Music
Little Boy Lost
After years of being told how great he is, guitar prodigy Charlie Sexton is learning a basic lesson of the music business: Hype doesn’t sell records—or keep your label happy.
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Consider what happened at Trees, a popular club in Dallas’ Deep Ellum district, last June 1—the first tour date. Throughout the show, audience members seemed unsure whether to dance or listen; eventually they grew bored, and many drifted out before the show ended. “As soon as a song is semi-quiet, it’s not loud enough to demand their attention,” Sexton complained, “and they start talking about how their car got towed or their hairdo. Sometimes I can’t even hear the drums in back of me.” Yet even the ones who listened patiently, like the bartender who had brought two old Charlie Sexton albums to work, grumbled disapprovingly. Another fan at the show told me, “I’m not usually this much of a pest, but he could at least play one or two old songs. Throw me a bone, Charlie, throw me a bone.” He shook his head. “Charlie is so self-absorbed that he doesn’t care about us.”
It was no different when the tour ended on August 12 at Austin’s Backyard. A deliriously drunk woman whirled and gyrated near the stage throughout Sexton’s performance, yelling, “‘Sweet Nadine,’ ‘Sweet Nadine,’” but her pleas for a rendition of the Arc Angels’ best-known hit went unanswered; she might as well have been talking to a wall. When I mentioned this to Sexton at Little City, he stared at me in disbelief. “‘Sweet Nadine’? Hey, the record’s there—they can listen to it whenever they want. I’m not a jukebox.” Jarring words from someone who should be eager to please, but he was totally serious. “I’ve spent a lot of time making and writing music, and I think American audiences are so spoiled,” he said. “I don’t want to revisit where I’ve been—I’m in a progression. I can always write better songs, I can always play better, and I can always be a better person.” Playing his old songs doesn’t bring back good memories, he said. Maybe he cares more about how he feels than how happy he can make his fans. “Why should they be happy?” he asked me. “I don’t mind making them happy, but I don’t want the strings attached.”
This picture of Charlie Sexton—embittered, embattled—is a far cry from the snapshot his mother, Kay, likes to show visitors: Charlie as a smiling baby, still in diapers but dragging a guitar behind him as if it were a wagon. Back then, he didn’t have to fret about fans or record sales. “When we were little kids, I told my younger brother, Will, to forget about basketball and playing with his friends,” he recalled. “We weren’t going to do any of that. We were musicians.”
By the time he and Will were old enough to toddle, Kay—just a teenager herself, and estranged from their father, Michael, who had served time in a state prison at Huntsville for marijuana possession—toted them off to wherever she happened to be hanging out: the One Knite, the Aus-Tex Lounge, the Continental Club. Over time, she exposed them to the music of artists like the Vaughan brothers, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Lou Ann Barton, W. C. Clark, Doug Sahm, the Leroi Brothers, the Bizarros, and El Molino. It was an education rarely afforded kids their age. Before Charlie was ten, he was bringing along a guitar to the clubs, and he and Will were actually sitting in with the musicians their mom had come to hear. His first band, Charlie Sexton and the Eager Beaver Boys, founded when he was thirteen, became regulars at the Continental Club. “We were like three kids,” remembers Kay, sitting cross-legged on her bed in an old touring bus she calls home. Clad in shorts and a loose-fitting blouse, the 43-year-old can talk for hours about Charlie, whom she obviously loves and dotes on and clearly considers a friend and peer. The plastic milk crates she fills with photos and newspaper clippings are testimony to something more than just a mother’s love for a son. “We learned together,” says Kay, “but he learned faster and better than me.”
Indeed, midway through the eighth grade, Charlie dropped out of school; too many times he was up all night at the clubs. “We’d get home and the school bus would be leaving our house,” says Kay. “We’d just laugh and say he’d been at night school.” Speedy Sparks remembers that Sexton was so popular with the clubgoing adults that nobody ever asked why he wasn’t in school: “I don’t think anybody else could have done that. He got the red carpet treatment.”
Charlie’s life never seemed to be affected by his chaotic upbringing—at least not until he got to Hollywood, where he mastered the bad-boy lifestyle: While other teenagers were out riding bikes or playing sports, he was going through as much money as he could, doing drugs, riding motorcycles with an older bad boy, actor Mickey Rourke, and hanging out with an even older bad boy, Ron Wood of the Rolling Stones. Unfortunately, Kay followed him to the West Coast and succumbed to big-city demons herself. Yet to his credit, Charlie was always there to pull her back—to pay the bills, sober her up, find her a place to live. “He was like a little man,” says Kay. “He wanted everything to be perfect.”
Even Kay would have to admit that today things aren’t perfect for Charlie. Certainly his close friends know it: “He’s out there on a limb,” says one, “and very few people want to tell him the truth. They don’t want to say the wrong thing.” And, finally, Charlie seems to know it too. “I’m in a weird place right now,” he acknowledges. But being without a label for the first time in his career means he is also in a good place, for he has the opportunity to slow down and regroup. “I didn’t have a scholarship or a family to send me to college,” he says. “Hell, I didn’t even have a childhood.” Maybe, as Speedy Sparks says, he’ll decide to get out of the business. Or maybe not. But at least it’s in his hands—and who knows? Parting company with MCA could turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.
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