Arc Angels Interview with Arnold Wells
Gibson Bus Outside of Antone’s
SXSW 2009 March 21st

After watching the spectacular performance from the upstairs lounge and waiting for the encore, I made my way to the Gibson Guitar Bus Parked just outside the front door of Antone’s.  A few minutes later I was sitting down in the back with Doyle Bramhall II.  Chris Layton and Charlie Sexton arrived a little later to provide their perspective on the new beginnings of Austin’s first Super Group.

YTM: First I wanted to ask why now?  What is different about your careers and relationships that makes now the right time?

Doyle: Why do it again?

YTM: Yeah.

Doyle: I think it’s always sort of eaten at us a little bit that the Arc Angels stopped right when it was just getting started.  It had so much behind it.  Every time we get together we have this chemistry that is undeniable.  We create this music that doesn’t sound like any one of us in our separate projects.  Because we’ve become really great friends and have deeper relationships than we did even back then.  So, it’s just a better time for it.  We get together for these reunion shows, and every time it seems, without doing anything, we see our fan base is growing.  So we are going to Dallas, and we have a bigger following in Dallas.  We sell out House of Blues; 3200 people we got in there and I don’t think we ever did that when we were together as the band back then.  So the fact that we can actually go out and have our music heard is a much more interesting thing to do now because it’s just so hard to do as a solo artist.

YTM: I know you guys have a CD/DVD coming out soon.  What is the release date on that?

Doyle:  There isn’t a release date, but we are finishing it hopefully in the next few weeks.  We have audio mixes to finish of the live shows that we did at Stubbs and Antone’s.  We are also, at the same time, recording three new tracks to put on that DVD as well.

YTM: So we will get to hear some new material then?

Doyle: We have started recording two of the songs and we’re going to go in to the studio  the next three days and work to try and get those finished.  We will be doing a UK tour with Eric Clapton where we will be supporting his shows. By the time we get to London we will have the finished product.

At this time Chris Layton arrives.

Chris: Hi Arnold!

YTM: Hi, excellent show!  We were just talking about the CD/DVD and the new material that was going to be on it.  Doyle said that there would be three new songs on the release.  But are there any plans so far for a future full CD release of all new material?

Doyle:  Well this is the start.  We’re starting with three songs, the bonus tracks are all new songs that we haven’t recorded before.

YTM:  Ok so I should hold my horses then?

Chris:  Well, you know, we’re starting that process.

Doyle:  We just finished a lot of obligations that we all had respectively so now that we’re done with that we can focus just on the Arc Angels.  We have a lot of things coming up and we’re going to be spending a lot of time together so we can get the writing ball rolling.

Chris: Say that three times fast.  It’s better than Peter Piper. “Writing ball rolling”.  Laughs

YTM: You are going to be touring the UK, you said, but do you have any plans to tour more extensively to back up the CD/DVD release?

Doyle:  Yeah, that’s kicking off.  I think we’re going to tour throughout the summer in the US after the Clapton shows.  We have already been getting offers from Europe and we even had an Indian offer which is pretty neat.  A lot of these things were not even available when first around.  This whole corporate gig thing has really opened the doors to traveling, like “let’s go to Singapore for four days to have one show at a bar”.  That wasn’t even around when we were first playing.

Chris:  What is the festival?  The Yani?  Is it the Wanee festival?

Doyle:  In India?

Chris: No in Florida.  We are doing that June 5th.  That’s with The Allman Brothers, Derek Trucks, and us.  There are a bunch of bands.  That’s a three day festival so we will be doing a run right after we get back.

Doyle: But we also are going to have a full tour booked.

YTM: Excellent.  I am assuming that with these extensive plans in place that you have the same level of support that you had from record companies that you enjoyed back in the day.

Chris:  No.  There is no record company.  We are doing it all ourselves.  We own it.  The first time around you need that kind of money.  That’s typically what is always the big hook with a label.  Early on, bands don’t have any money so the record companies are like, “We’ll give you the money”.  After that you are stuck there.  We own all this, and plus it’s [the record industry] so fragmented these days that they have nothing to offer.

YTM:  So the demise of the record industry is helping you guys out?

Chris: It’s a double edged sword because beforehand, once you got on that highway, you could go all kinds of places.  But once you got there you were kind of like in indentured servitude.  But the fact that it does not really exist with that kind of power any longer, there are parts that are helpful.  They can’t really control anybody anymore, and that’s the good part of it.

YTM: What do you think about internet downloads?

Doyle:  I think its all good, because our fans are gonna eat up everything.  They’ll buy anything that we put out.  Real True fans; so if we can just keep extending that fan base and building on it.  All the bands that are doing really great right now do that.  Like Dave Mathews.

Chris: You wanna hear a story?

YTM: Sure.

Chris: Stevie Ray Vaughan and double trouble – Sony Records.  You get a fraction of what they make on a record, and then they don’t pay you everything that they actually owe you.  Then you have to go hire specialized accounting firms that know how to audit them.  Then they will show up and say “Here is what we found that you actually owe the band”.  The company will turn around and say how can you prove that.  You know what you do?  You end up settling for 50 or 60 cents on the dollar.  By the end of the day you don’t really have anything anyway, unless you’re a band that sells like 30 million records.
So the thing of downloading and all that, its hard to capture that money anyway.  The more people hear your music, they just show up to the shows.  As far as the revenue part of it you capture it when you go to the show.  We collect that and then we leave with it.

Doyle: Man, the great thing about this band is seeing the band live.  I think that because the well is pretty deep musically for all of us, that every show can be a new experience.  It’s not a real rigid like some dancing pop star.  We are actually exploring things every night so I think we just keep building on that.

YTM: You guys have played with these legendary front men.  What part of that do you bring to the table with the Arc Angels if any, and what do you try and differentiate from?

Doyle:  I’ve spent quite a long time playing with Eric [Clapton] now.  I think being around him has given me an unconscious confidence.  I think it’s rubbed off playing next to Clapton for so long.  He has such a great way about him.  He is so confident in everything that he does.  Not just musically, but personally.  I play way more Clapton licks than I ever did before.

YTM:  I can only imagine.

Doyle:  Its funny being around him he’ll do a solo, then I’ll do a solo with his licks that he just played.

YTM:  Nice.  Is he picking up your licks?

Doyle: A few, I gotta say.  You know he might deny it, but I think so.

YTM: I know that communications problems were a huge issue in the first iteration of the Arc Angels.  I just saw a band in there today that seemed completely in love with playing together and …

Chris: Who?

YTM: You guys. Laughing

Chris:  Oh oh ok, I thought you talking about Gary Clark.

YTM:  No, I just mean that there were pauses, talking, and laughing and…

Doyle:  I think a bit of that was there when we were a band in the 60’s or whatever…  I think there was a lack of respect when we were a band together.  We had one aspect of our friendship and our family that was cool.  There was one side that had that in it where we did communicate.

Chris: We were really young at the time.  We were all like hot shit at the time and just got beaten down over time.  Now we just play really good music.

YTM: I know it was an issue in the demise of the band, so what would you say to all the up and comers in town now about the pitfalls of drug and alcohol abuse?

Doyle:  I would just say don’t do the stuff that’s cut.  That’s really dangerous. And try and get into treatment by age 17.

Chris:  You know what, that’s probably the biggest thing that’s fucked up music more than anything is drugs and alcohol.  If you ask me.

Doyle:  Yeah but it’s also had a creative side.

Chris: I agree, but that is like a rationalization toward the bigger detriment that it’s caused.

Doyle: I don’t think that Hendrix would have been quite as “Hendrixy” if he wouldn’t have been experimenting.  But maybe his mind just worked like acid.

Chris: Well you know what?  Stevie did think that Soul To Soul had some kind of wild tones on it.  He said that he thought that some of that had to do with drugs.  But I don’t know if it was or it was playing guitar when he’d been up for like five days.

Doyle:  What it does is it takes away all inhibition.  And some people just open up.  Ahh… But that’s not to say that anybody should be doing drugs.

YTM:  Don’t worry; I am not going to print this in Teen Beat Magazine.

Charlie Sexton enters the interview area at the back of the bus.

Doyle:  Yeah, I think it’s a hard thing if you are playing in Austin, That is a big part of the scene.  I walked down 6th street last night at one in the morning and I was the only sober person there; out of thousands of people that were down there.

YTM:  So how has Austin fit into this reunification?

Charlie: In what sense?

YTM: I am trying to get a sense that you all being from Texas has been a factor in your getting back together.

Charlie:  That’s tricky.

Chris:  Just for me that’s like trying to see the back of your head.  You know it’s just there.  Texas apparently does something to the people that grow up here.

Doyle: This is where the Arc Angels started, and it sort of feels right that we…

Charlie:  Probably would not have started in Frisco.  I think that Austin has changed so drastically and that began a long time ago.

Chris: About the time they gave it the moniker.

Doyle: Probably before the moniker occurred.  You know.

Charlie:  What moniker, I’m sorry.

Chris: Live Music Capitol of the World.

Charlie:  I flew in from out of town and they were like welcome to the live music…  I was like oh really; I didn’t get the memo on that one.  But there is truth to it.  The irony is that, I think that was used to lure all types of people that were maybe into that.  You walk on Sixth Street any night that’s not SXSW and you’re not going to hear a lot of music.  You can get a daiquiri, you can get a shot.  You can do those things but it’s all changed that way.  And so has the city in an interesting way.

Chris: We can do our part though… you know until housing goes down to like 300 dollars a month for a house.  See that was the deal.  When I moved here it was cheaper to live here than it was Corpus Christi which was a dying city.  That’s what helped create the Live Music Capitol of the World because art largely doesn’t pay.  You could live and pay rent on very few gigs that paid very little money.  That was very important.  You have to be able to at least to exist, and now Austin doesn’t afford that very easily.

Charlie:  You know everything struggles with growth what ever it is.  I think the reason there are not a lot of live music venues on sixth anymore is that it became not good for musicians to do gigs down there.  From getting tickets from the cops for unloading to you know.  In certain local government agencies defense,  when you’re dealing with a 20 year old kid that has got a roll of hundreds in his pocket and had a lot of booze, dealing with that for a few hours.  And then when a guy is loading his Super Reverb into the van, you might not be as patient.

Change seems to be the theme of the day here at Antone’s on this the last day of South by Southwest.  The Arc Angels have obviously been through a lot of changes, and so has the city that bore them from youthful pride to the comfortable compatibility that they enjoy today.  We look forward to seeing them often on the road from purgatory to their rightful place in the heavens.