Lesa Aldridge
Forty years ago in Memphis, the city’s most progressive musicians made connections between punk, which had recently reshaped the pop landscape, and the rockabilly and blues that Memphis had been churning out for decades. Inspired by the work of producer Jim Dickinson and the post-British Invasion pop of former Big Star singer and guitarist Alex Chilton, the all-female band The Klitz created unfettered punk that was grounded in the Bluff City’s bafflingly idiosyncratic musical history.
The Klitz recorded in Memphis between 1978 and 1980, but never released any music during their brief tenure. The quartet referenced the work of Memphis pioneers like guitarist Paul Burlison, who had played on The Rock and Roll Trio’s groundbreaking 1956 recording of “The Train Kept a-Rollin’.” At the same time, they covered songs by The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, recasting them in ways that peered into the future in the manner of Chilton’s work on Big Star’s Sister Lovers (the album also known as Third, recorded in late 1974 and first released in 1978) and his deconstructions of rock, pop and country on his 1979 release Like Flies on Sherbert.
After Chilton’s death in New Orleans in 2010, The Klitz reunited, and they’ll make their first Nashville appearance Saturday at The Basement. Talking to guitarist and singer Lesa Aldridge, who now lives in Nashville, I’m transported to Midtown Memphis circa 1974.
“Back then, the English invasion, ’60s rock ’n’ roll, that was the music we played hanging out in living rooms,” she tells the Scene from a seat in a Nashville coffee shop. “I always thought we weren’t good enough, so that’s why we got labeled ‘punk.’ I don’t know — we were never polished, and we still aren’t. We do sound better than we used to.”
Aldridge, who was involved in a relationship with Chilton throughout much of the ’70s, co-wrote the lyrics for the now-famous Big Star tune “Downs” — the first song composed for what would become Sister Lovers — in 1974 with the mercurial singer and guitarist. The Klitz still play it today.
“[Chilton] put it on a little tape recorder and took it to [Ardent Studios owner] John Fry,” Aldridge says of the song. “He came back and said, ‘I’m good. He loved it.’ That’s what launched Sister Lovers.”
Aldridge joined bassist Amy Gassner, drummer Marcia Clifton and keyboardist Elise Clifton to form The Klitz in 1978. The Clifton sisters had grown up in the Memphis suburb of Frayser, where they lived near rocker Domingo Samudio, who recorded the 1965 garage-rock tune “Wooly Bully” in Memphis under his sobriquet, Sam the Sham.
For Elise Clifton, who has lived in Memphis since the late 1980s, punk impelled her to explore Memphis music history. She had already played in a punkish duo, The Malverns, with Memphis drummer Ross Johnson, who would later join Chilton in avant-rockabilly band Tav Falco’s Panther Burns.
“I had discovered punk a couple of summers before,” Clifton remembers. “When Elvis died, I had never heard The Sun Sessions. When he died, I went and bought the record. And then, around that time, we all discovered The Rock and Roll Trio. We segued into rockabilly from punk, but I do think The Cramps had a lot to do with it, too.”
The Klitz cut Chilton’s “Hook or Crook” and an original, “Two Chords,” in 1978 at Sounds of Memphis Studio, with Chilton and Samudio producing the session. Working with Dickinson in 1979, they recorded a version of Jagger and Richards’ “Brown Sugar” that stands with Sherbert as an example of crazed Memphis psychodrama.
It seems incredible, but The Klitz cut “Brown Sugar” at a Memphis studio that had acquired at auction the recording gear used by the city’s legendary Stax Records, which had folded in 1975. Along with other tracks, “Brown Sugar” was finally released on the 2018 compilation Rocking the Memphis Underground 1978-1980, which features live and studio recordings. Like much of the Memphis music of the era, The Klitz’s version of punk connected Stax — and much more from the city’s storied musical past — to the insurgent spirit of 1979.
Aldridge, who says she last saw Chilton in 1981, tells me the band plans to play at SXSW in March, a gig that ought to raise their profile. As she says, history has vindicated their intuitive, anarchic approach.
“It’s very cool that the original four girls are still alive and kicking,” she says. “It’s become a challenge, because we’re older, and it’s been a lifetime ago. But I’m so pleased, because there’s something about the innocence.”
