Alex Chilton Fan Still Regrets Not Buying Box Tops Album When He Was 11

BROOKLYN, NY—Greg Scoff, associate editor at Stereo Review magazine and Alex Chilton fanatic, still regrets not buying a copy of a Box Tops LP he remembers seeing in the $1.99 bin in the record department of a Huntington, Long Island Woolco in 1977. “I still remember it like it was last week,” Scoff said. “I was flipping through this bin of records while my Mom was buying sneakers for my little brothers. There was this Box Tops album in the bin and I remembered picking it up and thinking to myself ‘what the hell is this?’ I put it back, thinking they were just a Beatles rip-off band or something.”

What Mr. Scoff didn’t realize at the time was that Alex Chilton was the lead singer of the ‘60s pop group. “I was only 11 year-old, what the hell did I know? I was into the Beatles and The Who at the time I hated all ‘70s music except for Cheap Trick.”
Scoff was a freshman at the State University of New York at Albany when he found a Big Star album in the record library at WCDB, the college’s radio station. “I remembered reading in Trouser Press that the guys in The Shoes really liked Big Star, So I put the record on and it was awesome. Then this guy at a used record store in downtown Albany told me that Alex Chilton was also the lead singer in the band that sang “The Letter.” He showed me the Box Tops album and I was like ‘holy shit!”

Scoff bought the album and immediately became one of Alex Chilton’s biggest fans. “Everybody is into Big Star and Alex Chilton now, but I heard the first Big Star album in 1984, so I’ve been into him longer than anybody I know...I mean, I was listening to ‘September Gurls’ a full year and a half before The Bangles covered it.”
Also a huge Jonathan Richman fan, Scoff thinks he remembers finding the first Modern Lovers album in a box at a flea market when he was twelve.

“I might be mixing it up with this dream I had where I’m at this flea market with my Dad and I found The Beatles’ “butcher cover” in a box full of Grand Funk and Three Dog Night albums, but I’m not sure. Even, if I did see the album, I was still a little kid and I didn’t have a paper route yet, so I didn’t have any money to spend on albums. Like there was this time when I was in a Sam Goody with my Dad and he was buying my Mom a Roberta Flack album and I almost asked him if he could buy me this Yardbirds album, but he was in a bad mood, so I didn’t.”

Still, Scoff regrets not getting the Box Tops album when he had the chance.

“If I had to do it over again, I would’ve bought the album in a second, even if I had to ask my mom for the money,” he said. “I mean, I could’ve been into Big Star a whole 8 years before I got to college!”

“I also would’ve bought this really cool coffee-table book about horror movies I was looking at,” Scoff added. “It had some really cool color stills from ‘50s and ‘60s Hammer films and stuff.”