by Lloyd Sachs
CHAPTER 7
Co-Conspirator
Taking a page from Ray Charles’s The Genius Hits the Road, Burnett took his act east, north, and south, guitar in hand. In New York in October 1983, opening for Richard Thompson’s “Big Band” at the Bottom Line, he called up Warren Zevon to play keyboard—and straight man—on an unruly encore of “Gloria.” After rapping out a charming narrative about a girl who “used to be so full of hope and dreams” but now pees on the couch, passes out, and takes out her false teeth and eyeball, Burnett turned to Zevon and said promptingly, “You know her.” And then again, when there was no response, “You know her,” to which, reported a spectator, Zevon blurted out, “Yeah, I remember the bitch.”
Headlining at Tuts in Chicago a few months later, dressed in suit and bow tie, Burnett opened on his knees, making grand stabs at a preprogrammed keyboard, appearing to be playing it himself. Then, with the stentorian chords still pouring out, he walked away to get his acoustic guitar. “Are you all a cult?” he asked the crowd. “I know I’m a cult artist—I’ve read it a thousand times.” At show’s end, he dashed into the crowd, Springsteen-style, to shake hands with audience members, and concluded the performance with an a cappella version of “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
These shows proved to be a warm-up for a larger undertaking. Beginning in spring 1984, in one of the more significant developments in his not-a-career, Burnett went on the road as the opening act for Elvis Costello. Performed over three legs, in the United States, the UK, Japan, and Australia, the tour was Costello’s first as a solo attraction—sans the Attractions, his often battling band. Burnett, who in 1977 had attended the first American concert by the brilliant, cutting, perturbable, impossibly prolific Brit but had not met him until they hit the road together, also performed solo. Not surprisingly, the two became fast friends and collaborators, bonded by their caustic wit, lofty intellectualism, devotion to music history, shared contempt for the ruling class, and love for Bob Dylan.
“A sort of Billy Bragg with an American accent, wider horizons, and the heritage of Bob Dylan and Hemingway, no one in Saturday night’s crowd knew quite what to make of him,” wrote the Glasgow Herald’s David Belcher of Burnett’s set at the Playhouse in Edinburgh, which boasted what Edinburgh University critic Duncan McLean (future author of Lone Star Swing: On the Trail of Bob Willis and His Texas Playboys) called “first-class buffoonery.” As in Chicago, Burnett opened his performances at the keyboard, making like a concert idol—only this time, he had a grand piano at his disposal and the jazz great Keith Jarrett’s Köln Concert to pantomime to. Cole Porter was along for some tomfoolery as well: “Terrorists were once alarming / Now they’re discreetly charming,” Burnett sang. “On TV shows / Anything goes.”
A highlight of the tour was the introduction of the Coward Brothers, Howard (Elvis) and Henry (T Bone), alleged long-lost sons of the great playwright and songwriter Noël Coward. In their “unscheduled” encore appearances, the duo informed audiences that they were determined to give the people what they wanted: “We’re not like those other guys—we play all our hits.” That translated into delirious covers of old favorites such as George Jones’s “Ragged but Right,” Bobby Charles’s “Tennessee Blues,” the Isley Brothers / Beatles hit “Twist and Shout,” the Kingston Trio’s signature cover “Tom Dooley,” and an unlikely medley of Scott McKenzie’s hippie anthem “San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers in Your Hair)” and Tony Bennett’s chestnut “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” They added new covers as the weeks progressed, notably Los Lobos’ “A Matter of Time” and the Hank Thompson hit “The Wild Side of Life,” performed with a teasing splash of the Beatles’ “She’s a Woman.”
The Cowards recorded one single, “The People’s Limousine,” a co-written original about a girl in crystal heels who becomes involved in some serious foreign intrigue. It features boisterous vocal harmonies and David Miner’s slapping, Johnny Cash–style bass. The B-side was “They’ll Never Take Her Love from Me,” a Leon Payne composition that George Jones had covered. In an NPR interview, Burnett compared Jones’s typically gripping reading to a John Steinbeck story; done up by the Cowards, however, the tune trades in emotional immediacy for cornpone, hold the grits.
During their travels, Costello played for Burnett solo demos he had recorded for his next album. Coming off Punch the Clock and Goodbye, Cruel World, a pair of mixed recordings that producers Clive Langer and Alan Winstanley had dressed in horns, strings, and synthesizers, Costello had a sparer production in mind. He especially wanted to get away from overpowering keyboard effects. Burnett encouraged him to record the new album with a close focus on voice and acoustic guitar—the best way, he said, to stay focused on the songs as originally written. While they were airborne between Japan and Australia, Burnett blueprinted what became King of America (released in the United States in 1986), matching up songs and musicians. As Costello recounts in his 2015 memoir, Unfaithful Music and Disappearing Ink, he planned on recording half of the Columbia album with the Attractions and the other half in acoustic settings with Burnett’s LA regulars, among them three alumni of Elvis Presley’s TCB Band of the 1970s, guitar hero James Burton, bassist Jerry Scheff, and drummer Ron Tutt. But Costello hit it off so well with the TCB men that, with Burnett producing, they recorded seven tracks, all live, in two days.
“Understandably, the Attractions’ sessions for King of America were less good-humored and rather uneasy affairs,” Costello writes in Unfaithful Music. “They all hated T Bone, casting him as the provocateur.” Furthermore, the man also known as Declan MacManus writes in his extensive liner notes to Rykodisc’s 2005 reissue of King of America, “After spending so much time together on the road, T Bone and I had a rapport based on a humour that unwittingly drove a wedge between the band and myself.” By the time they arrived, the Attractions were so pissed that they delivered what Costello called in his liner notes “some of their worst performances” and ended up appearing on only one number. (All is well that ends well, sort of: the Attractions were back at full strength for Costello’s next album, Blood and Chocolate.)
There was another reason the Attractions’ participation on King of America was limited: the rarified presence of jazz bassist Ray Brown and R&B drummer Earl Palmer. Between them, they had played on countless classic recordings with the likes of Charlie Parker, Oscar Peterson, Little Richard, and Fats Domino. Now, having never played together during all their years in Los Angeles, they were teaming up in support of Costello. If he wasn’t nervous enough when he entered the studio with these giants to record his country lament “Poisoned Rose,” hearing Brown utter to the younger musicians, “Okay, just don’t anybody play any ideas,” put him even more on edge. (In the 2015 Showtime documentary Elvis Costello: Mystery Dance, Burnett calls Brown “one of the most intense musicians I have worked with.”)
Neither of the songs featuring Brown and Palmer are magic, but Costello more than holds his own on “Poisoned Rose,” which requires him to sing in tandem with the bassist known in the jazz world as “Father Time.” And high spirits prevail on a loose, organ-dappled, cross-faded reading of the Chicago bluesman J. B. Lenoir’s “Eisenhower Blues.” Hearing Elvis thrive in such august company was rewarding for Burnett, who made a point of putting his un-cowardly partner in that situation. “At the time, everyone thought punk rockers were all bluffers,” he told the New Yorker in 2010, alluding to the image still clinging to Costello from his raw early years. “Because there was a lot of bluff in it. So he had a lot to overcome.”
Burnett, writes Costello in his memoir, “produced the album with a weightless, caring touch. He knew when to let the light and air in and when to pick up the pace.” He also credits his friend with knowing “just when to introduce an instrumental counter point to the narrative,” as with Cajun artist Jo-El Sonnier’s French melodeon on “American without Tears” and Costello’s own mandolin part on “Little Palaces.” It was also a masterstroke to have David
Hidalgo of Los Lobos sing harmony on “Brilliant Mistake,” Costello’s leading commentary about the “boulevard of broken dreams” called America.
In support of the album, Burnett performed some live dates as a rhythm guitarist with the Confederates, a band drawn from the King of America sessions that also featured bassist T-Bone Wolk. (The Rykodisc package includes a disc of cover versions from one of the shows, including Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Your Funeral and My Trial” and the Dan Penn–Spooner Oldham classic “It Tears Me Up.”) For all the deserved acclaim it got, King of America (officially credited in the United States to the Costello Show featuring Elvis Costello) didn’t fare particularly well commercially. It peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard 200 (a significant drop from the No. 11 spot claimed by Get Happy!! six years earlier).
“Burning through Warner Brothers’ money at top speed,” as Costello writes in his book, he and Burnett teamed again a few years later on a very different project, Spike, the Brit’s 1989 debut for Warner. Several albums in one, it was recorded in Dublin, London, New Orleans, and Los Angeles with different sets of musicians, during “the last couple of years when you were encouraged to make expensive experiments.” Though Costello took charge this time, making extensive demos in England in the beginning and overdubbing a mess of instrumentals in the end, Burnett again played a key role. He influenced the direction of the music by encouraging Costello to continue in the same experimental vein he had been in when writing songs and producing the soundtrack for The Courier, a 1988 drug drama starring Costello’s wife since 1986, former Pogue bassist Cait O’Riordan. And Burnett’s work as co-producer (aided by the engineer Kevin Killen) both sharpened and animated the album’s spirited sound.
Burnett likened Spike to a hip-hop record: they put down a loop, Costello put down a vocal, and then the fun began. “I would jump into it like it was a playpen or a sandbox and splash around and see what I could come up with,” says the guitarist Marc Ribot in Graham Johnson’s 2013 Costello biography, Complicated Shadows. The percussionist Michael Blair, a partner of Ribot’s in Tom Waits’s band, threw in the bathroom as well as the kitchen sink with metal pipes, hubcaps, horns, glockenspiel, and assorted noisemakers—ultimately inspiring the album’s title through his connection to the musical prankster Spike Jones. (The cover of Spike depicts Costello in antic clown face, in contrast to his sleepy-smirky pose on King of America.)
With such guest players as Paul McCartney, Roger McGuinn, Chrissie Hynde, the Dirty Dozen Brass Band, and Allen Toussaint, the album bursts with energy, emotion, wit, and improbable variety—here political, there romantic, here historical, there satiric. For Burnett, the opportunity to work with McCartney (in London, where he dubbed his bass part on “Veronica”) was a major highlight. “He’s probably the most musical person I’ve ever met,” Burnett told Vulture. “Music comes out of his pores. He played bass on a couple of tunes, and it was completely effortless. He wasn’t trying to do anything. From him, I learned something about ease and grace.”
Spike didn’t place much higher than King of America on the Billboard 200. But the luscious, glockenspiel-dappled “Veronica,” a collaboration between Costello and McCartney, was an unlikely Top 20 hit—the straw that stirred the concoction. If this isn’t Costello’s greatest album, it is certainly his freest.
By the time Burnett next produced a Costello album, more than twenty years later—this time in Nashville—Costello was less rock’s “Beloved Entertainer,” as he self-mockingly proclaimed on the cover of Spike, than a seasoned art-rocker preaching to a somewhat diminished choir. Listening to Secret, Profane and Sugarcane (2009), a return to the spare roots setting of King of America, you wonder whether these brothers in arms needed a third party to nudge them out of their comfort zone. Points for the speed and spontaneity with which they cut this album (which did hit No. 13 on the Billboard chart, but in a weakened marketplace) and cheers for Jim Lauderdale’s power harmonizing. But there is little on Secret and its successor, National Ransom, that can approach the thrills and immediacy of Spike. In an Elvis song death match, Secret’s wordy travelogue “Sulphur to Sugarcane” would have its lunch eaten by Spike’s uproarious, soul-baring “Deep Dark Truthful Mirror.”
During the stretch of time during which King of America was completed, Burnett got his feet wet in TV. His previous experience in film and video consisted mainly of working on a short 1972 film about the inaugural gala of Fort Worth’s Kimbell Art Museum. John Fleming and Bob Shaw, an East Coast photographer who became part of their Fort Worth circle, shot it, and Burnett—in his first feat of programming screen music—juxtaposed Nat King Cole’s 1956 recording of “When I Fall in Love” over a montage of people walking through the museum. Now he took on the task of directing an odd 1985 TV drama that was, according to its leading man, John Doe, “way over our heads.” A fantasy mystery shot for KABC’s Saturday night local programming slot, Legends of the Spanish Kitchen was inspired by an actual LA restaurant called the Spanish Kitchen, which the owner’s wife suddenly shuttered in 1961, with plates and silverware awaiting the dinner crowd on the red-and-white-checked tablecloths. The place had remained that way ever since. No one had set foot inside. Rumors of murder abounded. The story became such a source of fascination that tour buses stopped by and an episode of the popular TV series Lou Grant was based on it.
Legends boasted two fifteen-minute segments, both of which featured Los Lobos as house band. Burnett’s segment starred Doe, co-founder of the punk rock trailblazers X, as a drifter who gets shot by a woman—spoiler alert!—who turns out to be his mother. (The other mini-feature starred former Bonanza patriarch Lorne Greene—as the devil—and Phil Hartman, later to star on Saturday Night Live.) Initially, Burnett thought he would be too busy with King of America to take on Legends. He asked video veteran Hudson Marquez if he wanted to shoot it. Marquez said yes and proceeded to do all the preproduction work, including rehearsing the actors.
“On the day of the shoot,” Marquez told me, “T Bone calls up and says ‘I wanna do this with you.’ I say, ‘T Bone, this is the day of the shoot. We busted our ass for ten days. You can’t just show up like that.’ He says ‘I’ll meet you there.’” He added, “T Bone was just the cheerleader. I was the director. They said trust the cameraman, but the guy was terrible. It was a complete mess, totally amateur night.”
“Hudson knew lighting and T Bone was a great storyteller,” said Doe, who went on to become a prolific character actor in Hollywood but had appeared in only one indie film at the time. “He definitely had an idea of how he wanted the thing to look. He and John Huston were cut from the same cloth—big, blustery types who speak softly when they ask you to do something and say, ‘That won’t be a problem, will it?’”
That same year, after reading about plans for a cartoon show that allegedly was going to make Elvis Presley “bigger than Mickey Mouse,” Burnett was so “offended” (per the Los Angeles Times) that he concocted his own “brief Saturday morning scenario.” In his script, published in the December 1985 issue of Musician, Colonel Tom Parker (to be played by the Looney Tunes character Foghorn Leghorn) confronts Presley’s bodyguard Red West (Yosemite Sam) about the lateness of the truck carrying Elvis Lipsticks (“Always keep me on your lips, girls”) to the arena at which Elvis will be performing. Elvis (the cartoon likeness of which “better be good,” Burnett noted on the script), who has been practicing his bullfighting moves backstage, climbs a rope up into a magically appearing Blue Thunder helicopter and speeds across the city to wrest the truck from the Blue Meanies (the menaces from the Beatles’ Yellow Submarine, here played by characters from TV’s The Smurfs). After racing back to the venue in time to perform his concert, Elvis gets a call from Air Force One. “You’ve, uh, done it again,” says President Reagan.
“Burning Love,” as the piece was called, did not prompt Mad magazine to inquire about Burnett’s availability, which was all for the better considering the rarified heights he was about to climb as a musician.
/> CHAPTER 8
Seeker
In May 1986, Burnett appeared as guest speaker at the annual retreat of the Chicago faith and arts group CHART. The event, held at a summer resort in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, included various talks, music performances, and a 1960s-themed party (i.e., lots of head scarves). When the organizers invited Burnett, they didn’t think he would be available. But he flew in from Los Angeles and fully involved himself in the proceedings. He spoke to the gathering and, dressed in a black suit and white shirt, showed off his modest twirling and windmilling moves on the dance floor. He also surprised one of the organizers, Chris Stacey, by performing not just one tune with Stacey’s band, but fronting it on several surprisingly hard-edged covers (“The Letter,” “Bad Moon Rising,” “Subterranean Homesick Blues”). Burnett’s guitar solos were worth the price of a donation.
“He was a hero to a lot of us,” said CHART member and WXRT DJ Bill Cochran, with whom Burnett sat for an interview in a cottage at the resort. “We were sensible, intelligent Bible people, but edgy in our own ways, a kind of guerilla group of Christians. And he acted like he was one of us.”
Burnett’s “speech” consisted of a single line: “Generosity is the hallmark of the artist, any questions?” For those in attendance wanting advice on how to incorporate their Christian faith into their art “without being propagandistic,” as Cochran put it, the remark had many shades of meaning. Sharing yourself through art, revealing yourself, availing yourself to other artists’ sharing is surely what they should all be about. But that kind of generosity, Burnett said in a brief Q&A session that followed his opening/closing remark, is opposed by self-consciousness, which he deemed “the artist’s enemy.” How well you deal with doubt and fear will often determine what kind of artist you are. Sometimes, he said, the best solution is simply to drive through those insecurities. He acted out that strategy at the retreat by plowing through a section of empty chairs.