T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  On How Will the Wolf Survive?, Los Lobos emerged as full-time songwriters, sometimes recording tunes even as they were being written. The songs could generally be divided between the ballads and traditional tunes of singer-guitarist-accordionist David Hidalgo and drummer-guitarist Louie Perez, which dealt with the plight of Mexican immigrants and the band’s struggle to maintain its ethnic identity in their star-making city; and the funky, crunching rockers of singer-guitarist Rosas. “We would record something that didn’t have the lyrics yet, and David and Cesar would almost scat over them,” Burnett tells Morris. “They would just sing a melody over the band [track], and then they would go home and write lyrics.”

  “We were really burning the candle at both ends,” Perez says in Paul Zollo’s invaluable book Songwriters on Songwriting. “I was working on two things and they were doing a dance song. T Bone kept calling on the phone and saying, ‘Do you have that other verse done yet?’ And we’d say, ‘No, not yet.’ And finally he figured he would work on the part himself.”

  Burnett completed the slammin’ opening tune, “Don’t Worry Baby,” which proved to be one of the band’s most durable numbers. When Lobos bogged down with “The Breakdown,” a song they had been playing live for a year, he got them going again by dropping the zydeco section that gave the song its title and transforming the tune into an acoustic, medium-tempo vehicle with laid-back accordion, warm baritone sax riffs, and neat percussion effects. “When you get into a rut, T Bone’s good at getting things rolling again,” Hidalgo tells Zollo. “Just because of his personality. He starts jumping around. He’s a silly guy, you know. There were a couple of times we couldn’t do anything, we just couldn’t think anymore. So he’d go and buy a fifth of Scotch. And that helped a great deal. We got a couple songs out of that.”

  The most important song was Hidalgo’s late-arriving “Will the Wolf Survive?,” a gorgeous vehicle for his remarkable pop-operatic tenor and a perfect anthem to convey Los Lobos’ heart and soul involvement in social causes. “[Previously] they’d been way more into a ‘Don’t Worry Baby’ kind of mode, a blues kind of mode,” Burnett tells Chris Morris. “I had thought for a long time that the Hispanics were the new soul men. There was a sense that there was something coming from the Hispanic community that was going to be unbelievably soulful. When they showed up, I thought, ‘OK, this is them—these are the ones.’ They just told the truth, but it was in the way a blues musician would tell the truth. But when they started getting into these high-consciousness songs, as I’d call them, they started telling the truth at a different level.”

  Not all ruts, as Los Lobos learned, are created equal. As is the case with many bands facing the challenge of following a breakthrough effort with something equally good or better, living up to people’s grand expectations proved excruciatingly difficult for them. Two years after the release of Wolf—which, as good as it was, was not a commercial hit, topping out at No. 47 on the Billboard album chart and producing no Top 40 single—there was still no word on a follow-up. Had the pressure gotten to Hidalgo and company? Had touring to cash in on the success of Wolf worn the band out? Would the wolves survive?

  During their extensive time on the road in support of Wolf, Los Lobos hadn’t written any new songs. And when they did get around to working on songs for their next album, challenged by Burnett to go even deeper than before, they came up empty. “It was real hard,” Hidalgo told the Chicago Sun-Times critic Don McLeese. “There were times we got pretty discouraged. We were trying to move forward, and to do that is hard. A lot of times we would rehearse a song until we thought it was right, and then go play it and put it down, and it wasn’t right. So we’d have to start over and get the acoustic guitar, and that’s usually when it came out the best. It was painful a lot of the times, because we really had to put our feelings aside, and think of the album itself, to make sure that we had it right.”

  To add to their burden, as well as the madness in the studio, a few weeks after they started recording music for the new album, By the Light of the Moon, they were approached by the filmmaker Taylor Hackford and the screenwriter Luis Valdez (of Zoot Suit fame) about recording songs for La Bamba, their biopic about the Latin rock hero Ritchie Valens. For Los Lobos, great admirers of Valens who had played and recorded some of his songs, the offer was impossible to turn down. They ended up working on both projects at the same time, in different parts of the Sunset Sound recording studio, with Berlin concentrating on the film score at one end and Burnett on the follow-up to Wolf at the other.

  Inevitably, the differences between Burnett and Berlin became magnified. Berlin declined to comment on the sessions. “Having been pilloried for decades just for speaking the truth about Paul Simon, I’m not exactly looking for more dog shit to step into,” he e-mailed, referring to his public attacks on Simon for claiming songwriting credits to “The Myth of Fingerprints,” a tune Los Lobos wrote during the sessions for Simon’s hallowed 1986 album Graceland. But one major bone of contention was Burnett’s use of outside players—“a sensitive subject” for Los Lobos, Berlin later acknowledged in an interview with the Pennsylvania newspaper The Morning Call.

  Accomplished drumming had never been a high priority for Lobos during the do-it-yourself punk era, when Perez added traps to his résumé with next to no experience playing them. Now, Perez’s limitations, particularly his tendency to rush the beat, were causing problems. Burnett imported three different drummers for By the Light of the Moon: Anton Fier, formerly of the quasi-jazz group the Lounge Lizards; the Elvis Presley veteran Ron Tutt; and Mickey Curry, who had been playing with Hall and Oates. Though Burnett tells Morris that concerns about Perez came from inside the band, and he was only trying to satisfy them, it’s difficult to imagine this most drummer-centric of producers being that passive about this issue.

  For all the conflicts, complications, and looming deadlines, Los Lobos got things better than right. By the Light of the Moon is a great album. Assessing their early approach in a 1992 interview with the Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot, Burnett remarked, “They play so many styles, and their idea of making a record was to do a blues song and a rockabilly song and a Tex-Mex song and so on. I just tried to get them to merge all that.” In fighting for their “purity” as a band, he told Musician, he sometimes ended up “fighting against them.” Judging by the glowing cohesiveness of Moon, the fight was worth it. As stylistically varied as the songs are, they add up to a soulful and gripping statement about life on America’s margins during the Reagan era, when “tired souls with empty hands” were “searching for the promised land.” Set against that backdrop, the trembling rockabilly number “Shakin’ Shakin’ Shakes,” written with Burnett, is the purest kind of release.

  As stirring a work as By the Light of the Moon was, though, it was Los Lobos’ last-minute cover of “La Bamba”—not the version they recorded for the soundtrack, but a separate single produced by the Burnett protégé Mitchell Froom—that made them superstars. For Berlin and the band, who like everyone else hadn’t expected much from the film or the recording, the freak hit was a godsend. For Burnett, as he lamented to John Milward of the Philadelphia Inquirer, “La Bamba” wiped out three years of developing Los Lobos “so that they wouldn’t be perceived of as the token Mexican-American band.”

  Burnett would work again with Los Lobos on La Pistola y El Corazón, the 1988 EP that won a Grammy for Best Mexican American / Tejano Music Performance, and he has recorded frequently with David Hidalgo. But for other members of Los Lobos, sour memories of By the Light of the Moon linger, particularly Burnett’s lengthy absences from the studio to deal with personal issues. In the end, Rosas tells Morris, he and Burnett’s engineer Larry Hirsch were left to complete the album. “I leave people alone when they need to be left alone,” Burnett tells Morris, while asserting that he did mix and master the record. “I don’t think that’s a bad thing.”

  Burnett admits to dictating to artists when he started out as a producer. He wrote out arrang
ements, told drummers what beats and fills to play (he still tells them to lay off the hi-hat, which he compared in Modern Drummer to “a teacher tapping on the podium with a pointing stick”), and played parts himself. “To find a drummer who can play a completely unimportant part in a really important way is a rare thing,” he told Musician. But as he grew as a producer, learning from his mistakes and putting greater faith in working from his instinct, he set himself apart with a less-is-more approach. “T Bone’s not a control freak,” said the veteran music publicist and A&R man Bill Bentley, who was at Warner and Slash during the Los Lobos years. “He’ll never make you do something you don’t want to do. He goes after shaping songs and helping a band discover the best side of itself to record.”

  In his 2010 memoir Soul Mining, the brilliant French Canadian producer Daniel Lanois writes that in preparing to produce Emmylou Harris’s 1995 album Wrecking Ball, “I decided I was going to build a classic. The overwhelming sensation that I have felt at every moment of great decision rode over me like a wave; I was going in and I would not let up until we were there.” He added, “I felt that I had a chance to make a record as spine-chilling as Phil Spector’s production of the Crystals.”

  Every producer relates to his work differently, and in the case of Wrecking Ball, Lanois, “guided by Emmy’s emotional makeup,” did indeed create a classic—as he did with Dylan’s Time out of Mind and the Neville Brothers’ Yellow Moon. But it is difficult to imagine Burnett putting his ambitions for a recording first or discussing his intentions apart from that of the artist. “There are some producers who live through the artist they’re working on, and they think of it in some way as their record, which it’s not, really,” he told Musician. “I much more like the feeling of sitting on this beach and this is the sand, and over there are the trees, and overhead are the birds . . . and I’m a creature made by God who’s part of this thing going on.” He sounded a lot like Ornette Coleman, who said about his role as leader, “I don’t want them to follow me. I want them to follow themselves, but to be with me.” (The similarities between Burnett and Coleman, who died in 2015, are intriguing: both were raised in Fort Worth, came of age artistically in Los Angeles, coined a personal approach to recording—Coleman called his “sound grammar,” Burnett his a “world of sound for something to exist in”—and refused to compromise on the road to icon status.)

  When Burnett produced fellow Takoma alumnus Leo Kottke’s Time Step in 1983, Kottke was best known as a fingerstyle guitarist with a serviceable voice. Burnett showed him how appealing he could be as a singer, yet still do wonderful things on guitar, by having Emmylou Harris sing harmony with him on Kristofferson’s “Here Comes That Rainbow Again.” The nudge toward country broadened Kottke’s appeal without compromising his artistic identity.

  Marshall Crenshaw’s 1985 album Downtown was a more difficult project. The whip smart retro-rocker had cut eight or nine songs before Burnett entered the picture and wasn’t happy with any of them. In an interview with Bill Cochran of the Chicago alternative rock station WXRT in 1986, Cochran told me, Burnett confessed he wasn’t familiar enough with Crenshaw and what he was going after to help him sufficiently: “All I was trying to do was get his voice present in the mix so people could hear what a good singer he was.” (On Crenshaw’s previous album, Field Day, his sophomore effort, Steve Lillywhite, who had produced U2, among many other bands, had turned him into a singing mannequin dressed up in a booming wardrobe of sound.)

  But as disappointed as Burnett was with Downtown, songs like the rockabilly-tinged “Little Wild One (No. 5)” capture the Detroit native’s uncanny ability to both celebrate and update vintage rock ’n’ roll with his modern cool. Aided by Burnett’s electric sitar and Jerry Marotta’s bongos taking things into strange, enticing territory, “Terrifying Love” ranks among Crenshaw’s aching masterpieces.

  In contrast to Burnett’s restorative efforts with Crenshaw, Peter Case (1986) was a surprising work of reinvention. Case was known for his stints with the LA new wave bands the Nerves and the Plimsouls. Unbeknownst to many of his fans, the Buffalo native started out as a blues buster. “I had these new songs, story songs based on blues and folk ballads, and a whole new way of working,” Case told me. “But I didn’t know where to go with them.” Largely based on his admiration for Truth Decay, Case turned to Burnett, whom he knew from encounters on the LA music scene and related to as a Christian artist.

  “T Bone has the kind of charisma that makes you feel like things can happen,” Case told me in a 2007 No Depression interview. The 1985 project got underway in Fort Worth, where Case joined Burnett for two months to work on songs, demos, and recordings. Back in Los Angeles, with Geffen Records dollars to spend, Burnett brought in a big-name cast for the album—Ry Cooder, Roger McGuinn, John Hiatt, guitarist Mike Campbell from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, and Jim Keltner. But it wasn’t star voltage that made Peter Case special as much as the distinctive sound that Burnett, Case, and the co-producer Mitchell Froom crafted in the studio. “We put the songs, which we called ‘tribal folk,’ to a groove,” “playing and singing live with a drum machine going—not a programmed drum machine, but one that was attacked by Jerry Marotta. He ripped up the instructions to it and played the thing with a screwdriver.”

  “Peter is a folk musician, but he never played with any sort of folk piety,” Burnett told me. “I remember him assaulting that acoustic guitar, just playing the shit out of it, knocking out these unusual but completely happening chords. No one plays like him.”

  Boasting a Grammy-nominated song in the harp-driven “Old Blue Car” and three Burnett co-writes, Peter Case accomplished much of what Truth Decay did: it established an important, idiosyncratic artist on his own terms and drew attention-grabbing praise (for instance, the New York Times critic Robert Palmer named it the best pop/rock album of 1986). Unfortunately, Peter Case also linked up with Truth Decay by falling into a pile of “lost” recordings of the era. While Case has gone on to enjoy an active and interesting career, you can’t help thinking that he was one star who got away.

  No such fate awaited the BoDeans, four unknowns whose partnership with Burnett enabled them to live out the great rock ’n’ roll dream of coming out of nowhere—in their case, beautiful Waukesha, Wisconsin—and becoming a big-time success. When Burnett first met with the band, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, he lectured them, telling them they needed to go home and learn how to play their instruments. In retrospect, that may have set the wrong tone, but it appears they took his words to heart. Few first albums achieve the instant liftoff that their 1986 Slash debut, Love & Hope & Sex & Dreams, did with its levitating melodies, ramble tamble attack (Buddy Holly to the rescue again), and alternating acoustic and electric currents. With their unusual vocal harmonies, Kurt Neumann and Sam Llanas (he of the whiney, asking-to-be-spanked voice) could be Everly-like one moment and Louvin-like the next, but mostly they sounded like themselves.

  How much did people love Love & Hope? Let us count the yays: Rolling Stone named the BoDeans Best New Band. The group was profiled at length in Time. The Washington Post deemed the album “one of the year’s best.” Love & Hope got them tons of airplay on college and alternative radio stations. And the song “Still the Night” was featured on the soundtrack of Martin Scorsese’s The Color of Money. For all that, the BoDeans were unhappy with the album, which they said cramped their style and limited their audience. Neumann, Llanas told me in 2014, was upset that there wasn’t enough time or budget for him to work on his guitar sound.

  You would think that a band that went by Bob, Guy, Beau, and Sammy BoDean (after Jethro Bodine, the dim-witted character on the 1960s sitcom The Beverly Hillbillies) would be thrilled to score with alt-country listeners, but they were after bigger game. “They wrote these little songs, like ‘Runaway,’ about a woman whose husband beat her and she shot him, and then she took off in the car,” Burnett told the Chicago Tribune. “They wanted to do it like it was all ‘Apocalypse N
ow,’ even when it didn’t make sense for the songs. That was the fight on that record: How ‘big’ was it gonna be?”

  To bulk up on their second album, Outside Looking In, the Bo-Deans hired the Milwaukee native Jerry Harrison, keyboardist in Talking Heads, to produce. “He trusted us a bit more,” Llanas told me. “He let us steer.” But with all the steerage they may have gained, the BoDeans lost their direction. The warm cohesion of their debut gave way to a piecemeal approach that aimed for the arena crowd with synthesizers and exploding drums and discarded their pop tunes for reggae workouts. The quality control of the songs was gone. By the time they overcame their misgivings about Burnett and had him executive produce their largely acoustic 1993 effort, Closer to Free, it was too late to recapture all that was lost, even if the title track did become their biggest hit. Burnett largely sifted through what they had already recorded and advised them what was and wasn’t working. He also arbitrated when Neumann and Llanas didn’t see eye to eye, which was often.

  Another young artist who regretted falling out with Burnett was Tommy Keene. The guitar-playing indie rocker was knocking on the door of stardom following his acclaimed 1984 EP, Places That Are Gone, which had critics talking about him in the same tones as Alex Chilton, Matthew Sweet, and Paul Westerberg. But he and Burnett clashed in the studio, and Don Dixon, a gifted North Carolina singer-songwriter who went on to produce REM, was brought in to finish the sessions. That album never came out because Keene signed a deal with Geffen barring the release of any of the material. Four of the songs ended up on his Geffen album Songs from the Film, but they were given a commercial gloss by the producer Geoff Emerick. “They wanted me to be like Bryan Adams,” Keene told Rocker Magazine.

  You don’t have to be a fan of Burnett as a producer to acknowledge that even when he encourages artists to hear themselves in a new way, he doesn’t ask them to be anyone but themselves.