An Evening with Chris Bell
Apr 19, 2010 Hat's Off, Random Ramblings, Stranger than Fiction
As usual, I was late. But this was one band rehearsal I didn’t want to be late for. I FINALLY get to play with Chris Bell. 
My brother Randy had called a couple of nights earlier, and said that Jody Stephens, the regular drummer for the Baker Street Regulars was going … I forget …somewhere, and he and Van were wondering if I could play drums with them. I had heard the Regulars at every gig they had done, because ever since the melt down of Big Star, my favourite Memphis band, I had watched them morph* into this current line up of Van Duren on bass, my older Irish twin Randy Hampton on guitar, Chris Bell on another guitar, and Jody Stephens on drums.
THIS was a great rockband. It was parts of Brit-Pop Big Star blanded with parts of the best Brit-Pop cover band around, with Van’s Paul Mac meets Paul Carrack lead vocals, Jody (a Memphis version of John Bonham), and Randy, who could play about anything on guitar. And throw in Chris’ Yardbirds meets Zeppelin style (I could just say Jimmy Page meets the South…). But Chris introduced an additional recklessness, ala early Todd Rundgren, that one would expect from a talent of high calibre who, like Alex Chilton, kept finding himself being tripped up by life situations that kept that Platinum record and deserved recognition a breath away. Damn. Unbelievably unfair, at least to Chris’ slowly surrendering soul. I wanted to re-kindle his waning spirit. But who was I?
It worked for awhile. Van, Randy and I had been playing since high school. With us three being good friends, alienating Chris was a constant concern. That could get wrong, so I (and I’m sure all of us) went a little out of our way to make sure Chris was being “musically nurtured”, because I KNEW he could bolt in a heartbeat … and would …at the slightest negative look, word, motion … I was on eggshells at the first rehearsal, but, as always, we all began melding ideas and he was instantly attune to our high regard of him, and returned the thought by showing off with performance he KNEW we would respond to. We kept an eye on each other through every song, as did he and Van, and whenever I played a stupidly great drum fill, he would act like he didn’t notice by looking away. But his facial expression betrayed his seeming lack of validation – he’d be grinning. But when he blew ME away with something, I would yell how awesome it was. That would fuel him more, and the synergy would finally take over and sweep the entire room into a wild-man musical experience. WOW! This was gonna be good. The Regulars ROCKED! (we rocked)
We finally got our first gig (that’s short for engagement, you knuckleheads). One of Chris’ million sisters was getting married and we were going to be the music at the reception. Having met some sisters, this felt more like someone was doing Chris/us a favor, as his whole family seemed to be a bit too conservative to want us. Then again, if we kept to Beatles covers, obscure Rundgren and Badfinger, and threw in Chris’ and Van’s originals, we might just pull it off.
The gig was Saturday night at 8:00, and Randy and Van and I were there an hour early, our usual thing. But no Chris. Hmmmm. We went ahead, setting up personal gear and we always combined efforts to set up the sound, since it was usually big speaker cabinets and about a hundred wires, plus 4 vocal mics. Yeah, I sang back-up with Randy. Our genetically tuned harmonics made us ideal for ☝ combining voices. Still no Chris.
At 7:45, Van called Chris’ home. No answer. So he must be on his way. Right? Any minute now, I’m sure.
8:00 PM and all is not well. Where is Chris. Being the pros we were, we started playing 3 piece. I gotta admit we were pretty good. No applause, as I figured. That’s when I looked over and saw Chris, finally, at about 8:15 coming in through the well calculated center of the crowd assembled on the dance floor. Chris was indeed fashionably late. Wearing his whiter than white tennis sweater tied around his waist, whiter than white tennis shorts, whiter than white Hanes socks with tennis shoes, and, of course, a white of all whites Polo tennis shirt I expected what ever was resting on his shoulder to be a HEAD Racket. But it was Keith Sykes’ Fender Telecaster! Where was his red Gibson that sounded so great? And what amp was this? A Fender Concert combo, no naugahyde, was in his other hand. Chris had already stolen the show.
We got off the stage, Van was saying something about a technical problem, we’ll be right back. As Van approached Chris, I’m sure to bitch about his timing, Chris had already plugged in the amp, and the guitar into it. Oh hell … he just maxxed out the knobs! In slow motion, as Van’s mouth opened to speak, a sound straight out of Hell came out of the amp. It was the first lick of Zeppelin’s “Heartbreaker” solo. Van kept talking as Chris’ eyes combed the room, surely to see the how many girls were covering their ears. About 60%. Good work, Chris! With Van now talking AT him, Chris decided too much top end, lowered the treble on the amp, and played the lick again, this time with a little more conviction. Which is exactly how Jimmy Page starts the solo on Heartbreaker. Does that mean … Yep. Chris blazed through the rest of the solo, note for note, but he added good where Page went bad. UN-BE-FRIGGIN-LIEVABLE! Van gave up, and as the end of the solo got near, Chris once again peruses the room, which by now had all but cleared out, pushed out by the sheer volume. Finally, when he saw my approving smile, he smiled back. I guess we both had a little anarchist in us. The gig went from there without a hitch, but that solo was forever burned into my synapses. It was as if he was showing everyone how good he could be if he chose to be, so back off. Quite the statement.
After that there was, according to Randy, one more gig with Chris before that band imploded. Jody was just gone, Chris was going into running one of his family’s Danvers burger joints, Randy had finally decided to go back to school, I was becoming interested in recording music and would run into Chris later. Van went looking for a band that would stay together for more than 2 gigs, which meant doing a lot more cover songs, which really was where the money was for the long term musician in Memphis … until you get a record label to come along and give you a chance to break out.
A couple of years later I got a phone call at 7AM from my best-friend-in-the-world-that-still-doesn’t-know-it. In an unusually subdued voice he told me that Chris had been killed in a wreck while he was trying to fight telephone poles. He lost. I had no response except the normal nonsense of wheres, whens, and hows. I was talking to God right after that call, and asked him the question only He could answer, which he didn’t.
Why?
To this day, I can’t think of one person on the PLANET who didn’t like Chris. Almost everyone I know LOVED Chris. I did. He just grows on you. He and his brother David are some of the finest around. And, I guess, that’s why that call that morning just did not register. But, it is registering deeply as I write this. We will ALWAYS love you, CB.
Next Question …
*(morph 3 |mɔ(ə)rf| |mɔːf|verb
change or cause to change smoothly from one image to another by small gradual steps
Tags: Chris Bell, gig, HEAD, Jimmy Page, Jody Stephens, late, Randy Hampton, tennis, Van Duren, wedding, Yardbirds, Zeppelin
Alex Chilton: The Inveterate Showman
Mar 18, 2010 Hat's Off
When I hung the phone up, I had just finished going through my iPhoto pictures, trying vainly to categorize them for the thirty seventh time. I kept coming across one in particular that fit into 9 of my categories and I had to get it down to 1. It could be “Ardent Folk”, “Music folk”, “Family”, “Bizarre”, “Bigger that Life”, “Clients”… it was a picture of Alex with my first wife, before I had met either. Hmmmmm. When my phone rang, I answered it with my “EEEYELLOW”. Adam, my assistant, was telling me that Alex Chilton had just died. That was followed by that eerie silence. First I thought “he can’t be dead. I just saw him.” I guess it’s a weird form of shock. Adam was saying something about Fry – John Fry, our founder. Since I was going right by his house on my way home, I thought I would just drop by and check on him. His wife was at home, but then again, she wasn’t around in the day.
I first met Alex at Shoe Studios in Memphis when he was producing another friend, Tommy Hoehn. And Jon Tiven was there as pseudo executive producer. Tommy and Alex had written a song called “She Might Look My Way”, which someone said had missed the cut for Big Star’s Radio City record.
The drums weren’t quite the “vibe” and they needed a drummer. I got the gig. At Shoe, you couldn’t see into the control room. The usual glass ONLY through the headphones. Being the first time for me to ever play in ANY studio, it was … disconcerting at best. So I played as directed and the record was eventually released on Henry Loeb’s “Power Play” records which had also released the Scruffs first single. WOW! I had just played on my first record ever and Alex, the Big Star, had produced it. I was hot stuff, right? Well,considering I was just out of high school and already headed toward my goal-working in a recording studio. I was a happy dude. It was 1974.
March 17, 2010. As I headed down John’s street, I first looked the 1/4 mile to the garage to see if he had company. He did, but I drove up anyway. I called him from his driveway and when he answered, I asked him if everything was cool in there. He replied he was in the “shock bubble”, but assured me he was fine (for now). John had worked extensively on both of the Big Star records and had become very close with Alex, Chris Bell, Andy Hummell and Jody Stephens. They were his friends as well as his label’s pride. #1 record and Radio City were two of the most influential records ever made. But with distribution problems surrounding Stax… well, Big Star’s sales just never happened. I had heard rumors of Big Star’s records ending up in the soul music section of record stores, which I guess made sense in a weird sort of way. If the rumor is true, it would explain why such an influential band had such dismal sales. When you want to buy a rock record, you go to the rock section and if the record isn’t there, you usually buy something else instead of asking “Where are your Big Star records?” I tend to believe the story given the track record Stax had at the time.
Cut to 1977. A guy named Miles Copeland (as in IRS Records, as in Stewart as in The Police) had called to book time for a band he wanted Alex to produce called “The Cramps”. Alex asked if I could engineer the record. Since all I knew at the time was how to align a tape machine and repair faders, I was the perfect choice! Right?
We had a BALL doing that record. Lux Interior was always in character, Brian threw a cinder block at a pile of stuff we had built from folding chairs, flourescent tube lights, a couple of cymbals … and we recorded the subsequent chaos. Lux sang “Human Fly” and “Sunglasses After Dark”. It was NYU performance art becoming a validated rock music scene. Alex basically taught me how to make a rock-a-billy record, and we superimposed that methodology on the Cramps. NOW Alex had been there when I engineered my first record.
As luck would have it, I had inadvertently caused some distortion on the Cramps record. And Alex wanted remuneration for it. So Ardent gave him a week to fix the problem, which he used to record his record “Feudalist Tarts” (a cute little trick he had learned from HIS producer, Jim Dickinson) But wait! That’s cheating! No, I guess in Alex’s eyes, it was legit. I mean, Dickinson did it, so why can’t Alex? Jim always avowed that ‘you can’t have music without some element of crime’.
After that, I hadn’t seen Alex until it was time for him to produce a record on Tav Falco, who had just returned from Belgium where he was learning to Tango. That record, “Behind the Magnolia Curtain” was yet another cult fave, and Alex was now an underground super-star.
1968. Alex Chilton came out of the chute at 16 and within a couple of years had made a plane-load of money having his voice heard around the world. When the “Tops” were opening for the Beach Boys on tour, he stayed in drummer Dennis Wilson’s guest house with none other than Chuckie Manson! (Dennis had thought Charles was harmless enough, so Alex figures what the heck?)
After his ginormous success as the vocalist for the Box-Tops, as in The Letter, Soul Deep, Neon Rainbow, Cry Like a Baby, … a rock-pile of SMASH hits … he met Icewater’s Jody Stephens and Chris Bell (more on Chris soon) and rocket scientist Andy Hummell. Alex and Chris were fairly confident they could make a PowerPop band ala Raspberries, Byrds, Badfinger; PowerPop wis music largely influenced by ’60s British Music: Todd Rundgren’s “Runt” LP, Raspberries single “Go all the way”, Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” and “No Matter What” (a song Paul wrote for the Beatles), Dwight Twilley, Matthew Sweet … that was PowerPop. It’s a long list. And Alex was standing right in the middle of it’s birth. Had it not been for the demise of their distributor, Stax, I’m convinced they would have been the hottest thing since sunburn. “Back of a Car”, “September Gurls”, “Thirteen” … come on. Tell me that isn’t some of the best music you’ve EVER heard.
Though Alex could be cantankerous, i.e. kicking his Fender Twin at the famed and packed Antenna Club or slapping my hand away from the e.q. on a mix, I’m convinced THAT was the inveterate showman he was. Because he really was a great dude. I told him my birthday once around 1976. One day in 1997 at Ardent, he walked up to join me and a friend at 7 card stud, and out of nowhere, he looked up at me , kind of gazing through me, and said “November …(pause) … seventeenth.” Uncanny.
1986. When we started the Replacements “Pleased to Meet Me”, I was listening to their demos-soon-to-be-masters they had recorded the week before, and I thought to myself, “Paul sure sounds like Alex”. Again in 1988, as we heard Tommy Keene’s demos for “Based on Happy Times”, I thought to myself, “Tommy sure sounds like Alex”. Influenced.
Alex made an indelible mark on music. A BIG one. Anyone who is highly influenced by this artform, call me. I LOVE recording PowerPop. Just ask Gin Blossoms.
R I P Alex. We love you. God loves you. We’ll miss you.
No questions, please.
Tags: Alex Chilton, Andy Hummel, Back of a Car, Chris Bell, Ex-wife, Jim Dickinson, Jin Tiven, Jody Stephens, John Fry, Radio City, Tav Falco, The Cramps, The Replacements, Thirteen, Tommy Hoehn, Tommy Keene