Charlie Sexton
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| How we knew who was playing back in the olden days... |
Chestnut Cabaret, Philadelphia, PA
March 27, 1986
WMMR-FM
01 WMMR Announcer - WMMR Intro
02 Charlie Sexton - Restless
03 Charlie Sexton - Tell Me
04 Charlie Sexton - Pictures For Pleasure
05 Charlie Sexton - Impressed
06 Charlie Sexton - band intros
07 Charlie Sexton - Hold Me
08 Charlie Sexton - Attractions
09 Charlie Sexton - Silly Thing
10 Charlie Sexton - Space
11 Charlie Sexton - I Wake Up Screaming
12 Charlie Sexton - You Don't Belong Here
13 Charlie Sexton - It's Not Easy
14 Charlie Sexton - Beat's So Lonely
15 WMMR Announcer - WMMR break
16 Charlie Sexton - Don't Be Cruel
17 Charlie Sexton - Rebel Rebel
18 Charlie Sexton - The Nick I Know
Flac files of wavs, digitized July 2023
Here's another WMMR-FM tape from the collection of our pal, Sam Elliott's Mustache. This one is from the short-lived solo career of Charlie Sexton. At the time of this recording, Mr. Sexton was 17 years, 7 months, and 17 days old. He'd been a child-prodigy blues n' roots-rock guitar player, actually playing some gigs with Joe Ely when he was 13.
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| That's a lot of hairspray... |
His 1985 debut LP did well, hitting #15 on the Billboard Albums Chart on the strength of the #17 single, "Beat's So Lonely." It's hard to tell exactly what happened from this far out in time, but it appears there was some resentment against his having "gone Hollywood" with a bit of critical backlash against the teen-idol hype pushed by his record company. And yeah, his hair was almost as big as Flock of Seagulls.
This show features all nine tracks from that debut LP, plus four cover songs (the Rolling Stones "It's Not Easy," the Sex Pistols "Silly Thing," Elvis Presley's "Don't Be Cruel," and David Bowie's "Rebel Rebel"), plus one unreleased Sexton original.
That last one took some work to identify. Sexton introduces it as "The Nick I Know" which sounded off. The lyrics were pretty muffled in the mix, and I didn't hear the song title repeated in the lyrics, so I was pretty sure I was hearing it wrong. Searches on Discogs and the Internet came up with nothing. I got lucky, though, over on Newspapers.com. I found a "Letter To The Editor" by a reader who didn't like a critical review of a Sexton show. The letter mentions "Nick I Know, a song he wrote several years ago about Austin musician Nick Ferri."
Also from Newspapers.com, I managed to come up with a pre-show article from the Courier-Post that tips Sexton as "the next big thing". It also compares him to Philadelphia favorite Robert Hazard, recently featured here in another tape from the Sam Elliot's Mustache Collection.
There's also a wire story from the Boston Globe that ran in the Morning Call a week before the show...and not one, not two, but THREE print ads from consecutive weeks in the Philadelphia Inquirer!
And for fun, I've included some newspaper articles with the critical backlash. They're unrelated to this concert, dating from the prior year, but I wanted to show what he was up against.
Technical note:
There were three places where the audio dropped on the left channel for several seconds. I don't think this was a problem with the tape, I think it was either from the stage or broadcasting equipment. I patched the left channel dropout with a clip from the right channel. This drops it into mono for a few seconds, but it sounds better than the drop-out. I've included a picture of the worst drop-out for those interested in the technical aspect of digitizing these tapes.
