T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  The prefeminist joke in the lyrics is that if a woman has to suffer the consequences of living in a man’s world, she is going to make the opposite sex pay through the nose for her . . . attention. So, is Burnett sharing Lorelei’s delight, as a friend of hers, admiring her wiles? Or, is he playing the part of devil, in full control of the game and in full possession of his power? Sounding like they are in on the game, the answering vocalists have us leaning toward the latter interpretation. And then there is a third possibility: What if Burnett is singing as a willing victim? Who wouldn’t go into hock to spend some quality time with Marilyn? Rock on, indeed.

  It is difficult to imagine Burnett pulling off this stunt earlier in his career: “Men grow cold as girls grow old / And we all lose our charms in the end.” But at thirty-two, he had started absorbing the theatrical influences—Kurt Weill, Bertolt Brecht, Lotte Lenya—he had dipped into on the cabaret-derived material on The Unwritten Works of Geoffrey, Etc. A postmodern art song in rock clothing, his “Diamonds” casts a gentle irony that, coming from such a jigsaw-jagged commentator, is doubly winning.

  Elsewhere, the EP spotlights a very different kind of blonde. On “I Wish You Could Have Seen Her Dance,” a barroom attraction in a low-cut black satin dress, black velvet gloves, and rhinestone bracelets shows off her moves before a group of sexed-up teens: “She did a pirouette and then a kung fu step” and also “the flavo and the tango and the flamenco.” The song has more cute asides than it can bear, but its surging, new wave energy—and underlying compassion for a girl marked by disappointment—make up for that. With guitars jangling (and burning in the case of the solo near the end), “Ridiculous Man” exposes the follies of wealth and power. And then, wiping the slate clean, Burnett makes a powerful declaration of belief on “Poetry.” Reminiscent of a Brill Building ballad with its tailored melody, the song depicts being broken and scared, “hiding in the blackness of the darkness of night,” and then finding a burning presence to love not only “more than dreams and poetry / More than laughter more than tears, more than mystery”—but also “more than rhythm, more than song.”

  Coming from someone so profoundly invested in music, that is quite a statement. That said, the deeper you get into Burnett’s body of work, the more you get a sense that music in and of itself is for him a source of transcendent beauty and truth—not only in service of a higher authority, as in the Vineyard services, but on its own. “We talked a lot about how music in itself is enough, making it beautiful is enough, how you don’t need to weigh it down with a [religious] agenda,” Sam Phillips told me. A beautiful chord sequence or captivating rumble, whether it has roots in Howlin’ Wolf or Irving Berlin or an African tribal band, can lift us out of ourselves and into a dimension of spiritual feeling—of being connected to forces greater than ourselves. “I was beginning to go through a rough personal time, as were a lot of people around me,” Burnett says in the liner notes to the 2007 Rhino reissue of Trap Door. “I think I was trying to reassure those friends, and myself.”

  Though the running time of the EP, produced by Burnett and Reggie Fisher, is only twenty-two minutes, it doesn’t feel slight the way most efforts in this format do. There is a lot to digest. Reviews were strong. “The most profoundly elegant and powerful rock release of 1982,” wrote Joseph Sasfy in the Washington Post, holding out hope the artist would cease to be “somewhat unknown to the record-buying public.” He went on, “If Dylan is the only relevant comparison, you would have to return to ‘John Wesley Harding’ for a comparable experience.”

  His reputation rising, Burnett got a plum spot as opening act for several American “farewell” concerts by the Who in October 1982. His Rolling Thunder crony Mick Ronson reportedly turned down a lucrative offer from Bob Seger to accompany Burnett instead. Going on before Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey, and the blokes was no picnic for Burnett, a marginal figure at best for Who fanatics. According to coverage of the Seattle Kingdome concert on The Who Concert Guide site, he “suffered a particularly bad response of almost incessant booing and jeering . . . for the duration of their thirty-minute set.” And on Halloween eve at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, Burnett suffered the odd indignity of having to open not only for the Clash and the Who, but also a complete playing on the PA system of The Best of the Doors.

  The booers didn’t know what they missed. To hear Burnett, Ronson, and company perform at the Old Waldorf in San Francisco the same week, via an archival recording on the BB Chronicles blog, is to hear a unit that gave away nothing in slashing power and punkish concision. They opened the first set with a crunching reading of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody,” closed the second set with a Ronson guitar freak-out on Burnett’s “Love at First Sight,” and poured corrosive power into most everything in between. “Can I Get a Witness” was treated to a blistering, call-and-response, reggae-rock sermon (“Religion is so much easier now that God is gone / We don’t have to think about the things like right and wrong”). After giving “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” a showbiz-style intro—“Jule Styne song, Jule Styne and Leo Robin wrote this for Carol Channing”—Burnett turned it into a hard-edged romp. (Among the less satisfying numbers was his wobbly rendition of Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”)

  The other club dates Burnett was playing around the same time, without Ronson, “were always a total blast,” Mansfield said. On one memorable night at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, the Santa Monica landmark, the songs included Kris Kristofferson’s “The Pilgrim Chapter 33” (inspired by the “walkin’ contradiction” Bob Neuwirth); “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw,” originally recorded by Hank Williams as “Luke the Drifter” and later by Bob Dylan during the Basement Tapes sessions; and the spoken word and piano number “Art Movies,” which became a B-side obscurity (“They’re usually made by very small Germans,” Burnett informed the crowd).

  He was, in fact, a serious filmgoer, at a time when the American cinema was going through a golden period—directors like Martin Scorsese, John Cassavetes, Blake Edwards, and Jonathan Demme were turning out masterpieces—and new and revived European classics by the likes of Ingmar Bergman, Jean-Luc Godard, Eric Rohmer, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Germany’s Rainer Werner Fassbinder were being widely distributed. With his investment in darkness, and the truth about humanity that can be found there, Burnett was a big fan of film noir, including works based on or inspired by Raymond Chandler, one of Los Angeles’ greatest contributions to popular culture, and mysteries by such authors as his LA friend James Ellroy, widely known for The Black Dahlia. The presence of these works was strongly felt on his first full-fledged Warner album, Proof through the Night (1983).

  If any album seemed to prime him for stardom, this was it. It boasted guest shots by a murderer’s row of guitarists in Pete Townshend, Ry Cooder, Mick Ronson, Richard Thompson, and David Mansfield, not to mention the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers drummer Stan Lynch. And the songs, in the year of The Year of Living Dangerously, were edgy and atmospheric, marked by smeared red lipstick, the lingering scent of cigarette smoke, and the sound of heels clicking against darkened sidewalks. We encounter a disappeared girl who had “a whisper you could hear across an ocean”; a girl who “once made people faint” but “crumbled like a dream”; and, on the Townshend-fired “Fatally Beautiful,” a Marilyn Monroe–like character who was sexually abused as a foster child, got taken advantage of by a film producer, and became a centerfold before being murdered by an admirer.

  At its best, Proof through the Night has the moral complexity of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown and the offhand brilliance of Robert Altman’s Chandler adaptation, The Long Goodbye. “When the Night Falls,” written with Roy Orbison in mind, is a heart-wrenching portrait of existential despair in which a man, overcome with remorse over a lost love, leaves his hotel every twilight to “follow my shadow till morning” and climbs back to his dark room “through the litter of Sunday newspapers.” The visionary “Hefner and Disney,” spoken with a resigned anger bordering on wistfu
lness, portrays the Playboy founder and Mickey Mouse inventor as interchangeable threats to the moral fabric—evil men “who wanted to rob the children of their dreams.” Despite running only three minutes and forty seconds, this twisted fable has the feel of an epic with its spaghetti Western crescendos, modern classical touches, and muted female vocal choruses. (In 2014, Burnett named Uncle Walt as his “most despised living person” in Vanity Fair’s Proust Questionnaire.)

  Too often, though, Burnett gets caught up in easy moralizing and intellectual gamesmanship (e.g., he says the women in the songs are metaphorical stand-ins for America in its diminishing states of glory). The main offender is “The Sixties,” which purports to lament the tossing out of important 1960s ideals like social responsibility along with love-ins and tie-dyed shirts, but comes off as a contemptuous indictment of the “new breed of man”—the man in faded Levis and Gucci loafers whose idea of applying counterculture values is not questioning authority or putting larger purposes ahead of his immediate needs, but smoking “the best marijuana,” paying for “free love,” and talking the talk: “You know I’m a sports freak / I’m a jazz freak / I’m a video freak.”

  “I was writing about self-deception and deceiving myself while I was doing it,” Burnett told me in 2003. But responding to criticism at the time, he said that any moral judgments in the songs were meant to be self-inclusive. “I’ve written a lot of really tough songs; I’ve been really tough on my characters a lot of times,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “But at the same time I know any discussion of morality begins with one’s self, and the person I was really dealing with in all those things was myself.” He is no Jimmy Carter, but then again, Burnett has never made any bones about struggling with impure desires. “All the greed and lust and confusion and ambition is all part of me,” he told Rolling Stone.

  What made Burnett most unhappy about Proof through the Night—which, it should be pointed out, earned him the top spot in a Rolling Stone critics’ poll for songwriter of the year, and is regarded by many people as one of his best albums—was the way the songs were handled in the studio. Plans to have the Who regular Glyn Johns produce it in London fell through. The job went to Jeff Eyrich, a young LA studio bassist who went on to produce the Blasters, Rank and File, and Thin White Rope but at the time had produced only “A Million Miles Away,” the hit single by the power pop band the Plimsouls. Burnett had not yet acquired the clout to produce himself—or, as he prefers, co-produce with a trusted ally (“We all need editors”). With Eyrich at the controls, Proof became a study in excess.

  “It was decided that we needed more muscular rock ’n’ roll stuff,” Burnett wrote in his liner notes for the 2007 Rhino reissue of Proof (packaged in a two-disc set with Trap Door and Beyond the Trap Door, an EP of odds and ends that had been released in England). Posting on the mastering engineer Steve Hoffman’s Music Forums message board, Burnett lamented “some echo unit that the producer and engineer loved. They used it all over the record. It just went on and on.” In the end, he wrote in the Rhino notes, he was forced to write two songs on the spot “that I never really felt confident in.”

  It’s a measure of just how distressed Burnett was about Proof—which, he posted on Hoffman’s site, “was released prematurely and half-baked and overdone”—that it didn’t appear on CD until twenty-seven years after its initial release on vinyl. That is one of the longest stretches an album of its stature has remained undigitized. And the Rhino version came out only after he had had a chance to redo and in some cases lengthen no less than seven of the songs for Twenty Twenty.

  “I stripped off all the production,” he posted, “rewrote a couple of songs, re-sang a couple, and remixed the whole thing except for one song, ‘Shut It Tight,’ which was recorded before we began production on the album and therefore was not subject to the nonsense that went on during the actual production of the album, if you will forgive me for saying so. I always thought there was a pretty good record underneath all that and have now proven so to myself at least.”

  The alterations are pretty striking, conceptually as well as aurally. Burnett’s voice on the original version of “Hefner and Disney” has no definition; he is a talking head with no stake in the music going on around him. The remake gives his vocal a devilish dimension with its depth of focus: the medium meets the message. Out-of-sync acoustic guitars add a modern classical element to “Fatally Beautiful.” With its drums removed, the antinuclear rant “The Murder Weapon” makes a considerably subtler statement.

  “There were things that I know a lot more about now, things that had gnawed at me for years, things that I’d let go out that I wish I had paid more attention to, that I could have done a whole lot better,” he wrote in the Proof liner notes. He added, “Back then I used to make records and then go out on the road, and when you go out on the road you learn so much about how the song is speaking. There were a couple of songs that I re-sang because I thought that I could sing them so much better—I wish I had sung everything better. And I did some remixing where things got lost or covered up in production, where I couldn’t hear the song or even what I meant at the time.”

  For those purveyors of art who are opposed to after-the-fact tampering or repackaging—whether it’s Ted Turner colorizing classic films, an academic “restoring” Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men to the point of changing Willie Stark’s name (meet the new boss, Willie Talos?), or Bob Dylan releasing an alternate Self-Portrait—Burnett’s changes are objectionable on their face. Many fans of Proof prefer the sound of the original, echoes and all, to the resounding, deep tones and chamber-like sound of the remake. But as Burnett’s followers well know, there is no place for permanence in his ongoing pursuit of truth—aural, spiritual, poetic. Historical recordings need to be preserved, but for him, music—including or especially his own—is there for the renewing and reimagining. And in rare cases like Proof, where someone thinks it is a good idea to keep T Bone from being T Bone, music is there for the rebuilding—no matter how long that may take.

  CHAPTER 6

  Master Builder

  The brass at Warner Bros. may have had doubts about entrusting Burnett with the production of Proof through the Night. But during the making of that album, the Warner subsidiary, Slash Records, which was enjoying national success documenting the LA punk and roots-revival scene, asked him to produce a promising band from East Los Angeles. That band was Los Lobos, a long-standing unit that had developed from an acoustic group specializing in traditional Mexican music into an electric band with a blistering, punk-friendly attack.

  Lobbied by one of his leading acts, the Blasters, to sign Los Lobos, the head of Slash Records, Bob Biggs, a painter and art collector, put them on his roster. But he didn’t know what to do with them. His close friend Hudson Marquez, a conceptual artist (part of the art group Ant Farm, creators of Texas’ popular Cadillac Ranch installation) and video producer (known for TVTV), who knew Burnett from his Alpha Band days and had himself co-produced an album by the Blasters keyboardist Gene Taylor, urged Biggs to hire him. “I played Biggs the Alpha Band albums and other tapes I had of Bone,” Marquez told me. “He said he liked the simple, bare-bones production of T Bone’s recordings and his ease with R&B. And, of course, he knew Tex-Mex music.”

  Burnett, who had never seen Los Lobos live, was knocked out when he saw them perform at a club. Los Lobos knew next to nothing about him, but when the band members Cesar Rosas and Conrad Lozano met with him at Hollywood’s Ocean Studio, per Chris Morris’s Los Lobos: Dream in Blue, they were impressed with what he had been working on lately. Their shared love of norteño music and Buddy Holly clinched the deal. “They understood all the connections, how it all made sense,” Burnett tells Morris.

  Continuing the record-release strategy they had used with Burnett, Warner had Los Lobos record an EP as their Slash debut, with Burnett producing. The Blasters saxophonist Steve Berlin, who had been playing a lot with Los Lobos and had a strong desire to produce them, w
as hired as Burnett’s backup in the studio. Biggs, Berlin said in an e-mail to me, had been impressed by his production of Los Lobos’ “We’re Gonna Rock” on the Rhino collection LA Rockabilly, compiled by the original Blasters manager Art Fein. “He thought T Bone and I would work well together.”

  As things turned out, Burnett and the hard-edged Philly native Berlin butted heads from the start, to the point where, Berlin claims in the Morris book, Burnett tried to get him fired. As one of rock’s most valued honkers, Berlin placed a premium on capturing on record the live-wire intensity of the band, which he would soon join as a full-fledged member. “I like records that sound like they were played, not built or crafted,” he told the AV Club in 2012. “I’d rather hear the sound of things crashing into each other.” Burnett, as much as he strived for a live, spacious recorded sound, was very much a craftsman who recognized that songs which sound great onstage can sound terrible in the controlled environment of the recording studio.

  With its rambunctious dance numbers, accordion-fueled Spanish-language laments, and rollicking cover of Ritchie Valens’s “Come On Let’s Go,” Los Lobos’ 1983 EP debut, . . . and a Time to Dance, did what it was supposed to: capture widespread attention. Who were these guys, and where the heck had this stuff come from? It was voted the year’s top EP in the Village Voice’s Pazz & Jop critics’ poll and won a Grammy as Best Mexican American recording. With its potent mix of bar band swagger, hard rock heroics, and social conscience, the full-length album How Will the Wolf Survive?, released a year later, had listeners who thought Los Lobos little more than a curiosity eat that opinion. Ranking ahead of Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA, Prince’s Purple Rain, and U2’s The Unforgettable Fire on many Top 10 lists, the recording established them as one of America’s great bands.