XL Cover Story: Charlie in Charge
In the '80s, he was an Austin guitar protégé. More recently, he was Bob Dylan's ax slinger. But these days, he's most at ease massaging the songs of other musicians.
By Michael Corcoran | Photo by Deborah Cannon
August 25, 2005
A recording studio in New York City. 1984. A cigarette dangling from the prominent lips of a lanky youngster with jet-black hair, trading Stones licks with Keef himself. It's after midnight, the tape is rolling and the kid's in heaven. He'll be 16 years old in a couple weeks.
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Charlie Sexton started playing in clubs when he was 11 and landed a national record deal at age 15. More recently, he self-produced his CD 'Cruel and Gentle Things.'
Clips from Sexton's new disc: "Dillingham Lane""It Don't Take Long"
XL's Recording Studio Guide:
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Session producer Ron Wood has invited a guest, who suddenly materializes and emerges from the darkness, eyes first, like an owl. "Charlie Sexton!" the man says, extending a hand. "I've heard'a you."
If the kid's brain hadn't jammed up like a $19 rifle in the rain, he might've replied, "Bob Dylan. I've heard'a you, too."
Fifteen years old and the voice of a generation and a half has not only heard of you, but comes out late to hear you play. Wait, it gets better yet, but not before it gets worse.
This is the story of a kid who had it all, growing into a man who takes it as it comes.
What is success? What is failure? Priorities evolve and Sexton, who turned 37 on Aug. 11, has never been clearer about which rewards are most righteous. Success used to mean making the cover of Spin (May 1986 issue) and tracking the Top 20 chart position of debut single "Beat's So Lonely" at an age when most kids have white knuckles in driver's ed. Now success is working 12 hours straight in a recording studio and never losing interest.
Ten years ago, he was reading with Leonardo DiCaprio for a role in "Basketball Diaries" ("I wish I was as cool as that guy," Leo told producers after the audition). What's important to Sexton today is making gingerbread men with 6-year-old son Marlon, besting "all the other moms" at Barton Hills Elementary.
After spending three and a half years as Dylan's best-looking sidekick, from June 1999 to November 2002, Sexton has brought it all back home. You've seen him tooling around in the camel-colored 1950 Mercury lowrider convertible, looking like a sunglasses commercial. But more often he sits behind the console at recording studios in town, hearing mandolins and splashes of B-3 organ in his head. He's Larry the Layer Guy, building tracks from the core out and the air in.
"Everybody was telling me, 'Man, that's your dream job,' when I got the gig with Bob," Sexton says. "I know I'll never play better songs than I did on those tours, but for me, the ultimate dream is playing my own songs."
And getting the best work out of others.
An up-and-coming producer, whose late-blooming résumé includes Lucinda Williams, Los Super Seven, Shannon McNally and Jon Dee Graham, Sexton is set to release his own, self-helmed album Sept. 13 on the Back Porch/EMI label. "Cruel and Gentle Things," Sexton's first album in 10 years, picks up where 1995's bittersweet nostalgia trip "Under the Wishing Tree" left off, reminiscing about the last moments of pure innocence on "Dillingham Lane," exploring the joy and pain of a romantic relationship on "Just Like Love" and getting through life by any means necessary on "Regular Grind."
Besides having to learn 130 Dylan songs before his first gig with the legend, Sexton picked up a bit of wisdom. "Everything Bob does, every word, every action, is done for a reason. There are no wasted motions."
Sexton employs such expressive economy with his lyrics, especially on the stunning album closer "It Don't Take Long," which Sexton credits with "breaking the code" and showing him the way to make personal music without coming off too confessional or sentimental. Although some of the material alludes to a couple drifting apart, Sexton declined to address questions about his marital status, "in respect for the privacy of (wife) Karen and Marlon," and suggested listeners apply the lyrics to their own experiences.
During his stint with Dylan, an intensely private mentor, Sexton didn't finish writing a single song. His job -- and his mind-set -- was to play rhythm guitar for a rock god. After playing "Like a Rolling Stone" and "Just Like a Woman" with the guy who wrote them, it's a little hard to go back to the hotel room to pen a tune about missing your wife and kid. But Sexton had old songs that were never recorded and pieces of new songs that he would bear down on until he was satisfied that they said what he was trying to say.
Sexton is still finding vocal inspiration from across the pond, but this time he's more Elvis Costello than David Bowie. Sporting a dense, textured sound, "Cruel and Gentle Things," is not an easy listen. The hooks are shy, the words moody, the riffs seek no fists in the air. But give the record time -- live with it for awhile -- and the melodies creep inside. Listen actively and you can hear a man who may have come of age in the public eye, but grew up in private.
The heart of the song
He's sitting at his favorite room at Wire Recording on South Lamar Boulevard, where he mixed the new album, and as he talks he doodles on the keyboard. "The piano is my favorite instrument," he says, trying to remember a Leon Russell song he heard as a kid. "Sorry," he says each time he plays a wrong chord.
A talented mimic who relies on small gestures to do a spot-on Denny Freeman (his replacement in the Dylan band), Sexton relates an anecdote about producing Dr. John on the Double Trouble album six years ago, and you'd swear you were sitting there with ol' Mac Rebennack himself.
"We were trying to nail this one song, but the feel was all wrong," Sexton recalls of the "In and Out of the Blue" session. "We tried dozens of takes, but couldn't get it." Later, while the musicians were just messing around after a break, they found the groove on the tune and Sexton instructed the engineer to roll tape. Unfortunately, they came in about halfway through the "magical take," but Sexton had the idea to have Dr. John play the first half solo.
"You've got some big ears," Sexton imitates Dr. John's hipster rasp. Dr. John got it on take two.
"I love the word 'juxtapose,' " Sexton says, stopping his tinkling to light a cigarette (something he would do about a dozen times during a two-hour interview). "I like balancing words together like cruel and gentle, sad and beautiful. Life is not all black and white -- it's shaded."
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A younger Charlie Sexton was on the cover of Spin magazine in 1986. He wasn't old enough to drink legally, yet he was already a seasoned veteran of Austin clubs.
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Sexton's star as a producer shot into the stratosphere in 2001 when he did the unfathomable -- producing a Lucinda Williams album ("Essence") on schedule and on budget. Considering that her previous album, "Car Wheels On a Gravel Road" took six years and endured two do-overs, Sexton's feat made the industry take notice.
He was hired to just play guitar on the record during a Dylan tour break, but when the sessions lacked the feel Williams was going for, Sexton was asked to come back and produce. "Lucinda wanted to recut four songs, but I spent a couple hours listening to the tracks and I told her that I could fix them in two or three days." While she sat in the other room making Christmas cards, Sexton added some guitar coloring, adjusted tempos, got in tight with the Pro Tools program and delivered the tracks to the satisfaction of notorious perfectionist Williams.
When Sexton left Dylan's band to spend more time at home with "Marlo," as he calls his son, he knew production was his calling, but didn't know how he would go about getting work. Then he got a call out of the blue from Jim Phelan, the former A&R guy who had signed Charlie and Will Sexton to an ultimately fruitless and soul-zapping deal with A&M.
But Phelan hadn't called to apologize. He had just gotten back into managing producers and he wanted to sign Sexton to his Sanctuary roster. Sexton's friend Edie Brickell, whom he'd met when Dylan toured with Brickell's husband Paul Simon, had landed a new record deal based on demos she recorded with Sexton: Did he want to produce the record? Sexton jumped at the chance to follow through what he started. Next came a Los Super Seven album at Jack Rock's vintage studio off City Park Road.
Charlie's calling card as a producer, Phelan says, is that "he gets right to the heart of a song."
Nothing has felt more natural, Sexton says, than stepping to the console side of the big glass window. Even back when MCA was pushing him as the New Wave Elvis, Sexton had much more affinity for the studio work than live performing. The label folks may have walked Cheekbone Charlie, zombielike, through photo shoots and interviews and radio station visits, but Sexton was assertive in recording sessions, working side by side with veteran producers Keith Forsey (Billy Idol, Simple Minds) and Tony Berg ( Michael Penn, Squeeze). "Tony picked up on it right away," Sexton says of his second album's producer. "He said 'You're more comfortable here than at home.' "
Even as an 11-year-old, who'd often be called up to jam with Stevie Ray Vaughan, "Little Charlie" knew he'd make a living with his music. "It wasn't fun and games with Charlie; it was serious business from the get-go," says veteran bassist Speedy Sparks, who lived with the Sextons for about a year when he dated Charlie's mother circa 1979. It was Charlie's dream that he and Will would become rock stars and move as far away as possible from Wimberley, where Charlie was often taunted by classmates for his full lips and slicked back rockabilly hair.
"When all that 'pretty boy' stuff started, I was like, 'Me?'," Sexton says. "I thought of myself as a weird-looking freak. Kids used to punch me in the face just for the fun of it."
When Will, two years younger, decided to concentrate on basketball rather than music, Charlie couldn't see the logic. "You'll never make the pros," he scolded Will. "But you've got a chance with music."
At age 12, Charlie left home and stayed in Austin, crashing often at Jimmie and Connie Vaughan's place or with Joe Ely, who took him on tour when Charlie was 13. "I never had a single friend my own age when I was growing up," he says. "I grew up in the nightclubs. My baby-sitters were guitar players."
His first favorite record was "Magical Mystery Tour" by the Beatles. When he'd hear the cut-and-paste classic he wouldn't think of himself in the band, playing those songs onstage. He'd see himself in the studio, making the record. He didn't want to be John Lennon, but George Martin.
But hitting the clubs every night, where he might sit in with the Cobras at Soap Creek Saloon, then over to the One Knite, then maybe to punk mecca Club Foot, where his band Little Charlie and the Eager Beaver Boys opened shows for the Big Boys, indoctrinated young Sexton to the allure of playing live.
But by early 1999, a 20-year veteran at age 31, Sexton had had enough of the rock 'n' roll life. He and Will had finished an album for A&M, but when the label was swallowed in the big Universal/Polygram merger, he was without a record deal. His Sexton Sextet had moved on to play with others, and aside from occasional Arc Angels reunion paydays, there was little money coming in. When the Sextons welcomed Marlon into the world, Charlie considered quitting music altogether and taking a job doing stucco.
"I was fed up," he recalls. "I was just so tired of people telling me they didn't hear a single." Then came the call to join Dylan's band, where the paycheck was as appealing as the set list. "I hated to leave Karen and Marlon for weeks at a time," he says. "It was torture, but that was an opportunity that I just couldn't pass up." If he did, he says, he might have regretted that decision for the rest of his life.
Small steps on Dillingham Lane
Sexton has more than a photographic memory; he can see his past as if he's watching it on video. All the good times, all the painful times, every little detail. He can recall every aspect of the Wednesday night gigs at Cheatham Street Warehouse, when he'd sit in with the Fabulous Thunderbirds, whose "Girls Gone Wild" album taught him the language of the blues guitar. But he can also recall every minute of those horrifying four hours in 1987 when he, then-girlfriend Carlene Carter and Kathy Valentine of the Go-Gos were bound and menaced by a knife-wielding dope fiend at Valentine's house in the Hollywood Hills.
"It's a blessing and a curse," he says of the trait, but it was his sharp capacity to remember that brought Charlie back to "Dillingham Lane," the standout cut co-written by Steve Earle. A block past the Austin city limits, just off North Lamar Boulevard, Dillingham Lane is the first place in Austin Charlie and Will lived when their mother moved from San Antonio while their father was sent to prison after a drug bust. Charlie was 4 and Will was 2 at the time.
"I can still see that row of one-room shacks," Sexton says of buildings bulldozed long ago. There's no longer even a street sign for Dillingham, which today looks more like a dirt driveway than a lane, but Charlie's memory of an old man the young boys befriended is vivid. "He'd always be looking through the screen door, but he never came outside," Sexton recalls. "Me and Will would visit him and he'd give us little pieces of taffy out of a cigar box. Then, one day he wasn't there anymore."
"Then we both grew older/The winds blew colder/The only thing that still remains/Are footsteps on Dillingham Lane" is the chorus of a ditty that turns into a confessional of an older brother making amends. "All the pain I took out on you/Has always haunted me," Charlie sings to Will, ending the verse with "You were all I really had you see." It's a sad and beautiful song. Juxtaposition.
"Cruel and Gentle Things" is the portrait of a "chosen one" who found that life truly began when he started doing the choosing. The prodigal son has returned.
mcorcoran@statesman.com; 445-3652
