T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  According to Texas Monthly, the citizen who blew the whistle on the cult, from outside the organization, was none other than “Fort Worth musician and record producer” T Bone Burnett. (The description tells you how little known he still was in his home state after recording six albums, three under his own name, and appearing in Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.) Reportedly identifying himself as a member of the Spiritual Counterfeiters League, Burnett helped get Bass’s brother Sid to step in and save Ed from the “mental torture” being practiced on him by his business partner, systems ecologist John P. Allen. More than thirty years on, the story reads like a parody Burnett might write. But as different as he and Ed Bass were, they shared serious concerns about the future of civilization.

  Bass was also an investor in the $100 million Biosphere 2 project, dedicated to constructing “portable Earths” to carry people away from our sure-to-be-devastated planet to some safe destination—like Mars. Burnett, who grew up near Carswell Air Force Base, had never gotten over the continual presence of B-52s circling overhead, either returning home from Southeast Asia to refuel or heading back to drop more bombs. “They told us that [the B-52s] were protecting the strategic air force base there because we were the third Russian target in order of priority,” Burnett told Smoke Music Archive. “That puts no pressure on a six-year-old kid at all.”

  Joseph Henry Burnett III, an only child, was born in St. Louis on January 14, 1948. His grandfather Joseph Henry Burnett Sr. was for twenty-eight years the Georgia-based secretary of the Southern Baptist Convention. Having had his dreams of playing professional baseball or football erased by World War II, Burnett’s father—who was vigorously pursued by the Brooklyn Dodgers, among other teams—settled for a life in business. By the time T Bone Burnett was four, the family had moved to New Orleans and then Fort Worth, where his father got a job with the Tandy Corporation.

  By all accounts, his parents were happy-go-lucky types who led a lively social life and resisted the town’s hard-core conservative element. An Episcopalian, Burnett’s mother, Hazel, raised him in that faith. (“As maligned as the Episcopal Church is, they give you the whole Gospel every time you go in,” he told Today’s Christian Music in 1982.) For reasons he says he can’t remember, Burnett acquired his nickname when he was four or five. Like an old tie clip, the hyphen between “T” and “Bone” has a way of disappearing and reappearing. Reputedly razzed by blues artists for comparing himself to T-Bone Walker, another local music legend, Burnett went by J. Henry professionally for a while before reclaiming his nickname without the dash. For the sake of consistency, I will refer to him as T Bone Burnett from here on.

  He was a determined kid. When older boys in the neighborhood wouldn’t let him help them build a fort out of discarded Christmas trees, telling him he was too little, he went up and down the block gathering his own trees and dragged them back with a coat hanger hook. The boys changed their tune and let him play. “I was such an idealist that every time I got disappointed it would infuriate me,” he told Rolling Stone. “I wanted everything my way.” His feelings still overwhelm him as an adult. “My dad has mellowed as he has gotten older,” Simone Burnett told me, “but he has such a deep well of emotion that when he analyzes his own thoughts relating to how he can better himself, it can be too much for him.”

  He took up golf at an early age. By the time he was seven, he was a regular on the nearby Texas Christian University golf course. “We all wanted to be Ben Hogan,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle, referring to the Fort Worth fairway legend, whose wife was a friend of his mother. At the driving range, he said, Hogan “would come stand behind us and watch us hit balls. It would just be incredibly daunting. He wouldn’t say anything, and then he would go back inside.” Burnett never became Ben Hogan, or Byron Nelson (another PGA great from Fort Worth, also home of the satiric golf writer Dan Jenkins), but he did make it onto the golf team at Paschal High School. And he got good enough to be a 5 handicap at the 2014 Pebble Beach Pro Am, where he played in a foursome with the actor Ray Romano.

  His first exposure to music came via his parents’ ample collection of 78s by such greats as Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Dinah Washington, Count Basie, and Mahalia Jackson, and songwriter collections by the likes of Rodgers and Hart and Cole Porter. He was most taken with songs that transported him somewhere mysterious or exotic: Porter’s “Begin the Beguine”; “Hernando’s Hideaway,” from The Pajama Game (the Ella version); “The Naughty Lady of Shady Lane,” a hit for the Ames Brothers. “That’s when I started realizing you can create place with music,” he told the Daily Beast. “Music is a place. Music is atmosphere and environment. That’s something that’s been very important to me. Everything I do I try to do with a sense of place.”

  The radio was his gateway to a world of places. Top 40 stations, he recalled, “would play Peggy Lee and Little Tommy Tucker and Hank Williams, and then the Beatles, four songs in a row.” He listened to a steady diet of the West Texas prodigy Buddy Holly, whose rockabilly beat left a permanent imprint on him, and Johnny Cash, who had “the stature of Whitman or Emerson.” He absorbed the music of the blues greats Howlin’ Wolf (“a shaman”), early Skip James (“conjuring music”), and Jimmy Reed, whose “Big Boss Man” was “big-time sex music.” “When we were teenagers in Fort Worth,” he told Vulture, the New York Magazine site, “we would dance to Jimmy Reed all night long.”

  Among the musical greats who had called Fort Worth home were the blues-gospel legend Blind Willie Johnson, Lead Belly (who was a street singer there), Western swing king Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys, the soul saxophonist King Curtis, the R&B guitarist Cornell Dupree, and the jazz modernists Ornette Coleman, Julius Hemphill, and Dewey Redman. “For me, the kinds of distinctions people make between styles didn’t exist,” Burnett told me in a 2003 interview. “The Beatles, John Lennon doing ‘I’ll Cry Instead,’ were cut from the same cloth as the Carter Family, and it came from the same place as [Bobby “Blue” Bland’s] ‘Turn On Your Love Light.’”

  When Burnett was twelve, he began his lifelong investigation of music with his friend Stephen Bruton, who would become Kris Kristofferson’s longtime sideman and gain a following as a singer-songwriter himself. The boys spent Saturdays hanging out at the T. H. Conn Music store, pouring through catalogs and playing around with instruments, including the beat-up Epiphone Texan guitar Bruton talked the owner into selling him for a reduced rate. (He was still playing it on his final project, Crazy Heart, the 2009 film starring Jeff Bridges for which he wrote songs and provided inspiration.) The two friends also hung out at Record Town, the specialty shop on South University Drive near the TCU campus owned by Bruton’s father, Sumter Bruton Jr., a seasoned jazz drummer whose deep interest in all forms of music was reflected in the unusual—nay, spectacular—range of records he carried: records, Burnett told Terry Gross, host of NPR’s Fresh Air, “that we wouldn’t have had the wherewithal to find ourselves”; records that proved the legends he had been told about—Skip James, Robert Johnson, the Stanley Brothers, so many others—actually existed.

  Burnett credits Bruton, a preteen bluegrass banjo prodigy who was obsessed with field recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, with teaching him half of what he knows about music. Bruton introduced him to Dock Boggs’s original recording of “Oh Death,” which as “O Death” became one of the key components of the Coen Brothers’ film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the soundtrack of which Burnett produced. Burnett was also in thrall to the live 1956 version of “Wrought Iron Rag” by the trombonist Wilbur De Paris and his New New Orleans Jazz. With a lineup boasting the former Jelly Roll Morton clarinetist Omer Simeon and trumpeter Sidney De Paris, Wilbur’s brother, this Dixieland revival band ignites the form. One pitched solo follows another, each player upping the ante with brash wit and woolly intensity. “It’s like a supersonic jet taking off,” Burnett told NPR. “When it breaks the sound barrier, the audience goes into ecstasy.” A dedicated breaker of sound barriers hi
mself, he added, “That was something I always wanted to be part of, an event that created this much pandemonium.”

  If hearing such artists on record was transporting, hearing the music live raised Burnett’s excitement level even higher. “We would hear that there was this great band playing down the street, and the next thing you know, we’d be hiding under a pool table because we were under age, watching King Curtis and Cornell Dupree,” Stephen Bruton told the Tone Quest Report (his older brother, Sumter Bruton III, would sneak them in). The low-rent clubs on the Jacksboro Highway, known equally as a sin strip and a guitar player’s paradise, exposed both spectators and many backing musicians to a wide range of styles.

  Burnett said he was ten when he picked up an old Gibson guitar and became hooked on playing music: “I hit the low E string, and it did its thing,” he told Performing Songwriter. “I thought, ‘OK, what is that?’ I was gone, right there.” His mother said he started playing at age twelve. “One year I went to Mexico and bought him an eight-dollar guitar,” she told the TCU alumnus newspaper. “He never put it down.” The first song he learned to play was Maybelle Carter’s fingerpicking classic “Wildwood Flower.”

  That folk stuff didn’t last. In the wake of the British invasion of the early 1960s, a mighty wave of young Fort Worth rock bands with long hair, tight outfits, newly bought guitars, and names like the Jades and the Barons staged nightly battles, with as many as ten groups on a single bill. Singles were hawked. Teen clubs flourished. Races mixed. The Beatles’ February 9, 1964, appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show was life changing.

  “Two days later, I sensed a presence in my room,” Burnett’s high school friend David Graves told me. “It was Terry Burnett—that’s what we called him at the time—hammering away on a guitar. He had always played folk before then. But he had the same response to the Beatles that I did. He was totally smitten. Two weeks later, we had a garage band we put together with three other high school kids. It wasn’t much; we played high school parties and stuff. But that was the start.”

  Graves had Burnett’s father, then working at a furniture manufacturer, refurbish a bass Graves had purchased for ten dollars at a pawnshop. The boys formed the Shadows, whose gigs included a department store fashion show. They went on to perform at frat parties in a band called the Loose Ends, which often featured Stephen Bruton knocking out Chuck Berry riffs. Burnett would “get a job someplace and he’d say, ‘You’re playing electric guitar,’” Bruton told Fretboard Journal. “And I’d go there, and he’d put a guitar on me, and then he’d just reach over and turn up the volume and say, ‘Go!’”

  In the summer of 1965, after graduating from high school, Burnett and Graves practically lived at Sound City, the four-track basement studio located beneath the local KXOL radio station. That’s where the shady, Colonel Tom Parker–like promoter Major Bill Smith had produced two “cotton-pickin’ smashes,” Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby” (1962) and Paul and Paula’s “Hey Paula” (1963). Burnett quickly became taken with the recording process. “I loved the idea that you could go in and nothing was there, but you come out and something was there, something beautiful,” he told the Telegraph. And, he said in a New York Times interview, “We just jumped in and started plugging things in. Every once in a while they’d make a really good sound, and every once in a while a really horrible one. I found both equally mysterious and fascinating.”

  As John Morthland pointed out in his Austin Chronicle review of Fort Worth Teen Scene! Vols. 1–3, a collection of sides from 1964 to 1967, most local bands of the time had little interest in melody and harmony. They were more disposed toward the “fuzz, distortion, and raunch” of such British exports as the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and the Kinks. Burnett, who saw the Beatles perform in Houston on August 19, 1965, was quickly converted to their experimental style of pop. “Free Soul,” the Loose Ends’ main contribution to the anthology, stands out with its brooding melodicism and rudimentary effects. Written under the name Jon T. Bone, the single—Burnett’s first—boasts his best petulant John Lennon vocal (“I won’t be owned by you / There’s too much I’ve got to do / I want to be a free soul”) while aspiring to a Byrds-like Rickenbacker sound with a newly acquired twelve-string acoustic guitar.

  Recorded in the spring of 1966, “Free Soul” was, Graves told me, “T Bone’s first legitimate attempt to put out something saleable.” In his fledgling efforts as a producer, he had done little more than record bands live. Though Burnett enticed a Vietnam chopper pilot living in the apartment complex his mother managed into buying some new box amps and guitars in exchange for a co-producer credit, Sound City’s antiquated equipment made it difficult to achieve any kind of artful, layered sound. With the help of the engineer Phil York, who would gain prominence through his work with Willie Nelson and the Rolling Stones, Burnett increased the number of tracks at his disposal through the “bouncing down” or “mixing down” technique. That involved recording the four tracks from one machine over to one track on a second four-track machine, then recording more music on the first machine and mixing those tracks down to one track.

  The previous fall, Burnett had recorded “He’s a Nobody,” the even more Beatles-esque B-side included on Fort Worth Teen Scene! This harder-edged, garage-style rocker features Burnett’s attempt at a British pronunciation of “girl.” He revealed just how smitten he was with the Beatles when, after laying his hands on a prerelease radio promo copy of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in May 1967, he and Graves performed all the songs on it at a teen club. The actual album came out on June 1, 1967. “Since no one else had heard the songs yet, some had the impression they were our work,” Graves wrote on Facebook. “We didn’t say one way or the other. . . . For a few days, we had SPLHCB to ourselves.”

  The music provided an escape from what Burnett described to Rolling Stone as “a dark upbringing.” By the time he was in high school, his parents had divorced. His mother, an enthusiastic supporter of his musical efforts, moved into an apartment building; Burnett lived in the house with his ailing father, who would die in 1967. “T Bone was something of a lone wolf,” Graves told me.

  While attending TCU with Bruton, Burnett, deferred from military service because of an asthma condition, worked as an A&R man for the producer Charles Stewart, who was leasing Sound City. As noted in the September 2002 issue of TCU Magazine, Burnett’s “stint as a Horned Frog was short-lived. His passion for music and his [flair] as a record producer helped him march straight from campus to the music industry.” “He knew what he wanted, and he didn’t let anything stop him,” Bruton told Los Angeles Magazine. “T Bone looked at this like a big chess game, and he knew how to play.”

  Stewart, who had produced an R&B hit by the Van Dykes, helped get the Loose Ends’ “Free Soul / He’s a Nobody” released on the Mala label. Burnett became partners with Stewart and, with a bank loan of $12,000 plus inheritance money, purchased the studio with Jim Rutledge, future star of the hard rock band Bloodrock. “We were the first folks in there to develop it for the recording of real band music,” Graves told me.

  In 1968, Burnett took an oddball Texas singer dressed in leather chaps and a white ten-gallon hat into the studio. Two vacuum cleaner salesmen (or so the legend goes) had spotted the singer performing on the roof of a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air sedan, the sides of which had “NASA Presents the Legendary Stardust Cowboy” painted in black and the roof of which boasted a map of the moon. Accompanying himself on a broken Dobro and bugle, the Cowboy—Lubbock native Norman Carl Odam—unleashed a torrent of blood-curdling screams and hillbilly yelps, as if on a bad acid trip. Burnett thrashed away, perhaps in self-defense, on drums. “T-Bone Burnett was just hog wild,” the Cowboy claimed in his promotional bio. “He was orbiting the moon.”

  However elevated he was, Burnett heard something in the record. In what may have been the first demonstration of his sixth sense about what the public wants to hear even when it doesn’t know it, the young producer ran upstairs to KXOL with h
is two-track monaural tape of “Paralyzed.” Given some airplay, the Cowboy’s inchoate screaming fit drew a positive response. Co-authoring one of the strangest chapters in rock history, Burnett proceeded to press five hundred copies of the song on Major Bill Smith’s Psycho-Suave label and distributed it to other radio stations. Amazingly enough, it became a regional hit.

  And that wasn’t all: Mercury Records signed Ledge, as his fans called him, to a singles deal; in October 1968, “Paralyzed” got a mention in Billboard’s Special Merit Spotlight. The man who claimed to have written “more space songs than anybody” (even, presumably, his fellow intergalactic traveler, the visionary jazz bandleader Sun Ra) made an unlikely landing on Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, NBC’s popular sketch comedy show. To his dismay, he was mocked and laughed at by the cast. But that memory is no doubt eased by the fact that, while Rowan and Martin are history, the Stardust Cowboy is still Legendary.

  “Paralyzed,” which according to the musicologist Irwin Chusid’s book Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious World of Outsider Music, has actual lyrics (“I ran to the ’frigerator / Hungry as an alligator / I opened the door, and what did I see? / I saw my baby starin’ right back at me”), was but one of many records Odam cut at Sound City and Delta, another local studio. Don Duca, a drummer from Tulsa who was in Burnett’s circle, told me that Burnett laid down one stipulation for those recordings: “You couldn’t play an instrument on which you had any experience.”

  Soon after helping immortalize the Legendary Stardust Cowboy, Burnett produced what some rock fans consider a lost classic of the sixties, The Unwritten Works of Geoffrey, Etc. Recorded in September 1968, the album featured an ad hoc group of top-notch young local players—all either high schoolers or dropouts—who had played on the Cowboy sessions. Released under the name Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit, and Greenhill, Unwritten Works was an apt title for what David Bullock, Scott Fraser, Eddie Lively, and Phil White had going into the sessions. Most of the songs were written on the fly, frequently in a drug haze, over five days and nights. Borrowing liberally from leading California bands of the day—Buffalo Springfield, Jefferson Airplane, Moby Grape—Whistler and his pals brought a larkish high-mindedness to country-rock, baroque folk, and full-blown psychedelia.