Free A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man by Holly George-Warren

gambling,” according to Jim Dickinson, a session keyboardist at American in 1965: “He was a curly-haired country boy. He had a conspicuous jailhouse homemade tattoo on his right forearm, a pair of dice showing snake eyes and the slogan ‘Born to Loose’ [sic]. Chips was wiry and moved like a cat. He had a winning, good-natured grin and flashing blue eyes. He could hypnotize a roomful of musicians in two minutes flat.”
    Chips, as talented a songwriter as he was a guitarist and producer, had a new collaborator at American. He’d befriended Dan Penn during a Wilson Pickett session at FAME Recording Studios, three hours away in Muscle Shoals, Alabama. As a teenager, Penn, born Daniel Pennington in Vernon, Alabama, wrote his first hit, “Is a Bluebird Blue,” which scored on the country charts for Conway Twitty. Dan’s real love, however, was rhythm & blues, and blessed with a deep soulful voice, he’d fronted an R&B-tinged band, the Pallbearers, before turning his focus to songwriting. Dan had been engineering sessions at FAME and wanted to get into producing. Chips encouraged him to relocate to Memphis, where they could write together and Dan could produce sides at American. He and Chips wrote “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” a smash for ArethaFranklin, and Dan and keyboardist Spooner Oldham, another Alabaman who started at FAME, cowrote “Dark End of the Street” and “I’m Your Puppet,” both soul classics. Chips and Dan also hit it off with songwriter Wayne Carson Thompson when he arrived at the studio from Springfield, Missouri, in the fall of ’66 to make a recording and pitch his songs.
    “Everything I ever knew about R&B music,” says Wayne, “I learned from Dan Penn.” The son of Western music bandleader Shorty Thompson, Wayne—who later dropped his surname—wrote one particular track thanks to a short story his father had penned. “I had three numbers on my little demo tape,” Wayne remembers. “The first song was called ‘White Velvet Gloves,’ the second song I don’t remember, and the third one had a phrase from my dad’s story: ‘ticket for an aeroplane.’ It was called ‘The Letter.’”
    Chips passed along Wayne’s tape to the Devilles with the message “Learn one of these three songs and come back into the studio on Saturday and we’ll record it and see how it goes.” He’d decided to turn the group over to Dan Penn for his first-ever production job. “I wanted to produce a hit record, and that was in my mind day and night,” says Dan. “I’d told Chips, ‘You’re a great producer, but I want to cut my own record, and I don’t even want you there. Find me somebody to cut around here.’” Enter the Devilles.
    Though Russ Caccamisi remembers running through “The Letter” at American without having rehearsed it, Alex recalled the band listening to the tape at Danny’s and choosing “The Letter” over the two other numbers. “We worked out the chords to ‘The Letter,’” said Alex, “and used the same opening guitar lick that was on the original demo—just voice and guitar.” After a cursory rehearsal on Friday night, Alex took off to meet Kokie. The lovebirds stayed out until sunrise, drinking, smoking, and, according to what he later told one friend, making love under a tree in an out-of-the-way cemetery. Alex managed to get home and catch a few hours’ sleep before meeting the band at American on Saturday morning. In addition to being sleep deprived, he felt a cold coming on, bringing with it a sore throat and a raspy voice. “I was a little hungover,” said Alex, “been out in the dewy grass in my bare feet all night, and certainly wasn’t in the best shape I could have been in.”
    At the studio the Devilles expected to find Chips, who’d recorded them before. Instead, twenty-six-year-old Dan Penn, dressed in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt with one sleeve rolled up around a pack of Lucky Strikes, awaited them. “He was the darnedest thing to