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 B

1939 (the year Reid Chilton was born), had been raised on a cotton plantation, attended the Webb boarding school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, and became enamored with the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Eggleston would later revolutionize fine-art photography with his saturated-color images and “democratization” of subject matter, including his shot of a bloodred ceiling that would grace a future Big Star LP cover. Bill and his wife, Rosa, also a child of “old money,” were drifting from place to place when they first met the Chiltons.
    “We didn’t have a place to stay, and the Chiltons kind of adopted us,” recalls Rosa. “We were thinking about driving back to Mississippi, and Mary said, ‘Oh, spend the night here!’ We had this rapport going on. They did not seem like parents. The age gap was nonexistent.” Rosa remembers Mary Evelyn as “not really a very talkative person. She was a good listener and a very sweet person.” On afternoons in the Chiltons’ small kitchen, Mary Evelyn taught Rosa how to whip up homemade mayonnaise and to make espresso using an Italian coffee pot.
    Sidney and Mary Evelyn “were some of my closest friends,” Bill Eggleston told Robert Gordon for his musical portrait of the Bluff City,
It Came from Memphis
. “They were two of the most important people in Memphis from that time, the Kennedy era. Mary held what you might call a salon, and things happened in the house. . . . I don’t know who else would have fostered what they did.” The young couple stayed with the Chiltons a few nights, then rented an apartment nearby, close to Overton Park. Eventually the Chiltons offered part of the backyard carriage house (or, in Memphis parlance, “backhouse”), originally the servants’ quarters, to Bill Eggleston to use as a darkroom.
    When the Egglestons dropped by the Chiltons’, the classically trained Bill performed his favorite Baroque pieces on the Chickering. Howard, who played tuba in the Messick High orchestra, became friendly with the Egglestons, and occasionally Howard and Bill played music together. Bill showed young Alex a few things, too. “Eggleston was a fixture around our house for a few years,” Alex later said. “He played Baroque keyboards and gave me a taste for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century music, as did Howard.”
    Years later Cecelia Chilton told Rosa that Bill reminded her parents of Reid, though Sidney and Mary Evelyn never mentioned their deceased son to the Egglestons. No photographs of him adorned the house, either. By moving toMidtown, the Chiltons had hoped to put more than just distance between the tragedy of Reid’s death and their lives. Though Reid wasn’t discussed at home, over the years Alex would bring up his older brother’s death to friends, one of whom remembered, “When he told me that, he had a look on his face I had never seen before or since.”
    Along with the Egglestons and McCartys, Mary Evelyn’s Aunt Em occasionally stayed with the Chiltons for months at a time. So did Mary Evelyn’s old friend Peter Lindamood, who rented an apartment above the carriage house. With an oversized head and fey mannerisms, “he was real eccentric and delightful,” said Cecelia, recalling special family dinners where “Peter would help decorate the table and take pinking shears and make place mats out of construction paper and put ribbons around.” Alex’s good friend Calvin Turley remembered him as having “peach hair” and holding court at the kitchen table: “He would just pontificate about various things, but specifically he would try to get Alex and anybody else who was around, such as myself, to learn a new vocabulary word every day.” Adele Brown Tyler found Lindamood a character, with seemingly nowhere to go but the Chiltons’: “By the time he showed up in Memphis and lived out in their garage apartment, he seemed pretty down and out.”
    In addition to becoming a haven for jazz and modern art, the Chilton home