Chords for Entertainment Tonight: Alex Chilton of The Box Tops talks "The Letter" (1987)

_ _ _ _ _ _ _
Ain't got time for a fast [Abm] train.
Lonely days are gone, I'm going [B] home.
My baby, she wrote me a letter.
[N] Hey, I don't care how much money I gotta spend.
Gotta get back to my baby again.
Lonely days are gone, I'm going home.
My baby, she wrote me a letter.
My baby, she wrote me a letter.
Baby, she [Ab] wrote me a letter.
Natural fade out on that.
[Db] _ _ [Ab] _ _ _ _ [Db] _
_ [Ab] _ _ Natural fade out.
I love it.
They've got the lingo, they've got the rhythm.
Now they're grabbing our mics [Db] from us. Yeah.
[Ab] Hey.
Hey.
She had something going on.
Well, [Fm] the song on everyone's lips was the letter.
It [Ebm] was by the Box [Db] Tops.
And with it, we bring back a popular entertainment
this week series from last summer
with all new stories, the making of a hit.
And first up, as you heard, is a song
that's one of the shortest songs ever to hit number
one on the singles chart.
A song that came out during a difficult period
and had an important meaning, especially
for servicemen in Vietnam.
_ _ [G] _ _ [B]
In September of [Gb] 1967, Americans everywhere
were listening to the number one [B] record in the States,
Ode to Billy Joe.
But then along came a rather mysterious sounding song
called The Letter.
And Ode to Billy Joe's days were numbered.
We came right on up and knocked it off.
[Am] Give me a ticket [F] for an aeroplane. _
[G] Ain't got time to take [D] a fast train.
_ [Am] Lonely days are [F] gone.
I'm a _
_ [E] _ golden mail [Am] letter.
The group was the Box Tops.
And the only reason they got to cut a record at all
was because [G] a local Memphis DJ championed their [A] cause
to American [Eb] recording studios head [F] Chip Smolman
and his fledgling [E] house producer Dan Penn.
Though Penn didn't like the band's original lead singer,
he made the [Am] other boys an offer.
I said, y'all come back Saturday morning
and bring me a new singer. _
And we'll cut this record.
Though nobody really expected anything to come of it,
the band came back with 16-year-old Alex Chilton.
I started singing it really softly at first.
And the producer came out and said, no, sing it really hard.
And kind of growl it like this.
And he kind of demonstrated it for me.
And I did it as best I could.
When she wrote [G] me a letter, said [F] she couldn't [C] live
[G] without me [G] no more.
Some found it hard [C] to believe such a soulful voice
came from a 16-year-old.
People tell me that, oh, they thought I was 50
and really fat, you know, or black.
And _ _ we had a hit record on a lot of black stations
with that record because people thought we were the black.
He sang his little heart out.
It wasn't really until I started overdubbing it
that I started listening to his voice.
_ [Eb] _ _ _
[Am] Realized that he did have a real good little funky voice.
[G]
Ain't got time to take a [D] fast train.
The letter [E] stayed at number one for four [C] weeks
and went on to sell [Eb] a phenomenal four million copies [N] worldwide.
It's impossible to describe.
It has some sort of movement and immediacy about it, you know.
_ Give me a ticket for an airplane.
Ain't got time to take a fast train.
It gives you a feeling of movement and stuff.
I think a lot of people were in Vietnam at the time, too.
And that was their _ _ fondest dream was [F] their ticket out and back home.
It was the first gold record for producer [G] Penn,
who had the idea for the strings and [D] horns and airplane sound effects.
[E] Oh, and one other touch [F] he told us modestly.
[E] I had Alex say airplane.
_ _ _ Because [D] the demo was give me a ticket for an airplane, _ _ which
didn't sound right.
So I had him change to airplane.
_ _ _ And that helped everything.
One final note.
During the recording session for the letter,
the group still didn't have a name.
So why the Box Tops?
They were trying to think of a name.
And one of the group members says,
we're only doing a public contest.
And people can send in a box top and 25 cents
and help name the group.
He said, box tops.
Aha, that's it.
That's the name of the group.
I thought it was horrible at the time.
_ But looking back on it, it's kind of [Db] a good name.
People remember.
[Ab] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [Db] _
_ [Ab] _ _ _ [Db] _ _ _ _
[Ab] _ _ Wow, now he looks different.
Very different now.
He probably freaked out to see this video.
You know, the song is much shorter than the story
we just did about him.
The letter is only a minute 55 seconds.
That is very, very short.
And the Box Tops had only one other top 10 hit.
It was Cry Like a Baby.
Then the group just disbanded in 1970.
Well, actually, the letter made it into the top 10,
the top 20, rather, twice after the Box Tops recorded it.
Another version by the Arbors went to number 20 in 1969.
And the most famous one, other than the original, of course,
by Joe Cocker.
That went to number seven