T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  Shot at the Cocoanut Grove in Los Angeles in wispy black and white, with a generous amount of haze effects, the salute has an uncommonly relaxed feel to it, reflecting Orbison’s cool likability. What could have been a collection of star turns instead became another celebration of community. Even as the tribute elevates a single voice in honoring its lasting influence, the gathered congregation exuberantly shares in the glorious traditions that produced “In Dreams,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” and “Only the Lonely.” Orbison’s beaming smile beneath his trademark dark shades assures you that, less than a year before he died, he knew his place in history was secure.

  Put into rotation as a public television pledge-drive special, A Black and White Night took up permanent residence in the pop culture zeitgeist. With each airing, Orbison’s stature was further polished—and so was Burnett’s. By the time the Burnett-produced live album from the special was released in early 1989, Orbison was in posthumous orbit thanks to the astonishing success of The Traveling Wilburys, Vol. 1, the super session he recorded with Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Tom Petty, and ELO’s Jeff Lynne. The release of the 1989 hit album Mystery Girl, for which Burnett produced two songs as part of a Valley creative consortium to which the Wilburys, Dave Stewart, Randy Newman, and Roger McGuinn contributed, was icing on the cake.

  Jimmie Dale Gilmore grew up idolizing Orbison in the West Texas town of Lubbock, where he formed the legendarily unlegendary Flatlanders with Joe Ely and Butch Hancock. His 1991 album “After Awhile,” the most acclaimed offering in Elektra’s short-lived American Explorers Series, introduced to mainstream listeners an “alt-country” singer with his own mystical values—part Irish, part Native American, full-time Buddhist.

  Like Burnett, Gilmore had strong memories of gazing in wonder across Texas’s wide-open spaces. He knew that in this producer, he had someone who understood his need to avoid being confined by genre any more than geography—someone who would help him, he told me in a 1999 Chicago Sun-Times interview, “get unshackled from the country label.” Elmore James’s distorted, screaming electric guitar, he said, meant every bit as much to him as “any Hank Williams thing.” So did Chuck Berry, Mad magazine, and Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.”

  “I told T Bone I didn’t want to make a Roy Orbison album,” Gilmore says in the liner notes to Braver Newer World, their 1996 collaboration, “but I wanted to go in with the attitude Orbison, his producers and his musicians did, more of an anything-goes attitude. And T Bone knew what I was talking about, and maybe even took it further than I understood was possible.”

  The challenge, Burnett told Geoffrey Himes, writing for Texas Music in 2008, was “How do you capture that high consciousness thing without it becoming New Age? How do we keep the music on the ground but make it much deeper? How do you make a country record in an imaginary world where Roy Orbison had done this rather than that?” One answer was to use as a reference point those storms young Burnett saw heading toward Fort Worth. In the album’s liner notes, Gilmore said they “would start off like a little black thumb sticking up on the horizon. And as it would come closer the sky would get darker and darker, and then it would be black, and then there’d be lightning, and then it would be all purple and orange and gold, just a blurred mass of beauty all around. And then there’d be these beautiful blue skies . . . I wanted to make a record like that.”

  Burnett steered Gilmore through sonic weather neither of them had experienced before. Though Burnett, rather curiously, said he saw Gilmore, he of the slow-moving drawl and soulful pinched delivery, as a “classic” singer who ranked up there with Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra (a more apt analogy might be the idiosyncratic ballad singer Jimmy Scott), he recast him as a psychedelic rock and blues fiend. Wasting no time announcing its stylistic intentions, the album opens, on the title cut, by taking the listener into the realm of art rock with a mix of electric “Bombay” sitar, twanged notes, and dramatic slabs of sound. Gilmore sounds as if he is singing from the eye of a weird, temperamental storm—or, complicating his Buddhist beliefs, preparing for the Rapture. He assures us, however, that “there’s still time for heaven, though we’re already there.”

  Backing him with a full flank of guitarists, Burnett has Gilmore change stripes to vastly different effect on “Black Snake Moan,” a Blind Lemon Jefferson song Gilmore had performed in the Flatlanders as “Long Snake Moan” in the early 1970s. Dogged by the drummer Jim Keltner’s relentless, rock-steady attack, his voice dripping in reverb, Gilmore sounds like he is singing from an alternate dimension—one of dead reckonings. Typical of Burnett’s production are the rivulets of organ streaming below the sound. Like the action on the margins in Mad, you may not become aware of it until after several listens.

  The Orbison factor certainly is in play in Gilmore’s yearning delivery of Sam Phillips’s lovely ode to Oliver Twist, “Where Is Love Now.” Dressed with twanging bass notes, Moog fills, and beatbox effects, it is the kind of production that shows off Burnett’s willingness to challenge artists he respects and admires. (Gilmore said the only way he could master the melody was by imitating Phillips.) So does Darrell Leonard’s French horn arrangement on the Texas songwriting hero Al Strehli’s dreamy “Come Fly Away.” Gilmore sums up the risky moves he and Burnett made on Braver Newer World on “Outside the Lines”: “I painted myself into a corner / But footprints / Are just about to become part of my design.” “I caught a lot of grief for that album in Texas,” Burnett told me. “Some of our homeboys thought he sounded pretty strange.”

  On the upside, the Austin Chronicle pronounced Braver Newer World “a minor masterpiece”; the Texas Monthly declared, “There are moments when—for the first time ever—[Gilmore] rocks as effortlessly as he rolls.” Heard all these years later, when genre demands are more forgiving, Braver Newer World sounds even braver, its footprints even deeper. There is the distinct possibility that, ultimately, this will be the Jimmie Dale Gilmore album prized above all the others.

  “I listened to that record for the first time in a long while recently,” Gilmore told Himes, “and I was struck by the ethereal vibe of the music. Sometimes in the process of doing the record, it felt like we were pushing the boundaries too far, but I always ended up loving the end product. That’s what experimentation is all about—overcoming your own boundaries. It wasn’t about, ‘You play this part on this instrument and you play that part on that instrument.’ It was more, ‘Let’s get together and play and see where it goes.’”

  CHAPTER 12

  Mentor

  As an aspiring artist living in Ann Arbor, Michigan, circa 1980, Joe Henry mailed his first demos to record companies using addresses he found on the back of album jackets. His first response was a letter from T Bone Burnett. The big-time producer encouraged him to keep at it, saying he was a talented songwriter—the only indication from the outside world, Henry told me, that he should take himself seriously as an artist.

  Flash-forward to 1989. While attending a business meeting, Burnett overheard the A&R director of A&M Records, which that year had released Henry’s second effort, Murder of Crows, talking discouragingly about the singer-songwriter’s ambitious plans for his next album. He said there was no market for the moody songs and atmospheric production Henry had in mind, and that there was no way the label would let him make that album. According to Henry, “T Bone piped up and told the A&R man that the musician he was talking about was really talented and that A&M should just let him do what he did.” And then, though Burnett had never met or spoken to Henry—who was upset with the way Murder of Crows had been produced—he offered to help him record the new album. Trusting that a producer of Burnett’s savvy and experience would keep the young artist’s ambitions in check, the A&R man gave his approval. Chalk up another victory in Burnett’s campaign against the corporate oppressors.

  Henry, who was then living in Brooklyn, flew to Los Angeles to meet with Burnett—not in an office or boardroom or recording studio, but on a golf course, where business was t
he furthest thing from the producer’s mind. “It wasn’t until he was putting on the last green that he brought up possibilities regarding the album,” Henry told me. “And it wasn’t until we were in the middle of a conversation about something else a while later that he said, ‘Let’s make a record together.’”

  A singer of soulful tones and pensive, prophet-like phrasing, Henry had the songs for his album, Shuffletown, and its overall concept in place. He wanted to expand folk forms in the elastic, jazz-inflected way Van Morrison had on his 1968 masterwork Astral Weeks. To do so, he had lined up a pair of distinguished jazz artists, the bassist Cecil McBee, who had accompanied the likes of Charles Lloyd, Wayne Shorter, and Pharoah Sanders, and the cornetist Don Cherry, a member of Ornette Coleman’s history-making 1960s quartet. McBee would provide the deep, resonant heartbeat that Richard Davis did on Astral Weeks. Adding to the all-acoustic unit, Burnett brought in the string man David Mansfield and the percussionist Michael Blair.

  Shuffletown was recorded in three days in New York. Per usual, Burnett had the band perform the music live, a new and nervous-making approach for Henry. Burnett assured him it was the way to go by explaining that recording the music as a whole on two tracks of analog tape instead of dividing it into pieces on multiple digital tracks would ensure that no one at A&M would be able to “fuck with it” later.

  “It was an intensely focused way to work, but also very freeing,” Henry told me. He recalled everyone playing a percussive role, “poking the air in the room, moving it around,” while the suggestion of richer and wider orchestral sounds radiated up from the deep pulse. (“I watched [Burnett] walk around the studio with his hands out like a blind man,” Stephen Bruton told Los Angeles Magazine. “And he was going, ‘Okay, put a mike here. Put a mike there, because that’s where the air is moving.’ He picked that up from some old engineer at the radio station in Fort Worth.”)

  Henry contrasted Burnett’s open methods in the studio with the closed, set-in-stone approach of other producers. “I get the sense,” he told me, “that the way Prince [Nelson] approaches the studio is, ‘I already know everything about how this goes, and if you can’t get me what I need, I’ll get someone else in here or do it for myself, but I know the one way it works.’ I observed in T Bone the idea that you’re engaging something that’s already in play and you’re trying to abide it, very much like jumping into the ocean, and learning sort of how to swim or, on a good day, surf on top of it, but you didn’t create that momentum and you’re not going to control it.” He continued, “You’re going to learn to be grateful within it, and when you get together with musicians in a room, there’s a notion that there’s all kinds of ways that a song might work. Our job is to find what it is and be fully committed to it, which liberates you from thinking, did I guess right? The question is have we authentically engaged something that’s alive?” (Folk-rocker Freedy Johnston, whose beautiful, subdued 1999 gem, Blue Days Black Nights, was produced by Burnett, felt as liberated in the studio as Henry did: “I’ve always wanted to control things in the studio and this time I was advised to stop trying so much and to let it happen,” he told Triste Magazine, adding, “I never thought in the past that I could do a live vocal on demand.”)

  Like Astral Weeks, Shuffletown, which was released in 1990, is less an album of songs than a streaming reverie—just the kind of effort that A&M was primed to dump. On the day the album came out, the label dropped Henry, telling him he had no future with them. This “cult artist waiting for his cult to discover him,” as the critic Don McLeese described him, would have to wait some more—much like his mentor. Some young artists who found themselves in Henry’s painful and precarious position might have thought that Burnett had led them down the wrong path. Henry had uprooted his family and moved to Los Angeles. Now he was without a recording deal or any prospects. He didn’t fit into the LA scene any better than Burnett had as a singer-songwriter. But he felt only gratitude for all that Burnett had done for him: “T Bone allowed me to see myself as a professional musician, even though I felt cast off. The world he invited me into has remained open to me ever since.”

  Burnett invited Henry to hit some more golf balls (or watch him hit them, at any rate) and offered him a job as a production assistant. That required Henry to run errands. During the making of Sam Phillips’s Cruel Inventions, he found himself picking up her dry cleaning. But the gig also gave him the opportunity to learn all aspects of recording music from one of the top men in the field, and to be around great musicians such as Bruce Cockburn, Booker T, Jim Keltner, and Edgar Meyer during the making of Cockburn’s Nothing but a Burning Light. There’s little doubt that an artist as deep and original as Henry would have made his mark as a singer and songwriter had he not had the good fortune to cross Burnett’s path. But would he have become the prolific, wide-ranging producer he is (with clients ranging from Solomon Burke and Rodney Crowell to Aaron Neville and Bonnie Raitt) had Burnett not taken him under his wing during those scuffling days following Shuffletown? Not only did Burnett show him the ropes of production, he instilled in Henry the notion that producing was a way of expanding his artistic base, making a wider mark on the world—and providing himself with a regular source of income to offset the financial sacrifices that artists of his individuality and refined taste usually must make.

  Burnett and Henry share many of the same standout session players, notably the drummer Jay Bellerose (whom Henry introduced to Burnett), the keyboardist Keefus Ciancia, and the guitarist Marc Ribot. “I’ve never felt in competition with him,” Henry said to me. “I feel like we’re a community. Anytime T Bone has a session going, he invites me, and I never miss a chance to stick my head in. I always come away having something affirmed. And with projects he doesn’t think he’s suited for or doesn’t have time for, he recommends me.”

  Following Shuffletown, Burnett produced other emerging artists with mixed results. A. J. Croce (1993), co-produced by John Simon of the Band fame, was the nonstarting large-scale debut by the late Jim Croce’s son, a bluesy-jazzy artist striving after Dr. John–like authenticity. David Poe, the tantalizing 1997 debut by a folk-oriented singer and guitarist with strong eclectic tastes and quietly unsettling songs, was also a commercial bust. And perhaps most frustratingly, there was Sweetie, the 1996 debut of a nineteen-year-old LA phenom named Daniel Tashian, son of the singer-guitarist Barry Tashian, whose much-liked Boston band the Remains opened for the Beatles on their final North American tour and who teamed with his wife in the folk duo Barry and Holly Tashian.

  Daniel, also a singer and guitarist, had fashioned a unique blend of country-rock and power-pop (a hybrid that found expression in Nashville much later in groups such as Sugarland and the Band Perry). He was supported by the guitarist and future producer of note Jay Joyce and his band. And as his ace in the hole, he had the extravagantly gifted pedal steel player Bucky Baxter, a Bob Dylan regular. The sessions, at Groove Masters in Santa Monica, went well. The songs were solid. Burnett played some guitar and brought in Booker T and the Wrecking Crew veteran Larry Knechtel to play keyboards on one track each. Baxter was in top form. And during one moment when Burnett seemed to lose interest (“He’s got ADD to a pretty extensive degree, so he gets bored quite easily,” Tashian said in an online interview), the band captured his fancy with a spontaneous pop experiment on which Daniel played an old mandolin he said had been left in a storage room by Jackson Browne.

  Burnett, Tashian told me, “let me run the show and do my thing” in the early going “to get me focused on the music.” But the pressure became too intense for the quintessentially sensitive young artist, who was going through a lot of upheaval in his personal life. Burnett, he told me, “stepped in and took the reins and sort of held my hand. He has wonderful ways of nudging you in the right direction. Like if I wasn’t singing in tune, he’d say, ‘You’re like me, you don’t like singing with headphones.’ Or if he didn’t like a song or think it was up to caliber, instead of saying it wasn’t good enough, h
e’d say that in order to get it right, it would take a week, which we didn’t have, so we should concentrate on other songs.”

  To Tashian’s dismay, the people in control at Elektra, which was in a state of flux following the sudden exit of the label head Bob Krasnow, stripped Baxter’s steel guitar from the recording. They wanted something trendier, he said, “more Pearl Jam than Byrds. T Bone asked me if I wanted him to jump on someone’s desk and make a big stink. But because we thought we were going to do another album together pretty soon, we let it pass. In the end, it’s really up to the artist to stand up—the producer can stand up only so much—and I just wasn’t confident enough to do that.” However much standing up Burnett did, here was a rare instance of record execs holding serve on one of his productions.

  As it is, Sweetie is a strong album with a great guitar sound and standout tunes, including a flawless Byrds-style number, “Where Have You Gone.” But the production, notwithstanding some edgy effects, is slicker than anything Pearl Jam would have gone for, leaving you thinking the label did more than remove the steel. Elektra quickly buried Sweetie in its distribution slush pile, effectively ending Tashian’s big-time pop career before it started. Now based in Nashville, where he has done well for himself as a songwriter and leader of the band Silver Seas, he has good memories of working with Burnett—and not only because the producer took him to Barney’s and bought him a $4,000 Comme des Garçons suit. “He was very kind,” Tashian told me. “It was like having a magician for an uncle.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Hit Man

  Even as far as we have come with musical technology, many people still think that producers are the dudes who twist knobs and push buttons. It’s an image reinforced by cultural artifacts like Dave Grohl’s Sonic Highways documentary series, in which the nerdy, bespectacled Butch Vig (producer of Nirvana and Garbage) sits by the board waiting for all the joking around to stop, and TV’s late and lamented Parenthood, in which Dax Sheperd’s Crosby gazes unhappily through the glass at the temperamental bands causing problems in his Luncheonette studio.