Before Email, the Box Tops Delivered ‘The Letter'
‘200 Greatest 60s Rock Songs’ Book Excerpt
The 1960s was a watershed era for blue-eyed soul, with multiple hits by the Young Rascals, Mitch Ryder and the Righteous Brothers. Add the Box Tops, whose 1967 “The Letter” became a №1 single and would sell four million copies.
The band had been together four years before they were discovered by Memphis DJ Ray Banks, who asked producer Chips Moman of American Sound Studio to give them a break. Moman passed the group onto his assistant Dan Penn, who was anxious to produce his own records.
When the Box Tops arrived at American Sound in 1967, Penn was surprised that the band’s lead singer, Alex Chilton, was only 16. “The Letter” was written by Wayne Carson Thompson, who’d recorded a demo that Penn liked. Penn recalled in Guitar Towns: A Journey to the Crossroads of Rock ’n’ Roll that despite his age, Chilton didn’t require much guidance delivering the lead vocals.
“He was a little timid. I gave him a couple of small lessons in screaming. I said, ‘Now, don’t say airplane. Say aer-o-plane.’ It just came to me. Anyway, from that moment on, he picked it up, exactly as I had in mind, maybe even better. I hadn’t even paid any attention to how good he sang because I was busy trying to put the band together. I had a bunch of greenhorns who’d never cut a record, including me.”
Those greenhorns — drummer Danny Smythe, guitarists Gary Talley and John Evans and bassist Bill Cunningham — were joined by Chilton after the band gained popularity locally as the Devilles. The band became the Box Tops to avoid confusion with another Devilles group. Because of their lack of experience, Penn said he relied on Thompson’s demo as a guide for the group’s track.
“I borrowed everything from Wayne Thompson’s original demo — drums, bass, guitar. Even that good guitar lick. I added an organ with an ‘I’m a Believer’ lick. I liked that kind of groove. We cut it all on the studio’s three-track Ampex, a great little recording machine.”
“The Letter” would establish the Box Tops and Penn as stars. Chilton explained on the Gibson guitars site that while he was a fan of both British rock and the R&B of nearby Stax Records, the Box Tops’ sound “was Dan’s peculiar version of soul music.”
“His writing style was so much himself. It had its own little idiosyncrasies about it, and that didn’t necessarily appeal to me. I didn’t have a full appreciation for it at the time.
“It was pretty much a situation where everything had to be done his way. Of course, being a minor at the time, and not wanting to get sent back to school, I pretty much had to do what I was told. But that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted to be doing.”
After four weeks on top of the charts, “The Letter” became the №1 hit of 1967. Joe Cocker reached the Top 10 with his bluesy version in 1970; it would be the most successful of more than 200 covers of the song.
Frank Mastropolo is the author of the 200 Greatest Rock Songs series and Fillmore East: The Venue That Changed Rock Music Forever. For more on our latest projects, visit Edgar Street Books.