THE BOX TOPS: Memphis Soul With A Hint Of Psychedelia ALEX CHILTON, DANNY SMYTHE, JOHN EVANSand BILL CUNNINGHAM Interviewed By JUD COST

When Memphis combo the DeVilles changed their name to the Box Tops--just before their first single, "The Letter," was released in the summer of 1967--singer Alex Chilton, bassist Bill Cunningham, guitar player Gary Talley, keyboardist John Evans and drummer Danny Smythe were barely old enough to shave. What happened to their debut disc--a story repeated frequently in those glorious days of true DIY rock & roll--is the stuff of legends.
"The Letter" shot to the top of the charts towards the end of the Summer Of Love. It was followed over the next two years by six more Top Forty entries: "Neon Rainbow," "Cry Like A Baby," "Choo Choo Train," "I Met Her In Church," "Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March" and "Soul Deep" and four brilliant albums: The Letter/Neon Rainbow, Cry Like A Baby, Nonstop and Dimensions.
While his peach-fuzzed combo criss-crossed the country, making all the right stops on network and regional television, Box Tops producer Dan Penn was beavering in at American Recording Studios, employing Memphis' brilliant roster of studio artists to create deeply soulful/slightly psychedelic tapestries in front of which he would place Chilton and his bandmates as soon as they'd finished unpacking their suitcases. Four of the five original Box Tops have come forward here to spill the beans about their storybook career.

ALEX CHILTON:
I've heard it said that you and Dan Penn huddled to pick the material for the Box Tops' recordings. Any truth to that, Alex?
I never huddled with Dan to pick the material. He picked the material. He'd just come in and say ,"Do it" and "Do it like this." But with Chips (Moman) it was very much more a libertarian sort of thing. Dan had his agenda and he didn't care what I thought. I was just the artist and I was there to do what he told me to do. But Chips was like, "Well, what should we do?"

I hear you grew up in a family that loved music?
My dad was a jazz player and the house was full of jazz musicians every night. When I was seven, I guess, Chet Baker Sings came out. I was really taken by his voice, and I would sing along with that. And that's kinda how I started singing.

Where did you get that soulful growl at such a tender age?
Well, soul music was quite the thing in the '60s, and I dug it and I dug all those big-voiced soul singers.

What was it like going into the studio the very first time?
When we went in the studio the first time with Dan to record "The Letter" I was kinda timid, you know, and kinda sneakin' up on the microphone and singin' soft. And he came out and demonstrated. He said, "I want you to sing hard, like: "Gimme a ticket on an aeroplane." Dan had this way of moving back and forth from front to back, and I said, "Oh, yeah, yeah, you mean like the Bobby Bland scream or something." We played a lot of that stuff and I would do that onstage. Just in the studio, at first, I was a little self-conscious. Then when Dan demonstrated sort of what he had in mind I said, "Oh, OK, I can do that. No sweat." I'd been up all night the night before, drinking a bit and hanging out with this girlfriend of mine. And I think that contributed to the roughness of my voice, because this was on a Saturday about noon, maybe even earlier--maybe even 10:00 am--that we went into the studio. I don't know. But we weren't there all that long that day.

After "The Letter" what was your reaction to "Neon Rainbow"--a song I really like--with an almost early Neil Diamond feel to it?
Well, you know, there were some good things about it. It wasn't all that bad. I learned a lot doing songs like that. And that was a great environment for me to grow up in, hanging around all those great musicians in that studio. It was such a creative scene. I learned a lot. You know it was kinda funny, because all the great musicians were in the studio back then. There were tons, just hundreds of local bands in those days and a lot of teenage nightclubs too, so we could get around.

Did you get to see the Gentrys and the Hombres much in Memphis back in those days?
I lived right across the street from a Reformed Jewish Synagogue, and they played dances all the time. But I never really went. I was only fifteen or sixteen and my parents would not let me stay out very late, except on a weekend night. I got around a little bit, but the Gentrys were older, like eighteen (laughs). And the Hombres were mostly a road band. After we hit, Bill took me over to West Memphis where they were playin' a gig, and I met Charlie Rich in a gray sharkskin suit. He was very impressive to me. And Bill's brother's band, the Hombres, were playing behind.

What did you think of covering things like "Whiter Shade Of Pale" alongside the Memphis soul stuff?
Well I wasn't crazy about a lot of Dan's choices and selections of material, and that kind of thing. Maybe some of his choices of material wouldn't have been my choices. But I could see that if I got out of line I was gonna have to go back to high school, and that was the last thing I wanted to do. And so I stayed in line until I was eighteen, and then I said, "To hell with y'all."

DANNY SMYTHE:
How did the Box Tops get together, Danny?
I was in a local band in Memphis called Ronnie (Jordan) & the DeVilles. We had four local hit records on the Youngstown label that went to number one but never got out of the Mid-South. We lost Ronnie, and the guitar player quit at same time. So John (Evans) knew Alex and said "I know somebody who can sing." The band had been together four years, disintegrated and immediately reformed as another group. Of the five DeVilles I was the only one left. We continued to play as DeVilles because we kept the same manager who then became the manager for the Box Tops. I don't think we played one gig under that name, though. We just rehearsed for a few months.

How did you come to record "The Letter"?
We went into American Recording Studios and cut a few things, including "The Letter." I always thought it was a demo for somebody else for somebody else, Sam The Sham, or somebody. It sat on shelf for three months, but the record company heard it, added horns, violins, a jet engine and put it out. When I heard it I was embarrassed, especially when I heard the jet engine at the end of it. "That's so hokey," I thought. Shows what I know. They put it out and said, "Oh, by the way we're gonna change your name to the Box Tops" I came to practice one day and they told me: "We're the Box Tops." I dunno if (BT manager) Roy Mack decided it or not. He told us he came up with the new name, copyrighted it, making him officially the Box Tops. That's why the picture on the first album is fuzzy. You can't ID anybody, so he could interchange members. I never intended to tour with the group. I didn't know the record was going be a hit. I was going back college in the fall. But the record kept climbing and climbing, until I said, "Wait a minute. I'm aboard."

How did you get along with Dan Penn in the early days?
I wanted to impress him as a drummer, which I never did. I asked Dan over dinner one night, "How about the drums? Did they sound OK?" He said, "If I had my way, I wouldn't even use a drummer on most of these songs. My impression of Dan was that he was a country & western guy and early country & western didn't use drummers. So, I'm stuck making records for country & western guy. It was mostly Alex and some session guys in the studio.

With your busy touring schedule after "The Letter" hit, when did you find time to do more recording?
We'd come back to Memphis and know we gotta put an album together. All of a sudden we were informed that session players were gonna do most of it, because they could do it faster and better. We went down to Fame studios in Muscle Shoals to cut "Break My Mind." The DeVilles had cut several records down there too. It was the nicest studio I'd ever been in. American Studios was a hole in wall and Stax was in the bad section of town.

Was it any different dealing with Chips Moman?
I always felt in Memphis that I was in a country & western town. I felt like we'd be fighting to get rock & roll stuff out of these country and western guys who maybe resented rock & roll. Records coming out of that studio were like by Sandy Posey, more of a country & western feel to them. Then all of sudden more soulful stuff, like Aretha, started coming out of American Studios.

Any good tour stories from those days?
One of best gigs we ever played was this music festival in Dallas/Fort Worth. It was the Summer Of Love and we weren't hippies. Alex had long hair but the rest of us had short hair. We had band uniforms--matching pants and coats--and we get down to this festival and it's "hippie-ville." None of the bands were in uniforms; everybody's got long hair, acting kinda wild. They'd rented out an entire Holiday Inn for the bands, psychedelic light shows, with people selling incense, posters and roach clips. All the doors were open. And the big group there was the Doors. We shared our dressing rooms with go-go dancers who were undressing right in front of us. I was in heaven. And that changed our thinking: "We're not gonna be the Buckinghams, or Paul Revere & The Raiders. we're gonna go our own way." After that we spent so much money in Greenwich Village on clothes, Carnaby Street kinda stuff--a hundred dollars for velvet suits--and then we'd get 'em ruined by the cleaners a week later.

You toured on some pretty heavy all-soul reviews back then.
Right, with Wilson Pickett, the Staples Singers, Rufus Thomas and Carla Thomas--big names. When our record came out a lot of black stations were playing it. They thought we were black because of Alex's voice. We'd show up at gigs and they'd say, "You're not the Box Tops. They've gotta be black." So Alex would have to sing right there for the promoter, "Give me a ticket for an aeroplane..." And he'd say, "OK, he's the guy." The whole Wilson Pickett tour was black and at very bottom of bill: "Plus the Box Tops."

You also toured with Neil Diamond?
And Gene Pitney was on that tour too. But we had the number one record, so we were feeling pretty lofty because we had the hottest record. I was playing a drum set not to my liking--I always liked two floor toms--so I borrowed one of Neil Diamond's drummer's floor toms without asking. He said to me, "Don't you ever touch anybody's drums without asking." "I'm so sorry," I told him.

What television shows did you appear in those days?
One I remember in particular, we did Upbeat in Cleveland. We usually lip-synched on TV. But on this one TV show they told us, "Act like you're in a giant cereal bowl and we're gonna pour milk over you." Then they superimposed a bowl and a big milk pitcher and poured it over us."

Do you remember when you first heard "The Letter" on the radio?
Our manager was one of the top DJs in Memphis back then, on WMPS. And he couldn't play The Letter," because it would seem blatantly payola-like. So it broke in Philadelphia first and Birmingham, Alabama, long before it got heard in Memphis. The first time we heard "The Letter" on the radio must have been out of town, on our way to a gig in Philly or Birmingham.

What did you think of "Neon Rainbow" as a follow-up to "The Letter"?
Well, it wouldn't have been my choice. But the trend back then after a big rockin' record was to followed it with a ballad. But why? When the album came out they called it The Letter/Neon Rainbow. And we wondered why they were featuring "Neon Rainbow." And then it turns out to be our follow-up single.

Why did you quit the band?
I had to get ready to get drafted. I'd had a student deferment because I was enrolled in college. And I took all F's. I just kinda announced that I was quitting. They had this Christmas tour all lined up--our first headlining tour. And I thought going to Canada in the middle of winter was a terrible idea.

JOHN EVANS:
What do you recall about how the Box Tops formed, John?
I'm the one who got Alex and Gary into band. The first band I was in was with Greg Green, who played baritone horn right beside me in junior high school--the euphonium, like a small tuba--and our bass player, Russ Caccamisi, played sousaphone in the Christian Brothers Band. Greg played keyboards and started this group called the Chantelles. We had eight members, all people who played and didn't sing or vice versa. And I played rhythm guitar. The original DeVilles were like that too, a group of singers backed up by a band. I think the guy who thought up the name Chantelles liked that the fact that it sounded like "shant tell." Russ wound up joining the DeVilles in 1965, with Danny Smythe already in band. The DeVilles sounded a little like Herman's Hermits.

So how did the DeVilles change into what would become the Box Tops?
Ron Jordan, the singer, decided to leave. He wanted to do a Lovin' Spoonful kinda thing. He was tired of the DeVilles' absurd pop and started doing a band called Honey Jug. They cut an album 1966. It was the first thing released by Ardent. The rhythm guitar player in the DeVilles was Richard Malone. And when Ronnie left, everybody but Richard, Russ and Danny left too. So they hired me because I played both keyboards and guitar. But we still needed a singer. Danny and Russ wanted to make the group more R&B. We were listening to all things, especially the stuff on Stax and Hi.

How did Alex come into the picture?
Well, we needed somebody who could sing that way. I called up a friend, Jimmy Newman, from a band Gary Talley and I had played in called the In Crowd. And he said he'd seen somebody singing in a Central High School talent show--and that was Alex Chilton. He'd done "Sunny." Jimmy got me Alex's number. And he sounded excited about doing something musical. Alex's dad was a professional musician, a piano player, Sid Chilton. He was in the union. He did small big band stuff. Alex's father had a great record collection. And his mom had an art gallery right in the house. They were already counter-culture, before we even knew what that meant. Alex had just turned sixteen when we auditioned him. We immediately saw that he had a unique voice. And he was unusual-looking to us too. He wore blue jeans with holes in the knees. That was back when you just threw 'em away like that, we thought. The DeVilles had some gigs booked so we kept the name. And we were the DeVilles right up until "The Letter" came out.

What did the DeVilles sound like?
Danny and Russ had played together for a long time, and they had developed a method of playing together based on the way Al Jackson and Duck Dunn played together--to synchronize the accents of a tune, the bass with the bass drum pedal, that sort of thing. And you can hear that in "The Letter." We loved Steve Cropper's anti-Hendrix approach: How little can you play? We'd play things by the Rascals, and stuff like "Knock On Wood," and "Hold On I'm Coming."

What kind of radio stations did you listen to in Memphis?
The big AM station in town then was WDIA, an all-black station. The closest thing you could compare it to was it was like a PBS station, with programs at different times of the day that would appeal to different audiences: gospel for grandma, something for the after-school crowd and a late-night jazz show. We grew up listening to that in the car and felt part of that tradition. We wanted to be part of it. And we tried to do our little "white boy guitar band R&B thing," a la the English groups who were trying to do things like "House Of The Rising Sun," which we thought was pretty impressive.

What are your lasting impressions of working with Dan Penn?
Dan Penn is both a brilliant, understated hillbilly genius and an Alabama southern gentleman with the heart of a black man. What can you say? When we first went into the recording studio we thought Chips was going to produce us because it was his studio, American Recording Studios. It was right around corner from Selecto Hits, the studio of Tom Phillips, Sam's brother.

How did the rest of the original Box Tops get on board?
Alex brought in Bill and I knew Gary. Then Russ left because he had a full college scholarship. Richard's dad was in the Navy, so he moved to San Diego. And that was the line-up.

Do you remember what the atmosphere was like right before you recorded "The Letter"?
The night before the recording session we had practiced at Alex's, a big old house. Our manager, Roy Mack, comes in and says we've got this session at ten in the morning. And he needed to go to the studio to pick up some demo tapes so you guys could listen to some songs in advance. The tape had "The Letter" and two other Wayne Carson Thompson songs. He was Wayne Carson in the country world and Wayne Thompson when wrote R&B numbers like "The Letter." That song really stood out. One of the other two is remembered to this day only because Alex and I still argue over whether it was called, either "Pink" or "White Velvet." The original version by Wayne Carson Thompson sounded like the Everly Bros. We synchronized the bass drum and bass on our version. I thought I'd allude to a hit, "I'm A Believer" on keyboard, but they didn't have an electric piano so I ended up using percussion to make an organ sound like a calliope, unique in itself. There was nobody else there but us and Dan. It was all wired-together with spit and bailing wire. They overdubbed two trombone players from the Memphis Symphony and the usual string quartet, that sort of thing. And that was it, except for the sound effects at the end--from a record Dan got out of library.

While the Box Tops were on the road Dan recorded with Memphis studio cats?
When we went out of town they'd record happy with studio people, except for the vocals. And then all sorts of odd combinations: some tracks had the band, some had studio cats. Sometimes it was just Bill and Alex, and sometimes it was just Gary and me with the studio band. On every album there are songs that just the Box Tops played on and songs that had just Alex and the studio band.

BILL CUNNINGHAM:
OK, Bill, Let's put to rest this rumor that the Box Tops didn't play on their albums.
It's untrue. It probably started as a rumor based with a grain of salt. The record company wanted to have the group on the road, and, practically speaking, the way to get that done was to have a lot of session guys do things. We'd come back from the road and put a little something on the tapes or just let them wrap it up with Alex. That probably--along with a few loose comments--has been misinterpreted over the years, but factually it's not correct. There's a real combination of session players and various members of the Box Tops playing together. There are tracks with all the group members and no session players. And there are also tracks with just session players and Alex. The first album was a combination of group and session players. The second and third albums were more heavily session players, and the last album, Dimensions, turned back the clock to where it was more a combination of group and session players. For me, it's sort of like a dream that it all happened.

How did you first meet Alex?
I met Alex because he used to come to all of the concerts I played in with a group called the Jynx. That band had Chris Bell in it. Alex sang lead in the Jinx for a very brief time, only a couple of weeks. But he was always at the parties. We played lot of British Invasion stuff, a lot of Kinks, a lot of Them and also various Memphis things.

OK, how did you and Chris Bell first meet?
Chris and I were working together in 1966 and 1967 when Alex called me about the Box Tops. I met Chris when we were twelve or thirteen. He was playing with a drummer, DeWitt Shy, who formed the band. We were best friends all those years. We went to all the Beatles movies together.

What did Alex say when he approached you about joining what would become the Box Tops?
Alex calls and says, "Come and play with me in this other group, the DeVilles. I think I said "No" because I didn't want to leave Chris. Then finally I called him back and said "OK."

Do you recall any local teenage Battle Of The Bands back then?
I do. We played against Larry Raspberry And The Gentrys. And he usually won. They played "Keep On Dancing" before Chips recorded that. I remember I played with Richard Rosebrough in a band called the Jokers--at the Malco Theater in downtown Memphis.

How did the DeVilles name change come about?
They were about to release "The Letter" when they discovered there was another regional band called the DeVilles, so they needed to change the name.

What were your impressions of Dan Penn?
He was a pretty laid-back character. He didn't shock me as much as he may have shocked John and Danny, since they were much more conservative than I was. The way Dan dressed was very strange, not what they were accustomed to seeing--his hats, his mannerisms, his wearing a pack of cigarettes rolled in his sleeve--they didn't know what to make of him. A lot of these guys came from very conservative high schools. Alex and I went to one that was a little less conservative.

The pool of studio musicians you had to draw from in Memphis was pretty amazing.
They used the Sweet Inspirations and the Aldridge Sisters for background vocals. And Bobby Womack would hang around after playing Wilson Pickett sessions. Bobby played guitar on some of our records. I was just happy to be around at the time and be able to do whatever I could do, and go along with whatever anyone else wanted to do.

What did you think of Alex's voice?
He's very talented. It just comes out of him somehow. That growl he used on the Box Tops stuff was a lot of Dan Penn's influence. Dan would coach him to do his phrasing exactly the way Dan wanted it and to get his voice to sound sorta like Dan's. And I think some of Alex's feelings towards that material might be related to the work that Dan did coaching him and his lack of desire to sing that way. Alex does say--and we all admit it--that Dan's one of the great singers around.

How did Mark Lindsay come to write liner notes for the Cry Like A Baby album?
Tom Boggs was the guy who replaced Danny Smythe. And he played for a group called Flash And The Board Of Directors who had opened for the Paul Revere And The Raiders for a while. And that's probably how they got Mark Lindsay to write the notes. John and Danny left within a month and a half of each other. And John was replaced by Rick Allen.

How did you get around the country in those days?
We used to travel with rented U-Haul trailers. Within weeks we got a Chevy Suburban and a van to follow us and a road manager too. Within weeks of that we started flying and being met by equipment trucks. From the summer of '67 through September and early October we'd gone from a trailer rig to flying to gigs. But we were kids. We couldn't even sign the contracts. We had to have our folks come in and sign for us. We had a road manager back then.

Do you remember the first time you heard "The Letter" on the radio?
We were driving through the Knoxville, Tennessee area and he had a friend who was a disc jockey. And he told him to play "The Letter" at about such and such a time. We came back through town five days later, and they were playing it every 30 minutes. So the manager called his friend and says, "Hey, don't overdo it. The guy's will catch on and know this isn't real." And the DJ says, "No, no, this thing's broken. It's a big hit."

You went to New York at one point to do a photo shoot.
With Joel Brodsky, the guy who did the Doors albums. It was a big deal for us: the train photo shoots. Gary Talley had been ill at the time of the photo shoot for the Cry Like A Baby album. He was having tests done. So we brought in a guy for a month to fill in for Gary and that's the guy who's on the album cover. They put Alex and us up front. And then, way in the back, they've got this replacement guy. They drizzled rain over the window to distort his face so people wouldn't recognize that he was just the guy filling in for Gary Talley.

What kind of television exposure did you get when you cracked the charts?
We did American Bandstand in LA. Dick Clark was a good friend of my father's. My father worked with Sam Phillips, helping him set up Sun for the first ten years. We did The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, Doc Serverinsen--all of them there. I remember going over there and touching the piano and somebody telling me it was an expensive piano and don't play it. James Garner was on the show and told us how much he liked our music--along with the dwarf from the Wild Wild West TV show who played violin. And we also played The Merv Griffin Show.

Were you surprised at "Neon Rainbow" being chosen as the follow-up to "The Letter"?
It shocked people. It was typical back then for a group to come out with a follow-up song exactly the same as their first hit. And "Rainbow" was such a departure. Alex's voice was different. He proved he could sing a nice ballad. And then "Cry Like A Baby" returned to Alex's rougher sound.

Did you see much of Spooner Oldham in the studio back then?
We saw him a lot. You hear great piano or organ licks on Box Tops albums, and it's probably Spooner. He was a fantastic player, and they used a lot of Tommy Cogbill on bass too.

You played a little country music every once and a while too.
It sort of leaks in. Somehow or other, we always managed to play a country tune every now and then. Memphis was a real collision place for music, with blues coming up from the delta only a few miles down the road from Memphis. And then there's the Nashville country stuff. They all collided in Memphis, and that's what made the Elvis records what they were: a bunch of white country players trying to play blues. What I always cherish about it is that originally it all had energy and that came from the blues, this spiritual thing that comes not from the notes you play, but how you play them. You can't describe it. It has to be in your blood.