A few weeks before my most recent conversation with Charlie Sexton, my daughters were flipping through some family photos and found a real howler. Some guy in his early 20s with wild, bushy hair, a wisp of a beard, wearing a pink-and-white striped tank top (a muscle shirt showing little muscle), glasses so oversized they now look like goggles (or perhaps a Harry Caray homage), and a cockeyed, goofy grin.
What was I thinking? If this scrawny, scraggly geek was initially unrecognizable to my daughters as their father, he was barely recognizable to me. At different stages of your life, you look different, think different, act different. And, in the case of recording artists, sound different. Many of us have some photos tucked away that might embarrass if we shared them with the public at large (as if the public at large were all that interested). The difference between the rest of us and Charlie Sexton is that the multitalented Texan has spent practically his entire life growing up in the public's eye, his every incarnation documented within the photo album that is the collective consciousness of musical Austin.
While it has been two decades since his debut album as a 17-year-old wonderboy and a full decade since his last disc, the new Cruel And Gentle Things -- to be released September 13 on Back Porch Records -- shows he has reached a rich, reflective place in his life, though it also suggests the struggle it has been for him to get there. No one has enjoyed (or endured) a career like Sexton, who has recorded only four albums under his own name over that span of twenty years, plus one as a founding member of the bluesier Arc Angels (and another with his brother Will that remains unreleased).
For those of us who have watched him come of age, the very fact that Charlie Sexton, the perennial phenom, is now 37 years old is unfathomable. Even Charlie seems a little surprised, and a little dismayed, that a career he began with such prolific promise has seen him record so few albums under his own name, and with so long in between, though the new album reflects the benefits of the other projects with which he's been involved.
"I'm going to try to make up for lost time, but with quality attached," says Sexton, who expects this release to launch a prolific period while reintroducing him as a singer-songwriter. Not that he has been sitting at home playing dominos during the interim. He spent more than three years on the road as Bob Dylan's guitarslinger of choice, while supporting Dylan in the studio on the acclaimed Love And Theft. He has also established his credentials as a producer on projects ranging from Lucinda Williams' Essence to Jon Dee Graham's The Great Battle to Los Super Seven's Heard It On The X to Shannon McNally's Geronimo.
If it's hard to reconcile the pensive, smoky-voiced maturity of Sexton's new album with flashbacks to the videogenic kid who had a mid-'80s teenage breakthrough with "Beat's So Lonely", no apology is necessary from Sexton. By the time he signed with MCA at age 16, he'd already established his Austin musical bona fides -- with an apprenticeship at Antone's, a stint with Joe Ely, and frontman billing with the neo-rockabilly Little Charlie & the Eager Beaver Boys. From an early age, it was obvious to everyone that Charlie was going places.
And so he went -- to Los Angeles, after signing with MCA. In L.A., he recorded a very different sort of debut album than the folks back home were expecting. When Austin next saw its great young hope, he'd been transformed into a bionic pop star with the sheen of a fashion model, the plastic visage of a Billy Idol, and even a hint of a British accent. The barrage of hype surrounding him -- which included an appearance on the cover of Spin magazine in May 1986, just as "Beat's So Lonely" had peaked at #17 on the pop charts -- focused more on his chiseled cheekbones and boyish sensuality than on the musical chops he'd sharpened in Austin.
It was as if the music industry had performed a Dr. Frankenstein on Austin's native son, with Sexton as both raw material and willing accomplice. Austin turned on the teenage Charlie as if he were Benedict Arnold for betraying the roots-rocking verities in which he'd been schooled, the ones beloved by his elders and mentors, in favor of the sounds on the radio more popular with his own generation.
"I'd been really fortunate to grow up in Austin and be close with Jimmie and Stevie Vaughan and W.C. Clark, and to hear all those great blues players and rock 'n' rollers," he says. "It wasn't like learning the blues from a Led Zeppelin record. But I was also interested in a lot of English stuff coming out, Steve Lillywhite productions, U2 and Simple Minds and whoever. I had a rockabilly band when I signed with MCA, but then the Stray Cats had their big hit, and it was like that fifteen minutes had ended. There was somewhere else to go, because I had all these interests."
He still does, even more so, having expanded his circle of interests and influences significantly over the subsequent span of two decades. That the artist who could pass in the 1980s as a British new waver now sounds like such a weathered, Dylanesque troubadour suggests a chameleon quality to Sexton's musical progression, yet the material throughout his career carries a thematic imprint. There's a restless, yearning, occasionally desperate quality within the soul of Sexton's music, from the brooding insistence of "Beat's So Lonely", to the fatalism of his signature anthem with the Arc Angels, "Too Many Ways To Fall", to the introspection of the new album's "Once In A While", where a "blue boy" with a "haunted heart"..."sings to be free, if only in his dreams."
"It would be an easy conclusion to say my music is like therapy, but it's more the 'write what you know' cliche," he explains. "And unfortunately, this is a lot of what I know. I know other things, too. I've lived a charmed life. I've led a horrific life. And a lot of times it goes hand in hand."
Exorcising demons and coming to terms with dashed dreams, Cruel And Gentle Things isn't the work of a goodtime Charlie. Where his last album, 1995's Under The Wishing Tree, had more of an epic scope and scale, with the autobiographical centerpiece "Plain Bad Luck And Innocent Mistakes" building to a furious propulsion over the course of twelve minutes, the ten songs on the new album are tight, focused and elliptical. Its organic arrangements have Sexton playing piano as well as a variety of string instruments, without a single electric guitar solo. Spare and subtle, the music never hits the listener over the head, but insinuates itself beneath the skin. The more you listen, the deeper it sounds.
Though Under The Wishing Tree died a commercial death, it provided the creative breakthrough that continues to pay dividends ten years later on Cruel And Gentle Things. Sexton calls Wishing Tree a "Pandora's box," because once he opened it, all sorts of powerful, scary things emerged.
"It was the first record I was really, really happy with," says Sexton of that third release. "I was working toward something that really meant something. I couldn't deal with stuff just rhyming anymore or imagery that was a little too vague.
"I was born on the heels of Vietnam and the sex revolution or the drug culture or whatever all that bullshit was. Austin was particularly crazy with the hippie thing and all the drugs. There were some bad scenes, bad characters, bad situations. Everyone so proudly waved that banner of freedom, but unfortunately nothing is free, and the ones who paid were the children of that generation. Wishing Tree dealt with the fallout from all that freedom."
Some scars take decades to heal; others never do. When Charlie was born in 1968, his mother was still a kid herself, a free-spirited 16-year-old who liked music and loved to party. His father went to prison on a drug bust when Charlie was four and his younger brother Will was two. During their formative years, the brothers Sexton spent more time and got more of an education in the music clubs of Austin than they did in school. Charlie began playing guitar at age 5 and left home at age 12. By the time he was 16, when other kids were obsessed with Friday night football and worried about Monday morning geometry, Charlie was a high school dropout with a big record contract and a Saturday night gig. Though he'd always thought of himself as a gangly geek, his looks convinced the music industry that it had found a young James Dean (or at least a musical Matt Dillon).
When I first met Sexton twenty years ago, he was an uncommonly polite and unguarded 17-year-old, enjoying his national breakthrough hit while experiencing a pretty severe backlash in Austin. He'd hit the road for a heavily hyped tour in support of his debut album Pictures For Pleasure, and I interviewed him as pop music critic at the Chicago Sun-Times. I figured it was a novelty feature: a kid from Texas who sounded like a synth-pop Brit and was playing Chicago's leading rock club, where he couldn't even buy a legal beer.
I'd anticipated having some fun at the upstart's expense, but I left our interview disarmed. It was hard not to like him, hard not to root for him. Even if the album sounded calculatedly derivative, Charlie himself seemed transparently genuine, amazed at his good fortune, with a boy-in-an-amusement-park's enthusiasm and a readiness to enjoy the ride no matter where it might lead. If the folks back home were laughing at Charlie, he was plainly having the last laugh on the road.
It quickly appeared that the West Coast entertainment industry had adopted Charlie as a pet prodigy, just as Austin had earlier. There were reports of him hanging with the Stones' guitar tandem of Keith Richards and Ron Wood, jamming with Bob Dylan, riding bikes with young actors, dating starlets and models.
In 1989, Sexton issued a self-titled follow-up album, and when the label didn't hear a hit single and barely promoted the release, no one read or heard much about him anymore. He might as well have been Corey Hart, with "Beat's So Lonely" as his "Sunglasses At Night".
"The more I did the poppy kind of thing, it played into that whole big-business record company mentality -- if it's not some blatant single where they don't have to use any imagination, they hassle you to no end," he remembers.
It was five years before I next encountered Sexton, after I'd left Chicago in late 1990 to become the pop music critic at the Austin American-Statesman, drawn by some of those same musical values that his debut album had either ignored or defied. Within weeks of my arrival, I'd heard that Sexton was back in Austin as well, keeping a low profile, with the implication being that he had come home with his tail between his legs. If I dropped by the Hole in the Wall, I'd probably see him jamming with the Mystic Knights Of The Sea, an ad hoc roots-rocking cover band including bassist Speedy Sparks (who'd been like a surrogate father to the brothers Sexton during their formative club years).
After I'd left a couple of phone messages and received no return call, I went to the Hole to ambush Charlie, figuring I might make a big splash at my new gig with a full account of the prodigal son's rise and fall, a cautionary tale about how the music industry eats them young and spits them out. It was a career arc too typical of Austin; few cities have seen more teenage hotshots -- Kelly Willis, Monte Warden, Will Sexton (who'd signed with MCA in the wake of his older brother's ascent) -- dismissed as has-beens before their mid-twenties.
When I approached Charlie after the first set, he was as polite as ever but more guarded than previously. He didn't want to talk about the past until he had something new that was worth writing about, and he promised that he would before long.
In fact, he soon found himself with competing projects that pulled him in very different directions. He'd begun writing material that was more mature, ambitious and conceptual than his teenage video fare while woodshedding at the new Austin Rehearsal Complex, a musician's hangout in South Austin near the Continental Club. Among the others who also rented space at the ARC were drummer Chris Layton and bassist Tommy Shannon, the Double Trouble rhythm section for the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, and young guitarist Doyle Bramhall II, son of one of Stevie's mentors and songwriting partners. Austin music and the city at large were still very much in mourning from Vaughan's fatal helicopter crash in August 1990.
Taking an occasional break from the serious songwriting he was doing, Sexton began jamming with the other three, playing around with a high-octane band of barroom blues. They enjoyed the musical interaction so much they decided to book a few dates, dubbing themselves the Arc Angels, cranking the amps and pinning ears to the wall within the close confines of the Continental. Before long, a band that hadn't taken itself seriously was being seriously courted by label reps, signing with Geffen for an album that Steve Van Zandt (post-Springsteen, pre-"Sopranos") would produce.
For Austin fans, the Arc Angels carried the Stevie Ray torch and served as the redemption of Charlie Sexton, who finally had a chance to exercise the bluesy chops and roots-rocking sensibility he'd displayed before selling his soul in Los Angeles. Yet as much as Sexton enjoyed the musical partnership that brought him back into Austin's good graces, he paid a creative cost.
"When we did the Arc Angels, I was about halfway through writing Wishing Tree," he recalls. "It was really hard to abandon that, because that record was a big step for me, but morally it felt like the right thing to do. Chris and Tommy had come out of a really horrific situation, and Stevie and them had been real good to me when I was a kid. There was a chemistry within the band, but it wasn't money or career or an artistic level that made me do that project. It was on a human level, a spiritual thing, a way of giving back."
Once the Angels started recording for real rather than playing for fun, the band's incendiary live dynamics proved harder to ignite in the studio. With Bramhall's drug demons threatening the already tenuous relationship, the band that had appeared poised to become Austin's big breakthrough act of the early '90s disbanded after its 1992 debut album, though popular demand has inspired a series of reunions (with a 2005 concert DVD featuring a few new songs in the works).
The Arc Angels' demise allowed Sexton to devote full attention to Under The Wishing Tree, his re-emergence as a mature artist a full decade after his debut. It was the album that should have given Sexton his critical breakthrough -- to my ears, it was the most ambitious release (and one of the best) by an Austin artist during the decade I lived there -- but it never got widely heard. An editor at Rolling Stone who plainly loved Charlie assigned me to go on the road with the band and write a feature (as I'd done for the Arc Angels), but when the album stiffed and the magazine changed editors, the story didn't run.
In the wake of that failure, Sexton embarked on more changes at the same time the music industry was struggling through big changes. He left MCA, teamed with brother Will, shopped a more melodic, harmony-laden demo that got the Sexton Brothers signed to A&M, and went into the studio with producer Craig Street (Cassandra Wilson, Joe Henry). The brothers weren't happy with the tracks that resulted, and the label didn't hear a hit. Corporate consolidation and confusion put the whole project into extended limbo. While the Sextons continued to record, MCA became Universal, which swallowed A&M and a number of other labels, meaning Charlie was back with the company he'd just left, without any of the corporate support system of those who had championed the Sexton Brothers. The new label cut the brothers loose, and Charlie had no idea what to do next.
"Essentially what happened is that I got chewed up and spit out so many times it was completely stifling, artistically," he says. "And then I had a kid, and when my son was born, it was like the worst shape I'd ever been in financially. At that point it was like, 'OK, I had my dream of what I wanted to do. But that's not the priority now.' The priority was making sure there was a roof over my son's head. Maybe I'd get a stucco job, because I couldn't live with myself doing meaningless gigs and playing music I didn't believe in. I'd rather do stucco. I like stucco. But, luckily, Bob called."
This was actually the third time Dylan had offered Sexton a spot in his band, but Charlie had previously been focused on his own recording career and production projects. (Once he'd been in the middle of producing an album for Austin singer-songwriter Michael Fracasso, who was stunned to learn later that Sexton had continued with the sessions rather than hitting the road with Dylan.) Though he had appeared born to be a star, Charlie was content to become a sideman, playing the music of a man whose songs supplied some of Sexton's earliest musical memories with his freewheeling parents.
"I told Bob that when I was a kid, I didn't get lullabies," says Sexton with a laugh. "I got, 'They're selling postcards of the hanging...'"
Typically so responsive to even the most sensitive inquiries, Sexton becomes circumspect when asked to discuss Dylan, as if adhering to the old Zen dictum, "Those who know don't tell; those who tell don't know." Yet Sexton made a significant contribution to Dylan's music, as anyone who saw them in concert can attest; he played an even more crucial role once Dylan switched from guitar to primarily keyboards. In turn, Dylan's influence pervades Cruel And Gentle Things.
"My role in Bob's band is between him and me -- he knows what I was there for, and I knew what I was there for," Sexton says. "I learned a whole lot from him, and he didn't have to say anything. He knows exactly what he's doing; everything's for a reason. He has been great to me since the first second I met him 21 years ago.
"Bob's melodic sense is amazing, his phrasing is unbelievable, he's fearless with a song," he continues. "And obviously he knows how to put a couple of words together, too. He's the guy, and I think we're all trying to keep up. There are plenty of people out there who don't even know how influenced they are by him. Because they're influenced by something else that was influenced by someone else who got it when Bob rewrote the whole thing."
The time away from home, his wife Karen and his son Marlon (who is now 6) took its toll on Sexton, who describes the touring musician's routine as "22 hours of hell and two hours of bliss." He spent much of those years on the road in hotel rooms, writing a lyric here, a melody there, for the album he figured he'd eventually make. He'd wanted to play on a record with Dylan, and after he'd been afforded the opportunity to work on Love And Theft and to tour behind that album, he left the band, ending his tenure at three and a half years.
The Dylan experience plainly left its mark, as the opening track to the new album attests. "Don't you look out your window, don't you peek through the door," warns the first line of "Gospel", over an acoustic country-blues progression. "'Cause you just might find the thing that scares you most." The song sets for the tone for an album in which happiness is either elusive or an illusion, while most of life's essential struggles occur within one's soul.
"I never agreed with that concept that if I danced I was going to hell, that hard-line theology, but there's a moral code that I don't think is a bad thing to have a piece of," he says. "I think the world makes the same mistakes it's been making since the creation, and most of those are biblical."
Though the predominantly midtempo material is the most broodingly introspective of Sexton's career, some songs that date from the Sexton Brothers' sessions complement the newer compositions, providing melodic respite from the moodier fare.
"'Bring It Home Again' was the last song I wrote eight years ago for that record, after we'd turned it in and they'd turned the record down and the merge happened," he says. "It wasn't on the record we'd turned in, but for me it was a good representation of what I was willing to do -- write something that had some immediacy and melody, with some pop sensibility, but which was saying something where I believe every word. And after I did that and it didn't get us anywhere as far as resolving the problems with the label, I didn't write a song for two years."
Among the other songs salvaged from that project for the new album are the uptempo "Regular Grind", where Charlie and Will share songwriting credit, and the autobiographical "Dillingham Lane", which received some crucial editorial input from Steve Earle. It's a song that finds Charlie flipping through the pages of his own mental photo album.
"I had the music and this pile of lyrics when Will and I went to Nashville, but I told Steve I needed help finishing it," Charlie recalls. "It's about the first place we lived after we moved to Austin when I was about four, and all the images I remember so clearly. The original verse was just way too long, because I was trying to explain everything, for it all to make sense. And Steve goes, 'Hey, man, this is a song, not a book.' He really helped me -- gave me a line here, a zinger there -- he did so much without doing too much."
Such a philosophy extends to Sexton's burgeoning career as a producer. He says he takes as much satisfaction from studio sessions with other artists as he does in making his own albums. He earned his stripes with 2001's Essence, the crucial follow-up for Lucinda Williams to Car Wheels On A Gravel Road. While Car Wheels had proven both a creative triumph and a career breakthrough for Williams, its troubled sessions had seen her work through three different attempts (with different producers in different cities) to record it before she was satisfied. Initially enlisted to play guitar on Essence -- as he had for the final Car Wheels sessions -- Sexton was brought back to salvage some tracks that had gone awry, when it appeared that the album might be heading down as bumpy a road as Car Wheels.
"I've known Lucinda for around 26 years, since I played with her for the first time [at age 11!]," he says. "I listened to the tapes and thought about them and said, 'Here's the deal. You can bring everybody back here if you want to, and it's going to cost around 40 grand, but you don't have to. If you give me three days, I'll fix it all. You take some time off, go to the bookstore, do whatever you want to do.' So after three days of massive editing and surgery, she came back and said, 'I can't believe it!'
"Any artist who's any good, there's stories about them -- they're this and they're that -- and it just doesn't matter. Artists aren't supposed to be politicians, and I'll take substance any day over social [graces]. You need to take care of artists, make them feel good and safe so they can let out what's in there without being scared of it."
As an artist who has become comfortable in his own musical skin, Sexton no longer sounds like someone on a restless quest for identity. "I think there's a particular sort of song that shows up on this record that I've been working toward for a long time," he says. "This is what I do. The artists I love, they do a certain thing, and I go to that well to taste that water. I don't go to Randy Newman to hear a punk rock song, or Ry Cooder to hear speed metal.
"I guess I knew I'd finally arrived when I started to sell less and less records," he says with a laugh. "Now I've gotten to the point where I sell as few as some of my favorites have."
Though older than Charlie Sexton, ND senior editor Don McLeese is still trying to decide whether he wants to be a fireman or a cowboy when he grows up.
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