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 Page A

see,” John Evans recalls. “We didn’t know whatto think.” He remembers being struck by the overflowing ashtrays and empty coffee cups strewn around the studio. Knowing that Chips had cut a hit for the Gentrys, the Devilles thought they were getting a raw deal by working with an unknown producer.
    “We had a big room with some baffles where I set them up,” Dan recalls about the session. “Alex was quiet, polite—a good-looking kid—and I walked him to the mic and said, ‘There you are, son.’” He would be singing live while the band played the song.
    “We set up and started running the tune down,” Alex remembered. “[Dan] adjusted a few things on the organ sound, told the drummer not to do anything at all except the basic rhythm that was called for. No rolls, no nothin’. The bass player was playing pretty hot stuff, so he didn’t mess with what the bass player was doing.” Dan recalls, “The guitar player had the lick right—we copied Wayne’s demo. Then I asked the keyboard player to play an ‘I’m a Believer’ type of thing.”
    Never having recorded before, Alex started singing tentatively, “
Give me a ticket for an airplane
,” similar to Carson’s country-inflected style. “Punch it up, Alex,” Dan advised. Alex, whose first attempt was inspired by Chet Baker, later recalled that Dan demonstrated the way to emphasize the three syllables of “aer-o-plane.” Alex told Cub Koda:
    After Dan got all the instruments sounding the way he wanted them to sound, we started running it down in earnest. I was a little bit intimidated by my surroundings and I was singing kind of softly. Then Dan came out [of the control booth] and said, “I really want you to lay into this, I want you to sing like this.” And he started rocking back and forth and started singing it . . . he is one of the great soul singers in the world of any color. . . . So Dan showed me what he has in mind for the song, and I go, “Yeah, I can sound something like that.” Sounding like a soul singer is something I prided myself on being able to do. We did it like that a few times and Dan seemed to be liking it pretty well, and as we ran through it a couple of times, my voice, considering the night before, didn’t have a lot left in it. So I was getting kinda hoarse, which fitted into things just fine.
    “Alex was one of the few people I’ve ever seen that at an early age had his own voice,” says Dan. “He had something in him when he came into the studio.”
    After five or six takes, “The Letter”—originally clocking in at a minute and a half—made it onto tape, using up two tracks of what would be a three-track recording. (Most recordings today use up to twenty-four tracks.) Dan set to work on some overdub ideas to fill out the sound and expand the song by twenty-eight seconds. Alex went home to take a nap, and his fellow Devilles didn’t give the recording much thought. What they had just cut, though, would become the biggest hit single ever recorded in Memphis, Tennessee.

C HAPTER 6
America’s Youngest Hitmaker
    “I guess my life has been a series of flukes in the record business. The first thing I ever did was the biggest record that I’ll ever have,” Alex mused twenty years after he recorded “The Letter.”
    Producing the single, Dan Penn focused on Alex’s raspy, soulful vocals, bringing them up in the mix. He had a few tricks up his sleeve to enhance the song’s pop appeal. “When we cut it, I thought Alex was real good, but we didn’t know we were going to have a million-seller at this point,” says Dan. “We just had a track, and it was not complete.” At American, Chips had assembled a staff of talented session players—later known as the Memphis Boys—and, unique among them, bassist Mike Leech could read music. At Dan’s behest Mike wrote out arrangements for horns and strings for “The Letter.”
    “My very first string arrangement was ‘The Letter,’” Mike told Roben