Chris Bell (musician) - Early Career

Early Career

Prior to his later, more famous work in the 1970s with Alex Chilton, Bell played in a number of Memphis bands beginning in the 1960s. He had started playing music at age 12, influenced heavily by The Beatles and other British Invasion groups like The Yardbirds and The Who. One of Bell's early groups included Memphis natives Richard Rosebrough and Terry Manning, with whom he continued to work for the rest of his music career. In 1964 and 1965, Bell played lead guitar in a British Invasion-influenced group called the Jynx (the name is a takeoff on The Kinks) with local musicians, including lead vocalist Mike Harris, rhythm guitarist David Hoback, drummer DeWitt Shy, and bassist Bill Cunningham, and later, bassist Leo Goff. Other lead vocalists at some of the group's shows and rehearsals (though not present on their recordings) included local teens Ames Yates, Vance Alexander, and Chilton. Chilton, who attended nearly every Jynx show and sang lead vocals for a couple of weeks, soon joined the Box Tops with Cunningham, as the Jynx split up in 1966. Bell continued to perform and record in Memphis throughout the rest of the decade; by the late 1960s, he had turned his focus more toward writing original songs.