Los Super Seven – Border radio
Sauce’s musical education really began after his family moved to San Antonio, where he was exposed to Fats Domino, Little Richard, and the blues by a disc jockey named Johnny Phillips on his Sunday show on KCOR, the city’s premier Spanish-language radio station. “On Mondays we’d go hear Spot Barnett on the east side at the Ebony Club,” he remembers. “Rocky Morales was always bringing us tunes too.”
It’s a family, all the musicians on the West Side who grew up playing rhythm & blues, he says, citing Sunny & the Sunliners and lesser-known groups who put out rock ‘n’ roll records en ingles y en espanol such as Sonny Ace & the Twisters, Rudy & the Reno Bops, and Charlie & the Jives. “All those songs like ‘Blueberry Hill’, ‘The Wheel’, with Mexican popular songs were mixed in, stuff like Perez Prado’s ‘Patricia’, and it got to be known as the West Side Sound. They all played a mixture of stuff.”
One guitarist, Felix Villarreal, who could play like B.B. King and sing like him in Spanish, was so adamant about playing the real thing, he’d refuse requests for polkas and cumbias at a regular Sunday blues jam, telling anyone who’d listen, “We’re doing musica llanta negra — full black.”
“I can play a polka and do jazz and blues,” Sauce says, explaining the West Side way. “We work off ideas. That’s what Doug Sahm liked about us. He could teach us in 20 minutes what he said would take days for someone in California to learn. We were just doing what comes natural.”
Morales has hung up his saxophone because of emphysema and lung cancer, and McBurney gave up secular music when he joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses years ago; he died in 2003. But the West Side Horns remain rock solid and as distinctively different as ever. Al Gomez took McBurney’s place twenty years ago without missing a beat. Spot Barnett, the black sax player who was a role model for Sauce, Doug Sahm, and the whole West Side gang, has replaced Morales, synching together effortlessly with the Horns’ other horn man, Louie Bustos.
“With Rocky not being here, it’s different,” Sauce Gonzales acknowledges. “He knows that West Side punch and when to use it. But Spot knows all the old West Side material, and Louie’s been a student of both Spot and Rocky for most of his life.”
Charlie Sexton, the guy who brought the West Side Horns into Los Super Seven, stopped counting at 25 trying to figure out exactly how many players were involved in the third edition of the band, and he hadn’t even gotten to the guest vocalists yet. Charlie was too young to grow up with border radio. “But I grew up around the music that came from that and the musicians who heard it,” he’s quick to point out.
Trying to weave all the disparate parts of Austin music together into a definitive sound is like tying the Gordian knot. Willie Nelson comes closest to personalizing it because he runs in so many music circles and can play most any style with soul. Doug Sahm epitomized it, genre-jumping effortlessly between the hippies and the rednecks and the blues cats and the hillbillies; he was just as comfortable and credible in the company of psychedelic rocker Roky Erickson as he was around pedal steel legend Jimmy Day and still able to conduct a twelve-piece big band through a jump blues like he was T-Bone Walker. When Sahm died in 1999, I figured that ability to leap borders within the context of a single song — think “Song Of Everything”, which rambles from tight big-band blues to Out There Coltrane-worthy riffing with a whole lotta west coast pot-induced space-cadet observations thrown in — was lost forever.
Heard It On The X has me reconsidering.
Rick Clark’s thorough, anthropological research and unrestrained zeal is one reason. Without Dan Goodman’s determination, Los Super Seven would not exist. And as it turns out, Calexico was a solid, smart choice for a core band. They know their roots and are still adventurous and flexible enough to experiment when the situation is called for. But when the cows come home and everyone’s accounted for, this is Charlie Sexton’s album, and, at the age of 36, his coming out party.
Every Austin old-timer has their Little Charlie story. I won’t bother you with mine other than to say I first ran into him hanging around the stages of the Hole in the Wall and Raul’s punk club. He was 9. His brother Will was 7. Their uncles were honky-tonk musicians. Their mother, Kay, loved music and musicians and exposed her boys to the whole range of rootsy sounds floating around the city’s clubs. Both boys enjoyed getting up onstage to sing a Little Richard song or some other well-worn oldie. When he was 12, Charlie moved in with Speedy Sparks, the bassist for Doug Sahm and the Texas Tornados. His teachers became Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely and Doug Sahm.
At 13, he went on the road with the Joe Ely Band after lead guitarist Jesse Taylor broke his hand. “My band thought I had lost my mind having a 13-year-old kid replace Jesse Guitar Taylor,” Ely remembers. “But I’d seen him the week before at the IL Club over on the east side and he was laying down some stuff that was serious. I couldn’t believe he had such a broad comprehension of the blues. He knew honky-tonk too.”
When he wasn’t on the road with Ely, Sexton was fronting his own rockabilly trio, Little Charlie & the Eager Beaver Boys. He recorded with Keith Richards and Ron Wood when he was 15. By the following year, he’d moved to Los Angeles, got into synth music, recorded an album, had a semi-hit, graced the cover of Spin, rode motorcycles with Matt Dillon and Mickey Rourke, and spoke with a British accent when he returned to Austin to play the Opera House with True Believers opening.
As an adult, somewhere between forming the Arc Angels with the Double Trouble rhythm section and Doyle Bramhall Jr., touring for three years with Bob Dylan, and producing records for Lucinda Williams and Jon Dee Graham, he has matured into the only person I know who can cover all the bases like Doug Sahm did, with the smarts and demeanor to produce even better than he can perform. Heard It On The X, unlike anything he’s done before, uses the depth of his musical knowledge and his ability to cherry-pick the right players for flavoring a particular song, such as bringing in Merle Haggard’s guitarist Redd Volkaart and pedal steel player Lloyd Maines to push “My Window Faces The South”, a splendid piece of western swing with vocals by Lyle Lovett.
It was Charlie who rounded up Denny Freeman, Hunt Sales, Larry Fulcher and Glen Fukanaga to complement the West Side Horns and lay down the serious blues of “I Live The Life I Love” and “Talk To Me”, both of which pull out the best in Delbert McClinton’s voice, sassier and brassier than he’s sounded on record in years. “Live The Life” is especially low-down, due in no small part to Sales’ primal drums and Sexton’s own lap steel lead. You want to get that authentic “Talk To Me” sound that Sunny & the Sunliners had down cold? Ask Sauce Gonzales, the West Side Horns’ keyboard man, how it’s done. He played on the original.