the parlor floor of the house into a gallery exhibiting the couple’s pottery and ceramics, along with contemporary art and other regional artisans’ work.
    They covered the walls and stained-glass windows with pegboard for hanging the art, painted everything white, including the ceiling crossbeams and oak woodwork, and replaced the vintage ceiling fixtures with contemporary lighting. Just behind the kitchen the Chiltons turned their backyard into a concrete courtyard and strategically placed McCarty ceramics throughout. The McCartys traveled to Mexico annually and brought home artwork and handcrafted objects to exhibit and sell at the gallery.
    Mary Chilton Galleries got its first press coverage in November 1962: “Dozens of men and women were coming out . . . carrying large paintings, pottery, statues, and other art objects,” the
Memphis Press-Scimitar
reported about a joint exhibition: a one-man show by a maker of mobiles and stabiles from Cuernavaca, Mexico, and “Own-Your-Own-Art,” featuring a hodgepodge of affordable pieces. The article reported such unbelievable bargains as a Picasso woodcut for $18.50 and an original Cézanne etching for $26, along with jewelry designed by Elsa Freund of Eureka Springs, Arkansas ($6.50), and ceramic pots made by Memphian Dodie Mann ($5).
    While Mary Evelyn concentrated on her art gallery, Sidney returned to his old love—jazz. “Around 1961Daddy started playing music again,” Cecelia remembers. Its location, in Midtown Memphis, made the Chilton home an easy stopover for jazz musicians going to and from a gig. “When I was ten, it was party time around