Sometimes, simply saying “I love you” isn’t an available option. Sometimes, because it’s both forbidden and impossible, a person’s feelings go unexpressed and are left to gnaw away from the inside. That was the case for Charles K. Brown, who’d fallen for one of the other men in his country-rock band Sleepy Creek, just as they were starting to gain a following in the late 1970s. In the depths of his longing, he sat down and wrote “I Just Want to Talk to You,” as pure and lovely a statement about unrequited love as any before or since, and one that still hits just as hard nearly 50 years later.
“What I was trying to say was, ‘I wish I could tell you how I feel about you,’” Brown would explain, decades later. “But at that age, I wasn’t ready to accept myself.” Amid his own growing awareness that he was attracted to men and desired relationships with them, Charles Brown’s circumstances at the time wouldn’t permit him to explore and live openly. It was a recipe for hurt. “When you put all your eggs in that basket, and you know deep down it’s not going to happen like that,” Brown said, “it’s a lot of pain.”
There was never going to be a happy ending, unfortunately. But queer desire is like this sometimes—sometimes crushes turn out to be straight, sometimes they just don’t share the same attractions, and sometimes internalized shame can derail the whole operation by making it impossible to act. Brown had known the sour taste of such disappointments from the time he was a teenager.
“I Just Want to Talk to You” sets the stage for this new collection of Brown’s work, recorded during his time as both lead singer of the band Sleepy Creek and as a solo artist. It’s a group of songs shot through with desire, heartache and longing—a worthy look at a gifted singer-songwriter who never broke through to a mainstream audience, as well as a crucial piece of the puzzle in country music’s slowly unfolding history of queer performers.
A self-described “Navy brat” and one of four siblings, Brown was born April 1, 1959, in Nashville, Tennessee, where his family lived for a brief time while his father taught school. During Brown’s youth, the family relocated every few years, doing short stints near naval bases in Oklahoma, New Jersey, Virginia, Illinois, and Rockville, Maryland, where Charles eventually attended high school and began to develop his skills as a writer and performer.
Brown’s interest in music was already evident well before he reached his teenage years. His mother was a talented singer, who’d often sit at the piano with her son, duetting along to country-gospel standards. In the early days of the British invasion, Charles’s sister Sara brought home The Beatles’ “Love Me Do” single, a disc that wound up in regular rotation on the family turntable and shaped Brown’s predilection for guitar-driven sounds. But country and western were never far from his ears: his mother loved cowboy crooners like Rex Allen, while his father gravitated toward Canadian guitarist Hank Snow and Californian folk-poppers The Kingston Trio.
In Rockville, Brown had gathered up the courage to begin performing with some of his high school classmates, despite feeling isolated and largely shut out of their social cliques. With one high school band called Spare Change, he performed covers of Top 40 pop songs at local parties. “We made a little money,” Brown said. “We weren’t doing anything original, just cover songs like Gary Wright’s ‘Dream Weaver.’”
Brown’s efforts to put himself out there eventually paid off. Another group of respected local musicians—guitarist Steve Bernd, drummer Kendall Diehl, bassist Greg Hardin, and guitarist Alan Slawter—were taken with Brown’s powerful singing. They showed up at his house to recruit him for their own band. Together, they formed Sleepy Creek, naming themselves after a stream that ran through the Bernd family’s West Virginia farm. “I was behind the whole thing of getting him,” Bernd said. “It worked out for a while. That was really the first working band for a lot of us.”
The activities of Sleepy Creek amassed instant cachet for Brown, dramatically transforming his social prospects at school. “All of a sudden, I was a star,” he said. “I got voted ‘Most Talented.’ The band played at our senior banquet.” The quintet had bonded over their love of rock ‘n’ roll, country, and R&B, while Lowell George’s funky, eclectic, and like-minded Little Feat—then six LPs deep into their popular run of records for Warner Brothers—had an outsized influence on Brown and his mates. Charles attended two Little Feat dates at the Lisner Auditorium in nearby Washington, D.C., shows the band had taped and earmarked for 1978’s live double LP Waiting for Columbus, which eventually went platinum.
In more traditional country music, meanwhile, transition was afoot during the late 1970s. The past generation of legends, like Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings, were still capable of running hits up the charts despite competition from a slew of considerably younger acts. In 1980, the landmark John Travolta movie vehicle Urban Cowboy and the chart-topping singles from its soundtrack, by Kenny Rogers, Johnny Lee, and Mickey Gilley, ushered in softer sounds and pop-friendly arrangements, while breakthrough selections from George Strait’s 1981 debut LP signaled a contrasting back-to-basics approach elsewhere in the market. The result was a range of musical sensibilities pouring forth from country radio, from classic country sounds to offerings that bore the distinct influences of rockers like the Eagles and sensitive folkies like James Taylor—an environment into which Sleepy Creek might have neatly situated themselves, had things played out differently.
Meanwhile, bonding over examples of the era’s more adventuresome pop ended up kicking Brown’s feelings for his bandmate into overdrive. Together, they had attended concerts by Tom Waits and Joan Armatrading, both of them artists Brown came to admire across the decades. ”It wasn’t even grounded in physical attraction—I was attracted, of course, and would’ve kissed the dirt he walked on, but he also turned me on to all this music.” As much as Brown longed for a connection deeper than friendship, his bandmate crush was as straight as they come, and utterly incapable of responding in kind to Brown’s hopeful signals.
Brown finally worked up the nerve to play “I Just Want to Talk to You” for the man he’d written it about. In response, he got either cluelessness or some form of a cruel tease. “He said, ‘If you sang to me like that and you were a girl, I would be gone,’” Brown recalled. “He said that to me. And that made me fall in love more.”
There’s more than a touch of teenage innocence to “I Just Want to Talk to You,” the kind of lyricism that might’ve come out of an earlier era in pop. The title reads like an attempt to disarm someone’s apparent defenses: “Hey, don’t worry, I just want to talk.” In a pure, high tenor, Brown sings of feeling “like you’re the one and only, but it’s the rest of us as well,” a sly admission about how nobody really evades self-doubt. “It’s about me, but feeling like there’s somebody out there who knows what I’m talking about,” Brown said. “I was trying to justify being different.”
By the third verse, that innocent dialogue is replaced by bolder desires that escalate toward the physical. “I just want to hold you close / ‘cause conversation leaves me rather cold / I could use a healthy dose / of the kind of love that makes you strong and bold,” Brown sings. “I don’t just want to talk to you. I want to be with you,” Brown said of the song. “I’m making a little confession. But then it goes right back to ‘I just want to talk to you,’ so now I’m being humble and meek again.”
After receiving a cash gift from Ann deAvilla, the mother of Brown’s then-girlfriend Ana, the group started cutting a handful of their original songs. Among this small batch of late-’70s Sleepy Creek recordings were “I Just Want to Talk to You,” “Tennessee Woman,” “Restless,” “Trouble Is,” and “Talk Too Much Blues.”
“Tennessee Woman” is gently twanging country rock in praise of a woman who has the distinction of making the narrator feel at home. Brown wrote it for his school friend Jackie, who never really had the chance to see much of the world beyond Maryland before dying in her 20s. Jackie was also the subject of “Colorado (My Lady Says)”, Brown’s earliest recording and a clear nod to John Denver. Although he still loves the idea behind “Tennessee Woman,” Brown has come to feel that the track borrows a little too heavily from another popular band of the era.
“It was right after ‘Take It Easy,’” Brown said. “It’s got the same chords in it! It’s obviously an Eagles kind of thing.”
He’s remained considerably more enthusiastic about “Talk Too Much Blues,” however, which has a shuffling, syncopated beat and woozy peals of slide guitar, which Brown improvised using a piece of metal pulled off a nearby car, after guitarist Steve Bernd forgot to bring his own slide. “I wrote that for the band because Steve played slide and I wanted it to sound like Little Feat’s ‘Rock And Roll Doctor,’” Brown said. “It has that kind of rhythm.” The session for “Talk Too Much Blues” featured a partial Sleepy Creek lineup, with drums held down by Joe Dougherty, a classmate of Brown’s who’d go on to join the Grass Roots.
“Restless” shifted gears into itchy, tense rock with twin guitar leads and lyrics castigating a character who’s “always running around” and who takes without giving anything in return. Apparently directed toward a woman, the song flips gender perspective somewhat, to put Brown in the role of the faithful partner waiting at home—a less traditional position for a male rock songwriter to assume.
Eventually, Brown’s unrequited feelings for his collaborator began to boil over. With Sleepy Creek set to play a late 1978 or early ‘79 gig in Ocean City, Maryland, the two rode together to the show. After the set, Brown discovered that he’d been left with the rest of the band while his crush absconded to the home of a young woman he’d met that night. Brown managed to get a ride to the woman’s house, where he confronted his perplexed compatriot. As upset and overwhelmed with jealousy as Brown was in the moment, he still couldn’t come right out and admit exactly how he felt. But it hardly mattered, because the bandmate got the idea loud and clear, and Brown was left literally out in the cold.
“I slept on the porch in the chair while they did their thing,” he recalled. “It wasn’t two weeks later that he said, ‘We need to have a talk about me leaving the band.’”
For Sleepy Creek, it was an inflection point. They’d been gaining momentum by playing around Maryland and the Washington, D.C., area, gigging at popular spots like Timothy’s Pub, Papa Joe’s, and My Friend’s House. Several tracks worth of original material had been recorded, but now the lineup was shifting, and changing band dynamics along with it. Years later, Brown still harbored regret about what he views as his role in the band’s dissolution. “I never did apologize,” he said. “If I had it to do all over again, I would’ve begged him, ‘Don’t quit the band just because I had a fit. I’m not even dealing with the fact that I’m gay!’”
In the end, Sleepy Creek drifted apart, rather than breaking up officially. Brown and Bernd formed another short-lived band called Spotlight, with a repertoire of disco covers. Brown finished high school and headed south for Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, just outside Nashville, at his parents’ wish. Sleepy Creek’s finished recordings wouldn’t appear in physical form until after he was already in Tennessee, well into the next part of his journey. Only a few copies of their privately released 1977 three-track 7" were ever distributed.
In Tennessee, Brown worked to get his songwriting career off the ground, with mixed results. He took a job performing at a local bar, then had to leave Middle Tennessee for a spell due to poor grades. When he returned to MTSU, he’d matriculate through the school’s prestigious Recording Industry Management (RIM) program and was even chosen to record his original songs for student-produced albums at year’s end—a significant honor bestowed on the program’s top talent.
The songs Brown recorded as a solo artist commonly arose from his earlier, formative experiences, from family struggles to the same feelings of intense longing that had powered “I Just Want to Talk to You.” “The Hurtin’ Kind,” which bears resemblance to the melodic melancholy of Cat Stevens/Yusuf, was inspired by the end of Brown’s high school romance with Ana. “That song came from a bitter breakup,” he said. “We did hurt each other. And I think I wanted her to know that that wasn’t who I was.”
Whereas Sleepy Creek’s “Restless” took an unfaithful lover to task, Brown’s “Trouble Is” turned that lyrical microscope inward. It’s a two-minute examination of the touring musician and rambler’s contradictory life, a state of constantly craving creature comforts while out on the road and the restless will, upon returning home, to get up and leave again. “‘Trouble Is’ is one of the best songs I ever wrote,” Brown said. “It’s that paradox.” He’d revisit the same thematic territory again on “Living in a Suitcase.”
“On the Corner” borrows portions of its lyric from Sleepy Creek drummer Kendall Diehl’s poetry, delivering the words in layers of spooky, spectral harmony that evoke Alex Chilton and Big Star. In “Where Did the Love Go,” Brown is an old soul watching the grains of time run out for everyone. “I knew nothing about aging!” he said. “The deepest songs I wrote were when I was 14, 15, and 16. I didn’t know where they came from. I felt like Benjamin Button—I was born an old man and mentally I got younger and younger. I might be wiser, but I’m not deeper than I was when I was discovering myself at 13 and 14.” “Where Did the Love Go” tacks on a second song, “Blue Love,” at the end, making for a Beatle-esque medley with a double layer of heartbreak for good measure.
“Circles” was originally imagined as a note to Brown’s father, who never believed that pursuing music as a career was a sensible decision. Its fingerstyle folk arrangement is suffused with sadness and quiet anger, then bolstered by beautiful three-part harmonies. “The original lyric was, ‘Daddy I’ve been meaning to write,’ but I decided to leave [Daddy] out when I recorded it because I wanted it to be more universal,” Brown said. “[My father] said I needed to stop spinning my wheels. He was practical and pragmatic: ‘You don’t dream you’re making money, you make money.’”
Hearing “Circles” recorded for the first time was confirmation for Brown that he was on the right track. “When I took that cassette out into my Volkswagen and plugged it into the tape player, I listened to it all night long,” he said. “I thought, ‘Oh my god, I’m going to be a recording artist!’ It was like, ‘How could anybody say it isn’t beautiful?’” By morning, the VW’s battery had gone dead.
But Nashville’s entertainment industry is a famously fickle mistress, and Brown’s plans for recording stardom didn’t pan out quite like he imagined, as much as he kept at it. There were a few near misses: His songs were sometimes rejected for not being commercial enough to fit on country radio, and scheduling conflicts once kept him from a potential launchpad on Charlie Daniels’ Talent Roundup.
For a portion of the mid-’80s, Brown lived in Florida, reuniting with Bernd to sing in another Little Feat-inspired band called Sailin’ Shoes. He’d also make a left turn into acting, doing local theater before segueing into several paid seasons at Horse Cave Theater near Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave. He also appeared in a variety of local commercials as well as videos for Nashvillian singer-songwriter Deana Carter’s 1996 country lamentation “Did I Shave My Legs for This?” and country rock band BR549’s “Cherokee Boogie.” Later, Brown lived in Alaska and sang in a cheekily named acoustic duo called Butch & Nelly.
Throughout this period, Brown endured dark, uncertain stretches. He’d battle a debilitating drug addiction and eventually spend time in rehab, where he received assistance with career retraining. After that, he got his nursing license and worked for several different Tennessee medical facilities, right up until the COVID-19 pandemic began in the early part of 2020.
The first quarter of the 21st century has seen Brown maintain his ties to music in a variety of ways. In 2010, he independently released an album of recently penned material called Trouble Is, and then joined up with a few other queer-identified songwriters for the touring music festival known as Bearapalooza, which catered to the gay bear community. The notorious video for his song “Stanley,” which depicts a taboo prison fantasy, has amassed more than a million views on YouTube since it appeared circa 2012.
Brown’s songwriting has slowed, but his voice is as strong as ever—weathered slightly by time and experience. He’s returned to tinkering with an older composition called “Love Without Love,” one he feels like he’s never quite finished. In the latest version, he’s switched all the pronouns to “him” and “his” to reflect his own lived experience as a gay man. “When I decided it didn’t matter anymore, I made it a gay anthem,” he said.
Time has also gifted Brown the ability to see his teenage infatuation with a member of his own band more clearly, even if it doesn’t necessarily soothe the heartache it caused. “Now when I look back at that budding feeling, I realize we didn’t know each other at all,” he said. “You’re not really in love unless somebody’s in it with you.”
Brown can’t help but feel a different kind of sadness about never quite becoming a career musician or seeing his songs achieve popularity when they were first released. But renewed interest in his 45-year-old compositions has given him a much-needed boost—the feeling that maybe he was onto something after all, even if the pieces failed to fall fully into place.
“Whatever it is that interests people, I’m glad,” he said. “It makes me feel validated. For people to love ‘I Just Want to Talk to You’—that song was me putting my heart on my sleeve. My music may live long after me, and I hope it does. A lot of people want to feel a legacy, like something’s going to carry on. My songs are my children. Some of them are good enough to live on and have a new life.”
The rediscovery and reappraisal of Brown’s work is also quite timely, given the dramatic shifts in the makeup of country and roots music over the last decade. Circa 2024, there are more out queer-identified performers than ever before, including mainstream talents like Chely Wright, Ty Herndon, Brandy Clark, and T.J. Osborne of Brothers Osborne, as well as roots-music stars like Allison Russell, Justin Hiltner, and Adeem the Artist.
It’s hardly a queer utopia—there are still too few queer voices on country radio and on tour as headliners. But doors are open now that simply weren’t so for Charles K. Brown as the ‘70s gave way to the 1980s. Along with these expanding opportunities has come the growing understanding that there have been queer performers all along, quietly contributing to the country- and roots-music canon in ways all their own, many of them without the benefit of either a spotlight or any real institutional support. That’s what continues to make “I Just Want to Talk to You” so essential; it’s a crucial text we can now celebrate and hold up as part of that colorful, ever-evolving story.
—Jon Freeman, January 2024
