It Takes A Lot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry 18: “I just serve the song”

by Jochen Markhorst

XVIII    “I just serve the song”

“I basically do anything or nothing depending on what the song is calling for,” says Charlie Sexton in the interview with Arlene R. Weiss for Guitar International in October 2002. “One of the main things I try to achieve when I’m doing that kind of work, is I just serve the song.” The self-analysis echoes some 20 years later when his employer dishes out a eulogy to Charlie in the New York Times interview of 12 June 2020. It’s as if you can read each other’s minds, says interviewer Douglas Brinkley;

“As far as Charlie goes, he can read anybody’s mind. Charlie, though, creates songs and sings them as well, and he can play guitar to beat the band. There aren’t any of my songs that Charlie doesn’t feel part of and he’s always played great with me. “False Prophet” is only one of three 12-bar structural things on this record. Charlie is good on all the songs. He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants. He’s very restrained in his playing but can be explosive when he wants to be. It’s a classic style of playing. Very old school. He inhabits a song rather than attacking it. He’s always done that with me.”

… just as it mirrors guitarist Blake Mills’ analysis, following his first studio experiences with Dylan when recording Rough And Rowdy Ways: “Dylan doesn’t tell you exactly what to play. He does expect you to play what needs to be played. That may seem the same, but it’s a world of difference” (interview with Kurt Blondeel for Belgian magazine Knack, 9 March 2021). And in that, in playing what needs to be played, Charlie Sexton is a grand master – in this respect perhaps the best guitarist ever to stand on stage alongside Dylan. Which, by the way, could also be a key to the background of Dylan’s somewhat gloomy but ultimately correct future prediction in the booklet accompanying Biograph in 1985: “I’d like to see Charlie Sexton become a big star, but the whole machine would have to break down right now before that would happen.”

By “the machine” Dylan is referring to the music industry and the commercialisation of rock ‘n’ roll (“Now it’s just rock, capital R, no roll, the roll’s gone”), suggesting that being a great, pure rock ‘n’ roll musician has become irrelevant. But a more prosaic explanation for why Sexton never became a “big star” seems more obvious: nice guys finish last. There is not a trace of controversy around Charlie Sexton – which has been a prerequisite for admission to Olympus since time immemorial. Charlie does not shock with androgynous presentation or sexual ambiguity, does not flirt with religious taboos or challenge societal sacred cows, no sensitive politics, self-aggrandisement or self-destruction… Charlie feels part of the song – he is always subordinate to the song.

Dylan fans are not too sad about his inability to become a superstar. Sexton’s contributors to Dylan’s output from 1999 to 2002 as well as those in Charlie’s second stint 2009-2019 are masterful, mood- and colour-defining exercises by the former prodigy who, thanks to his peculiar life trajectory, at 50, in 2018, is a veteran with 40 years of wide-ranging experience. “Charlie is good on all the songs,” Dylan says, and that’s true. Audiences are grateful for the splashy rock injections into classics like “Stuck Inside Of Mobile” in the 2009 tour, fans admire the restrained, tasteful guitar parts on Tempest (“Scarlet Town”!), the ingenious tapestries of sound on “Love And Theft”, sound and old-time mastery on Rough And Rowdy Ways (“Goodbye Jimmy Reed”! ), and everyone takes their hat off to Charlie’s breathtaking colouring of “Not Dark Yet” at the 2019 concerts – arguably the most perfect, blood-curdling performances of the song since its conception in 1997.

Not Dark Yet

And who knows, maybe we owe the glorious 2018 return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” on the setlist to Charlie, too. “He’s not a show-off guitar player, although he can do that if he wants,” Dylan says in 2020, and good employment practice dictates that you have to give your valued employees space from time to time – which Charlie gets in those 84 wonderful performances between Christchurch 2018 and Washington 2019.

The song has become a hypnotic slow blues rocker. The Texan axegrinder in Sexton awakens, and as the tour progresses, we hear more and more of what Sexton learned from Stevie Ray Vaughn and how much DNA he shares with ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons; shimmering, cutting off-beat incisions and two daily varying, but always exciting solos (after the second verse and as a finale). A long string of gems, those 84 performances. Berlin 4 April 2019 is brilliant. As is Prague, five days later. From Paris 12 April, the sound quality is less, but here we see Charlie in action:

It Takes a Lot to Laugh Paris April 2019:

Post-Corona, the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour 2021-2025, means goodbye again to Charlie Sexton and with him to “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” as well. Though it’s a farewell on reflection and on second thought; the very first two concerts of that endless tour still have the song on the setlist, both times as a final encore (Milwaukee and Chicago, 2 and 3 November ‘21). Remarkably, in doing so, the man-who-never-repeats himself chooses exactly the same arrangement, exactly the same groove and exactly the same space for the guitar solo as in 2019. But Bob Britt, for all his qualities, is no Charlie Sexton – or at least, that’s what Dylan seems to think when he dismisses the song after only two attempts. We will not hear the song again in the remaining 248 concerts of the 2021-2025 World Wide Tour.

But once again history repeats itself for the man-who-never-repeats himself: at the start of the next concert series, Dylan’s contribution to the 37 shows of Willie Nelson’s Outlaw Music Festival, among such even bigger surprises as The Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho” and “Blind Willie McTell” and Charlie Rich’s “I’ll Make It All Up To You”, we are surprised by the return of “It Takes A Lot To Laugh” to the setlist. In again the same slow blues-rock arrangement. And Dylan still misses Charlie; at the first performance, Phoenix 13 May 2025, we see Britt making preparations to fill the space between the second and third verse with a guitar solo, but he is brutally hammered away by a clearly improvised piano solo by Dylan. It’s being evaluated, apparently: at the second concert, two days later in California’s Chula Vista, Bob Britt will then be allowed to do his thing. Though only on the fallow land after the second verse, for now. After the last words of the last verse, there will be no finale, so no second guitar solo either.

We still miss someone.

It Takes a Lot to Laugh Phoenix May 2025:

To be continued. Next up It Takes A Lot Part 19 (final): Mail Train Kept A-Rollin’

Jochen is a regular reviewer of Dylan’s work on Untold. His books, in English, Dutch and German, are available via Amazon both in paperback and on Kindle:

• Blood on the Tracks: Dylan’s Masterpiece in Blue
• Blonde On Blonde: Bob Dylan’s mercurial masterpiece
• Where Are You Tonight? Bob Dylan’s hushed-up classic from 1978
• Desolation Row: Bob Dylan’s poetic letter from 1965
• Basement Tapes: Bob Dylan’s Summer of 1967
• Mississippi: Bob Dylan’s midlife masterpiece
• Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits
• John Wesley Harding: Bob Dylan meets Kafka in Nashville
• Tombstone Blues b/w Jet Pilot: Dylan’s lookin’ for the fuse
• Street-Legal: Bob Dylan’s unpolished gem from 1978
• Bringing It All Back Home: Bob Dylan’s 2^nd Big Bang
• Time Out Of Mind: The Rising of an Old Master
• Crossing The Rubicon: Dylan’s latter-day classic
• Nashville Skyline: Bob Dylan’s other type of music
• Nick Drake’s River Man: A very British Masterpiece
• I Contain Multitudes: Bob Dylan’s Account of the Long Strange Trip
• Bob Dylan’s Rough And Rowdy Ways – Side B
• Bob Dylan’s High Water (for Charley Patton)
• Bob Dylan’s 1971

Like A Rolling Stone b/w Gates Of Eden: Bob Dylan kicks open the door