T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  The Alpha Band fell far short of Beatle-like—or Bay City Roller–like—heights. Pressured by a mortified Clive Davis to be more listener-friendly, the group did its best to follow his directive—to a point, and with mixed results—on their 1977 follow-up, Spark in the Dark. Burnett’s treatment of Bob Dylan’s infrequently heard “You Angel You” is one of his most delectable covers. On the rock bard’s underrated 1974 album Planet Waves, “You Angel You” got the full Band treatment, with Robbie Robertson at his most cutting on guitar, Garth Hudson pouring out lyrical insight on organ, and Rick Danko and Levon Helm locking down the rhythm with soulful strength. Burnett transforms the song into an elegant, sweetly galloping rockabilly number, with guest Ringo Starr providing a buoyant backbeat on drums and singing harmony.

  “Silver Mantis,” though boasting an exotic arrangement featuring Osamu Kitajima’s kora and Mansfield’s haunting cello, here occasions one of Burnett’s most agreeably unaffected performances. The story of the warlord’s daughter and the servant who gets thrown in a dungeon for saving her is told in slow, unhurried fashion (at six minutes and thirty-three seconds, it’s one of Burnett’s longest songs), boasting rare, meaningful silences between sections. Kris Kristofferson and Rita Coolidge would soon record “Silver Mantis” for their 1979 album Natural Act.

  Had the rest of Spark in the Dark been as strong, Clive Davis might have had his high hopes for the Alpha Band validated. But the album, “humbly offered in the light of the triune God,” is weighed down by preachiness. “Born in Captivity” is a smug attack on corporate brainwashing set to a clip-clop beat, in which helpless consumers are portrayed as “Cossack children of the bourgeoisie.” And on the group-written “East of East,” Burnett, cast as an “absent-minded priest,” ruminates on sin with church bells pealing over slide guitar. (The latter song was inspired, he writes in the notes to his 2006 anthology, Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett, by the disquieting sight late one morning at the Chateau Marmont Hotel of a beautiful thirteen-year-old German girl joining her mother and a stoned-out Roman Polanski in his room. The girl was future film star Nastassja Kinski.)

  Filled out by a flowery piano piece by Soles and a new-agey acoustic number by Mansfield, Spark in the Dark awakened little more interest than did The Alpha Band. Burnett, worn out from Arista’s efforts to make the group more accessible—“I was ready for the wigwam,” he told Rolling Stone—informed Davis that the Alphas were going to jump the commercial tracks even more on the third and final album of their deal. If the label wanted to let them out of their contract, it could. Perhaps holding out hope for a miracle, Davis let them complete their religious trilogy.

  Throwing himself into his songwriting, Burnett turned out the most explicitly Christian Alpha Band album—and the boldest, widest reaching, and biggest sounding. Featuring an expansive cast of Burnett regulars, plus a church choir directed by the famed gospel artist Andraé Crouch, The Statue Makers of Hollywood (1978) made the country-rock tag that some reviewers insisted on sticking on the band seem even sillier than before. For all its messages from on high, the album came down to earth with its interjections of humor, irony, and playfulness.

  The opener, “Tick Tock,” is a bumptious, eight-minute telling of Genesis, carried by a low-riding funk groove that might have been stolen from the multiracial LA band War. The song features a rare trick vocal by Burnett, whose teasing, drawn-out “Ohhh yeaaaaahhs” provide the hook. On “Mighty Man” and “Perverse Generation,” Burnett takes the modern age to task for achieving “progress” at the cost of hardened hearts. The faithless Everyman in the first song, which channels the work of the Italian film composer Ennio Morricone with its whistling high notes and stentorian male chorus, “can fly to the moon but . . . can’t get to heaven in his rocket” (and the lowly mortal “can’t even keep his car from stalling”).

  Best of all is “Rich Man,” which is unlike anything Burnett had done before. “Oh, you rich man weep and howl” is the basic theme, but repeated over the earthy, swooping sound of the church choir the phrase takes on all-inclusive power. Mansfield’s mandolin is first heard dancing through Darrell Leonard’s burly, dissonant horn arrangement. Then, playing off congas with unlikely sitar-like effects, Mansfield fashions what can only be described as a Caribbean raga sound. The song is nothing short of epic and yet, in the end, has the airiness of a hit single. Following “Back in My Baby’s Arms,” a happy dose of Texas-meets-Memphis soul, Burnett brings things full circle with Hank Williams’s “Thank God,” one of the ultimate mergers of secular and sacred. “In this world of grief and sorrow / Filled with selfishness and greed,” he sings, “There remains the Glory Fountain / To supply our every need.”

  The Statue Makers of Hollywood was another commercial flop. In his autobiography and in various interviews, Clive Davis has singled out his signing of the Alpha Band as one of his biggest misfires. In his estimation, the band failed to win an audience because, though their albums were “perfectly respectable” (ouch), they didn’t yield the “signature song” needed to “fully establish a group’s identity with the public.” If anyone in the music business can claim to have solved the vexing riddle of how to make a hit record, it’s Davis, who has scored with everyone from Barry Manilow to Patti Smith to Whitney Houston. But the Alpha Band’s failure to ignite seems to have had less to do with its lack of “a signature song” than its preachy intellectualism.

  Burnett has said the band never had real direction and became temperamental. Hoping they could pull off a Steely Dan—take on only choice gigs and make records when they felt like it—the Alphas hit the road only when they needed to cover debts. “We were a bit full of ourselves,” Mansfield told me.

  In 1979, Dylan shocked the world (again) with his own religious album, Slow Train Coming, which announced his conversion to evangelical Christianity. “Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord / But you’re gonna have to serve somebody,” he sings, pointing a threatening finger at “All nonbelievers and men stealers talkin’ in the name of religion.” Speculation was rife that Burnett, playing pied piper for the Vineyard, had “turned” one of the world’s most famous Jews. But while Soles spoke openly about religiously lobbying Dylan—“I kept telling him that I was so glad that I didn’t have to place my faith in man any longer,” he told New Musical Express in 1979—Burnett repeatedly denied that he played any such role.

  In a 1987 interview with the Los Angeles Times critics Robert Hilburn and Chris Willman bearing the headline, “Rock of Ages: There’s a New Spirituality in Pop Music,” Burnett said he thought the former Robert Zimmerman had gotten caught up in a worldwide spiritual moment that also had touched Ireland’s U2 and Australia’s INXS as well as musicians in his own backyard, such as Roger McGuinn, Richie Furay of Poco, and Barry McGuire of “Eve of Destruction” fame. “Maybe rock ’n’ roll has finally begun to grow up,” Burnett said. “It has gone through its infancy and its adolescence, which was the ’60s, and probably its yuppie, material stage. Now, the artists are free to look a bit deeper into life and search for some eternal truths . . . the kind of search that has been part of literature and art for ages. Rock ’n’ roll is a very powerful medium, and it helps us all to get something through this medium that is about life rather than death.”

  Burnett would continue to express and explore his religious faith through music, but the Alpha Band was history, leaving behind little in the way of bonus tracks, bootlegs, or boo hoos. Still as much of an outsider in Los Angeles as he had been in Fort Worth, Burnett was again left looking for artistic purchase. He returned to Texas, played a lot of golf, and worked on a sci-finovel, thinking that kind of writing would become his life’s work. Kris Kristofferson helped set him straight.

  CHAPTER 5

  Spiritual Gumshoe

  In the spring of 1979, while Burnett was regrouping and de-discombobulating post-Alpha Band, Kristofferson the matinee idol was up in Montana’s Glacier National Park filming Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s il
l-fated Western epic. He invited Bruton, Burnett, and David Mansfield to join him. They each were given a cameo role: Burnett was the leader of the Heaven’s Gate Band (he got to count in a tune), Bruton the band member D. B. Schultz and, in a charming roller rink scene, Mansfield the skating violinist John DeCory. (Mansfield ended up scoring Heaven’s Gate, winning the job over several big-name movie composers, after the soundtrack superstar John Williams bowed out to become conductor of the Boston Pops Orchestra.) Rolling Thunder Revue trouper Ronnie Hawkins, who played “Bob Dylan” in Renaldo and Clara, also appeared in Cimino’s film.

  During the weeks that stretched to six months in Big Sky Country, Burnett and Mansfield had plenty of time and opportunities to preach religion. “We were like two little Bible thumpers,” Mansfield told me. “T Bone was on fire. He was seeing everything in black and white.” Burnett was set back on his heels a bit when he asked John Hurt whether he had read any C. S. Lewis, an important writer for the Christian movement, and the British actor replied, “Oh, yes, my father was friends with Jack Lewis.” A fellow free spirit, Hurt ended up commandeering a six-seat private plane with Burnett. “We felt like we were escaping across the Rockies!” the actor told Vulture.

  More productively, Burnett and his cronies worked on a bunch of new songs back at their Kalispell hotel, the Outlaw Inn (now unfortunately called the GuestHouse Inn & Suites & Outlaw Convention Center). Kristofferson lent them members of his band, including the Louisiana guitar wiz Gerry McGee, a latter-day member of the Ventures. The revered composer of “Me and Bobby McGee” (no relation) and “For the Good Times,” who didn’t often cover other people’s tunes, had become one of Burnett’s major patrons by including not only “Silver Mantis” but also “Hula Hoop” and “Back in My Baby’s Arms” on his album Natural Act. A few years earlier, Kristofferson had tried to get “Hula Hoop” into the rock music remake of A Star Is Born, but his co-star and executive producer Barbra Streisand wanted ownership of the publishing. Refusing to give away those rights, Burnett reportedly walked away from a big payday.

  The gathered players at the Outlaw Inn worked out the songs by day and performed them by night in the hotel bar. Ultimately, they recorded acoustic versions of them in Mansfield’s room on his two high-powered Nakamichi cassette decks. “We nailed the songs, the feel of them, the directions we wanted to go, without drums,” Mansfield told me. “They were nice-sounding little recordings. T Bone was really eager to get them out.”

  Back in Los Angeles, Burnett signed a deal with Takoma, an indie label founded and made semi-famous by the fingerpicking guitar god John Fahey (though he no longer owned it). It was run by Denny Bruce, a respected industry figure and former drummer who had managed Burnett’s B-52 Band and produced the folk artist Leo Kottke. Bruce reportedly told Burnett to make an album like Buddy Holly would make in Las Cruces, were he alive in the last year of the 1970s. That album, largely consisting of the songs recorded in Montana, was Truth Decay, the 1980 release widely regarded as Burnett’s bona fide solo debut.

  Buddy Holly certainly would have been right at home in the garage where the Truth Decay sessions took place—the Valley garage studio of Burnett friend Reggie Fisher. Nothing if not resourceful, Fisher created the album’s trashy-ambient sound by leaving the door leading from the garage to the attached house half-open and miking the room next to it—which may seem like a far cry from the sophisticated techniques Burnett would later employ as a producer, but reflected a shared desire to capture old sounds in new ways. The rockabilly spirit couldn’t be more alive on tunes like “Quicksand,” on which the basic Outlaw Inn band stirs the catchy melody over a shaking groove and Burnett’s ringing guitar chords reflect off the sizzle of the cymbals.

  With the great, perennially undervalued Billy Swan singing harmonies behind him, Burnett performs with understated confidence. The low-boil, bluesified swing of “Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk” and the high-octane, hard-edged Western swing of “Driving Wheel” reveal Burnett’s feel for jazz. The thwomping power-pop workout “Boomerang,” a leftover from the Alpha Band, is both the hookiest tune on the album and the one with the most skewed narrative—one in which “thieves and debutants talked in italics.” On the mournful, lovely piano ballad “Madison Avenue,” Burnett asks, “Who is the father of lies?”—an ageless question that might be directed at Mad Men’s advertising legend Don Draper and the empty, manufactured values he promotes.

  “Power of Love,” a stately, high-stepping ballad later covered by Arlo Guthrie, radiates beams of steadfast belief, as does the tender country-spiritual ballad “I’m Coming Home,” which is lifted by Mansfield’s gorgeous guitar solo. In contrast to the harsh visions Burnett expressed in his Jeremiah mode, these smart, probing songs unfold in a soft-spoken, nonthreatening manner. The emptiness of “Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk” (“They don’t say nothing”) is counterbalanced by the full emotions of “Tears Tears Tears,” on which Burnett declares, “Know that truth is truth and I love you.” The false values of “House of Mirrors” (“This suit is you, this car is you, this studio is you”) are neutralized by the power of love, which “can make a skeptic believe.”

  Like the soul singer Al Green, who released his great Belle Album three years earlier, Burnett was adept at ambiguity. Home could be where you live or where He lives. Love could lift you romantically and save you from your loneliness or lift you higher and forgive you of your sins. But on Truth Decay, Burnett came clean with his direct expression of religion, presenting himself not as a Christian rocker, and not as a rock artist with a “Christian” point of view, but a rock artist of Christian faith with wholly personal beliefs. Asked in 1982 by Today’s Christian Music about his religious message, he said, “I’m not really conscious of it but I know what my message is not. It’s not: ‘I-used-to-be-miserable-but-now-I-found-Jesus—but-you’re-still-miserable-so-why-don’t-you-find-Jesus-and-be-happy-like-me.’” He added, “I don’t find myself needing to go out and find people to tell about Jesus. My ministry is to make doubters out of unbelievers.”

  At the same time, he felt cut off from believers: “I’m out there doing it. I’d appreciate some support. I am a Christian and I think what I’m doing is healthy.” Bono, among other young, religious-minded rock artists looking for role models, agreed, embracing Truth Decay as a breakthrough album. The Takoma debut, wrote Ken Tucker in Rolling Stone, “suggests that T Bone Burnett is the best singer-songwriter in the country right now. No one this year will make music more forthright, more tender, more scrupulously free of cheap irony and trumped-up passion.” The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau called it the best rockabilly album of the year.

  For all that, Truth Decay failed to find an audience, partly because people had trouble finding it. When the album was reissued on CD by the British Demon label in 1986, a time when people were excited about acquiring digital versions of their favorite LPs, Truth Decay was long absent from the vinyl racks. These days, it is not commercially available in any format. Burnett did remix three of the songs for Twenty Twenty, but as good as those reconstituted tracks sound, you miss the garage-band immediacy of the originals.

  In early 1981, Burnett and his wife mutually decided, following this latest disappointment, that it was time for him to get more aggressive in pursuing success—“to dance or get off the floor” as he put it in a November 1983 Rolling Stone profile. For long stretches over the next couple of years, leaving his wife, Stephanie, and their daughters Angelina (born in 1978) and Molly (born in 1981) behind in Fort Worth, he lived in Los Angeles, crashing in his manager’s rented house and driving a maroon 1965 Cadillac with “TEXAS” emblazoned on the license plate.

  Burnett, who hadn’t played much live outside of Rolling Thunder, began regularly appearing at Hop Singh’s, a jazz and rock joint in the West Los Angeles community of Marina Del Rey, and Madame Wong’s, a Chinese restaurant with spots in Chinatown and Santa Monica. His unusual shows, which drew on his love of show tunes and standards as well as roots music, and show
ed off his offbeat wit, drew attention. Warner Bros., which expressed interest in signing him, rejected his proposal to do an album consisting of personal interpretations of show and film tunes. But his first major label, which like other record companies was dabbling with the “mini-album” or extended-play format in the days preceding the arrival of the compact disc, had no trouble making his insouciant treatment of “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” the centerpiece of a six-song EP, Trap Door (1982).

  There have been few notable rock covers of Broadway tunes: Janis Joplin’s “Summertime” from Porgy and Bess; the Mamas and the Papas’ “My Heart Stood Still” from A Connecticut Yankee; the Beatles’ “Till There Was You” from The Music Man; and I suppose we must include the Fifth Dimension’s “Aquarius / Let the Sunshine In” from Hair. In his notes to Twenty Twenty, Burnett says he always found it strange to hear a man sing “House of the Rising Sun” (a 1964 smash for the Animals), being that it was written about a girl working in a New Orleans brothel. “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” written by Styne and Robin for the iconic character of Lorelei in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, was his own experiment in gender reversal.

  In the annals of popular music, the words “Let’s rock” have never been uttered with cooler reserve than they are when Burnett kicks his “Diamonds” into gear. He recites the words in song-speak as if imparting some kind of secret knowledge; you picture him in front of a fireplace in some fancy boîte, his spectators swigging wine; maybe there are imported olives and nuts in brilliant cut crystal bowls. “Diamonds” does indeed rock, just fine, its chiming folk-rock guitars and thrumming percussion and his bandmates’ bright harmony vocals making for good company. But anyone who has heard the song delivered from Lorelei’s point of view in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes—especially as performed by the super-seductive Marilyn Monroe in the film version—may need a few moments to adjust the vertical hold.