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 B

Jones for
Memphis Boys
, her authoritative history of American Recording Studios. “The only reason
I
did that was because I knew how to write music notation. . . . Dan called me to come into the studio and play some things on the [Hammond B3] organ while he listened in the control room. When I played something he liked he would tell me to ‘write that down.’ . . . After he was satisfied with the arrangement he asked me if I had other ideas and I suggested the two trombones. He liked the idea and said, ‘Do it.’ The string section consisted of two violins and one viola.”
    Dan hired members of the Memphis Symphony for the string section, including Noel Gilbert, who would later participate and be name-checked by Alex in a Big Star song, “Stroke It Noel.” Gilbert had been Mike Leech’s music professor at Memphis State. This particular string section became a favorite of Dan and Mike’s and would become part of American’s signature, as would “thestateliness of [Mike’s] arranging style,” according to Jones. Dan liked the Memphis Strings because “they just had this barbecue sound.” Mike agrees: “The Memphis Strings were a little sloppy. Downbeats were a matter of opinion. But they had a soulful sound. Dan Penn loved them. The very first time I heard of a violin using a mute came from Dan.”
    Mike attended the sessions with Dan while the strings were overdubbed on “The Letter.” “Everything was going well,” Dan recalls, “except there was a space on the record where Alex quit singing [near the end] and the strings are playing, and it hit me that we could put in the sound of a jet plane.” Going for what Roben Jones called a “literal illustration” of the song’s narrative, Dan checked out a sound-effects LP from the library that included airplanes. A studio assistant, Darryl Carter, played the record while Dan overdubbed it onto the acetate; during the last twenty seconds of the song, with keys and strings as backing, the jet takes off and soars into the clouds. “That was a big part of the record,” says Dan. “When I finished it up, I played it for Chips, and he said, ‘That’s a pretty good little rock & roll record, but you’ve got to take that airplane off it.’ I said, ‘If the record’s going out, it’s going out with the airplane on it.’ He said, ‘Okay, it’s
your
record.’”
    The result was perfection: It opens with the spare
rap, rap, rap
of a snare drum and a simple guitar riff, then Alex’s distinctive gruff voice comes in loud and clear. Accented by trombones and cushioned by strings, the vocals never lose their prominence in the mix, grounded by a tight rhythm section. The fadeout includes background “humming”—by Devilles Russ and John, as well as vocalist Sandy Posey—the strings, and the “aeroplane” sound effects. Instrumentally, there’s a key change here, the subtle modulation adding to the “liftoff” feeling of the song.
    Chips had given Dan the green light to make his own deal. The next step was to find a record label to put it out. The Devilles played the song for the first time at a dance at the University of Tennessee in Martin in the spring of ’67. “We hadn’t really worked up ‘The Letter,’” Russ remembers, “and we got into the tune and didn’t know how to end it. Alex made a sound on the mic with his mouth to simulate an airplane, but the ending was a train wreck.”
    As the school year came to an end that May, Alex couldn’t be bothered with final exams; after all, in the past, he’d “never had to crack a book to get straight A’s at school,” Alex recalled. “I never had to study at all. I was like a sponge and just absorbed everything I needed.” Now, however, he failed his classes, and his Central High report card informed him he would have to repeat tenth grade. Hisparents berated him about this bad news, and his stormy moods darkened. “We worried before shows,” says Russ Caccamisi, “‘Is he