INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT

 

These pages are changed monthly. Each month we go into the Retrospectives archives to bring you a full interview transcript of one of our many past interview specials.

 

 

 

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Radio Awareness for Kids

                     (The Box Tops)

                   First aired 3rd November 1998

Coming out of Memphis in the latter half of the 1960’s The Box Tops were one of America’s finest exponents of “blue eyed soul” with a succession of worldwide hits during that time. The guitarist for The Box Tops Gary Talley has joined us twice on Retrospectives, the second time just prior to an Australian visit last year for some guitar clinics. Here is a transcript of Gary’s first interview on Retrospectives discussing the history of the band. Hope you enjoy.

JB– Let’s go back to the formation of the band. Did you guys all know each other before hand?

GT– No not really. I knew one of the guys John Evans and what happened was there was a band called the Devilles in Memphis and the lead singer quit a guy named Ronnie Jordan. At this time I wasn’t in the band it was John Evans, Danny Smythe and a couple of other guys, that’s when they got Alex Chilton to join the band as the lead singer but it still wasn’t known as The Box Tops it was just The Devilles. What happened was soon after that I joined and then Bill Cunningham joined so the line up was Alex Chilton, Bill Cunningham on bass and keyboard, John Evans on guitar and keyboards and I played lead guitar and Danny Smythe played drums. We were managed by a DJ named Roy Mack and he got us into the studio American Studios which was run by Chips Moman who’s quite a well known producer and The Letter the guy who wrote The Letter was Wayne Carson who had a little three song demo and The Letter was on it and a couple of other easily forgettable songs and so the band just went in and recorded these songs because we didn’t have a record deal or anything. Our manager Roy Mack was interested in getting us a recording deal. As it happened the name The Box Tops didn’t happen until after The Letter was recorded and our manage thought of the name, we didn’t think it was a very good name but it surprised us because the president of Bell Records came down to Memphis because Sandy Posey had a couple of hit records that were produced in the same studio so Larry Uttal came down and he heard our version of The Letter and he just flipped and he thought it was great and he wanted to put it out so we wound up getting a record deal kind of in an odd way. When he put the record out we were still playing down south as The Devilles and then when the record came out we started playing as The Box Tops. , then we discovered that the record was doing really well so we began booking more concert dates and then the record went to number one and we were dumfounded we couldn’t believe it. So that’s basically how it all got started.

 

JB– Do you know what became of Wayne Carson who wrote The Letter?

GT– Oh yeah he wrote some more hits after that of course The Letter was the biggest one. He was one of the writers on