Generally, when musicians go into a studio and a car wreck breaks out, no one’s happy. Ears are injured. Listener ears, record executive ears, ears everywhere show up at emergency rooms in screaming ambulances to be treated, some for life-threatening injuries. It’s not good.
But what if, and it happens, the musician in question crashed the car on purpose? Such was the case with Alex Chilton and his 1979 debut solo LP Like Flies on Sherbert. Chilton, legendary teenage frontman of the Box Tops, co-chairman of power pop pioneers Big Star and notorious substance abuser, was no car wrecker. He knew how to put a record together. He was a student of songcraft. Wasted or no, he was a studio pro.
But in 1978 and 1979 he went into a pair of studios in Memphis, Tennessee and, inspired by the “Look ma, no hands!” lead of producer/musician Jim Dickinson, decided to make a mess. Not at first—it took a few happy accidents to convince him that deliberately crashing the car might just be the way to go. After that, “crazy and anarchic” (his words) were the order of the day.
Musicians don’t know the songs? So what? Nobody in the control room? No biggie. Instrument (a Minimoog in this instance) on the fritz? Use it. As for using the best and the brightest, forget about it. Chilton opted to let Dickinson play guitar for much of the record precisely because Dickinson was no guitarist. Remembers Dickinson: “Alex said, ‘You still play like you’re 14 years old.’ I said, ‘Yeah, I play bad.’ That’s what he wanted.”
It didn’t hurt that the stakes were low. Chilton had no big-time record label execs looking over his back. He wasn’t signed to a major label. Only 500 copies of his “wild mess,” Like Flies on Sherbert, were released by Peabody Records, a label run by Memphis singer and guitarist Sid Selvidge. (I’m reviewing the English Aura Records release because it includes the great cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.”) Car wrecks can ruin careers. This one happened and no one noticed.
Except that’s not true. The music critics took notice, and most weren’t kind—Chilton’s mess offended their tender intestinal sensibilities. It took years, in some cases, and this newfangled concept “lo-fi,” for some to catch up, by which time Chilton had given up music, done a stint as a dishwasher, played in a Bourbon Street bar cover band, and done various and sundry other things before attempting to resurrect his career. I saw him at a club in Philadelphia when his single “No Sex” was making a stir in the mid-eighties. When it came to which one of us was more wasted, I would call it a draw. But he was the one behind the microphone.
Like Flies on Sherbert is a collection of slapped-silly originals and (with one exception) obscure covers that Chilton and company do not treat with the reverence they deserve. It’s also a heck of a lot of fun. There are two reasons for this. In a contemporaneous review of the LP Robert Christgau refers to the originals as “discarded,” as if they were the dregs of some body of superior material, but where is said body of superior material?
What I do know is the originals have an endearing, readymade quality to them and don’t sound like discards to me. The second reason is that the fun Chilton and the others are having in the studio is contagious. Making music can be a deadly serious business, or it can be just slubbering around. Legend has it that the folks left to clean a studio where the Replacements had recorded an early album were confronted with vomit on the ceiling. I love those early Replacements records.
Chilton’s commitment to just slubbering around is obvious from the LP’s ramshackle opener—an inspired cover of KC and the Sunshine Band’s “Boogie Shoes.” The first thing that strikes you is the guitarist—or one of them, anyway—is proudly and glaringly incompetent. (I’m guessing it’s Dickinson, but who knows?) The song’s more than a bit wobbly on its feet at first, then in he comes, playing the scratchiest guitar you’ve ever heard. The sound levels go up and down, as is the studio was a boat in high seas. Occasionally the guitarist lets loose with a nuclear blast of noise. There appears to be no reason for this. Chilton sings, then he stops. After that he says, “Alright, get in the groove!” but no one listens. Then he sings, “I wanna do it til I can’t get it up,” which is not on KC’s lyric sheet. Chilton’s piano playing gets frilly, the guitarist lets loose a couple of more times, it’s great.
Original “My Rival” boasts an oddball set of lyrics (his rival is 5’5’’ and has muscles and Chilton is going to stab him AND shoot him) but what sets it apart from the pack is sheer chaos. The guitar makes this rumbling dissonant noise while Dickinson “plays” the broken Minimoog by basically twiddling random nobs. The song kinda holds together until the near the end, when the guitarist cuts loose and plays some of the greatest bad guitar I’ve ever heard. It’s inspired is what it is, punk served up Memphis style, until everybody drops out but the drummer and Chilton says “Sounds pretty hot.” It’s possible he’s being sarcastic. It’s also possible he’s right.
The band bashes out original “Hey! Little Girl” and I mean that literally. Bum bum, bumbumbum goes the rhythm, with Chilton going “Hey!” when he isn’t importuning a little schoolgirl in her little schoolgirl uniform like a dirty old man in his twenties and suggesting she drop out of school and “maybe travel somewhere down south.” All of the Amber Alert salaciousness goes on while a thin guitar runs roughshod and Chilton’s honky tonk piano comes in and out. This one is sheer propulsion and dirty thoughts, “Aqualung” gone to to meet Elvis, and great if primal is your thing and why shouldn’t primal be your thing? You can tell Chilton had been hanging out with the punks of New York, but luckily he was hanging out with the right punks and didn’t get any Television or Patti Smith on him. They could have ruined him.
Original “Hook or Crook” is bar band ragged but hangs together, and has a nice garage rock feel—boasts a pretty good bar band guitar solo, too. “I’ll try anything,” sings Chilton, “once or ten times,” and you believe him. Then he sings, “You think it’s such a shame/I’ve got no shame” and you believe that too. Sounds like a junkie confession to me, and you know what they say about junkies—they’ll steal your shit, then help you look for it. In any event, swell song—raw, rough, a demo by anybody else’s standards, a polished gem by the standards of Like Flies on Sherbert.
Chilton’s cover of the Bell Notes 1959 hit “I’ve Had It” has a Basement Tapes feel to it—he’s not so much covering the song or even interpreting it as he is re-inventing and rescuing it, and turning it into something new but timeless. The opening’s a mess, as is the case with most of these songs, but what you ultimately get is a lot of half-assed “la la la la/la la la la” in a strange timbre (hard to tell if it’s just Chilton singing, or everybody in the damn studio) followed by “When I saw her on the corner/Then I knew I was a goner” set to a Velvets raw beat with a guitar grinding away in the background and Chilton (literally by the sounds of it) stomping on the piano while somebody else is dinging a beer bottle or something and it would be a joke if the melody wasn’t so damned infectious. Love the way Chilton really lays into that last “la la la.” Sounds like he really needs to blow his nose. But then he sounds like that the whole way through the song.
Chilton lisps, snuffles like a pig, and makes assorted other wonderful noises on the rockabilly-flavored original “Rock Hard,” a party number on which he more or less free-associates his way through the lyrics. “Rock hard, ripples/Rock hard, nipples/Rock hard, purple,” he sings, before snuffling like Porky Pig. Add some great raw-boned guitar solos, throw in his pounding piano, and what you have is a number that you know damn well inspired the Replacements.
“What song is this?” asks Chilton at the opening of his cover of obscure early sixties artist Troy Shondell’s “Girl After Girl.” He ups the tempo of the original, throws in some organ and a staccato guitar, and does a campy imitation of Shondell’s singing style to boot, descending into some ridiculous vocal noise at the end. A joke and a throwaway, but I think it was Lou Reed who once said “My shit’s worth more than other people’s diamonds,” and it applies.
Chilton takes things even further on Ernest Tubb’s “Waltz Across Texas,” adopting a campy country voice appropriate to the occasion. The band can’t keep the thing steady, and Chilton finally gives up on sounding like Texas cuz he’d sooner sound like Elvis. The Meat Puppets could have done it better, Kinky Friedman for sure could have done it better, and no doubt about it this one’s a throwaway, but it’s still as much fun to listen to as it was to make.
Next up Chilton takes on Grand Ole Opry stalwart and Cajun country artist Jimmy C. Newman’s signature song “Alligator Man,” and he sings it like a city slicker, no mimicry at all and surprise, surprise. Gives it a kind of cool Memphis feel, while the guitars do their half-assed work around him. Drummer really bashes it out, he does, and you get the idea the band might have actually run through this one once or twice before committing it to tape.
The title track is shambolic lovely, with a fetching and ethereal melody that Chilton tackles in a wrecked and reckless falsetto while Dickinson goes space man with the busted Minimoog and somebody bang-shang-a-langs a tamborine. The backing singers are a disaster, Chilton gives up on the lyrics (if there were any) to mad lib (“Ich bin,” he sings, then “Auf Wiedersehen,” then why not “Mein Kampf”) before saying to hell with it and just screaming. It would be interesting to hear what this one would have sounded like recorded properly, but never happened and ain’t gonna happen.
The closer’s a deranged cover of the Carter Family’s “No More the Moon Shines on Lorena.” From Minimoog martian noise to spoken intro (which had to be overdubbed because there was nobody in the control booth when the band started the song) to Chilton’s cracking up mid-verse this one’s a lark, with somebody thumping on something that doesn’t sound like a drum while Chilton throws in on piano player whenever he damn well pleases.
Then Chilton screams and a guitarist stretches out and Chilton hammers on the piano like it’s a percussion instrument. It’s no way to treat a tragic slave song, but then again this tragic slave song does its best to ridicule itself with its cliches and lines like “And the possum playing on the wild bananas/And the old owl a-hooting like a horn.” Hell, I thought Chilton made up that line about the bananas until I checked the original lyrics. No wonder he couldn’t keep a straight face.
Some people simply can’t wrap their minds around studio car wrecks—one critic called Like Flies on Sherbert “a front-runner for the worst album ever made,” inexplicably ignoring every Emerson, Lake & Palmer album ever made. Another called it “universally slipshod and boorish…sloppy and lackluster.” Well it may be a lot of things (it’s sloppy for sure) but lackluster it ain’t.
Anybody can go into a studio and make an album that sounds good, as in well-produced. Chilton could have done it, wasted or sober as a judge. The guy had been doing it since his teens. Instead he made an album that makes me wish I’d been in that studio when he made it.
And personally, I can say that about very few albums. Recording studios are boring places. Work gets done. Professionals do their jobs. They check levels and spend hours placing microphones and days getting the kick drum to sound right and then check the levels again while musicians play their parts over and over and over again until they could play them in an irreversible coma. How horrible.
Recording studio as sterile operating room, producer as surgeon, it’s hard to avoid the analogy. Patients in 1979, the year Like Flies on Sherbert came out of the operating room, included Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, Dire Straits’ Communique, Wings’ Back to the Egg, and Electric Light Orchestra’s Discovery. All perfect, all polished to a high gloss, all dead. Like Flies on Sherbert is not dead. It’s unkillable. But I suspect that the right surgeon, Steve Lillywhite say, given the master tapes, a state-of-the-art operating theater and unlimited time, could succeed in sending it to the emergency room.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
