Aura Records in the UK had released Big Star's third album, Like Flies on Sherbet, and 'Hey! Little Child' as a single before Chilton recorded this live album for it in May of 1980. Despite an intriguing backing band - The Soft Boys' rhythm section, plus The Vibrators' Knox on guitar - the album is mainly going to appeal to fans of Chilton's lost years.

Goodbye El Goodo By Alex stuck his finger down his throat and gagged, showing me that’s how much he hated Memphis. We laughed about it. He didn’t like me much either (something I wrote perhaps, or his interpretation of my horoscope charts), but that didn’t mean we couldn’t laugh together, and it didn’t mean he couldn’t enjoy Memphis. He’d recently boarded a flight for a European tour, and the movie showing was The Firm, shot in Memphis—he gagged again.

Memphis was a cloak that was hard to shake. Alex Chilton became a public figure at the age of 16 when, not long after he’d first seen the inside of a recording studio, a song from that session became a 1967 #1 worldwide hit, “The Letter” by the Box Tops. At that impressionable age he became a product packaged and sold, considerable talent yielding considerable profits—for the manager and not the artist.

Soon, the monkey walked away from the organ grinder to do his own thing. His thing: He channeled the future by capturing the underground zeitgeist, three times in the 1970s alone—an audience for the clean pop of the first two Big Star Records caught up to the music a decade after it was made; the third Big Star album was nihilistic and beautiful (hello Elliot Smith and the ‘90s); the shambolic Like Flies on Sherbert deemed hip the wealth and diversity of Americana roots while becoming a punk rock classic. The art of these efforts has become canonized, but the financial return was—again—basically nil. So the monkey bit the hand that fed the banana and cut its own path. Instead of profit, he was assigned prophecy. But the Replacements only got it half right in their tribute song. Children by the million might have screamed for Alex Chilton, but he’d never have come running.

Waves of admiration and love were an assault, and he was scornful of those who needed to make more of his songs than he did. His lifelong interest in astrology makes sense: What is colder, more beautiful, more distant than the stars? Astrology is the province of the seeker, not the sought. Alex Chilton’s career in song is a testament to his seeking, to his eye for precise detail, his adventuresome ear, his empathetic heart. In a few lines he could chillingly evoke the angst and maelstrom of young adulthood, touching strangers in a personal way (their responses leading to his notorious friction with admirers). He could be a sweetheart as often, and less notoriously, than the contrarian. His mind remained curious all his life, making its own way through politics, the humanities, and sciences with the same zeal he mined R&B, country, classical and all music.

He was never predictable, and kept his audience on its guard. In the same late-night late-1970s radio appearance when he sang Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You”—years, of course, before Whitney Houston made a career out of it, he also broke into a filthy racist ballad.

His songs were not unlike William Eggleston’s photographs—crisp, saturated, and composed, with an underlying menace, with a throat-aching wistfulness. Late Night Tales The Cinematic Orchestra Rapidshare more. Alex was as complicated as Memphis itself. XL Chitterlings, my favorite of his stage names, stole Wilhelm Reich books from the Memphis Public Library because he said no one checked them out, and he gave them to people whom he thought would appreciate them. When a friend heard him explain his world view, he chided him, “You're right Alex, the world is wrong.” Telling me about this later, Alex added “And, hell.

I believe that. The world is wrong, I am right.” To the end, he did it his way.