Delbert was an easy sell. “I didn’t know I was in Super Seven until they asked me if I wanted in to sing ‘Talk To Me’. I was in,” he says, on his way out the door to do his annual sea cruise. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve done that song, I’d be all right. I remember the first time I ever heard it, I said to myself, ‘I gotta sing that song.’ It moved me with that C-A minor-F-G bubblegum turnaround, that kind of thing. That was more than three chords, and we had a hard time discovering the bridge.”
“That song is the one song I came away with when I went down to Austin to dig up material two years ago,” Rick Clark says. “If someone got misty-eyed about getting a song on the project, it was that one.”
Sexton gets credit for John Hiatt nailing Doug Sahm’s “I’m Not That Kat Anymore”, pushed by Augie Meyers, Sahm’s lifelong collaborator, on piano and the Fulcher/Sales rhythm section. (Sales appeared on television’s “Hullabaloo” music show the same year the Sir Douglas Quintet did, later played with Todd Rundgren’s Utopia, and recorded with David Bowie as part of the Tin Machine.) But there was common ground to begin with. Hiatt comes from southern Indiana, the only other place in America besides San Antonio where Big Red, an artificially-colored, highly-caffeinated soft drink that tastes like liquid bubblegum, is popular.
Joe Ely credits Sexton for the fire in his version of “Let Her Dance”, the second-best song the Bobby Fuller Four ever recorded. “We’ve played together on and off for years, but I think this is the first time we actually worked in the studio together,” Ely says. “I came in and we sat around all day into the night and into the next day working on a feel for it.
“For awhile, it didn’t seem to fly. Max Baca was playing bajo sexto and the song was too bajo and not enough rock. Charlie came out from the control booth, plugged in his electric, and it was a rock ‘n’ roll song all of a sudden. He’s like Lloyd [Maines]. He knows how to get out of the producer’s chair and into the player’s chair. The best producers are players too. They can step across the other side of the glass. With some producers, especially those who don’t play, it’s all voodoo.”
Rodney Crowell covers the other great west Texas rock ‘n’ roller to infuse his sound with Tex-Mex, Buddy Holly. “Learning The Game”, from Holly’s final recording session in his apartment living room, is one of his more arcane tracks, although it was covered by the Crickets and Albert Lee, Waylon Jennings with Mark Knopfler, and the Lemonheads. Done in an innocent sing-song rhythm not unlike “Everyday”, Crowell’s interpretation sparkles thanks to the addition of Flaco Jimenez’s accordion fills, adding another feather to the producer’s cap.
The title track, sung by Ruben Ramos doing a damn close imitation of Billy Gibbons imitating a southern black man, is infused by some smart Latin elements, including Jimenez’s accordion riffs (which sound copped from the great South Texas jazz accordeonista Esteban Jordan) and a salsa-fied counterpoint piano break.
The Latin material is less satisfying, generic at best, covering the mariachi angle at the expense of abandoning altogether the bouncy polkita that is the backbone of Tejano and conjunto, its funkier country cousin. Rick Trevino and Freddy Fender share the honors for tracking Spanish vocals on “Ojitos Traidores” and “Cupido”, while Raul Malo sings lead on “The El Burro Song”. Raul Malo doing mariachi is cool. No Tex-Mex isn’t so cool.
The album closes with “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean”, a raw account of the somber blues composed and first sung by Texas pioneer Blind Lemon Jefferson. “The essence is, ‘Please regard me well when I’m gone,'” Rick Clark says. “The song at the end would be about the freewheeling spirit of border radio — don’t forget this, remember that radio was once like this.”
There had been talk of getting Solomon Burke to sing a cowboy song to close out the album, but that deal couldn’t be swung, which is just as well. Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was the right person to have the last word.
“I hadn’t brought up the song to Gate until two weeks before he went into the studio,” Clark says. “That’s when we found out about his medical condition.” Brown, 80, and normally a cantankerous cuss, was cool with doing Blind Lemon. It was almost coming full circle for him. He got his career break after taking the stage at Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock Club in Houston in 1947 to sit in right after his role model, T-Bone Walker, had taken sick. His first flirtation with fame was fronting big bands with a string of jump hits including “Okie Dokie Stomp” and “Pressure Cooker”. But over the course of his career he has also worked country, swing, Cajun, zydeco and hillbilly genres.
According to Colin Walters, who’s writing Brown’s biography, two serendipitous events preceded the recording of Gatemouth Brown’s end piece, completed two days after his appearance at the Austin City Limits Festival. “We went out the night before to the Pier. He’d just gotten his pardon from death by being released from M.D. Anderson Hospital in Houston, where he was being treated for terminal lung cancer, unbeknownst to us. He usually hates anything that’s on the radio or CD, but he’d heard Count Basie and Louis Jordan and he let up a little, saying, ‘That’s what I grew up with. My guitar plays those horn lines.’
“Then at the Pier there was a 20-piece big band playing, the Austin Swing Syndicate. They did a couple of his songs and he got up and did something I’ve never seen him do, he sat at the bar and had a drink. He can get crotchety and he was not crotchety that weekend,” Walters says.
Sexton was nothing but respectful to Brown, and when he plinked out the guitar lines accompanying Brown, he got down on his knees to work out the lines. “Gatemouth told Charlie he’s a decent guitarist — he doesn’t say that about many people,” admits Walters. “He made a comment when they were talking about the song. He remembered seeing Marty Robbins getting on a touring bus after a gig just before he died. He said, ‘I could see death coming. He was going down, looking bad.'”
Rick Trevino has been on the entire LS7 ride, but he admits the shift in direction this time around almost threw him off. “I haven’t gotten a copy of the CD yet,” he says over the phone shortly before hitting the road to promote a single off his last country album to radio station programmers. But he’s got faith in the Goodman-Clark vision, even if he isn’t sure what exactly that vision is.
Trevino has stuck with Goodman as his manager since he was signed in 1993, and Trevino has known Clark almost as long. “Rick was at my first radio showcase for Sony,” Trevino says. “He’s got this encyclopedic knowledge about music.”
