By 1970, Alex Chilton was barely old enough to vote but already enough of a music biz veteran to be completely jaded by the industry. His short tenure in the Box Tops produced two million-selling hits, "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby", but the group's sound and direction were determined almost exclusively by producers Chips Moman and Dan Penn, who rarely diverged from the group's R&B-laced rock'n'roll. They chose almost all of the Box Tops' songs, dictated how they should be sung, and relegated Chilton's own compositions to hastily recorded B-sides, denying the singer not only his creative freedom but potential royalties as well. Whether this was the heavy hand of a svengali or the harried influence of a producer-cum-babysitter is debatable, but after an aborted tour of Europe, the Box Tops fell apart.
Free from the demands of that hit group, Chilton holed up in Memphis' Ardent Studios with producer/founder John Fry and engineer Terry Manning to record a batch of his own songs. The sessions were casual and low-key, resulting in a full album of material that was never released. Instead, Chilton formed a new band, called Big Star, which translated British power pop to American shores. But those 1970 sessions became lore among Big Star fans, passed around as rumors or bootlegs until 1996, when Ardent released them as 1970. That collection has since gone out of print, and now Omnivore Records has reissued it with bonus tracks, following up last year's excellent white-label edition of Big Star's Third.
This music represents the midpoint between the Box Tops and Big Star almost too literally, as Chilton volleys between blues-rock rave-ups like "All I Really Want Is Money" and softly sung pop ballads like "The EMI Song (Smile for Me)". The transitions can be jarring, especially as he switches between his low, gruff vocals and his mod-ish falsetto. It's hard to believe it's the same human being singing those songs. And yet, on some level, this collection may be one of the purest expressions of Chilton's personality-- not only his dreamy ruminations but also his coarse humor. According to the new liner notes by Bob Mehr, Chilton made fun of Moman and other producers for being out of touch with current sounds, specifically the British Invasion. This mocking spirit extends to "All I Really Want Is Money" and "I Wish I Could Meet Elvis", which seem to take the piss out of the Box Tops.
There's a telling contradiction embedded in these half-assed numbers: Chilton obviously adores the rhythm and bluster of these songs, yet he has been conditioned to resent the style, to view R&B as a hopelessly passé genre. His performances become caricatures of black blues vocals, or perhaps caricatures of white approximations of black blues vocals. It can be an uncomfortable listen, especially when he sings, "that's all I cares about in de world," on "All I Really Want Is Money". Perhaps because we know about his troubles with the Box Tops, Chilton's perspective-- that of a white teenager whose voice had been conditioned to resemble that of a black man-- remains oddly compelling in its jumpy defiance, especially on the gloriously perverse covers of the Stones' "Jumpin' Jack Flash" and the Archies' "Sugar Sugar" (which gets mashed up with James Brown's "I Got the Feelin'").
On the other hand, songs like "If You Would Marry Me Babe" and "All We Ever Got From Them Was Pain" sound like templates for some of Chilton's best-known Big Star numbers, contrasting his cynical streak with an earnestly romantic side. "The EMI Song (Smile for Me)" may be the sweetest and most delicate melody he ever wrote, and "It Isn't Always That Easy" is a ruminative acoustic demo that exposes the ravages of Chilton's short career to date. On "The Happy Song", he tries on a nudie suit for size, and the country snare patter and steel guitar fit his vocals so perfectly it's not hard to imagine what other avenues he might have traveled in subsequent decades.
Free Again doesn't simply predict his work with Big Star; in fact, these songs eerily prefigure much of his solo material, which deconstructed-- often messily or carelessly, but occasionally beautifully-- everything he once held dear. Even as a teenager, he had an inclination to undercut every expectation, even his own. "Every Day as We Grow Closer" may be a quiet song with a lovely melody and a huge impact, but he nearly ruins the effect by appending a short, tongue-in-cheek jam at the end. For many listeners, this aspect of Free Again may be off-putting, like hearing a comedian tell only inside jokes. This release, much like Rhino's 1970, is certainly not intended as an introduction to Chilton's music. Instead, it's more like an endpoint for devoted fans looking to connect the dots. As such, it provides a fascinating coming-of-age story of an artist who came into his own playing styles he knew he loved and others he only thought he hated.
