by Lloyd Sachs
In recording his next album, T Bone Burnett, that summer, Burnett chased self-consciousness by acting out of character—by taking a vacation from high concepts, production effects, and star turns. Gazing at the album cover, you don’t expect a stripping away of artistic guises. Wearing dark glasses and a fashion-statement jacket with wide, dotted lapels, his arms crossed meaningfully at the wrists, Burnett stares at us with an enigmatic, sub–Mona Lisa look, daring us to guess what he’s thinking. But backed by an acoustic band including the Nashville wiz Jerry Douglas on Dobro, Byron Berline on fiddle, and David Hidalgo on acoustic guitar and accordion, Burnett made his deepest, purest, and most revelatory album—the one he started to make before Proof through the Night got hijacked by his producer.
Following his own advice to Elvis Costello, Burnett focused on voice and acoustic guitar and recorded the album quickly, live to two-track tape—a standard method before multitracking and digital editing became the norm and one that has long been his preferred approach because it produces a clean, punchy, natural sound. The band plays together in the room, feeding off one another’s energy and ideas, as opposed to recording individually in isolation booths. Produced by Burnett’s frequent sideman, David Miner, T Bone Burnett is frequently described as the closest Burnett has come to a traditional country album. Some reviewers praised it as a beautiful collection of love songs. It might also be regarded as a personal reckoning akin to Dylan’s marital breakup masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks.
Burnett’s rueful, plainspoken voice—that of “a man with a lot of oblivion behind him,” as Howard Hampton memorably wrote in the Village Voice—is one we haven’t heard before. Burnett’s marriage was on the rocks—he would be divorced in December. You can hear the tears between the lines on “Little Daughter,” a folk benediction for Angelina (now a successful TV writer) and Molly: “Little daughter, I pray the Lord will always bless you” and “When I’m not with you, little daughter / I pray the Lord surrounds you with his angels.” You also get the sense that this was a last-gasp album by an artist who didn’t know where his career was going—or if it was going anywhere.
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time,” wrote Thomas Merton, a twentieth-century Catholic mystic whose words have had a strong impact on Burnett. To find himself, the singer stripped away the defense mechanisms—the caustic wit, the irony, the posturing—and allowed himself to be vulnerable. The hymnlike masterpiece “River of Love” sets the tone: “I had to run before I knew how to crawl / The first step was hard but I’ve had trouble with them all,” he sings, with Douglas’s strings answering back in a sympathetic voice. Dogma is easy, belief is hard.
On the near-perfect “Shake Yourself Loose,” one of Burnett’s most generous expressions of humanity, he wrestles with resignation in addressing a lover or friend who is too far gone to help but not so far that he can’t recognize in that person his own troubling state of dependence: “I believe that you believe, you’re searching for the truth / I don’t know what hold that rounder downtown has on you / But keep on shaking, baby, till you shake yourself loose.”
“You’re a garden in this God-forsaken land / And the only true love I have known,” Burnett sings on “The Bird That I Held in My Hand,” written with Bob Neuwirth and Billy Swan. This is not the judgment-rendering Jeremiah of earlier phases, but an inwardly directed artist, searching for solace and belief in the face of the most basic mortal struggles. What makes these songs so powerful is Burnett’s self-effacement in giving himself over to musical expression with a spiritual commitment that, as Merton wrote, “lifts it above itself, takes it out of itself, and makes it present to itself on a level of being that it did not know it could ever achieve.”
On secular tunes such as the Elmer Laird hillbilly chestnut “Poison Love” and Burnett’s “I Remember,” a riff on the country god Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” Burnett’s embrace of the religion of music is a seamless extension of the religion of religion. The only song to break free of the darkness is “Oh No Darling,” an infectious skiffle-rockabilly hybrid boasting a superb harmony vocal by Swan. But with its underlying promise that spiritual striving is its own reward, the album pays heed to what Leonard Cohen calls the “crack in everything” that allows the light to get in—just enough light, in the vastness of time and space, to illuminate hope.
“I believe that if you believe Jesus is the light of the world, there are a couple of kinds of songs you can write about,” Burnett told Robert Hilburn and Chris Willman. “You can write songs about the light or you can write songs about what you see by the light.” In the acknowledgments for its 1991 album Achtung Baby, U2 thanks Burnett for “the truth in the dark”—for going where few pop artists were comfortable in going. “Nobody really wants to do that,” Sam Phillips told Jeffrey Overstreet of the Patheos site. “Everybody wants to look cool. And to try to fight that is important.”
(Burnett first met Bono face to face at London’s Portobello Hotel in 1985, when they shared a manager. They co-wrote “Having a Wonderful Time, Wish You Were Her,” which appears on Burnett’s Beyond the Trap Door. Their friendship has endured the occasional jab from Burnett. Writes Bill Flanagan in his book U2: At the End of the World, “T Bone says he’s decided U2 are a lot like [1920s evangelist] Aimee Semple McPherson . . . who began to think it was her power that was healing people and not God’s.”)
With its enveloping warmth, understated devotion to heroes past, and throwback countrypolitan lineup, T Bone Burnett also recalls Dylan’s country departure Nashville Skyline (however chirpier that 1969 gem is). The irony is that Dot Records, the briefly revived label that released this one-shot, was home in the 1950s to Pat Boone, a blandly handsome TV host in white buck shoes whose success in covering hits by black R&B artists like Little Richard and Fats Domino should not be construed as early efforts in roots revivalism. Those recordings were soulless rip-offs—though viewed from a postmodern perspective, their thoroughgoing blandness may seem downright radical. With its heartfelt religious expression, though, T Bone Burnett might well have been a favorite of Boone, a born-again Christian.
If T Bone Burnett suggested that T Bone had traded in his wild card, his live performances a few months later suggested he had gotten a joker in return. His three-night gig in Fort Worth—at Caravan of Dreams, of all places—had audience members shaking their heads as much in disbelief as in amusement. Performing solo, he dedicated the first half of his epic thirty-seven-song performances to originals (“The People’s Limousine,” “Madison Avenue,” “Monkey Dance”) and covers (Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” Willie Nelson’s “One in a Row,” the Rolling Stones’ “Lady Jane”). After intermission, things took a turn for the weird. His hair slicked back, Eddie Cochran–style, Burnett began with Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show theme—DA dot da da da!—accompanied by a synthesizer player and noise effects man called Mr. Literal. He proceeded to demolish Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes” again, this time inserting references to rock ’n’ roll druggies and the Plasmatics, the punk band led by the rowdy and ribald Wendy O. Williams. Dancing on tabletops, Burnett encouraged people to clink their glasses “to get some polyrhythms going” and basked in the recorded applause played by Mr. Literal. A drink-server and lyric-sheet holder called Nurse Shot also joined the party.
“Why he isn’t a star is anybody’s guess,” wrote the Dallas Morning News reviewer Dave Ferman. Less taken with the spectacle, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram critic Jeff Guinn felt no need to join in the guessing. Coming from someone with Burnett’s discomfort as a performer, the crazy antics can be seen as his way of lunging—shades of Rolling Thunder—past self-consciousness and self-doubt. What better way to get over yourself than to take on an alternate identity? This lover of show tunes might also have been unleashing his inner Tommy Tune, another tall, high-stepping Texan, one of Broadway’s most beloved stars. One thing was clear: there was, indeed, no business like the show business for which Burnett was
becoming known.
CHAPTER 9
Svengali
On the second day of the T Bone Burnett sessions, Burnett received a visit from the woman who would become his next wife. The young Christian pop singer Leslie Phillips was brought to the studio by Tom Willett, the A&R director at her label, Myrrh. He thought that Burnett, with whom he had worked on rocker Tonio K’s Romeo Unchained, might be just the man to produce her. After recording three albums for Myrrh and establishing a following in contemporary Christian music (or CCM), Phillips had had it with being told by label executives not only what kind of songs she could and couldn’t record and how they should sound, but also what clothes she could and couldn’t wear and what her evangelical responsibilities were before the public. (At the 1985 Gospel Music Association’s Dove Awards, wearing a fluffy layered pink outfit with her hair seriously puffed, she looked like she was on an audition for the World War II generation’s favorite TV bandleader, Lawrence Welk.)
When Phillips told Willett she was going to quit the label, he assured her that if she would record one more album for him, she could do whatever she wanted. The prospect of working with Burnett appealed to her. “I had Trap Door,” she told me. “I loved his music but had no idea he was a producer. I didn’t know about the Los Lobos record.” She subsequently went with Willett to meet with Burnett at the historic Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, which had just been redone. He was living there out of large steamer trunks. “He was such a character,” Phillips told me. “I was so taken with him. I just sat there, just listening to him. Poor Tom thought it was a disaster, she’s not saying anything.”
“At that point,” Phillips said, “it wasn’t really, necessarily, about producing me. He had experience with fundamentalism, he had a brush with those people. I think he was willing to meet with me and just see if he could inspire me because he was sympathetic to what I had gone through.”
Phillips played Burnett a new song she was working on. In a 1996 interview with the Dallas Observer’s Robert Wilonsky, Burnett said he told her it was “really sweet” but that she was “trying to be something [she was] not. [She was] dealing with these tough issues, but not honestly. I think she liked hearing that because, in retrospect, it was her struggle. She’d been incredibly sheltered in a world where you can’t see R-rated movies or go to the ballet because the girls wear tutus. Seriously. Seriously. That’s the world she was trying to work in.” He described her albums as “diabolical”—drowned in syrupy arrangements and noisy production effects that sometimes had “the Christian Cyndi Lauper,” as she was touted, screeching in a painful falsetto.
“We liked each other from the start,” Phillips told me. “I had never met anyone like him before. He was very kind and loving and at the same time a complete pistol and eccentric. He was kind of doubtful about the record company. He said, ‘I don’t know that they’ll pay me my fee.’ And I said, ‘Oh they’ll pay you.’ He liked that. I was so inspired by that meeting, I went home and wrote five or six songs.”
Burnett had never met anyone like Phillips, either. A native of the LA suburb of Glendale, she had played jails, homeless shelters, and halfway houses as a teenage activist during the punk era, singing her songs of salvation. Her background was in dance and drama; she got into music to provide a spiritual alternative to what the mainstream culture was offering. Though at thirty-eight Burnett was considerably older than Phillips (he and his wife, Stephanie, were the same age), they were a good match with their shared interest in things spiritual and intellectual, their love of the Beatles, the Great American Songbook, and the power of melody—and their antagonism toward the burgeoning religious right.
During a follow-up meeting, she played him her songs. He agreed to produce what would, in fact, be her final Myrrh album (not counting a subsequent best-of collection he put together). The only catch was they had to record the album in Fort Worth, where Burnett was spending the rest of that summer to be near his daughters. That was fine with Phillips, who was happy to get out of Los Angeles. Plus, this would be a good way to mark her “starting over” as an artist. The analog studio they used, Eagle Audio, was a funky place that had mostly done commercials—a far cry from the state-of-the-art rooms Burnett used on the West Coast. “But T Bone said it had a good enough board and we could use our ingenuity to get the best out of it, do some experimenting,” Phillips told me. “It was fun. Tom Willett was very supportive. We both felt a lot of freedom to do what we wanted.”
“There was just a great amount of excitement both of us felt over what we could do, what music we could make,” she told me. “I grew up sheltered. T Bone threw open the windows and doors and said look out there, look at the possibilities. I think he had a blast playing me things, saying how do you like this record, how do you like that record? There was drama in our personal lives, both of us coming out of relationships, there was that element, too. I felt so understood. I was open to changing and he was open to changing me. There was so much excitement over what we could do, what music we could make. We were dreaming our dream, we were together.”
“His ideas were freeing,” she said. “I was trying to find a way to be an artist and he made it easy. He helped me clarify what I wanted to do and who I was. If he hadn’t shown me an alternative artistic path, I would have quit, stopped writing music, and gone back to school at twenty-four. I would have done something completely different.”
With its twangy Burnett guitar solos, rockabilly energy, and soulful intensity, the music plugged into mid-1980s currents in Los Angeles, where alternative country acts like Lone Justice (featuring Phillips’s high school friend Maria McKee), Green on Red, the Long Ryders, Peter Case, and his wife, Victoria Williams, were making a noise. At the same time, the melodic drum programming, girl group–style backing vocals, and other production touches on the album, aptly named The Turning, anticipate the music of Sam Phillips (she adopted her childhood nickname to formalize her break from CCM). And when it doesn’t, as with her spare version of “River of Love” and “God Is Watching You,” a folksy call-and-answer number she co-wrote with Burnett, it still shines a different kind of light. “T Bone said to me if I was going to make gospel music, why try to sound like someone on the Top 40 charts?” Phillips told me. “Why not make real gospel music, like Mahalia Jackson?”
For all its fetching touches, The Turning is no casual farewell note. A hard, probing voice and dark, searching perspective replace the blanket praise and unshakable faith of Phillips’s earlier efforts. Aching questions about faith and trust—ones with which Burnett was intimately familiar—abound: “How long have I got / To answer a higher calling? / And how long have I got / To walk the line without falling?” and “Why do I run away / When I come face to face / With anything I need?” and “Have I lost it if I hope for something more / Than feeling fatalistic pain? / And if true love never did exist / How could we know its name?”
That The Turning, reissued in 1997, placed eighth in CCM Magazine’s 2001 selection of The 100 Greatest Albums in Christian Music tells you how much mainstream Christian tastes had changed. Recording these songs had been an open act of rebellion by Phillips against her bosses’ directive to never question her faith in public. Now, the songs were part of a map for other Christian artists to follow.
Working with Phillips had a significant impact on Burnett as well. With the exception of Elvis Costello and possibly David Hidalgo, he had never produced anyone with her rarified melodic gift—or committed himself to the extent that he did, over the course of their four albums for Virgin Records, to the most meticulous, painstaking popcraft. For Burnett, who married Phillips in 1989, it was a labor of love.
The cover of Phillips’s 1988 Virgin debut, The Indescribable Wow, which took its title from a signboard at an alternative church in West Hollywood, seemed to promise another girl singer with attitude. Looking pretty through a hot pink filter, her arm wrapped beneath her chin, Phillips gazes directly at us through her one exposed eye as if issuing a dare, her name and th
e title circling her face like a crown of pop art thorns (it would seem you can take the contemporary Christian out of the Bible belt, but you can’t take the Bible belt out of the contemporary Christian). But from the casual, strumming opening of “I Don’t Want to Fall in Love”—our introduction to the comforting folk-meets-cabaret sound that helped brand Gilmore Girls—the album marks the arrival of a different kind of artist than the cover art was promoting.
Showing off his unalloyed affection for 1960s rock, Burnett dresses up the songs with organ and raga effects, guitars that emulate the Beatles’ “Taxman” and edgy instrumental fades. “Out of Time” is fashioned after 1960s girl groups. “I Can’t Stop Crying” combines an irresistible Turtles-like melody and big drums. “What Do I Do?” boasts doubled and divided voices (few singers have overdubbed themselves as winningly as Phillips) and a moody symphonic-style string arrangement by the gifted pop maestro Van Dyke Parks, celebrated for his work with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
Making The Indescribable Wow was “a full-time job,” Phillips told me. Pro Tools, the digital technology that made editing music dramatically easier by eliminating the need to cut and splice tape, was still around the corner. The basic technique was to start with the drum machine and then build songs around vocal and guitar. Each song was a major production in and of itself; Burnett obsessed on small details and experimented relentlessly to fit them together. According to Phillips, he could work on a guitar part for hours to get it right.
Though he has been known to call a musician back after a session—sometimes from out of town—to redo a part, Burnett says he doesn’t tell anyone what to play or how to play it. “Usually the first thing a musician plays is the best thing he’s going to come up with,” Burnett told Tape Op. “So, if a guitarist comes in and the thing he’s doing isn’t working—I just say, ‘Thank you. Fantastic. Thank you very much. We’ll see you later.’ I don’t torture musicians. I take what they give me and I’m very grateful for it.”