What's the Value of a Human Life?

DATE May 1, 2000 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Author Francine Prose on her new novel "Blue Angel"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

My guest Francine Prose is a novelist, book reviewer and cultural critic. Her
recent New York Times Magazine piece, A Wasteland of One's Own(ph), was about
the paradoxes of the new women's culture to the Oxygen Network to iVillage and
"Bridgett Jones' Diary." It sounds great, she says, culture by and for
women, but the content reinforces all the old stereotypes.

In a recent edition of Harper's, she wrote about how American high school
students learned to loathe literature. In her new novel, "Blue Angel," she
takes on university politics and political correctness. Reviewing it in The
Washington Post, Michael Dirda described it as among the most enjoyable books
he's read in a long time. The main character, Ted Swenson, is a 47-year-old
professor of creative writing who wrote a well-received novel early in his
career, but can't making any progress writing his current one. He's feeling
increasingly alienated from his students with their piercings and tattoos, but
he's lured into an affair with a student and ends up facing sexual harassment
charges. Here's a reading from an early scene.

Ms. FRANCINE PROSE (Author, "Blue Angel"): The scene begins at a college-wide
meeting--this is a small college, Euston College, in Vermont, and the dean
has--Dean Benthem(ph) has convened the entire faculty to remind them of the
college's sexual harassment policy because there's been a sort of
controversial case at a nearby college and he wants to make sure that none of
his faculty will make the same mistake. So he reads the policy.

`No Euston College faculty member shall have sexual relations with a currently
enrolled or former student, nor offer to trade sexual favors for academic
advancement.' And then we go into the head of my hero, Swenson, who's
listening. `Puritanism's alive and well. Thank God for repression. What if
someone rose to say what so many of them are thinking, that there's something
erotic about the act of teaching, all that information streaming back and
forth like some bodily fluid? Doesn't Genesis trace sex to that first bite of
apple? Not the fruit from just any tree, but the tree of knowledge.'

`Teacher-student attraction is an occupational hazard. Over the years, plenty
of girls have had crushes on Swenson. He's not flattering himself about this.
It's built into the system. Still, their interest is flattering, which, in
itself is attractive, and so their attention was sometimes returned in ways
that couldn't have been more harmless. So what if he read Ms. A's paper first
or looked to see if Ms. B got his joke? More often than not, those students
worked harder and learned more. And those fleeting attachments never led any
further. Swenson should be canonized. He's the saint of Euston.'

`As hard as it might be for anyone, including himself to believe, he's taught
for 20 years and never once slept with a student. He loves Sherry(ph), his
wife. He wants his marriage to last. He's always felt shy around women. Nor
does he need the dean to point out the moral implications of the power gap
between teacher and student. So he'd managed to get past those awkward spots
with literary talk. Each friendly, formal, professorial chat layered a
barrier between him and the problematically attractive student until neither
of them could have begun to dismantle that protective partition. By then it
was way too late, too embarrassing and daunting, to face each other on any
other terms; as male and female, for example.'

`But what the dean's saying is that nothing has to happen. Any spark can set
off the tinderbox of gender war. Best not to make eye contact or shake a
student's hand. Every classroom's a lion's den; every teacher a Daniel. And
every Tuesday afternoon Swenson's job requires him to discuss someone's tale
of familial incest and fumbling teen-age sex with the college's most
hypersensitive and unbalanced students, some of whom simply despise him for
reasons he can only guess. He's the teacher and they're not. Or he looks
like somebody's father.'

GROSS: Thanks for reading that, Francine Prose. And that's from Francine
Prose's new novel, "Blue Angel."

Now what inspired you to put yourself in a male professor's position? Having
written a lot about woman--essays and fiction--during your career, you'd
think, in a way, that you'd be writing from a woman's point of view,
especially about a subject as charged as sexual harassment.

Ms. PROSE: Well, for one thing, I found it tremendously liberating to write
from a male point of view. Just on the simplest technical level, you can call
a male character by his last name. I mean, it still is possible to say,
`Swenson did this, Swenson did that,' whereas, in fact, when you're writing
about a female character it's very rare--you almost never see a writer saying,
you know, `Jones got up in the morning and brushed her hair.' So that gives
you a certain distance on the character. And I wanted that kind of distance
here on my main character.

Also, I was basing it on "The Blue Angel," I mean, the Marlene Dietrich film,
and the professor was a male and I thought, `Well, let's just make the
professor a male and see what happens.'

GROSS: I'm wondering if writing from a male point of view is a good exercise
for you in the sense that you're getting into, you know, your male character's
point of view and not just having a kind of blanket response of men are sexual
harassers, women are the ones who get harassed.

Ms. PROSE: Oh, yeah. And the thing is that was amazing for me was how
sympathetic I felt for this guy and how deeply--you know, as--I mean, I
really--you know, Swenson, `Say moi?' After about two chapters, I felt so
close to this guy and all his kind of embarrassing, impermissible, outrageous
thoughts were my embarrassing, impermissible, outrageous thoughts. I mean,
his response at that tedious faculty dinner party, I have been to that dinner
party, I was that guy at that dinner party. So it was easy. And then really
kind of as an extra benefit, it gave me the ability to reverse those
traditional roles of, you know, the victimizing male harasser and the innocent
female student. I mean, that's not what's happening here.

But I should say that that wasn't my intention. When I started out, I really
wanted to do a love story. I mean, I wasn't thinking, `I'm going to sit down
now and write a novel about sexual harassment.' I thought, `I'm going to do
this novel, I'm going to think about "Blue Angel" and I'm going to think about
obsessional love and about how it can ruin your life.' And I thought, `Well,
I'll set it in a college classroom, I've been spending a certain amount of
time in these classrooms.' And the next thing I knew I realized what universe
I was writing about, and I thought, you know, `If this happened in this
atmosphere, here's what would happen. It would be a particular kind of mess
and he would ruin his life in a particular kind of way.'

GROSS: And--I mean, I hope I'm not giving away too much here, but the student
that he has the relationship with, he has no clue to quite how troubled she is
and quite how manipulative she's being and really what a liar she is, too. So
she really initiates this relationship, although he's the one who's found
guilty.

Ms. PROSE: Yeah, I didn't either, to tell you the truth. I mean, as I was
writing the novel--you know, one of the great pleasures for me of writing
fiction is that you don't know where it's going. I don't. I mean, some
writers I think have things planned out. I don't, and I just write from
sentence to sentence and chapter to chapter and hope for the best. And I had
no idea that Angela Argo, the student, would turn out to be the kind of person
she turns out to be. And as each sort of upsetting and progressively more
horrible revelation came about, I felt almost as if I were watching this train
wreck. I was going, `Oh, my God, that's what she's doing. That's what she's
going to do.'

GROSS: Writer Francine Prose is my guest, and her novel is called "Blue
Angel." You know, one of the teachers in your novel says, `We all have to
watch our backs now. I never talk to a female student in my office alone
without the door wide open, and I keep a tape recorder in my desk that I can
activate if things get dicey.' Has it come to that?

Ms. PROSE: Yeah, it absolutely has. I mean, those are--not much in this
novel actually happened or is based on life, but those are things I've heard
from friends--male friends, colleagues, teachers. They do keep tape recorders
in their desks and they do keep the door open. And, you know, sometimes, I
have to tell you, that I've heard these sorts of statements from these sort of
very sweet, very elderly men. And part of me thinks, you know, `In your
dreams this is going to be the problem that you're ...(unintelligible).' But
in fact I think that they're right to be worried.

I mean, you know, their horror--and I don't think that they're so far
wrong--is that it'll reach the point that you have to have kind of the nurse
present at the student conference the way you do at the visit to the doctor's
office.

GROSS: What's your critique of sexual harassment codes at universities now?

Ms. PROSE: Well, you know, I think the old days when it was perfectly normal
and acceptable and no one really said much for usually male professors to have
affairs with female students, it was pretty bad. I mean, I think it was bad
for the students, it was bad for the--it was just bad for the atmosphere. And
what's rarely talked about--I mean, of course there was unequal power
relation, it was very bad for the young woman involved, but it was also, you
know, having been in classes where it was clear--as a student, where it was
clear that that was going on, it was very bad for the morale of the other
class. I mean, you know, the other students are thinking, you know, `What are
we, chopped liver? I mean, why--you know, what'--and then, any pretense of
fearness that there's actually a grading system that's just based on merit
goes right out the window.

So I think that that was really excessive and that there were wrongs that
needed to be addressed and taken care of. But I do think that it's gone much
too far in the other direction, because now, as everybody knows, I guess, it's
really begun to influence free speech issues. I mean, it's crept over--it's
not just about having affairs with students, it's about, you know, you tell
some lame dirty joke in front of your class, and the next thing you know
your job's on the line.

And I also think that it's not particularly good for women. It's not good for
young women, for their image of themselves. You know, I mean, the way they
behave as if college-age women were these kind of frail, Victorian flowers who
would just be, you know, totally withered by hearing one slightly dirty word
from their professor. How can that possibly help women to be seen that way
and to see themselves this way?

GROSS: My guest is Francine Prose. Her new novel is called "Blue Angel."
We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: If you're just joining us, my guest if Francine Prose. Her new novel
is called "Blue Angel."

Because your professor is an English teacher, you know, you have sessions in
which a student has to read their short story out loud, and then the other
students critique it. And some of these sessions are really pretty funny in
your book, and I'm sure you've led a lot of these critique sessions yourself.
What are some of the things that go on in critique sessions that you find
either particularly funny or embarrassing or disturbing in terms of how
students critique each other's writing.

Ms. PROSE: Well, you know, one of the things that comes up in the very first
chapter is someone says, or thinks of saying, `Why don't you rewrite the story
from the dog's point of view?' I mean, you hear that sort of thing and you
almost--you hear yourself saying that sort of thing, just--I mean, it's an odd
process. I mean, there's something, I think, ever so slightly sadistic about
the process. I mean, about the whole idea of sitting there with your work,
you know, your heart and soul, really kind of laid out on this table, and then
all these strangers, or near strangers, talking about it, you know, it's very,
very difficult. I mean, I like Swenson. I've reached the point where I'm
almost always overidentified with the student whose work is being discussed,
and I'm just sitting there in agony, even if the student is doing a perfectly
good job and it quite resilient about it.

I mean, you just hear--you know, the other thing I think that happens is that
there are various taboos in the workshop. I mean, and the strongest taboo, I
think, the thing you can't say is, `I was interested' or `I was bored,' which
seem to be the most basic thing about writing. You know, when I myself am
writing, what I'm hoping and praying is it's not boring, don't let it be
boring, I'm rewriting it so it's not boring. But when you're teaching, you're
not allowed to say that. So instead there's a whole kind of vocabulary of
euphemism that's grown up to avoid having to say the word `boring.' So people
say, you know, `You're showing'--What is it?--`You're showing and not
telling--or you're telling and not showing.' Or `What's the stakes for these
characters?' Or `Whose story is it?' You know, a number of sort of formulaic
responses that just gets around the issue of, you know, `I was reading your
story and I went to the refrigerator 20 times because it was what I'd rather
do.'

GROSS: So do you think that these student critiques are worth doing, or do
they just cause a lot of pain without helping much?

Ms. PROSE: I think you can teach students--I mean, I don't think these
classes are worthless at all. I mean, there's value. You can teach students
to edit themselves. You can teach them. And I think the students find it
helpful. Because for students, really, it's sort of the equivalent of
publication. I mean, you're putting your work out there and you're seeing how
people do respond in ways that can be helpful.

I mean, when I--you know, I didn't take so many workshops--I took a few
workshops I guess when I was a senior in college and a junior in college, and
what is very helpful is that something that's very, very clear to you can be
not clear to another person. You know, just--I mean, you've rewritten it a
million times, let's say you even cut it out of a story, and in your mind it's
always there whether you cut it or not. So, you know, when another student
says, `I didn't understand that,' that can be extraordinarily helpful.

On the other hand, frankly, if I had to redesign the whole system, I would go
in there and do all of that in conference with a student, and then we'd just
talk about literature during those two hours.

GROSS: There's a scene in the book where the student who the teacher has
fallen in love with is reading her story out loud. Now the teacher thinks
that this is really brilliant. This is part of the reason why he's fallen in
love with her, that he admires her writing so much. The students all think
the writing is awful. Who's right?

Ms. PROSE: He is. I mean, comparatively. You know, I should tell you that
Angela's novel that she's writing is actually a novel I started about five
years ago and gave up because it just seemed not very good to me, and I
thought, `This isn't going anywhere.' So I just put it in a drawer. And when
I needed a novel for Angela to have written, or to be writing, I thought,
`Wait a second, I have this novel somewhere,' and I rooted around through my
drawer and I found it. And, you know, it's funny when you're writing the sort
of strange coincidences and things you didn't plan, it didn't occur to me
while I was looking for Angela's novel or my novel or whoever it was, that it
was about an affair between a teacher and a student. I mean, it just so
happened that that's what it was about, and I thought, `Oh, my God, how
perfect.' I never would have planned it.

So I don't think that Angela's novel is a great novel. On the other hand,
it's so much, so much better than what the other students are writing. I
mean, part of the fun of writing the book was, I have to say, writing their
stories, a number of which were just so hilariously bad that it was just
exhilarating. I mean, I'd be sort of writing it and giggling at the same
time. And, you know, there was an element of--I won't say payback, but
certainly, you know, after years and years and years of reading really bad
stories to be able to write one and have everybody talk about it in a scene in
my novel was just thrilling. I just thought, `OK, it's all worth it.'

GROSS: Can you read a few lines of one of the really bad student's
submissions?

Ms. PROSE: Yeah. All right, this is a story written by one of the students
named Courtney Alcott(ph), who's kind of a Boston Brahmin, a young woman from
Boston, old family, and she's written a story called "First Kiss: Inner-City
Blues." And she begins to read.

Quote, `"The summer heat sat on the hot city streets, making it hard for it to
breathe, especially Lydia Sanchez(ph). Lydia sat on the filthy, garbage-laden
front steps of her brownstone tenement home watching kids play in the gutter
and the water rushing out of a broken fire hydrant. Just yesterday, she used
to be one of those kids, but she wasn't now. Lydia was miserable. That
morning, she'd yelled at her mother and hit her baby brother, then she felt
even worse. She was used to the crime-ridden, drug-infested city streets of
her neighborhood. She didn't let any of that get to her anymore. But this
time was different."'

GROSS: What would be your critique of that?

Ms. PROSE: My real critique, or the critique that I would be allowed to say?
I mean, my real critique would be...

GROSS: Why don't you compare them. Yeah. Go ahead.

Ms. PROSE: You know, in fact, the thing that you're trying not to say is,
`Why are you writing this? Why is this the thing you want to write?
Certainly there's something you know about that you can do a better job.
Maybe you should consider just letting it go and starting all over again.'
But, in fact, you really say that, so you say what actually Angela says in the
novel, which is, `More detail, more specificity.' You don't say,
`crime-ridden city street.' You try and make that street come alive. You try
and talk about what's on the street. You know, you try to make the reader see
that street.

So I guess--you know, I guess that isn't actually a bad critique, and if other
students who are--What do I want to say?--more naturally gifted than poor
Courtney in this class can take that sort of advice and apply it to their own
work, then that's actually very useful.

GROSS: And, of course, there's like no verb and noun agreement and all that
in that first and second sentence.

Ms. PROSE: Oh, grammar?

GROSS: Yeah.

Ms. PROSE: Forget it.

GROSS: How much do you deal with grammar when you're doing a critique
session?

Ms. PROSE: Oh, absolutely, completely. I mean, when I'm talking to a
student in conference, we go over it word by word, line by line, because,
frankly, I think that's the only useful and the most useful way to talk about
any of this. I mean, the fact is when you--the other problem with going to
class is students saying things like, you know, `I wanted to know more about
her mother and father. I wanted to know more about what happened before the
story begins. What about the back story?' Whereas I think really what I want
to talk about is language, is how the thing is written, how a sentence can be
improved. Because you can have all the motivation and all the psychological
information you want, but the tools we're working in, you know, are language
and sentences and paragraphs, and that's what's important, and that's,
unfortunately, what's more rarely talked about in classes.

GROSS: You know, when the student, Angela, reads her story out loud in
Swenson's class, one of the things she's critiqued for is not writing in a
believable voice. All the other students in the class feel like, `Look,
Angela's still a teen-ager and this is not written in a teen-ager's voice.
Teen-agers don't speak this way.' I'm wondering how you deal with that as a
teacher. You know, teen-agers really have their own language and their own
way of speaking. Do you expect them to write in that voice, or to write in a
voice that doesn't have a lot of `likes' in it?

Ms. PROSE: Well, of course, writing isn't speaking, so, yeah, take the
`likes' out, certainly. But what I've found is that teen-agers actually have
great ways of using the language--I mean, when they're speaking, when they're
writing, they really have this kind of fresh approach to language. And, in
fact, if you can get them--you know, I've gone into high schools and junior
high schools not as a full semester teacher, but to do daylong workshops and
stuff, and what I've found is if somehow you can get them to be more free
rather than less free and, you know, really kind of express themselves and use
language on the page the way they use language with each other, they're much
more inventive than if they think that have to write that sort of--whatever
they think they have to write for English class, that kind of denatured,
stripped down, you know, textbook kind of language, which isn't there
language. I mean, so much of writing really is about voice, about what you
sound like, what you think like and finding a way to get that onto the page
with the fewest possible barriers.

GROSS: Well, Francine Prose, thank you so much for talking with us.

Ms. PROSE: Sure. Thank you very much.

GROSS: Francine Prose is the author of the new novel "Blue Angel."

I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

(Funding credits)

GROSS: This is NPR, National Public Radio.

Coming up, a surprising new turn for singer, guitarist and songwriter Alex
Chilton, a new CD featuring his covers of other people's songs. We're
listening to it now. And our book critic, Maureen Corrigan, receives a letter
from the Social Security Administration about her benefits when she retires,
and considers what it reveals about how work is valued, or undervalued.

(Soundbite of Alex Chilton song)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Commentary: Measure of human life
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

What's the measure of a human life? Commentator Maureen Corrigan says that if
the Social Security Administration is to be believed, much of her life can be
measured in the low four figures.

MAUREEN CORRIGAN:

My life flashed before my eyes last week, and it wasn't a pretty sight. No, I
didn't have a near-death experience. I had a sobering brush with bureaucracy.
I received one of those letters from the Social Security Administration
notifying me that I've finally earned enough work credits to be eligible for
benefits when I retire. My first reaction was gratitude. Good old Franklin
Roosevelt. What a wonderful president he was for ensuring that we Americans
will enjoy some measure of security in our old age.

Then I looked at page two of the letter, which spelled out the monthly
benefits I could expect to receive, depending on when I retire. It's
dispiriting to realize that in my twilight years, I'll be returning to the
lifestyle I enjoyed as a young graduate student: dinner most nights will
once again be a box of macaroni and cheese, and I'll be eating it in the group
house I'll no doubt be sharing with a bunch of other depressed people in the
same situation, except this time 'round, the line for the bathroom in the
morning will move a lot more slowly.

But that vision of the future wasn't even the grimmest thing about this
letter. Far worse was the implied message that my country, the land of
opportunity and optimism, had stopped believing in my potential to better
myself. The letter said my projected retirement benefits were based on my
current earnings, so tactfully, Social Security was informing me it thought I
had topped out as a wage earner.

How could this have happened to me? As the letter detailed, I'd been working
since junior high, and if the lasting payoff of all those jobs--especially the
early ones I held in my working life--can't be calculated in dollars, what was
their worth?

That's when I looked at the chart entitled, `Your Earnings Record at a
Glance,' and the Social Security ghost of jobs past escorted me on a journey
back, back to the land of the time card. 1971, the first year for which I've
got a recorded salary--$327. That was probably for a series of summer temp
jobs, filing in offices. Just thinking about those jobs makes the seconds
crawl by. I'd read Dickens' "David Copperfield" in junior high, and I
remember identifying with all the grandiosity and earnestness of youth, with
David's despair as he toiled in that infamous blacking factory.

There were lots of soul-numbing jobs like that: cashier at Kress's Five and
Ten(ph), grader for the Educational Testing Service, which was the closest I
ever came to prostitution, even if it was only intellectual prostitution.
Then there were other early jobs that are memorable because they crystalize a
time or, for better or worse, they taught me what? Something.

There was the job I had as a salesgirl in the husky boys' department at
Macy's. It's seared into my memory, not because of the job itself, but
because of what I had to do to get it. The personnel officer told me when I
applied that I didn't qualify as Macy's material because my face was too
broken out. She said that if I came back the following week and my acne had
cleared up, I'd be hired. So after a week of slathering on the Clearasil, I
did go back to present my face for inspection, and got the job. Ugh. There's
all the humiliation of late adolescence, wrapped up in that $1,951 windfall
from 1977.

My yearly total for 1978 reads zero, so I must have been paid under the table
for my job as a camp counselor in the Catskills. That was my first intense
multicultural experience. The place had formerly been an Orthodox Jewish
camp, and the cook still worked there, turning out daily meals of kasha, and
bananas and sour cream for the uncomprehending campers, who were all deaf
underprivileged black and Hispanic kids.

So maybe it's no wonder that given this haphazard work history, when I got to
graduate school, I was attracted to the writings of the great 19th century
English artist and socialist, William Morris. In his utopian fantasy, "News
From Nowhere," Morris envisioned a society without money, where everyone
devoted themselves to work that engaged their minds and hearts. As somebody
who's wound up teaching and writing for an underpaid living, I've been lucky
enough to find that kind of work. `The reward of labor is life,' says one of
Morris' characters in "News From Nowhere." Is that not enough?

According to this letter from Social Security, it looks like it's going to
have to be.

GROSS: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University.

Coming up, singer, songwriter and guitarist Alex Chilton: As a teen-ager, he
sang lead on the hits "The Letter" and "Cry Like a Baby." Now he's revered
for his own songs.

This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Alex Chilton, singer, songwriter and guitarist,
discusses his music and his new CD "Set"
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

As the lead singer of the group The Box Tops, Alex Chilton had a number one
hit at the age of 16 with the 1967 record, "The Letter." The Box Tops also
had a big hit with "Cry Like a Baby." Chilton left the group in 1969. He
formed his own band, Big Star, which mostly recorded his own songs. Although
his songs haven't become hits, they have earned him the status of cult figure.
Many singer-songwriters have been inspired by his songs. The Replacements
even recorded a song called "Alex Chilton." Now Chilton is paying tribute to
some of his favorite songs and songwriters on his new CD, "Set." It features
his covers of rock 'n' roll, soul and jazz records.

We talked with Chilton about The Box Tops a few years ago on FRESH AIR. We
invited him back, with his guitar, to talk about his latest work. Chilton now
lives in New Orleans, which, like his hometown of Memphis, has a rich music
history. Let's hear "Lipstick Traces," a song from Chilton's new CD, which
was written by Allen Toussaint, one of the major figures in early New Orleans
rock 'n' roll.

(Soundbite of music, "Lipstick Traces," performed by Alex Chilton)

Mr. ALEX CHILTON (Singer/Songwriter): (Sings) `Your pretty brown eyes, your
wavy hair, I won't go home no more 'cause you're not there. I've got it bad,
like I told you before, I'm so in love with you, don't leave me no more.
Lipstick traces...'

GROSS: Alex Chilton, welcome back to FRESH AIR.

Mr. CHILTON: Thanks, Terry.

GROSS: Now you're really known as a songwriter, in addition to a performer.
Why did you want to do an album of other people's songs?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, I hadn't been writing anything for a few years, and I
don't know, it was time to do a record, and the band was hot, and we had a lot
of fresh material that I thought would go well for a record.

GROSS: How did you put together the set list for your new CD, "Set"? How did
you narrow down what songs you wanted to do?

Mr. CHILTON: I guess maybe eight of them I intended to do when we got to the
studio. I sort of had a list of things that--some of them were just obscure,
great tunes, some of them not so obscure, but interesting for one reason or
another, and then while we were in the studio, doing the thing--I mean, we
recorded the thing all in one night, because we knew all the material
backwards and forwards, and it's sort of more interesting, it's more lively to
just do it live, I think.

But then as we recorded these things, other things from our repertoire
occurred to us, that the musicians would sometimes suggest or would just
occur to me, that I hadn't really premeditated doing on the session, and so,
you know, four or five of the tunes from the record were just things that one
of us suggested off the tops of our heads.

GROSS: You grew up in Memphis, just a real capital for both black music and
white music, black performers and white performers, and I'm wondering if there
was any place where you, as a listener when you were growing up, that was off
limits to you racially, or if you could go to concerts in black neighborhoods
and white neighborhoods, black performers and white performers?

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah. There was nothing off limits. In fact, at first--the
first concert I ever attended was Bobby Bland, Jackie Wilson, B.B. King and
many more, and I don't know how many white people were there. I think I was
12 or 13 years old, and I went alone, and it was no problem.

GROSS: Let's play a track from the new CD that relates to your years growing
up in Memphis. Is there any song on here that was performed by someone from
Memphis or produced in a Memphis studio?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, yeah, the first tune on the record--What's it
called--"I've Never Found a Girl," the Eddie Floyd song that was recorded
there at Stats.

GROSS: And what did the song mean to you when you were young?

Mr. CHILTON: Oh, not so much. It's something that I became more of a fan of
later. In the last few years, I've become big on that record.

GROSS: Tell me why, and why you lead your new CD with it.

Mr. CHILTON: Well, a friend of mine suggested that I do the tune, and it was
something I'd never much thought about, and as I watched her groove to it, I
realized that maybe it would be a good thing, and we just started doing it
live, and it was just completely fun, and so that's sort of how it happened
for me.

GROSS: Why don't we hear it? And this is "Never Found A Girl," featuring
Alex Chilton on voice and guitar, from his new CD, "Set."

(Soundbite of music, "Never Found a Girl," performed by Alex Chilton)

Mr. CHILTON: (Sings) `Ain't no love, ain't no love like my baby's love--like
my baby's love. It's like burning fire all shut up in my bones--shut up in my
bones. Ain't no lonely, lonely days, ain't no lonely nights, 'cause
everything she does, I know the girl's all right--I know the girl's all right.
And I never, never found me a girl who loved me like you do--who loved me like
you do. Ain't no man...'

GROSS: That's Alex Chilton from his new CD, "Set." Now I know when you were
growing up, your father was a jazz musician. What did he play? What was his
instrument?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, he was--before I was born back in the '30s, he was a sax
player in Mississippi and, you know, played with some big bands and smaller
bands and that sort of thing. But he didn't make his living playing music in
my lifetime, and by the time I was born, he was playing mostly piano--in fact,
almost completely.

GROSS: Did you grow up listening to jazz, and do you feel like that's like
one of the central parts of your like early musical vocabulary?

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah. The first records I became interested in were in his
jazz collection.

GROSS: Well, you do some jazz standards on the new CD. I thought we'd hear
your version of "April in Paris," obviously inspired by the Count Basie
version of it. Did your father have the Basie version of "April in Paris" in
his collection?

Mr. CHILTON: He did, and he would--Count Basie would come through town all
the time, and my dad always tried to get me to go with him to see Count Basie,
and I could never--at the time, you know, I was--in those days, I was a rock
fan, and I couldn't see the beauty of Basie at all, and I never went with him
to see him, but as the years went by, I began to get the picture, and so I
guess somewhere in the last few years, I became fascinated with "April in
Paris" and "Shiny Stockings" and those things, and sort of worked them out on
the guitar, and so there they are on the record.

GROSS: Did you know how to work them out on the guitar?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, yeah. I didn't know--over the past 10 or 15 years, I've
done a lot of transcribing of orchestra pieces to the guitar. I mean, I'll
take Wagner or Handel or Bach and do little guitar arrangements of them
sometimes.

GROSS: How come?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, why not? It's just a kick to play those things, just to
play those pieces of music, and not having a big band at my disposal all the
time, the guitar--I don't know, you just try to play what pieces of music you
like on whatever instrument you've got and do them as best you can.

GROSS: Well, why don't we hear "April in Paris" from Alex Chilton's new CD,
"Set"?

(Soundbite of music, "April in Paris," performed by Alex Chilton)

GROSS: That's "April in Paris," featuring Alex Chilton singing and on guitar
from his new CD, "Set."

Now let me ask you about another song of yours, and the song is called "In the
Street," and this has actually become the theme song for the show, "That
Seventies Show," and the current version of it that's used as a theme is
performed by Cheap Trick. What do you know about how this song was chosen as
the theme for the show?

Mr. CHILTON: A friend of mine from Philadelphia--or at least from right
across the river--named Ben Vaughan has been working in Hollywood doing
music for various media productions--television, I guess, and movies--for the
past few years, and he somehow was working with the people who produced the
show, "The Seventies Show," and they were looking for a theme, and he
suggested this tune to them, and I guess that they liked it and thought it
would work well. So that's how it happened.

GROSS: Did you write it in the '70s?

Mr. CHILTON: I did, yeah.

GROSS: And does the song say '70s to you?

Mr. CHILTON: I never thought about it, actually, as having to do with a
period of time. I thought of it as having to do with sort of growing up
suburban and being a teen-ager more or less.

GROSS: Would you play some of it for us?

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah, I'll play some of it for you.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. CHILTON: (Singing) Hanging out down the street, the same old thing we
did last week; not a thing to do but talk to you. Steal a car and bring it
down, pick me up, we'll drive around. Wish we had a joint so bad.

GROSS: So how old were you when you wrote that?

Mr. CHILTON: I guess I was 19 or 20.

GROSS: So you weren't far removed from the character in the song.

Mr. CHILTON: True. True.

GROSS: Smoking joints?

Mr. CHILTON: Oh, of course.

GROSS: The lyric is kind of rewritten for the TV show. I think there's
nothing about the joint on it, and instead, there are lyrics about `Nixon's
gone, but rock lives on.'

Mr. CHILTON: Oh really? You know, I've never watched the show. I've never
heard them do it.

GROSS: Well, at least that's on the CD version of the theme from the show.
I'm not sure that it's actually on the TV version.

Mr. CHILTON: Uh-huh.

GROSS: How did you feel about them changing your lyric?

Mr. CHILTON: Oh, I don't care what they do.

GROSS: Uh-huh. I guess you never really know what's going to happen to one
of your songs.

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah, people can twist it any kind of way they want I guess.

GROSS: But, I mean, you never know like what use it's gonna have.

Mr. CHILTON: That's true.

GROSS: Yeah. Let me take...

Mr. CHILTON: I don't feel like it's a real desecration. You know, it's not a
sacred object.

GROSS: Right. My guest is singer, songwriter and guitarist Alex Chilton.
His new CD of covers is called "Set." More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is singer, songwriter and guitarist Alex Chilton. He has a
new CD called "Set," featuring his covers of jazz, soul and rock 'n' roll
recordings.

Since you have your guitar with you, I wonder if you could play for us a song
that you're currently really infatuated with, a song that you're just hearing
in your head a lot now?

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah. There's an old tune by a guy named Frederick Knight
who's been kicking around the soul scene for a long time, and he's a producer
and writer for Malaco these days, and this is a tune of his that I remember
that--I don't know if this thing ever really hit or anything. I just
discovered it by accident, maybe in the early '70s. And I can't find the
record anymore, so I had to rewrite the second verse on my own. I could only
remember his first verse. But it's a song called "A Claim to Fame" and I
think it's something I'm going to start doing with my band pretty soon, so,
all right, "Claim to Fame" by Frederick Knight here.

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. CHILTON: (Singing) As I saw you standing there with the wind blowing in
your hair, I saw you with your wings on, well, I guess I couldn't deny what I
was feeling deep inside. Is this your claim to--is this your claim to fame?
Is love your claim to fame? Don't be ashamed to call my name out loud. Yeah,
is this your claim to fame? Is love your claim to fame? Pardon me while I
sing it one more time.

La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. La, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,
la. Girl, you know you caught my eye, up against the sea and sky, the sun
your picture frame. Well, I knew right then and there that for me this one so
fair--is this your claim to fame? Is this your claim to fame? Ba, ba, ba,
ba. Is love your claim to fame? Don't be ashamed to call my name out loud.
Yeah, is this your claim to fame? Is love your claim to fame? Pardon me
while I sing it one more time.

GROSS: I like it.

Mr. CHILTON: Anyway, it sort of goes like that.

GROSS: I like the song. I've never heard it before.

Mr. CHILTON: Nobody has but me, you know, and I can't even find it to find
the second verse of it, so I just had to write it myself.

GROSS: So you think you'll be writing more songs again soon? Is that
something you're hoping for?

Mr. CHILTON: I actually have been writing a lot this year, but I don't know
what--over the last year, I've been writing a lot. I haven't really done any
discerning about it to see which ones among them are worth my doing at the
moment.

GROSS: How do you decide that?

Mr. CHILTON: Well, mostly what I've done in the last year is write sets of
lyrics, and a lot of times, I just look at a set of lyrics and have a general
idea of what sort of music, what sort of thing it'll be, and I'll just leave
the set of lyrics there, and sometimes I'll just let the thing kind of fall
together around a very rudimentary concept in the studio and that may be the
way some of it happens, if and when I get around to recording some of them.

GROSS: Let me play something else from your new CD set and this is the Harry
Warren, Mack Gordon song, "There Will Never Be Another You." What
inspired you to include that?

Mr. CHILTON: It's just something that we do now and then on stage, and one of
the musicians said, `Hey, let's try "Another You."' It wasn't something I'd
planned, and so I counted it off a little too fast, and we did it and it just
worked.

GROSS: What are your memories of this song? This song dates back to the
'40s.

Mr. CHILTON: Yeah, well, it's one of the things that--I mean, when I was
seven, my dad got a Chet Baker record and really the first singer that ever
caught me was Chet Baker, and I just loved his voice and I sang along with his
records and it's a thing that I first heard Chet Baker do.

GROSS: Well, good. Well, let's hear it. And this is "There Will Never Be
Another You" from the new Alex Chilton CD, "Set."

(Soundbite of music)

Mr. CHILTON: (Singing) There will be many other nights like this, see, and
I'll be standing here with someone new. There will be other songs to sing,
another fall, another spring, but there will never be another you. There will
be other lips that I may kiss, but they won't thrill me like yours used to do.
Oh, I may dream a million dreams, but how can they come true when there will
never, ever be another you?

GROSS: Music from Alex Chilton's new CD, "Set."

(Credits given)
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