100 Greatest Songs of the 60’s #66 The Box Tops – The Letter

Released: 1967

These days it’s almost impossible to move without stumbling over a high profile disciple of Big Star, the doomed but vastly influential band who sold a negligible amount of records during their first run in the mid-seventies but, similarly to Gram Parsons or of a later generation Slint, became legendary very much in spite of themselves.

Big Star were fronted by Alex Chilton, who had joined them after three frenetic years with The Box Tops, Memphians who bottled up the area’s diverse musical influences – soul, country, rock n’ roll, blues – and going into the studio for their first session with almost no useful material, came up with the first ever song made in the city to be a nationwide number one.

The Letter’s charms were many, the first in being a pop friendly sub two minutes in duration, meaning you could be almost anywhere listening to the radio and hear the whole thing whatever you were doing. The second was the then seventeen years old Chilton’s voice, a rusty, aged-before-its-time soothsayer’s grind that made the tale sound like it was about one of the founding fathers jet planing back to Mary Ball. Finally, an ultra weird psychedelic run out gave the impression of coming from another dimension. All cults have to start somewhere – and there were worse places than this.