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

Author:George-Warren, Holly [George-Warren, Holly]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19

Shakin’ the World

It was ultimately Wilhelm Reich who helped lift Alex out of his depression. Alex had always listened to his brother Howard’s counsel when it came to literary, philosophical, and political matters. A PhD candidate in philosophy at the University of Indiana, Howard, along with Alex’s philosophy professor at Memphis State, had opened up the psychoanalytic world to him. While recuperating, Alex began reading Reich’s signature 1933 work, Character Analysis. “I began sorting things out,” Alex later said. “Character Analysis helped me understand myself and people around me. . . . That book put the whole Freudian psychoanalysis into really succinct terms, and from then on, I kind of knew what I was doing and where I wanted to go. All those psychoanalysts are obsessed with sex, but he had the best theory of sanity.”

“It’s a great description of early psychoanalytic theory,” Alex told journalist Jonathan Valaria in 2000. “I took a lot of that to heart. In the book, Reich basically described how he would go about treating a patient, and somehow through that I developed a method of looking skeptically at a person, and prodding certain areas about what was mysterious about the person. I’m not into mysteries at all. Although some people you love, you can’t figure them out as well as you want. And so between the character analytic technique and astrology, I managed to deal with most of the mysteries in front of me.”

Cutting out the pills also helped Alex gain clarity. “In 1976 I decided to quit taking drugs and did,” he recalled. “At that point I hadn’t even realized it—because I’d been taking all these drugs—I had a drinking problem, too. I was just drinking to take the edge off the drugs. I was not taking drugs anymore, except for smoking pot, and my life got a little more under control in some ways. But I still drank a lot . . . and sank further into dipsomania for the rest of . . . ’76. Just hanging around, no money, staying at my parents’. . . . Going around town, sitting in with bands a lot, getting onstage, fooling around, having fun.”

He frequently performed “My Rival” at the Procape and was filmed by Bill Eggleston while singing it one night. Of the song he later said, “I was getting to the point of being obsessed with various things like guns and phallic symbols like that. Any kind of power I could feel, I was really trying to feel it as strongly as I could. But ‘My Rival’ is really more of an emotional outburst than a serious statement of anything. I’ve never used a gun—I felt like it for a few years, though.”

Alex seemed to relish the low life. Chilton family friend Vernon Richards, often out on the town with Eggleston, remembered Alex “at a big art-type function at the Orpheum Theatre, and everybody that came wore either a tux or dressy things, and Alex showed up looking like he had slept next to the Dumpster around the corner.

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