T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  There are certainly plenty of producers, like Burnett, who do their share of knob turning. Some standouts in the field, among them Daniel Lanois, believe no producer is worth his or her salt unless the person has superior, all-encompassing skills at the board and knows how to apply them in every situation. But that is called audio or sound engineering. The history of producers reveals a wide range of methods and approaches that have little to do with mixing and mastering.

  John Hammond’s reputation rests more on his “discovery,” support, and promotion of great artists such as Count Basie, Billie Holiday, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen than his skills in recording them. He basically put young Dylan in front of a microphone and pushed the record button, occasionally telling him to stand back a bit. As Dylan wrote in Chronicles: Volume One, Hammond also had a profound impact on him by introducing him to Robert Johnson via a copy of King of the Delta Blues Singers.

  The Atlantic Records legend Jerry Wexler was unmatched in bringing out the best of Aretha Franklin, Dusty Springfield, Wilson Pickett, and many other artists by matching them up with particular musicians and treating them with certain instrumental combinations while remaining open to new ideas. In his 1993 memoir Rhythm and the Blues, Wexler freely acknowledges learning from the great Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section “a new way of making records spontaneously, synergistically” through a numbering system that made it easy to change keys and left room for other variations.

  Tom Wilson, the first black staff producer at Columbia Records, was a brilliant “out of the box” conceptualist—he’s credited with electrifying Dylan and rescuing the folk duo Simon and Garfunkel from navel-gazing obscurity by redoing “The Sounds of Silence” with instrumental overdubs. A native of Waco, Texas, Wilson also lifted artists with his “ebullient spirit,” Van Dyke Parks told Texas Monthly. He was “charismatic, statuesque, and curiously empowering for those in his orbit.”

  Bob Johnston, the producer of such Dylan masterpieces as Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde, was willing to go many extra miles to prop up his artists. After Leonard Cohen, unhappy with his attempts at “The Partisan” (included on the poet’s 1969 album Songs from a Room), remarked that it would sound good with French voices, Johnston flew to Paris and brought back three female singers—and an accordion player. Secretly, he had them overdub their parts and then sprang the results on a pleased Cohen—revealing a thoughtful side to his personality that those who remember Johnston only for his brashness need to know.

  George Martin, the “fifth Beatle,” was known for his spontaneity and experimentation. He introduced a new level of sophistication to cutting and splicing different takes together and broke new ground with sound effects and orchestrations—the double string quartet on “Eleanor Rigby” is one of pop music’s monuments.

  And among Burnett’s peers, Rick Rubin, who has played guru for artists as varied as Slayer, the Beastie Boys, and Johnny Cash, is known to employ meditation methods to put artists in the right frame of mind. “One of the main things I always try to do is to create an environment where the artist feels pretty comfortable being naked,” he told Forbes.

  What has made T Bone Burnett special as a producer—and, indeed, what has enabled him to transcend that status like no one else—is his incorporation of the aforementioned methods and practices, plus the special insight he brings to the studio as an artist himself. “He doesn’t do what he does without being a great songwriter, deeply invested in craft, at a level most producers couldn’t dream of,” Joe Henry told me. Burnett’s curatorial skills are unsurpassed. Using his encyclopedic knowledge of recorded music, he puts together voluminous playlists of songs from all stylistic precincts to expose artists to songs they have forgotten or never heard before—songs that, if not used, might suggest other cover material or inspire other directions.

  In terms of a producing style, Burnett was developing from an enabler—a neutral presence dedicated to concentrating on the music before him and “listening it into existence”—to a catalyst who gets out on the floor with a guitar or bass or exotic instrument to help guide artists. But as his longtime engineer Mike Piersante told me, “I don’t know if we’ve ever consciously gone after a particular sound. The goal has always been to capture the artist in the best possible light, without being gimmicky.”

  When you ask someone Burnett has produced what makes the experience so rewarding, he or she will typically begin by discussing how at ease he puts them in the studio, how laid back the atmosphere he creates is, and how well he treats them. “T Bone is a deep soul with an artist’s mind,” Rosanne Cash told me. “He has tremendous respect for musicians and never acts like he is the authority figure. He’s interested in the conversation, in the process. He’s very attuned to what is happening in the moment and is able to switch courses, make a left turn, find a completely new idea, and let go of the old without regret.”

  None of which is to suggest there aren’t artists he has rubbed the wrong way, industry peers who see him as a prima donna, listeners who believe he does a disservice to artists by bottling up their sound. In 1997, Burnett worked for weeks on an album by the E Street Band singer Patti Scialfa for which he summoned Marc Ribot (of course), the keyboardist John Medeski of the progressive jazz-funk group Medeski Martin & Wood, and the experimental guitarist David Torn. All he had to show for the sessions in the end was a single song. Grace Potter, leader of the Nocturnals, didn’t like Burnett’s mixes for her 2009 solo album—about which she recently had great things to say—and shelved it. (The record may well have been doomed from the start when Burnett, who has no compunction about swapping an underachieving player for a top-level pro, replaced the drummer Mark Barr, Potter’s boyfriend, with Jim Keltner). Another young and overconfident artist who shall remain nameless was so displeased with Burnett’s production that he put out his own demo instead. It got little attention.

  Ironically, as with BoDeans, Burnett has been spanked by artists who recorded their best albums with him. Discussing the making of his resplendent Nothing but a Burning Light in his 2014 memoir Rumours of Glory, the Canadian legend (and Christian music hero) Bruce Cockburn chafes over Burnett’s sense of control: “If a song doesn’t come out the way he thinks it should, he’ll insist on re-doing it or throwing it out. He would call me on the music and even the lyrics.” He continued, “T Bone spoke with Texan courtliness but projected a clear assumption that he was in command of his environment. He had about him an intriguing intensity and a penetrating intelligence, along with the faintest whiff of a cruel streak held in check by moral resolve.” This while acknowledging the producer’s “taste, discernment and instinct” and recognizing that “with him at the helm, everything rolled into place like the ball in a roulette wheel.”

  Cockburn also had positive things to say about the experience in an interview with Paul Zollo. He began the project, he said, looking to take a break from what he called “the droning effect” in his lyrics—to simplify his songs and make his melodies more singable. From Burnett, he “picked up an understanding . . . of how to focus on the essence of a song without screwing it up in the process of adding instruments to it.” That understanding is reflected in lovely, shimmering songs such as “Great Big Love” and “A Dream Like Mine,” which brought out winning qualities in the usually sober singer-songwriter that we hadn’t heard before.

  If, as Cockburn said in a 1991 radio interview, Burnett got “sort of fed up” with how long it was taking Cockburn and band to record “Indian Wars,” his decision to have Cockburn, the violinist Mark O’Connor, and Jackson Browne (on Dobro and low harmony vocals) break apart from the full band and do the song live off the floor resulted in another of the album’s standout tracks. The session, a rare one for Cockburn outside his hometown of Toronto, ended on an up note when Burnett asked Cockburn if he had any songs he had been wanting to record and Cockburn picked Blind Willie Johnson’s “Soul of a Man”—a tune close to Burnett’s heart that Cockburn awakened on resonator guitar. But rela
tions between the artists were off from start to finish during the making of Dart to the Heart (1993). In his book, Cockburn puts the onus for the album’s mixed results on “T Bone’s gift for running up expenses” while admitting he (Cockburn) was off his game because an a ffair with a woman he had met in Los Angeles had ended badly.

  As for the would’ve-could’ve-should’ves in Burnett’s producing life, we can only imagine what John Fogerty’s 2009 album The Blue Ridge Rangers Rides Again would have amounted to had not an unhappy encounter with the high-strung singer caused Burnett to walk away from the project. And what about the 2013 Jerry Lee Lewis album that was in the works until the Hall of Fame rocker rejected the songs and musicians Burnett had lined up for it? Plans were to hold the sessions in the basement of Memphis’s historic Peabody Hotel—where Memphis Minnie, among others, cut tracks in temporary studios during the 1920s. Lewis decided to go the safer, all-star route instead on Rock & Roll Time, the solid but less than ear-opening effort co-produced by Jim Keltner at Sun Studios, Jerry Lee’s old home away from home.

  Well, maybe the Killer remembered Burnett disarming him on the set of the 1989 biopic Great Balls of Fire! Burnett was producing him on new versions of his songs for the film’s star Dennis Quaid to lip-sync along with. Recalled Burnett’s ex-wife Sam Phillips, “Jerry Lee came in with a gun the day before the sessions started and T Bone kind of looked at it and said, ‘Hey, that’s a really nice piece, can I see it?’ And Jerry Lee said, ‘Sure,’ and handed it over. T Bone took out the bullets and put them in his pocket.”

  The sessions went well—better than the Jim McBride film, which, for all its Memphis color and sneering grins by Quaid, soft-peddled the Jerry Lee myth. But killers do have such long memories.

  CHAPTER 14

  Reluctant Artist

  As the eighties turned into the nineties, Burnett was performing very little and touring not at all, but the shows he did play were memorable. After a solo acoustic set in June 1989 at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, he strolled onto Pico Boulevard and led the people standing in line for the late show in a sing-along of “Kumbaya.” Two years later at the same Santa Monica landmark, he hosted a series of offbeat Friday night variety shows that were recorded for an NPR Christmas Eve special. Among the “surprise” guests were the actor Jeff Bridges, the satirist and Simpsons voice artist Harry Shearer, and an exotic dancer billing himself (and, perhaps, his invisible partners) as the Zen Nude Dancers. According to the Los Angeles Times, Burnett handed out paper-bag masks for audience members to slip on in case they were planning “to run for office someday.”

  As for “the recording thing,” as he put it, “I hated the whole deal,” he told me. The failure of The Talking Animals had deepened his self-doubts. More than ever, he feared that he didn’t have what it took to be a successful recording artist—success being defined by record sales and exposure, not artistic achievement. Though he had no problem working with other artists on their songs (as tiring as working on so many outside projects could be), he was stymied by his own efforts to negotiate words and music. He thought his lyrics were pretentious and marked by “silly schoolboy attitudes.” He told me, “I had reached a point where I couldn’t tell why one note should be there and another shouldn’t. I think John Cage found himself in the same place when he began experimenting with silence.”

  During his long stretch with Phillips in Fort Worth, where he could be “a part of ordinary life again,” he spent time with his daughters, read a lot of books, and listened to a lot of recorded music, including his own. “I tend to write really well in Fort Worth,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “There’s something about seeing the horizon all the way around you, all 360 degrees, for hundreds of miles. It lets you look a long way off. It gives you room to think.”

  “I tried to pick out what I do well,” he told Pulse! in the early 1990s, as quoted by Musician Guide. “I noticed that the more simple stuff, the stuff which comes more naturally to me, is generally the stuff that works best, so I tried to work within that vein.” Who better to school him in the art of simplicity than Lead Belly, with whose works (such as “Goodnight, Irene” and “Cotton Fields”) he spent many hours.

  With the mushrooming of Operation Desert Storm, Anita Hill’s harassment charges against Clarence Thomas, the continuing fallout from Iran-Contra, and the rise of the religious right, there was no lack of bad stuff going on in the world to fire up his writing. In an article in the November 1992 issue of Spin, “25 Things to Remember about George Bush When You Go to the Polls,” he ripped the president for “kissing the ring of Pat Robertson, as power-mad a religious figure as we’ve been afflicted with since Rasputin,” and for declaring “the system has worked” after the acquittal of the Los Angeles police officers charged with using excessive force in arresting black motorist Rodney King—a verdict that led to widespread rioting.

  But Burnett shied away from returning to the studio, conscious of what happened the last time he flexed his politics on record. In a meeting with Donnie Ienner, the new president of Columbia Records, he said he didn’t feel like he fit into the label’s plans as a recording artist and offered to stick to producing. Ienner assured him he was an important artist and wanted him to continue making albums. Only when Bob Neuwirth signed on as Burnett’s co-producer did the reluctant artist’s resistance weaken.

  Neuwirth convinced his friend to concentrate on his songs and not worry about the things over which he had no control. He also prodded Burnett into stepping more into his own spotlight. “I generally try to put the person I’m recording with very big in the frame, and make it a good, close, intimate record,” Burnett said in a 1992 Billboard article. “A few times in the past, I’ve lost my nerve and obscured myself on my own records, stayed hidden so to speak, and Neuwirth just didn’t let me hide.” (In the Billboard piece, Sam Phillips remarked on her husband’s tendency to “shoot himself in the foot” when it came to recording his own work.)

  As the title of his 1992 album, The Criminal under My Own Hat, makes clear, Burnett wasn’t letting himself off any hooks regarding the sorry state of the world. The day of reckoning he invokes—“The big heat is coming down / Like hail from the sky” and “We live in an age lit by lightning / After the flash we’re blind again”—is coming for him as much as anyone. In the CD booklet, he is seen, as on Proof through the Night, in Sherlockian attire—in one photograph with his hands cuffed and his head bowed down, and in another in prayerful repose, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him. Returning to his theme of dual identity, the images tell us that each of us must investigate and answer to our own misdeeds—to the criminal inside us—before we can point fingers at anyone or anything else.

  Inside the CD booklet is an unsettling collage by his friend John “Flex” Fleming, a troubled soul who committed suicide in 2004. Embedded in the collage is a small photo of a tattooed man whose head is etched with the likeness of a suffering Christ—shades of the tormented soul in Flannery O’Connor’s blistering “Parker’s Back.” As Burnett described this favorite short story of his, it is “about a wife who is very religious, and her husband gets a tattoo of Jesus on his back, and she screams, ‘Blasphemy!’ That, to me, is the South in a nutshell.”

  With their acts of defilement, the Fleming work and “Parker’s Back” address the meeting of the spirit and the flesh that informs Criminal songs such as “Primitives” (“The frightening thing is not dying / The frightening thing is not living”) and previous Burnett songs, such as “River of Love.” Without pain in our lives, without sins to atone for, these songs tell us, there would be no need for belief in a higher power. That there is no freedom from pain is, in the end, a kind of blessing.

  However bleak Burnett’s vision is on Criminal, however lethal the atmosphere, the melodies are so strong, the rockabilly currents so alive, the singer so relaxed in his element, that it is one of his most appealing albums. On “It’s Not Too Late,” a jaunty Euro cabaret-style number written with Neuwirth and E
lvis Costello, Burnett offers hope even with “the weather crashing down.” Riding over Burnett’s vocal and percussive acoustic guitar playing on “Over You,” Roy Huskey Jr.’s slapped bass bounds in good feeling. “Any Time at All” is a heartfelt pledge of undying love.

  The album, half of which was recorded with drummerless acoustic units and half with spatially oriented electric trios, is not without its oddball features. “Humans from Earth,” Burnett says in his Twenty Twenty liner notes, dates back to the 1960s, when during the height of the military-industrial complex he founded the Interplanetary Real Estate Agency to sell deeds to lots on “hospitable” planets. But listening to him scathingly sing, “We’re out here in the universe buying real estate / Hope we haven’t gotten here too late,” you can’t help but think of Ed Bass and Biosphere 2 and the friendly(?) planet of Mars.

  On two versions of “I Can Explain Everything,” which works over lying TV preachers and politicians, Burnett employs a jarring theatrical falsetto to deliver pithy Ogden Nash–like lyrics (“The genius of France can be seen at a glance / And it’s not their fabled fashion scene / It’s not that they’re mean or their wine or cuisine / I refer of course to the guillotine”). “For years, my hotel name was ‘Ogden Nashville,’” he told Vulture. “I spent a tremendous amount of time studying the way he played with words, made up words, with a light touch, like a twinkle in his eye. I look at most of my songs as musical versions of what Ogden Nash did.”

  It could be that people had trouble finding the Nash in his nightmares. Criminal was nominated for a Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album (“Kumbaya,” indeed) and was awarded an A grade in Entertainment Weekly. “Burnett’s highly moralistic, deeply religious compositions—especially the intimate, disarming acoustic tracks—tilt nobly at the windmills of human weakness, both global and personal,” wrote Billy Altman. “Of such honest, cathartic communications are masterpieces made.” But for all that, Criminal was, excuse the expression, criminally overlooked commercially and was the last recording he would make for nearly a decade and a half.