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.
