by Lloyd Sachs
In revealing the ambition and restless creativity of a young producer working on the cheap and with outmoded equipment, Unwritten Works—all twenty-eight minutes of it—is a fascinating document. For one of the songs, Burnett took tracks from the master tape of a tune he had previously recorded with a string quartet, played them backward, and combined them with plucked piano strings. On another number, Stephen Bruton produced a quirky banjo sound by playing a six-string acoustic guitar in open tuning with the capo high up the neck.
“We spent hundreds of hours decorating our tracks with plucked pianos, backward guitar solos, accordions, sand blocks, you name it,” Bullock wrote in a letter to the producers of TV’s beloved mother-daughter series Gilmore Girls after the show’s aspiring girl drummer character, Lane (Keiko Agena), spoke of needing to find a copy of Unwritten Works to complete her collection of must-have albums. (Lane may well have been reading The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion, in which Unwritten Works is included among the six hundred greatest albums ever made. Burnett no doubt appreciated the subhead on the entry, “Showcase of the sophisticated scene in Ft. Worth, Texas”—especially having arranged for go-go girls from Sump’n Else, a Saturday afternoon teen dance show out of Dallas, to come to Sound City to sing on a few songs with Whistler and company.)
Burnett wrote four of the tracks on Unwritten Works. Rendered in cozy folk-rock style, with soulful harmonica and fiddle solos, “The Viper (What John Rance Had to Tell)” is an early manifestation of his interest in crime themes. Its parenthetical phrase was taken from a chapter title in A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes book by Arthur Conan Doyle. In the story, Rance is a constable who discovers a dead body. Exactly what is going on in the song is unclear, but take care, dear listener: “When you ask about the sniper / You may find a black spot in the palm of your hand.”
“As Pure as the Freshly Driven Snow,” a mere snippet at one minutes and thirty-nine seconds, is a jaunty, string-infused love tune with echo effects. “On Lusty Gentlemen” is noteworthy for its discordant touches, spooky organ and flute, pounded piano chords, distant voices, and a long sustained tone at the end. And then there’s “Street in Paris,” a melodramatic art-rock number with rickety upright piano and violin about a life-changing encounter with a girl that leaves the shy singer in a painful daze. Sung with megaphone effects (the Roaring Twenties idol Rudy Vallée lives!), the tune climaxes with a demented crying jag that might have been inspired by “Paralyzed.” A “horrible, trippy, music-hall influenced tune,” pronounced the mononymous Jason in 2007 on the vintage music site Rising Storm.
According to Bullock, as reported in “Lost in Space: The Epic Saga of Fort Worth’s Space Opera,” an extensive, multipart article about his next band, published on the Rock & Reprise site, Major Bill helped Burnett get the Whistler group a deal with UNI, an MCA imprint. But after a good initial offer was made, recalled the band’s singer, John Carrick, Burnett told them, “If this is what they are willing to offer right off the bat, I should push for more.” Indeed, he did just that, resulting in UNI taking the offer off the table and giving it to the Houston psychedelic band Fever Tree. “What we finally got,” said Carrick, “was kind of a cut-out bin deal.” The Unwritten Works of Geoffrey, Etc.—which, trivia fans take note, boasted a cover designed by the rising singer-songwriter Guy Clark—floated away in a sea of barely noticed albums.
Following an acrimonious split by the band that never really was a band, three of its members went on to form the well-regarded, Byrds-influenced Space Opera. After Burnett impressed on them the importance of complete artistic control, they spurned a modest offer from Clive Davis at Columbia Records that didn’t give them that autonomy, and signed instead with Columbia Records of Canada, which did. Branded a Canadian band—probably not a label you wanted stuck on you if you weren’t the Guess Who—Space Opera was one album and out. Well, Burnett was still finding his groove as a deal maker.
During his time at Sound City, Burnett produced dozens of regional hits, among them the Van Dykes’ horn-boosted, glockenspiel-dappled “Sunday Kind of Love” and a live album by the blues artist Robert Ealey & His Five Careless Lovers, featuring Sumter Bruton III on guitar. He also had name artists such as Conway Twitty, Doug Kershaw, Doug Sahm, and Marc Benno stop by for midnight tapings after their club dates.
In some ways, Burnett never left Sound City. During his time there as a producer, he strived to capture the spacious sound of the Skyliner Ballroom, a juke joint and sometime strip club where young T Bone stayed out late hearing Bobby Bland, Junior Parker, and the local bandleader Ray Sharpe, best known for “Linda Lu.” Years later, listening to the recordings he made at Sound City alongside Live! The Ike & Tina Turner Show, recorded in 1965 at the Skyliner, he was struck by how much that sound had followed him. The Ike and Tina recording, he told Tape Op, “sounded like everything I’ve done my whole life and I realized that everything I’ve been trying to do from the beginning was to recreate this excitement of sound.” If the recordings he most prized as a child had the mysterious ability to transport him to different times and places, these recordings were equally special for their ability to transport him back to a specific time and place with the same sense of wonder.
While coming of age in Fort Worth, Burnett never put much stock in the hippie movement. He didn’t trust it, he said. For him, the visual artists he befriended in high school were the real counterculture. “They looked at things in a way that no one I grew up with had even thought of,” he told Smoke Music Archive. “They were funny, smart and there was also more of that sense of escape and getting out that was real. Those people felt free.” In an interview with Mix, he said, “I always thought of making records as the equivalent of what my friends who painted did.”
Jim Meeker, a local oil man and art collector, facilitated Burnett’s and his high school friends’ interest in art by bringing to town such celebrated modernists as Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Ed Ruscha, and Kenny Price. The Jackson Pollock school had an especially powerful impact on Burnett. Inspired by the bold statements the abstract expressionist made through the uncontrolled spreading of dripped paint across a canvas, he became devoted to uncontrolled waves of sound in the studio, to allowing musical overtones and blooming after-tones to emerge naturally. He also learned to let the music unfold on its own terms when it didn’t want to conform to preconceived strategies.
However much was going on in Fort Worth in a cultural sense, the city was too isolated to provide more than the occasional gig. “We were living under such a low ceiling,” Burnett told the Riverfront Times of St. Louis. “There were no roads out. It seemed like we were trapped.” Given its open persecution of free-spirited sixties types—young guys with long hair and beards were refused service at gas stations and restaurants—Texas as a whole was too conservative for someone with Burnett’s brand of individualism. It certainly wasn’t a place where you could perform your own songs without having people scream out for songs they already knew.
Los Angeles beckoned.
CHAPTER 2
The Outsider
During his first visit to Los Angeles in 1967, Burnett discovered that the cool and carefree California in which the late-fifties and early-sixties TV stars Ricky “Hello Mary Lou” Nelson and Edd “Kookie” Byrnes existed was nowhere to be found—and that the rednecks on acid he hoped he had left behind were there as well. Still, “the Athens of the modern world,” as he calls Los Angeles (when not comparing it to Andy Griffith’s Mayberry), offered all kinds of opportunities to play. In 1969, he fell in with a group of musicians living in the Valley in a small group of houses called the Plantation, including Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal, late of the Rising Sons; the southern soul transplants Delaney and Bonnie Bramlett; and the Oklahomans Leon Russell, J. J. Cale, Bobby Keys, and Jesse Ed Davis. Some were coming off a stint with the Shindogs, the house band of TV’s short-lived rock variety show Shindig!, while others had played with the unsung session greats known as the Wreck
ing Crew. While living in Laurel Canyon, Burnett and Bruton went to the Troubadour in West Hollywood most nights and forged connections with Dr. John (who, lest anyone forget, got his start in Los Angeles writing for Sonny and Cher), the Flying Burrito Brother Chris Ethridge, and other exceptional players.
For years, Burnett spent much of his time in transit between Fort Worth and Los Angeles. Darrell Leonard, a trumpeter with whom he became friends after Leonard’s touring Oklahoma band cut a bunch of tracks at Sound City, remembers Burnett tracking him down at a Sunday jam session in 1971 immediately after returning from a road trip to Los Angeles. “T Bone said his car was acting funny and he needed a ride to California, did I want to go?” Leonard told me. “I thought it over and said sure.”
Their extended stay in Los Angeles proved rewarding. Leonard became a working member of Delaney & Bonnie and Friends, the celebrated rock ’n’ soul road band whose most noteworthy Friend was Eric Clapton, and got Burnett a gig as substitute guitarist in the ensemble for a few shows on the West Coast. “T Bone was like a skinny little kid, a great big twelve-year-old kid,” singer Bonnie Bramlett told me. “I wanted to slingshot his little butt. But he had big dreams.”
Burnett struggled to attain those dreams in a scene dominated by the sensitive singer-songwriter confessions of Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne, and James Taylor, the zipless country-rock of Linda Ronstadt, and the peaceful, easy, decreasingly countrified rock of the Eagles. As a Texan whose band, the B-52s, was mostly made up of Lone Star players, he lacked the cosmic LA vibe of such blues-bitten artists as Tom Waits and Captain Beefheart.
He led a vagabond existence, staying with friends, including a wedding musician who once brought home cake on which they subsisted for an entire week. For a time, he rented a former hunting lodge in Tujunga—on a good day, a thirty-minute drive from Hollywood—with Leonard and other musicians. The Lodge, as it was known, had a big living room space in which to rehearse and record. According to Leonard, Burnett played a lot of fingerpicking acoustic blues—“Mississippi Fred McDowell, that type of thing. He was a thoughtful player, with solid fundamentals in the blues stuff. He also was a good R&B player in a Steve Cropper–ish way. He always came up with cool parts, and a good sound, and he knew a gazillion songs.”
At another point, Burnett found himself living next door to Burt Bacharach, the artist he likes to say was his role model when he was plotting his escape from Fort Worth: someone who wrote songs for the movies, had race horses and, oh yes, was married to Angie Dickinson. (For the record, Burnett also wanted to become Phil Spector, producer of giant-sounding hits by Ike and Tina Turner, the Ronettes, and the Righteous Brothers; Don Kirshner, who orchestrated the TV success of the Monkees and produced the syndicated show Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert; and the Four Seasons songwriter and producer Bob Crewe.)
In 1972, Burnett married Stephanie Harrison, a hippie girl (as one friend described her) he had met the previous year on Dennis Hopper’s ranch in Taos, New Mexico, where the actor retreated—stumbled, actually—following the commercial flop of his ambitious film The Last Movie. (Hopper hosted all kinds of painters, rock artists, and poets.) During that notable year, Burnett co-produced his first major album, Delbert & Glen, the debut of Fort Worthians Delbert McClinton and Glen Clark, and the first and only album by the artist known as J. Henry Burnett, The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks.
Burnett, who was seven years younger than McClinton, didn’t know him well personally but certainly knew him as an artist. In 1960, McClinton’s “Wake Up Baby” became the first song by a white artist to land on local blues station KNOK. He played harmonica on Bruce Channel’s “Hey! Baby”; led one of the early blue-eyed soul groups, the Ron-Dels; and backed a host of blues legends at the Skyliner. Burnett wasn’t well acquainted with Clark either, who was the same age as him but attended a different high school and ran in different circles in Fort Worth.
Burnett was brought into Delbert & Glen by his friend Daniel Moore, a seasoned musician and songwriter who would become best known for “Shambala,” a 1973 smash for Three Dog Night, and “My Maria,” a Top 10 hit that same year for co-writer B. W. Stevenson. Burnett and Moore had worked together on demos by a Texas band called the Fare that was later signed under the name El Roacho by CBS. Using their connections, they got the regal chief of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, to listen to a three-song demo by McClinton and Clark. Not long after, Ertegun and his close friend, art collector Earl McGrath, pulled up to the Lodge in a stretch limo to ink a deal. Released in 1972, Delbert & Glen was the first release on Clean Records, an Atlantic-distributed label headed by McGrath.
Though Burnett is widely credited as sole producer of the LP, Moore called the shots in the studio; in fact, his name precedes Burnett’s in the credits. Burnett’s main contribution, Moore told me, was as “a facilitator.” Burnett cast the project, bringing in members of his band, not least the accomplished keyboardist Tom Canning. “Without T Bone’s wheeling and dealing and putting on the dog, the album might not have happened,” Clark told me. “He provided the wherewithal to get it done.”
Though the cover of Delbert & Glen boasts abstract cow art by proto-pop painter Larry Rivers, McClinton and Clark refused to buy into the cosmic-cowboy image that record labels were using to promote Texas acts, and didn’t want any part of country-rock either. McClinton spoke to me of the “madness” of the sessions, alluding to the free flow of drugs and alcohol—and, perhaps, the spooky vibe that still lingered in Los Angeles following the 1971 conviction of Charles Manson. But the album is an unassuming mix of honky-tonk, rock, and blues—Texas barroom music, performed by musicians who knew it floor to ceiling.
Clean Records, which disappeared as suddenly as it appeared, did little to promote Delbert & Glen. Voilà: a collector’s item. A few months later, however, with the project under his belt, Burnett felt ready to record an album by the B-52s. As a producer, he again played second fiddle to Moore. But with its eager testing of styles and mixing of genres, The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks is clearly Burnett’s album.
This is that rare debut that feels like a transitional album, one that is frequently a step ahead of itself. Coming from someone known for much of his career for a stripped-down approach as a producer, The B-52 Band may catch you by surprise in the way it pulls out stops and hoists up walls of sound. Part soul revival (the rollicking “We Have All Got a Past”), part Texas blues workout (the four-to-the-floor “Mama, Please Don’t You Lie”), part Beatles homage (the dark, chiming “Sliding By,” which cops the melody from “Don’t Let Me Down”), and part religious hymn (the aching piano ballad “Bring Me Back Again,” featuring a second lead vocalist, Gary Montgomery), The B-52 Band keeps you off guard with its leapfrogging of styles.
Burnett, whose reedy voice has always set him apart, hadn’t yet settled on a vocal identity. He ranges from sinister swamp man on “Now I Don’t Mind No Light Sermon” (“Why you make it hard on me and my friends for something you yourself did?”) to sensitive John on “You Been Away So Long,” with its stark Lennonism, “Please, mama, stand alone.” And the Skylarks, Rita Jean Bodine and Linda Carey Dillard, aren’t so fabulous as background singers. They can wear you out with their answering choruses. But as easy as it is to dismiss The B-52s as an inconsistent early effort, or write it off as a minor offshoot of the rock ’n’ soul revival instigated by Leon Russell and Joe Cocker (with whom Moore was familiar from his work with their Mad Dogs and Englishmen troupe), this is anything but a “straightforward collection of bluesy rock tunes” (Encyclopedia Britannica) or an otherwise conventional effort.
In its own way, The B-52s revealed Burnett’s ties to the singer-songwriter Randy Newman, an outsider who had made himself an LA rock favorite. The charismatic Burnett and super-laconic Newman (whose masterpiece Sail Away had just been released) were very different in style and temperament. But like his Louisiana-born counterpart, Burnett infused LA rock culture with southernisms. Like Newman, a latter-day Stephen Foster, Bur
nett embraced bedrock American song forms. And though Burnett hadn’t yet cranked up his social commentary, he would prove to be as committed a Swiftian as Newman—and as “loving” of “El Lay.” “The constant unbelievable backstabbing here has taught me never to say a bad word about anyone,” Burnett told me in 2003. “It’s not possible to hate people because if you start, you’ll never stop.”
It took Burnett a while to record another album under his own name. When Bob Dylan hijacks you, it is easy to set your personal goals aside.
CHAPTER 3
Player in the Band
One of Burnett’s blessings, and sometimes one of his curses, is an inability to think small—to approach a song or a project without seeing its larger meanings and possibilities. Long before he told the graduates at the University of Southern California that “the goal of art is to create conscience,” he was measuring things in those terms. Individual successes were great, but how can we change the mind-set of popular culture? How can we instill in people the need for change? What alternatives to what Burnett calls “music for people who don’t like music” can we create?
According to Don Duca, a onetime club owner who for many years was a regular at Burnett’s weekly poker game at the tall Texan’s oceanside condo in Santa Monica, Burnett came up with the idea for Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Burnett, he said, proposed it several months before it came to pass, when they were staying at the Tujunga Canyon lodge in 1975. “T Bone was always talking at the breakfast table about what he thought Dylan should do, what Dylan needed to do at that point, what direction he needed to take as a performer,” Duca told me. “He had all sorts of ideas. One morning, he brought up the idea of the tour. The next day, he flew to New York. A couple of weeks later, someone brought in the latest issue of People magazine. In it was a large picture of T Bone, at a table at a fancy New York restaurant with Dylan and his manager Al Grossman. T Bone never had any qualms about going straight to the top with a project proposal.”