When it comes to your storied—and star-crossed—careers, Alex Chilton is one hard guy to top. From a number one hit as vocalist for the Box Tops—at the tender age of 16, and on his first time inside a studio yet—to his 3-LP stint as co-founder of the brilliant (if erratic) and commercially unsuccessful power pop band Big Star, Chilton had both the chops and the genius to become a star in the glittering rock firmament.
It never happened. Sure, everybody from Michael Stipe to the Replacements loves him now. He’s an indie rock saint, and Big Star is every other band’s biggest influence. But Big Star’s was a right songs/wrong time sort of fate, and that fecklessness followed Chilton all his life. His post-Big Star years were one long unhappy tour of rock’s Stations of the Cross: addiction problems, poorly received solo albums, even a stint in New Orleans spent doing odd jobs—washing dishes and trimming trees.
I saw Chilton play once, not too long after the song “No Sex” came out, and he was wasted (I think—I was totally trashed) and took swipes at the audience, and the audience took swipes right back. I remember not particularly liking what Mr. Nasty was playing. But I was an idiot then, and I’m a different sort of idiot now. And having finally listened to Chilton’s 1979 debut solo LP Like Flies on Sherbert, I suspect the now idiot would have loved the show.
And I have Kiki Solis, the very talented bassist, baritone guitarist, and vocalist for the sublimely wonderful Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds, to thank. Solis recently gave me some neighborly advice. I say neighborly although we actually live five states apart. But we both have very loud voices, and there’s no law against shouting across state lines. Anyway, Kiki’s advice was this: listen to Like Flies on Sherbert. Do it today. You could die tomorrow, following an attack of sudden onset rickets, and you would have missed out on some brilliantly fucked-up trash.
And that’s exactly what Like Flies on Sherbert is—one very poorly recorded, haphazardly played LP. It sounds like exactly zero minutes were spent putting the songs together; the musicians just flung shit wherever the fuck they felt like it; and whoever was supposed to be in the recording booth was in the john hoovering blow—for the entire session. To be honest, I’ve never heard anything quite like it. It’s the epitome of slapdash rock’n’roll trash, and it’s wonderful. I want to own 50 copies. I want to sleep with those 50 copies. I want this album played nonstop in my coffin, and piped out (like at 11) to horrified cemetery visitors through speakers on my tombstone.
One of the most wonderful things about Like Flies on Sherbert—which combines five Chilton originals with five very odd covers by the likes of KC and the Sunshine Band, Ernest Tubb, and early sixties singer and one-hit wonder Troy Shondell—is that Chilton wanted it to sound slapdash, chaotic, and insane. It was Like Flies on Sherbert co-producer Jim Dickinson, the Memphis knob-twister who worked with everyone from Screamin’ Jay Hawkins to Big Star and The Replacements, who led Chilton, who was accustomed to a careful and methodical recording approach, down the primrose path to deliberate imperfection. “Before that,” said Chilton, “I’d been into careful layerings of guitars and voices and harmonies… Dickinson showed me how to… just create a wild mess and make it sound really crazy and anarchic.” It was his first step away from formalism towards the gutter of punk, and the music he’d play solo and with Tav Falco’s Panther Burns.
Unfortunately the LP—big surprise—didn’t exactly sell like heroin-filled Milk Duds. And while there were dissenters, the overall critical reaction to Chilton’s “wild mess” was not exactly positive. One critic dismissed the LP as “universally slipshod and boorish,” while another went so far as to describe Like Flies on Sherbert as “a front-runner for the worst album ever made.” Well, all I can say is that critic was a fool, and probably the kind of guy who liked Michael McDonald’s Doobious Brothers because they were polished until they glowed in the dark. Oh, and before I forget, I should mention there are two versions of Like Flies on Sherbert, and in choosing the Aura Records version, I sacrificed two truly brilliant tunes, covers of Memphis ranter Ross Johnson’s frantic “Baron of Love, Pt. II” and The Carter Family’s “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena.”
Like Flies on Sherbert opens with KC and The Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes,” an inspired choice if there ever was one. The sound is primitive, the musicianship rough and loose as a goose. The bass is full of echo, the guitar is frazzled-sounding and jumps in when it feels like it, and Dickinson’s piano playing is inspired. Chilton plays lots of razor-wire riffs and his singing is the opposite of impassioned, especially at the end, when he puts zero effort into singing, “I wanna put on… mymymymy boogie shoes?” “My Rival” is a veritable landmark in weirdness, with its crashing and dissonant double opening, Dickinson twisting the nods carelessly on a broken mini-moog, and lots of slaphazard guitar, which Dickinson may well have played because Chilton loved the fact that Dickinson played (in Dickinson’s own words) like “a 14-year-old.” This song is chaos at its best, with Chilton playing a frenzied and dissonant solo over Dickinson’s ever-present moog. And it completely spazzes out at the end, with Chilton scraping away at his guitar while that moog whistles away. Afterwards Chilton says, “Sounds pretty hot,” and he’s right, even if 87 percent of the world population would disagree.
“Hey, Little Child” is a true star, a very pretty (and pretty fucked up) march of a song about a potential Mann Act violation in a “Plaid skirt, flannel vest/Silly nubiles are the best.” The drums keep a steady beat; the great chorus goes “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!”; and Chilton plays some cool riffs and natty fills on the geetar while Dickinson knocks out a repetitive Velvets riff on the piano. This one may be rough, but unlike some of the other tunes on the LP, it sounds like the band may have actually run through it once or twice before recording it. Oh, and I love the way Chilton throws in a “Hey! Sacred Heart!” like he has school pride, if not in his own alma mater then in one brimming with blooming possibilities for statutory rape. “Hook of Crook” is one very cool tune with a great melody and some very chill vocals by Chilton. And it gets downright wonderful when Chilton sings, “I only rarely rat/I only seldom snitch/And it’s such a shame/I ain’t go no shame” then says, “Alright here we go,” leading into a great guitar solo that is followed by the even greater guitar solo that closes the tune.
Chilton’s cover of The Bell Notes’ “I’ve Had It” (the Long Island boys’ one hit!) is weirdness supreme, from its wonderfully half-assed vocals to its clinking percussion and Dickinson’s happily tuneless piano plinking. This could be a Dylan/The Band basement tape song, that’s how raw and off-the-cuff fantastic it is, what with AC sounding like somebody else and Lesa Aldridge throwing in on backing vocals and Chilton carelessly playing classic rock’n’roll riffs on the guitar, right down to the licks he tosses off to end the tune. “Rock Hard” sounds like another early sixties rocker (from its opening “Rock hard, everybody!”) but is a Chilton original featuring several frenetic guitar solos, more great Dickinson piano, and some great basic drum bash. Chilton, meanwhile, throws out some truly odd lyrics, such as “Rock hard/The ripples/The nipples/Rock hard/Purple,” at which point he snorts. He snorts! Then sings about falling out of a swamp, snorts several more times, and I’m dumbfounded by pure knuckleheaded genius. Especially by that “purple,” which seems to surprise him as much as it does me.
Chilton’s cover of Troy Shondell’s obscure “Girl After Girl” is a beautiful freak show, from its failed beginning and restart to Chilton’s bizarre vocals, which sound like Dracula recording for Sun Studios. The song moves thanks to the drums and Dickinson’s very funky organ, and there’s no way not to love Chilton’s inspired raving at song’s end: “Oooh oooh oooh oooh/uhuh huh huh huh/Ooo ooo ooo ooo/Wyaw wyaw wyaw wyaw/Roah Roah Roah Roah/Awoo wah hoo ROOOAAAH!” Next up is a campy take on Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas.” Chilton sings it like Hank Williams’ long-lost son, not Bocephus but Beelzebub, while some lazy guitars play and the drums sound way off in the distance from somewhere in Arkansas. Then Dickinson’s organ comes in and the guitars, one acoustic and the other electric, play a wonderful dual solo. The song’s worth it for the way Chilton sings, “Like a storybook ending/I’m LO-O-O-S-T in your charms,” and the way the song takes on an almost Velvets vibe after that, what with Dickinson’s organ drone and the guitars riffing and Chilton tossing off all kinds of inspired jibber-jabber.
“Alligator Man” is one very raw, odd, and amped-up pop take on Dick Nixon lookalike Jimmy C. Chapman’s swampy kuntry tune, and features what sounds like both Dickinson (very primitive) and Chilton on guitars. I love the guitar break, and that rough-and-ready guitar in particular, almost as much as I love the instrumental that ends the song. Meanwhile, LP closer “Like Flies on Sherbert” is a bizarre but brilliant showstopper, a kind of mock fifties song with a tambourine shaking and Dickinson playing piano while twiddling the knobs of that busted mini-moog. But the song’s warped chocolate center is Chilton’s singing. He sings in a falsetto; shouts and screams in a falsetto; abandons the falsetto to sing in a voice like Sid Vicious; does a pretty good imitation of a guy being strangled; and finally closes out the tune with a scream. As for the lyrics, about all I can make out is “Auf Wiedersehen” and “Mein Kampf,” which makes me wonder just what the hell the song is about. Can’t find the lyrics on the net; if you’ve got ‘em, shoot ‘em my way, puhlease!
Alex Chilton’s was one of their stranger treks across the American musical landscape. They say you can’t change horses in midstream, but that’s precisely what Chilton did when he gave us Like Flies on Sherbert. He abandoned his formalist muse to make allies with chaos, and in so doing must have known he was committing career hari-kari. Ah, but sometimes it takes a rock’n’roll suicide to make a truly mad, unruly, and brilliant rock’n’roll record. Chilton himself never regretted his transformation; he called Like Flies on Sherbert his masterpiece. The Replacements sang, “I never go very far/Without a little Big Star.” Well, who does? But I’m not going very far without Like Flies on Sherbert either. It comes from the ditch, and the ditch is where things get interesting.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
