by Lloyd Sachs
What would be the point of dictating to a creative wiz like the guitarist Marc Ribot, on whom you depend for his off-the-chart inventiveness? Or requiring a stylish pro like the drummer Mickey Curry to play licks for hours—as the big-time hard rock and Shania Twain producer Mutt Lange is known to have done—before him turning him loose in the studio? Trust is the key: “One of the things I learned from T Bone is if you’re a smart casting director, you can sort of get out of the way,” Joe Henry told me. A protégé of Burnett who became a coveted producer himself, he defined smart casting as bringing in musicians with “less thought to instrumentation than personhood.”
To get the right musicians—in many cases the top players in their field, like the drummer Jim Keltner, who has recorded with three of the Beatles—Burnett is not shy about paying top dollar for them. That doesn’t always sit well with budget-minded label executives when days go by with no noticeable accomplishments in the studio. “T Bone can sit in his office all day if he senses that’s what’s called for, if a band needs to work out things on its own, for example,” the A&R man Bill Bentley told me. “And when he believes his time is not being well spent, he’ll leave.”
“What I won’t do is sit around the studio for hours and hours while somebody practices,” Burnett told the Hollywood Reporter. “Or while somebody tries to punch in a part or something like that. And that was a lot of recording for a long time—overdubbing.” Executives also aren’t endeared by what Phillips calls her ex-husband’s “stubborn grace.” “I remember people wanting to drop in on my sessions and hear what we had,” she told me. “He wouldn’t let them. He’s very protective of artists, and the whole creative process.”
Following their marriage in 1989, Burnett and Phillips moved to Texas for three years, a period that involved considerable back and forth between Fort Worth and Los Angeles. They recorded much of her next album, Cruel Inventions, at Eagle Audio. A more cohesive collection than The Indescribable Wow, it boasts luxuriant Chamberlin effects, drum choruses, Marc Ribot’s jagged lyrical guitar, and a string quartet arrangement by Van Dyke Parks that is straight out of the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby.”
As he demonstrates on Phillips’s agitpropping “Go Down” (“Break the code of death for profit, break the guns / Break the silence of money, break the greedy unison”), Burnett is not a producer who needs to devise all the solutions himself. Struggling to come up with finishing touches for the song, which is graced by a lilting Spanish guitar, he ran out of Ocean Way’s prized Studio B and dragged in Elvis Costello from the next room. Costello listened to the song, grabbed a twelve-string guitar, and played it with pencils to produce the kind of texture Burnett liked. On another, much later occasion when Burnett was stumped in the studio, he left to attend a holiday concert at his daughter Simone’s school. “Sitting in the quiet and dark among these beautiful fourth graders, he was able to clear his mind,” said Phillips. “After the show, he went right back, picked up his guitar, and just started playing the feel and everyone followed him.”
Along with their pair of postmillennial collaborations for Nonesuch (and not counting anthologies), Burnett produced seven Phillips albums. The runaway favorite among fans and critics is Martinis and Bikinis, the third Virgin release; its swooningly lovely “Strawberry Road,” inspired by an American Indian parable that says the route to paradise is covered with fresh strawberries, is her best-loved song. The way that Burnett frames his wife’s voice on the tune—those airy violins playing off that plucky strummed guitar, those overdubbed vocals circling with the delicacy of angels dancing on the head of a pin—is as powerful a statement of love as you can find in popular music. The arrangement keeps adding new details, the way the light keeps changing, “down between our longing and desire.” (You can’t help wondering how someone who once wailed with the Legendary Stardust Cowboy became capable of work as exquisite as this.)
Burnett’s guitar is all over Martinis and Bikinis—and then there is that sitar lending the dreamy raga feel to “I Need You.” But ultimately, when Phillips falls, “amazed by it all,” she does so on her own passionate terms. If there were justice in the world, these three albums would have made her a star on the level of Tori Amos or Alanis Morissette. But at a time when hook-driven melodic pop was struggling to break through in the marketplace (see also Marshall Crenshaw, Elliott Smith, Matthew Sweet, Shoes, et al.), the personal and sometimes secretive feeling of her songs held her back. Her final Virgin album, the bold pop experiment Omnipop (It’s Only a Flesh Wound Lamb-chop), added a chilliness to that equation.
Released in 1996, the recording gave the lie to the stereotype of Burnett as a stripper-down of sounds. Here, we encounter his production style writ large: fuzz, wah-wah, and distorted guitar effects; a Tijuana Brass chorus, unison baritone saxes, and free jazz–wailing bass clarinet; Chamberlins, marimbas, and harmonium; doubled and tripled drums, bongos, maracas; loops, bicycle horns, and “interesting noises.” Burnett even took the opportunity to engage in hip-hop with “Slapstick Heart,” which Phillips wrote with members of REM.
Playing the role of art-rock ringmaster in this sonic circus, where “Animals on Wheels” (read: empty trends) go “faster all the time,” Phillips does her best to invest cheery irony in lyrics steeped in disillusionment and dystopian alienation: “You watch my lips / Like a pair of wrists that have never been slit” and “Love doesn’t pay attention to / The metal teeth of ugly rules” and “Painted smile but I don’t feel the part / In dream I hold your knife over my heart.” And her poetry has such scalpel-like authority, you are willing to go along for the ride most of the time. But for all of Omnipop’s musical activity, it is a bit stuck in place emotionally, leaving fans who were expecting more Martinis and Bikinis magic feeling like they were trapped on a Ferris wheel. Critics were unkind: the Village Voice’s Robert Christgau dropped a bomb on the album in his Consumer Guide; in a sophomoric dismissal, Entertainment Weekly said Phillips’s lyrics “convey all the depth of a tortured graduate student.”
Looking back, Phillips told me it is her least favorite of her albums: “At that point, we were under way too much pressure. I knew something was coming to an end, that this was the last record I was going to make [for Virgin]. I wish I had taken more time; it came out way too quickly.”
Virgin was in a state of flux; executives were jumping ship. Though she had survived four regimes there, she said, “No one at Virgin seemed to know who I was.” The label quickly shelved Omnipop. Her final release for them, Zero Zero Zero (1998), was a retrospective designed to preserve some of the best songs she and Burnett had recorded while asserting its own identity. Things being as they were, they feared that all their music would fall off the edge of the earth. (At this writing, all of her Virgin albums were available as MP3s, but with the exception of Martinis and Bikinis, reissued in 2012, the recordings were available on CD only from third-party online sellers.)
Done up Burnett-style, Zero Zero Zero included alternate mixes and remixes of selected songs, plus an eerie Ribot interlude and a timely new song, “Disappearing Act.” “I’m not sure I agreed with T Bone about going back and correcting things,” Phillips told me. “Maybe it’s better to leave a snapshot of what you did at the time alone. So it’s really his anthology.”
Following her unceremonious departure from Virgin, Phillips took an extended break. Freed from the pressures of making records, she laid low—and, oh yes, had a daughter. She spent her time raising baby Simone with Burnett, reading books, and enjoying time with friends—some of whom would prove crucial collaborators with her and her husband on two masterpieces yet to come.
CHAPTER 10
Imagist
Signed by Columbia Records, Bob Dylan’s longtime label, following T Bone Burnett—and, notably, his production of the rapturously received Roy Orbison cable tribute A Black and White Night, more on which in the next chapter—Burnett was determined to make an album that would break the commercial ice. Abandoning the austere settings and low-key
performances of T Bone Burnett, he returned on 1988’s The Talking Animals to the edgy narratives and thematic ambitions of Proof through the Night, while consciously trying to avoid slipping into the “bad mood” he said he was in when he recorded that album. “I was being real hard on myself on that record, and I decided I wasn’t going to do that on this record,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
His co-producer on The Talking Animals was David Rhodes, Peter Gabriel’s regular guitarist. As you might guess from titles such as “Dance Dance Dance,” “Euromad,” and “The Wild Truth,” Burnett is in a frisky mood on this record. James Thurber trumps Keats and Byron on “Monkey Dance” (a way to “become advanced”); the Great Gatsby femme Daisy Buchanan is linked to Lauren Bacall on “You Could Look It Up”; and what could be more disarming than a song with words by five-year-old Molly Burnett, “The Killer Moon” (what it’s called when it’s “so big and yellow”). Never mind that; as delivered by her father, the lyrics, in which “we seem like we’re being followed,” produce the dark shivers of a Maurice Sendak story.
But for this committed exposer of big lies, playing things loose doesn’t mean letting up on the attack. Behind its bouncy beat and Playboy comic book setting—an exotic South American island populated by Hollywood starlets—“Dance Dance Dance” tells of a coldblooded military intervention. (In a slightly biased review of The Talking Animals in Musician, Elvis Costello called it “the smartest song about American foreign policy since Randy Newman’s ‘Political Science.’”) “We don’t need no voodoo stories / From no magic president,” Burnett sings on the ferociously rocking “Wild Truth,” a scathing indictment of greed, lies, miscarriages of justice, and torture that ends on a searching note and an understanding of the injustice in the world with a line drawn from Thomas Merton’s 1964 essay on “the beautiful inconsistency of mercy,” “To Each His Darkness.”
“Mercy is not consistent, it’s like the wind,” pronounces Burnett. “It goes where it will.” “Mercy is comic, and it’s the only / Thing worth taking seriously.” Wrote Merton, “Mercy breaks into the world of magic and justice and overturns its apparent consistency. Mercy is inconsistent. It is therefore comic. It liberates us from the tragic seriousness of the obsessive world which we have ‘made up’ for ourselves by yielding to our obsessions.”
If anything defined Burnett’s writing at this juncture, it was his embrace of dualities and opposites, whether in the form of paradox (“It’s a funny thing about humility / As soon as you know you’re being humble / You’re no longer humble”) or the steady push-pull of reality and illusion. “Image,” the most abused song on The Talking Animals, is not one of Burnett’s most successful efforts. On it, four vocalists, each speaking a different language, repeat the same brief lines in which they relate how their images of one another entered into conversation: “And somewhere along the way / Our image sort of let each other down.” Burnett speaks in English, Cait O’Riordan in French, Ruben Blades in Spanish, and the mystery singer Ludmila (who Burnett said he found in a Russian bar on Sunset Avenue) in Russian. As a vocal art installation, “Image” is flat in affect; as a statement on universal misunderstanding, it is awkward.
Still, set against Van Dyke Parks’ gorgeous tango arrangement for strings and bandoneons, or button accordions, “Image” exerts a stubborn attraction. “None of us is what he thinks he is, or what other people think he is, still less what his passport says he is,” Merton wrote in The Waters of Siloe. “And it is fortunate for most of us that we are mistaken. We do not generally know what is good for us. That is because, in St. Bernard’s language, our true personality has been concealed under the ‘disguise’ of a false self, the ego, whom we tend to worship in place of God.” As on “House of Mirrors” from the Truth Decay album, Burnett reveals a fascination with those false selves even as he rejects them. What is, in the end, the true self? And what do we do if we don’t like it?
“The Strange Case of Frank Cash and the Morning Paper,” the album’s other outré item, is a very different kind of head-scratcher. The Beat-style spoken narrative relates the experiences of a lonely hustler who makes a fortune betting on football games after the newspaper that is delivered to his doorstep every day starts listing scores ahead of time. You don’t have to be a seasoned Twilight Zone watcher to know that tabloid is suddenly going to run out of magic. But even Rod Serling would be surprised by the meta-fictional turn “Strange Case” takes after the bitterly disappointed Frank returns to his old digs looking for the day’s sports section, tussles with the occupant, and shoots him dead. In his defense, Frank—a handy stand-in for some critics?—blames “this guy” T Bone Burnett for making everything up and says he doesn’t believe in him or his existence. Song over. Except then, Frank’s creator—now speaking in the first person—befriends him, gets him back the money he’d lost, and sees him marry a soulful woman who gives birth to a future president.
Burnett wrote “Strange Case” with Tonio K (an unlikely future collaborator of Burt Bacharach), whom he met in the late 1970s through the actress Mary Kay Place, then a recording artist cashing in her popularity on the mock soap opera Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. In exploring the idea of a character discovering he is being manipulated by someone or something assuming divine powers, “Strange Case” was a decade ahead of Peter Weir’s film The Truman Show. Judging by the AV Club’s inclusion of it on a 2007 list of songs “that are just as good as short stories,” it may have been ahead of its time. But its studied abstractions, on top of the chilly conceptual trappings of “Image,” invested The Talking Animals with more of a curiosity factor than it could bear.
In its review of the album, People said that Burnett “tends to err on the side of the precious.” In its album guide, Trouser Press wished “this talented jerk weren’t so impressed with himself.” Half of its songs, TP said, were guilty of “scaling new heights of pretension.” The Chicago Tribune pronounced the album “wildly uneven.” In what passed for a rave, New York Times critic Stephen Holden called it “a fascinating oddity.”
You couldn’t help noticing a pattern developing with Burnett. When working quickly, on a tight budget, in a controlled setting, he came up with three exceptional efforts: Truth Decay, Trap Door, and T Bone Burnett. Given major label money and too much time to tinker in the studio, he recorded the inconsistent and less easily approachable Proof through the Night and The Talking Animals. What makes these tendencies fascinating is that as much as Burnett may have craved commercial approval, he never compromised his art to attain it. On the contrary, unlike most artists who have the good fortune to land on a major label, he dug down deeper into his identity as an artist and embraced his eccentricities. He also accepted the risk of making political statements he needed to make—a commercial kiss of death on the marketplace if your name isn’t Dylan or, later on, Springsteen. In the face of what had to have been considerable pressure, he remained true to himself on The Talking Animals—believing, beneath his self-doubts, that that was his ticket to stardom.
CHAPTER 11
Native Son
With its broad expanses, high sky, and thunderstorms that Burnett said he could see coming from two hundred miles away as a kid, Texas has nurtured some of the boldest and most capacious musical voices. Would Illinois Jacquet, King Curtis, and Dewey Redman have developed their brawny, high-flying tenor saxophone sounds in, say, Ohio? Would Van Cliburn have had the bullets in his piano to conquer the Russians had he grown up in Count Basie’s hustling, bustling Kansas City? And would Roy Orbison and Jimmie Dale Gilmore, two of the most idiosyncratic singers of the rock era, have developed their soaring vocal styles anywhere but in Texas?
Orbison, who was born outside of Wichita Falls and spent much of his childhood in Fort Worth, was for Burnett nothing less than “the greatest singer of the twentieth century.” His vocals had a transcendent beauty and power. Even as he embodied romantic desire on songs such as “Only the Lonely” and “Oh, Pretty Woman”—which, a half century after hitting
the charts, have lost none of their unearthly appeal—he lifted himself and his listeners above mortal concerns with his refusal to hold anything back. Indeed, his compositional style required him to go for broke. “He didn’t write songs in a form like verse, verse, chorus, verse,” Burnett told Terry Gross. “He wrote songs that would start on his lowest note and go to his highest note. And he would just find a way to arrive—to leave the one and arrive at the other. ‘In Dreams’ is a good example of that . . . There are no parts that repeat themselves. It’s like a little aria, like a little pop aria.”
Burnett first went into the studio with Orbison in April 1987 to record a new version of “In Dreams,” which the director David Lynch had made spectacular use of in his film Blue Velvet. (Dean Stockwell’s character lip-syncs to the song in a supremely creepy scene.) The remake, and the collection of redone Orbison classics on which it was included, was designed to capitalize on both the success of the 1986 film and Orbison’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in May 1987, and to show the world that this artist was anything but a 1960s relic.
Serving Orbison’s outsize talent, Burnett flashed his own Texas sense of proportion as musical supervisor of the 1987 Cinemax tribute, Roy Orbison and Friends: A Black and White Night, for which he convened an adoring all-star band featuring Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Tom Waits, and two sets of backup vocalists: Bonnie Raitt, k. d. lang, and Jennifer Warnes, and Jackson Browne and J. D. Souther. Burnett himself strums away self-effacingly on acoustic guitar in the back row, head tilted down, cutting quite a different figure than he did in the Rolling Thunder Revue.