A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, from Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man - Hardcover

The first biography of the influential musician and forebear of the indie-rock scene

Alex Chilton’s story is rags to riches in reverse, beginning with teenage rock stardom and heading downward. Following stints leading 60s sensation the Box Tops (?The Letter”) and pioneering 70s popsters Big Star (?the ultimate American pop band”?Time), Chilton became a dishwasher. Yet he rose again in the 80s as a solo artist, producer, and trendsetter, coinventing the indie-rock genre. By the 90s, acolytes from R.E.M. to Jeff Buckley embodied Chilton’s legacy, ushering him back to the spotlight before his untimely death in 2010.

In the career-spanning and revelatory A Man Called Destruction, longtime Chilton acquaintance Holly George-Warren has interviewed more than 100 bandmates, friends, and family members to flesh out a man who presided over?and influenced?four decades of American musical history, rendered here with new perspective through the adventures of a true iconoclast.

Holly George-Warren is the award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Road to Woodstock (with Michael Lang), Public Cowboy #1: The Life and Times of Gene Autry, Punk 365, and a dozen other books. The two-time Grammy nominee has written for such publications as Rolling Stone, the New York Times, The Village Voice, and Entertainment Weekly. Coeditor of The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll, she served as the editorial director of Rolling Stone Press for eight years. She lives in upstate New York.