Charlie Sexton – The Austin Kid
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.