It might seem counterintuitive to move to New Orleans, a city where folks go to party hard, if you want to get sober and restart your life, but
Alex Chilton was a guy who stubbornly did things his own way. After going from success to failure to dissolution in his birthplace of Memphis,
Chilton pulled up stakes and settled in New Orleans in the early '80s. There, he put down the bottle, worked a variety of odd jobs as he took a long look at himself, and watched as he went from forgotten man to a cult hero as
R.E.M. and
the Replacements dropped his name and
the Bangles covered "September Gurls." In 1985,
Chilton returned to music, but he set aside the sound of his previous work in favor of a lean, stripped-down style that filtered the rolling R&B of his new hometown through scrappy guitar leads and a "first thought equals best thought" philosophy of record-making. More than a few fans of
Chilton's masterful work with
Big Star were thoroughly puzzled with such '80s comeback efforts as
Feudalist Tarts and
High Priest -- especially his emphasis on covers rather than original songs -- but in retrospect that music represented
Chilton making a clean break from his past and finding a new avenue of creativity that championed spontaneity and living in the moment.
Chilton's music of the '80s also gave him a platform for the sly wit that had previously lurked in the background of his music, and originals like "Lost My Job," "Underclass," and "No Sex" were funny but deeply cutting at the same time.