Alex Chilton’s Following Is a Cult Above : * Former member of the Box Tops and Big Star is satisfied with his small following, as long as he gets to make the records he wants. He plays tonight at Bogart’s in Long Beach.

You’d think that a musician responsible for some of the finest pop-rock of the 1970s would have more to show for it than a glowing audio fan letter, but that is pretty much how it has gone for Alex Chilton.

Chilton’s wonderful work with the Memphis band Big Star went practically unrewarded. But thanks to the Replacements, at least it has not gone unsung: Their 1987 homage “Alex Chilton” became a hit on college radio. One could readily believe Paul Westerberg, the Replacements’ front man, when he sang, “I never travel far without a little Big Star.” But his claim that “children by the million wait for Alex Chilton to come around” was just a lovely fantasy.

“Cultists in the hundreds” would be closer to the truth. None of the three Big Star albums is available in the United States, except via import--although that could be changing soon. The wry, earthy, R&B-dominated; recordings that Chilton has issued since his 1985 return from near-oblivion also have gone out of print in America. But Rhino Records recently put Chilton back in the U.S. CD bins by releasing a 19-song collection drawn from his solo career and from the last Big Star album.

As for Chilton himself, he still comes around to play for however many children await, fronting a basic rock trio in unpretentious shows devoted mainly to his recent work.

Speaking over the phone last week as he launched a cross-country tour that brings him to Bogart’s tonight, Chilton, at 40, sounded accepting of his cult-hero lot.

“If I can keep going the way I’m going, it’s fine,” he said in a slow, nasal voice. “I’m making records that I want.”

Ironically, Chilton’s only mass-audience success came when he was a teen-ager with hardly any creative control over his music. Almost by accident, the young garage rocker found himself singing lead for the Box Tops, a creature of a Memphis studio team presided over by producers Chips Moman and Dann Penn.

The group’s first recording, “The Letter,” became a Number One hit in 1967, when Chilton was 16. He spent the next three years in the Box Tops as the band scored six more Top 40 singles, including “Cry Like a Baby,” which reached No. 2 in 1968.

“Memphis was a big town for independent recording in those days. Any kid off the streets could have fallen into the same thing,” Chilton said. With the Box Tops, his job was mainly to serve as mouthpiece for his producers, who supplied most of the band’s material. “There were all these rules and formulas that the Box Tops had to live (with). That wasn’t the way we really were,” Chilton said. “But to be around a production company that churned out a hell of a lot of great records was a real education.”

In Big Star, formed in 1971, Chilton put what he had learned to use.

The band also included drummer Jody Stephens, bassist Andy Hummel and, on its first album, Chris Bell on guitar. It wove some of the finest pop influences of the 1960s into memorable songs that had too much feeling to be mere imitations. For the most part, Chilton’s Big Star material dealt with romantic themes, portraying an innocent, post-adolescent passage through love from infatuated beginnings to wounded aftermath, to ultimate despondency.

Musically, the band changed with each release. “1 Record,” from 1972, was a glistening combination of Beatles and Byrds influences. The following year, “Radio City” sounded raw, desperate, and powerful. In 1974, just before it broke up, Big Star recorded “Big Star’s Third: Sister Lovers,” a harrowing but often beautiful reflection of emotional exhaustion and disintegration.

Today, Chilton views those cult classics with a mixture of affection and disdain.

“I don’t think I was a very accomplished songwriter in those days,” he said. “I was experimenting to see what worked. A few of them did. A lot more of them almost work. The music on them is really well put together sometimes. That, to me, is remarkable, looking back. I’m proud of the music I put together.

“But a lot of the songs are clunkers. They go through about three lines, then lay some lyrical egg. I didn’t understand a lot of things I understand now. But the things I did understand, I could do some pretty cool stuff with.”

After Big Star, Chilton’s music practically fell apart. The Rhino collection includes a couple of serviceable garage-rockers from 1978, but tracks from a 1979 Chilton release, “Like Flies on Sherbert,” lurch toward incoherence, more like an involuntary spasm than a thought-out performance. For Chilton, it was the audible end of a downward spiral.

“You can see the bridge between reality and unreality in the third (Big Star) album,” Stephens, Chilton’s former Big Star band mate, said in a phone interview from Memphis where he now works as a manager and producer for Ardent Recording, the same studio where Big Star’s albums were made. “I think he loses the bridge in subsequent (‘70s) albums.”

Chilton matter-of-factly says alcohol dulled his muse and, for a few years, cast him out of the music business.

“My problem mainly was that from the early ‘70s to 1981 I really drank a lot,” he said. “I was kind of notoriously unreliable. People didn’t want to work with me as long as I was so crazy. I quit doing that in 1982, but I had to wait a while” before opportunities to resume his career materialized.

Chilton said his problem stemmed from “being insecure in general. When I became a big success playing rock ‘n’ roll (with the Box Tops), I didn’t even know how to play. It was a long time before I felt I was good enough to handle things. That was a scary prospect for me in the early ‘70s.”

Since his comeback in 1985, Chilton has taken a tack far removed from Big Star’s pure-pop approach. His voice is gruffer and saltier than in the old days, when he liked to sing at the top of his range for plaintive effect.

The musical slant is toward R&B; (Chilton says that Ray Charles’ early recordings for Atlantic represent his idea of an “ideal” sound) as he dredges up obscure oldies for fun, or writes originals with an ironic cast. Chilton even had a kitschy go at “Volare” on his last American release, “High Priest” (1987).

Other songs that appear on the new Rhino compilation include “Lost My Job,” a funny reflection on his scrounging days outside of music, and “No Sex,” a black-humored look at the AIDS epidemic.

Chilton also has toyed with songs that can be viewed as glosses on his lot at the margins of a medium that worships mass appeal. “Make a Little Love,” from “High Priest,” is a remake of an obscure, funky oldie about a singer who hits it big: “Used to be a tramp, but I ain’t no more/Got a hit record now, pockets just full of dough.” In an original song from “High Priest,” Chilton identifies with another dispossessed icon, the Dalai Lama.

Chilton’s own digs are considerably less ornate than the Tibetan palace he imagines in “Dalai Llama.” He said he is building a house for himself in a small town in the middle of Tennessee. So far, he said, it consists only of a roof and supports; before going on tour, Chilton said, he had been living in a tent on the property.

“Making a living is the motivation” for his music, he said--which means that his music-making sometimes extends to singing Box Tops hits on oldies package tours. “I can’t afford to close any chapters,” Chilton said. “I need to work at whatever I can.”

At his own concerts, Chilton will play those old hits only “if somebody asks for it and is really insistent and needs to have it done for them.” But on oldies package tours, “the money’s good, so of course it’s enjoyable. Playing any piece of music can be enjoyable. I try to do them as well as I can, whatever that might be.”

Chilton hinted that he likes to throw some wrinkles into the Box Tops material when he can, but he picks his spots. “At county fairs, you don’t want to get so eccentric.”

His current plans call for recording a new album early next year, with hopes of finding an American label to release it. “These days I’m writing some more really light pop tunes, which I’m enjoying,” he said. “They’re sort of embarrassingly innocuous, but I love them just the same.”

Meanwhile, some--and possibly all--of Chilton’s Big Star work figures to be reintroduced to the U.S. market early next year. The Ryko label, known for its reissue of the David Bowie catalogue, has acquired the rights to “Big Star’s Third: Sister Lovers” as well as a previously unreleased live 1974 radio performance.

Jeff Rougvie, a Ryko executive, said those albums and a disc of previously unavailable solo recordings by Chris Bell (who died in a car wreck in 1979) will be issued in January. Rougvie said Ryko is also trying to negotiate a possible reissue of the first two Big Star albums on a single CD.

“I don’t really mind what happens,” Chilton said. “It’s not going to put any money in my pocket.”

Chilton said he is open to a recording reunion of Big Star, something that has been discussed recently.

According to Stephens, Scott Litt, who has produced R.E.M., broached the possibility of working up a new Big Star song for a movie soundtrack. If it happens, Stephens said, it would be a casual get-together, “to do a song and have fun, just for the experience,” with no thought of a more lasting reunion.

Stephens said he and Chilton have been in contact over the past four years or so, after a long lapse following Big Star’s breakup.

“It’s like a family, or brotherhood. There’s a bond there that you renew every time you run into each other,” Stephens said. “Don’t tell Alex (I think) he’s being a nice guy these days. Just as soon as you tell him, he won’t be. Alex likes to be unpredictable.”

* Alex Chilton and Chris Cacavas and Junkyard Love play tonight at 9:30 at Bogart’s, in the Marina Pacifica mall, 6288 E. Pacific Coast Highway, Long Beach. Tickets: $10. Information: (213) 594-8975.