RSD 25 Release In February last year, the often-elusive Alex Chilton was in New York City for a couple of gigs at the late, great East Village dive Coney Island High, with bassist Ron Easley and drummer Richard Dworkin. The trio had enough of a groove on playing mostly vintage soul tunes that they went into a Manhattan recording studio, Sear Sound, and kept the music rolling. In a single night, they cut 19 cover tunes, and Alex produced the session himself. That sort of approach was common in the studios of Memphis, Tennessee and Muscle Shoals, Alabama during the classic era of the sixties soul, though this think-on-your-feet, overdub-free style is an anomaly today. For the Memphis born-and-bred Alex, that’s the way he always liked it.Alex and his cohorts had a list of songs for Set, based on what they’d been cooking up on stage, but, as Alex put it, “we thought of a few more once we got there.”As he recently explained to a British reporter, “I had probably ten or twelve in mind when we went into the studio. As the evening wore on, band members would suggest tunes to do, and we’d do them. I think we only did more than one take of two or three of the songs we did, and I don’t think we used any second takes on the album. There are all different approaches to do things. Over the years, I have come to think spontaneity and doing things live as much as possible is worth something. Somehow, when you layer things by overdubbing them, that seems to lose an element of spontaneity and live that’s very important.”The material on Set ranges from the modern to the classic, the playful to the sexy. It stays in an R&B groove, save for a trio of jazzy numbers (“April In Paris,” “There Will Never Be Another You,” “Shiny Stockings”) and a country tune from the even more elusive Gary Stewart (“Single Again”) What links the lineup is that all these tuners are part of Alex’s personal hit parade. “I know a few scholars of old R&B,” he explains, “they play things for me to get me going. Plus I remember things from my teenage years, stuff that was even obscure then.”Growing up in Memphis, Alex would listen to deejay George Klein on WHBO-AM, would sign off each night with Jesse Blevin’s “Goodnight My Love” –which reappears here as Alex’s send-off to Set. “Lipstick Traces,” written by Allen Toussaint but published under his mother’s name, is another youthful fave. But other cuts, like the Randy “You’ve Got a Booger Bear Under There,” are fresh off the car radio—if you happen to be driving around the Deep South, that is.
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