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Songs from Robin Hood Lane

by Alex Chilton

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All Of You 01:37
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What Was 01:58

about

One day in the mid-1980s on a street in New York City I ran into my music gourmandizing friend Peter. He was quite excited.

“Guess what?” he said. “I ran into Alex Chilton the other day and he told me something really interesting. I asked him what singer influenced him the most and he told me Chet Baker!"

What?!?

Chilton had re-surfaced and was playing around New York City again. We knew Chet Baker as the cool jazz trumpet player from the 1950s who was known to be a heroin addict. But a vocalist? Chilton always seemed to have a way to confuse and surprise his devoted listeners. He was also quite prescient as the Chet Baker vocal records would come back into vogue a couple years later. Indeed, the fragile, high tenor of Baker with its dreamy, druggy, lost-in-the-fog approach is not all that far removed from what Chilton did vocally on the Big Star Third album.

Chilton first heard the Chet Baker vocal records when he was seven years old and he knew he wanted to be a singer. He heard them in his childhood home at 987 Robin Hood Lane in a Memphis post-war suburb called Sherwood Forest. "We lived in a three-bedroom, red brick house,” remembers his sister Cecelia. “I was surprised when my mother apologized to me years later for having had us live there, but I loved it.”

Chilton’s father, Sydney Chilton, was a jazz piano player and saxophonist who stopped playing professionally when he found himself the father of four children, choosing instead more stable and remunerative work for a theatrical lighting company.

[Abrupt transition]

"From Robin Hood Lane" collects a number of songs Chilton recorded that he most likely heard growing up there. Some are previously unreleased, some are rare. All were previously out of print.

Several tracks were produced by Ron Miller. He met Chilton in the late 1970s when they both lived on the same block in New York City. Chilton was trying to get a solo career going on the Max’s-CBGBs circuit after the demise of his band Big Star.

A few years later Miller got a job playing with the Memphis Symphony. Chilton had returned to Memphis as well and was playing with Panther Burns in their earliest and wildest incarnation. Miller re-introduced himself and said he'd be interested in getting involved.

Years later, Miller cut tracks with Chilton for a concept album called “Medium Cool” based around the Chet Baker vocal albums. Chilton cut three songs — “Look for the Silver Lining (his personal favorite), “Like Someone in Love” and “That Old Feeling." Miller produced and played standup bass, with Robert Arron [spelled correctly?] on piano and tenor sax, and Richard Dworkin known for his work with the Microscopic Septet on drums. Dworkin would go on to play with Chilton for more than fifteen years.

A second unreleased session produced by Miller in 1993 went farther afield, with Chilton suggesting songs made famous by Ray Charles (“Don’t let The Sun Catch You Crying”) and Nancy Wilson (“Save Your Love for Me"). Chilton also cut “There Will Never Another You,” a song that Chet Baker helped turn into a bass [???] standard. Children regularly performed the song in his live shows.

The album is filled out with tracks from Chilton’s 1993 album “Clichés,” that finds him working up beautiful, solo acoustic renditions of standards like "My Baby Just Cares For Me," based on the piano version by Nina Simone, and “Let’s Get Lost,” the song that became the title of a documentary film about Chet Baker that returned him to the international spotlight in 1988.

The album ends with a song called “What Was” that Chilton probably first heard on a 1979 movie called “The Late Show,” starring Art Carney and produced by Robert Altman.

[Abrupt transition. I also think more background may be necessary]

When Chilton was a mere 16-year-old, he became the singer for Memphis hitmakers the Box Tops, singing in a deep, soulful voice he picked up by listening to producer-songwriter Dan Penn, who wrote the Box Tops hit “Cry Like A Baby” and produced the band’s first number one single, “The Letter.” Chilton abandoned that voice when he left the Box Tops and joined the band that became Big Star.
His vocals in Big Star were high and vulnerable compared to the relative manly swagger of the Box Tops.

The “Robin Hood Lane” recordings bring something in between. You can hear hints of the original singers of the songs, but also debts to other singers Chilton liked. Yet he filters those influence through his own perspective to create something entirely new and distinctive.

There is also something else here – something about Chilton’s approach that is truly human and universal. Listen to Baker’s original vocal recording of “Let’s Get Lost” and compare it to Chilton’s version. Chilton is a little more behind the beat as he takes on Baker’s dreamy tones, but also adds a more down to earth style, letting in bits of other colors and emotions, making the performance truly his own.

That is the magic gift of Alex Chilton.

credits

released March 15, 2020

Compilation Produced by Glenn Morrow
Compilation Mastered by Scott Anthony at Storybook Sound.

Tracks 1, 3, 4, 11: Alex Chilton – Vocals, Ron Miller – Acoustic Bass, Robert Arron – Piano, Tenor Sax, Flute, Hammond Organ and Arrangements Richard Dworkin- Drums / Produced by Ron Miller at Sear Sound, Brooklyn, NY

Tracks 6,7,8: Alex Chilton – Vocals, Ron Miller – Acoustic Bass, Robert Arron – Piano, Tenor Sax and Arrangements Richard Dworkin- Drums / Produced by Ron Miller at Rawlston Recording, Brooklyn, NY / Engineered by Tom Weber

Tracks 2, 5, 9, 10, 12 Alex Chilton – Guitar/vocals, Produced by Alex Chilton & Keith Keller. Engineered by Keith Keller at Chez Flames, New Orleans, LA

Tracks 6,7,8 originally appeared on Medium Cool; 1991 Rough Trade. On license from Cooking Vinyl.
Tracks 2, 5, 9, 10, 12 originally appeared on Clichés; 1994 Ardent Productions.
Tracks 1, 3, 4, 11 previously unreleased.

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Alex Chilton Memphis, Tennessee

Alex Chilton was that rare artist who reinvented himself over and over again, often abandoning earlier successful formulas. He ran the gamut: the blue-eyed soul of the Box Tops, the Beatles-meets-Beale Street-high harmony of Big Star, a stint as a ’77 punk provocateur, a co-conspirator in mutant Memphis art rock, and a songster interested in soul and blues tunes, jazz standards and rockabilly. ... more

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