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

my parents’ house,” Alex said. “I remember countless nights of going to sleep with, like, sixteen jazz musicians playing downstairs.” Some days, as Alex returned home from school and walked up the wide stone front steps, he could hear jazz wafting out. Sidney “and some friends would be jamming,” Alex remembered. “My dad played piano and he had an electric guitar player, bass, fiddle, and a drummer.” Alex told
Times-Picayune
reporter Keith Spera, “Five o’clock came, and two or three musicians were over at the house drinking heavily and playing and listening to records. That was every day.”
    Each summer, with the family in tow, the Chiltons would travel to Eureka Springs, Arkansas, for gatherings Sidney organized to socialize with other musicians and their families. “It was probably only a couple of years or so after Reid died when Sidney started having thesesummer get-togethers for musician friends from Jackson and Ole Miss,” Adele Brown Tyler recalls.
    The Browns adored the Chiltons but worried about Mary Evelyn and Sidney’s consumption of alcohol. Over the years the Browns had become more conventional: Army, a member of the Jackson Chamber of Commerce, would foundthe city orchestra; Iris gave up her job to be a full-time homemaker. At the Chiltons’ evening gatherings, Mary Evelyn would welcome her guests holding a bourbon and OJ in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Though Sidney had heart disease, he continued to sip bourbon and smoke heavily throughout the festivities. (It wasn’t until around the time that he had triple-bypass surgery in the ’70s that he quit smoking and drinking.) In 1997 Alex, during an onstage interview at Jazzfest in New Orleans, referred to his late parents as alcoholics and remembered their salons as including “a lot of crazy people all the time. I knew they were crazy. They didn’t know they were crazy.”
    The Browns had also expressed concern about the scant parental supervision on the Chiltons’ part as early as their time in the suburbs, but now, it seemed, Alex’s parents left him to fend for himself entirely, imposing no restrictions or demands of any kind on him. “I got the feeling thathe kind of raised himself,” Adele says, “and I did, too, to some degree, because I was also a much later child. Our parents had both started ten years earlier having kids, and we were at the tail end, and maybe they’d run out of energy or something.”
    Free of homework or any household chores, Alex listened to music. The Chiltons’ hi-fi sat next to a stack of vinyl that kept growing; just as he had absorbed his brother Reid’s Coasters 45, Alex devoured Sidney’s jazz discs, as he later described:
    I became a fan of his Glenn Miller records first, and then I went on to Ray Charles and Mingus, Cannonball Adderley, Dave Brubeck. . . . I was listening to a lot of records from his collection. He’d be listening to something and be fascinated with some element of a piece of music, and he would talk to me about it and describe the way it was put together. He shared what he liked with me. I might not have really understood it very well, but a lot of it stuck with me. . . . I became a big fan of Chet Baker, and that was when I first really wanted to sing. He first inspired me to sing when I was about 7.
    Sidney occasionally mentored Alex in jazz piano. “He’d come home from work and play something and talk to me about theory and chord structures,” Alex remembered, “and when I did start playing more earnestly, I remembered a lot of things he said, and I could piece together diminished scales. It was brilliant left-hand stuff. He showed me a couple of simple, good jazzy bluesy accompaniments to generally use.”
    Sidney’s impromptu soirees drew other music and art lovers to the Chilton home. Among them was a well-heeled pair of newlyweds—Memphis’s answer to Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. William Eggleston, born into a wealthy Mississippi family in