Mar 25 2010
Alex Chilton and “The Letter”
Last week, rock singer/guitarist/band leader Alex Chilton died of a heart attack. Not unusual for a 59-year-old these days. If you’re a baby boomer, you may remember Chilton as the voice on “The Letter,” the 1967 hit by The Box Tops. (Wayne Carson Thompson, a Nashville musician, penned the tune.) Joe Cocker covered it in 1970 and made it a hit again. Chilton was 16 when he sang “The Letter” in a distinctive growl that thousands of teen wannabes attempted to emulate in late-sixties’ garage bands.
“The Letter” is memorable nowadays not only for its perennially tuneful appeal but also for what its lyrics say about communication (writing) back in the day: “Get me a ticket for an airplane, ain’t got time for a fast train/ Lonely days are gone, I’m a goin’ home,/ my baby, she wrote me a letter.”
Nobody takes a train for long distance travel anymore, much less talks of it in the same sentence as the word “fast.” More interesting is the power of the letter in the situation this song describes. One wonders why his “baby” (the ex who wants him back) didn’t just phone him: granted, my baby, she just phoned me doesn’t have much poetic power. And maybe this guy didn’t have a phone. Maybe he was working odd jobs, staying in a room. Maybe the phone he used, when he used one, was down the hall. That would not have been unusual in the 1960s (think of Benjamin staying in a Berkeley rooming house in 1967’s “The Graduate”) .
The song’s assumption is that there’s a great, unbridgeable distance between the speaker and his loved-one. He’s got to get home and it’s going to cost him (”don’t care how much money I’ve got to spend/ got to get home to my baby again”) and, apparently, it’s going to take time. He’s got this letter in hand, maybe tucked into the back pocket of his jeans. And he’s scraping up money for that plane ticket.
Problem is, he can’t spend any cash on a long distance phone call. Long distance cost quite a bit in the 1960s. It wasn’t part of any phone plan. You had to dial the operator and get her (always her) to connect you. He could have reversed the charges but who wants to do that to an ex who’s waiting for your arrival? No, he’s got to get to her—she’s sent him word. That’s it.
No internet. No cell phones. No easy way to contact anybody from a long distance. How’s that for a different world? You had mail, I mean pen and paper mail, and land-line phone. And now, well, we can even find you with GPS as you’re texting your friends from China. I’m not sure what the equivalent situation would be for a song like “The Letter” written in 2010: “Get me a ticket for an airplane,/ ain’t got time for a migraine/ Lonely days are gone, I’m a goin’ home/ my baby, she texted me a message.”
I guess some things we’ll just have to leave behind.
If you want to read more about Chilton’s ultra-influential but perennially overlooked 1980’s band “Big Star,” check out the LA Times’s obit:
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Jill and I took a field trip to Baltimore’s most toxic industrial area, Wagner’s Point. This was Jill’s idea. She is fascinated with gross things, dangerous places, and old buildings. I share this fascination. Wagner’s Point is one of several muddy stretches of marshland extending like flattened fingers from Baltimore’s harbor shoreline. This one happens to contain a ghost town. In the late 1990s, 
The hundred-year-old neighborhood—270 residents in a six-block area—was a pocket of houses in the midst of a smelly, smoky, oily industrial waste land, which is home to 10 chemical plants, several oil refineries and storage depots, scrap metal dump sites, and industrial waste recycling outfits, among others things. Many of the residents didn’t want to move but the City declared imminent domain, no doubt to spare itself future lawsuits. It was much cheaper to buy out the residents than pay their future medical bills.
The residents didn’t get a bad deal. They received above-market value for their houses, a relocation fee, and a guaranteed low mortgage on any house elsewhere. So, it was a happy ending, more or less. Jill and I found the neighborhood. The City leveled it. You’d never know there had been a neighborhood here. Here’s a link to a City Paper article about the last inhabitants before they were pushed out: 
Among the other things we saw in the farthest reaches of Baltimore’s industrial shoreline: a mountain of salt for winter roadways, orange and black hills of chewed up scrap metals, a medical wastes dump whose trucks announce, “chemotheraputic infectious waste,” streets named “Chemical Road” and “Quarantine Road,” and the sky-scraper tall incinerator stack of the BGE plant. We tried to get into the city 
My friends and I would have called these “flood pants” or “farmer pants.” For anybody who came of age between 1970 and 1990, men’s pants were supposed to “break” just below the shin and lie on top of the shoe. You weren’t supposed to feel your pant leg fluttering about your ankles when you walked. And, when you sat, you didn’t have to worry about your pant leg riding up to your calf.
My mother always hemmed my pants. She taught us boys how to do it too. If you didn’t hem your pants, you looked like a clown, your pants-ends bunched on top of your shoe. This has changed. It seems nobody hems pants anymore. As a result, most of us men are wearing pants that are way too long. It does look clownish, I must admit. But, for most of us, it’s an inevitable necessity for the following reasons:
I don’t know if or when pants hems will rise again. I can recall when, as a boy, my pants legs were sometimes too short, a fact I would not notice until my peers made fun of me. My humiliation could not have been greater had I been naked. Too-short trousers still carry that stigma. As for the opposite, the too-long trousers, it seems we’ve learned to live with them. About once a week, I tell myself that my pants are too long–I carry too much fabric on my shoes. I don’t like it and I suspect that, years from now, I will look back and cringe at what we now consider appropriate.
