Seems I was the only guy on the planet who loved The Letter by The Box Tops — I played it incessantly on a jukebox on Corfu in 1976 — and did not know the vocals were by Alex Chilton, who before he died last week achieved what Phil Nugent called “inspiring flakiness.”
Since I just wrote a piece about Krim that tagged him a “highly talented flake,” I wanted to know more.
For Nugent, Chilton’s name “had a special magic to it because of what was resolutely unmagical about him. . . . he wasn’t a big swinging dick of the music industry whose ring [the band The Replacements] had to kiss, but he wasn’t a broken-down dude out of rehab who had to be beholden to the big new stars, either. They were both pros, in it for the long haul, stubbornly working their limited market share, left of the dial.”
Stubbornly working a limited market share? That was Krim. And Nugent called Chilton, “a terrestrial minor deity,” a perfect description or Off Broadway part for Krim, a force whose power didn’t extend beyond the neighborhood (or even E. 10th Street).
And Chilton’s albums were “a long way from perfect and often a bit of a ways from recommendable to anyone but the passionately converted,” but inevitably had something “that’d knock your hat in the creek.”
So far it all fits. Krim’s first book, Views of a Nearsighted Cannoneer, was, like Chilton’s “The Letter,” the celebrated work that made it into all the obituaries. But it was followed by collections that were miles from perfect and recommendable only to people who knew how flaky you were but also that sometimes you could smell out quality in places others were too fastidious to stick their noses.
And what also fits is the love Krim and Chilton inspire among a certain group of passionate appreciators who can certainly get stoned on the greatest works ever written but have a special affection for those whose gifts stop short of the penthouse and illuminate a smaller patch of ground.
But Nugent salutes Chilton for an equanimity Krim did not possess. “It’s an open question whether [Chilton] could have had another [hit] if he’d wanted it. But the fact that he seemed capable of living without it” made him seem to Nugent like one of the guys.
Krim wanted another Cannoneer success. And though he proved incapable of achieving it but also capable of living without it — and even wrote a reputation-making essay about not hitting the big time — I can’t tip my hat to his example of how to live gracefully without it. He suffered from it and wrestled with it and bemoaned, raged, cursed, sighed, and profoundly understood the social and cultural meaning of it. But he wasn’t in a state of grace about it.
But then, that’s not what I expect from my Jewish writers. Their grace inventory is low. They’re always fresh out of grace.
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