His segue from The Box Tops to Big Star is where the shape of Chilton's perverse, at times self-sabotaging mindset begins to become clear. His was a career in reverse: After being thrust into fame as the lead singer of a multimillion-selling band, he became the co-leader of the critically lauded but unsuccessful Big Star, and from there he turned to relative obscurity as the sideman in a small-time punk band and a solo artist whose sporadic work never touched — or even seemed to aim for — the grandeur of Big Star.
Big Star recorded three increasingly fractured and beautiful albums before dissolving in 1974 (their moment in the sun would come in 1998, when That '70s Show used Cheap Trick's cover version of their song "In The Street" as its theme); by then Chilton had reformed the group and gotten enough momentum and belated acclaim to leave the menial, cab-driving-and-dishwashing jobs he'd held for years. George-Warren captures this erratic arc with a smooth economy, spicing Chilton's pathos-laden life with warm anecdotes and just the right touch of musicology. And like all good music biographies, the book doubles as a cultural chronicle, from the British Invasion to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the devastation of his adopted home of New Orleans Hurricane Katrina — not to mention Chilton's brief, dramatic disappearance during the storm's aftermath, a surreal episode that seems to sum up so much of his fateful mystique.
It's hard not to compare A Man Called Destruction to Big Star: Nothing Can Hurt Me, the 2012 documentary that covers so much of the same ground. But where the film rightly splits its focus between Chilton and his co-leader Chris Bell, the book dwells on the man who has most captured the hearts and minds of generations of fans and fellow musicians. The Replacements famously wrote a song, forthrightly dubbed "Alex Chilton," about their hero, and it's only one of the many instances of artists claiming Big Star's inheritance (R.E.M. and Elliott Smith among them). But here, the poignantly plainspoken story of Chilton's troubles pulls back the blanket of superlatives he's been smothered with for decades, instead delivering a sober portrait of a life that was anything but. George-Warren doesn't mistake the myth for the territory, and A Man Called Destruction succeeds because of it.
Read an excerpt of A Man Called Destruction