INTERVIEW: The Box Tops keep opening that ‘Letter’
Photo: The Box Tops in 2018 features, from left, Gary Talley, Bill Cunningham and Rick Levy. Photo courtesy of the band / Provided by bands’ PR agent with permission.
The Box Tops rose to the top of the charts in the 1960s with their mega-hit “The Letter,” and that song and the revived band show now signs of slowing down. Original members Bill Cunningham and Gary Talley have joined together and have been touring the world for the past few years, playing their many hits to audiences who remember the original tunes gracing the airwaves 50 years ago.
Cunningham and company have a few key concert dates coming up, including Aug. 25 in Deadwood, South Dakota, at the Kool Deadwood Nights festival. Plus they will perform live on a TV show in Germany in September. After that: Oct. 20 at the Golden Nugget in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Dec. 22 at the Desert Diamond Casino in Sahuarita, Arizona.
The Box Tops began their success in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where each of the founding members was born and raised.
“My dad was part of a music scene,” Cunningham said in a recent phone interview. “He worked with Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis. All the original Box Tops were all born and raised in Memphis, Tennessee, so Sam Phillips was a neighbor of ours. And my dad worked with him at Sun. My dad was a recording artist as well as helping to get the Sun 45’s pressed when they were plastic, when they did the actual 45’s, so he was in the business. And then my brother followed on as a session musician and later as an artist and ended up being in a group called The Hombres.”
Cunningham, whose mother and grandfather were classical musicians, was turned on to music from a young age, but what cemented the deal — like it did for so many other teenagers — was when the Beatles played the United States in February of 1964. At the time, Cunningham, who played bass and keyboards in the original lineup of The Box Tops, had been in a bunch of bands in those early days, and actually the original Box Tops members would play against one another in ‘Battle of the Bands’ contests.
Eventually the members came together and formed The Devilles — named after the Cadillac DeVille.
“People used to name bands, I guess, after cars, or at least some bands did,” Cunningham remembers. “Then when we went to put ‘The Letter’ out, we had to do a check to make sure The Devilles was a clear name to use, that it wasn’t nationally registered or something. Sure enough, there was as a group called The DeVilles on a national level, so we couldn’t use that name. We had to come up with another name, and somehow or another, we ended up with Box Tops, which sounded terrible to me. But after ‘The Letter’ hit number one, the sound of the name didn’t bother me nearly as much.”
“The Letter” became the band’s most recognizable hit and continues to receive airplay on radio stations. It is a quintessential American song from the 1960s — somehow pop sounding and yet dark and brooding. The vocals by Alex Chilton are original and haunting; the backing instrumentals are melodic and complementary. Cunningham was only 17 when it hit #1.
“I was 17, and Alex Chilton, the lead singer, was 16,” he said. “So we were born in the same year but different ends of the year. I was born in January, and he was born in December of ’50. And the other members were no older than two years older than us, so everyone was below 20. So everyone was in their teens.”
The instant fame was not the shock to the system that it might seem. After all, Cunningham comes from a musical family. His father and brother were in the music industry, and he grew up knowing the likes of Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
“I sort of saw this stuff happen,” he said. “I thought in a way that it wasn’t such a different thing that I had seen this happen before, but, of course, when it happens to yourself it feels different.”
The group would go on to record four albums and 10 singles. Their other mega-hit is “Cry Like a Baby.”
But all good things must come to an end. After several lineup changes, The Box Tops disbanded in 1970, according to their official website. It took more than 25 years for the original members to reform and perform together, but then came the tragic death of Chilton in 2010 (he had been playing with the band Big Star for years). Then in 2015-2016, Cunningham and Talley revived The Box Tops name and have been playing together ever since.
“I got invited to a session with some guys from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and they were going to record it in Nashville, Tennessee,” he said. “I flew to Nashville to do the session, and I had lunch with our guitar player [Talley], the other founding member that’s still playing. So we had lunch, and I was telling him about the session. He said, ‘Oh, I’d like to come to that.’ I said, ‘Well, come on. I’m sure they’d be glad to see you.’ So he did, and he happened to have some guitars in the back of his car. And they invited me to play on the session, and soon as we played on the first track that we were on … I recognized that sound that we had. It just sort of felt right, so we said, ‘Maybe we should do something.’”
The rest is history.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
The Box Tops have a string of concerts in the coming weeks and months. Click here for more information and tickets.
