Alex Chilton

In a business that reinvents itself at every turn, Alex Chilton has managed to survive for three decades with a three-fold career as well -- his early recordings with The Box Tops, the three albums he did with Big Star in the mid-'70s and the spate of cool, but chaotic, solo albums he's recorded since then. To some, he's a classic hit-maker from the '60s. To others, he's a genius British-style pop musician and songwriter. To yet another audience, he's a doomed and despairing artist who spent several years battling the bottle, delivering anarchistic records and performances while thumbing his nose at all pretenses of stardom, a quirky iconoclast whose influence has spawned the likes of The Replacements and Teenage Fanclub.



For a guy who grew up in and around Memphis, there isn't anything remotely Southern about Alex Chilton. Although fully aware of his surroundings and in tune spiritually with its most lunatic fringe aspects, Alex Chilton's South has more to do with genteel Southern intellectualisms than rednecks.

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