T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  “I got behind the scenes as far as I could,” he told me. When you’re T Bone Burnett, though, being “behind” the scenes, however far, hardly keeps you out of the frame. Just ask the next band he would launch for proof of that.

  Paschal High senior yearbook photo. Courtesy of Don Duca.

  Burnett leading the Shadows, circa 1964. Courtesy of David Graves.

  Burnett with David Graves at Sound City, 1965. Photo by Phil York; courtesy of David Graves.

  Burnett in ten-gallon hat at the Lodge, in Tujunga, California, 1973. © Bob Shaw. Courtesy of BobShaw.com.

  Burnett with Bob Dylan at the Houston Astrodome, during the Rolling Thunder Revue, 1976. © Bob Shaw. Courtesy of BobShaw.com.

  Publicity shot for the Alpha Band’s Spark in the Dark (1977). Arista handout.

  Burnett opening for the Who, Chicago Amphitheatre, 1982. Photo by Paul Natkin.

  Burnett performing with Jennifer Warnes, Jackson Browne, Warren Zevon, and Richard Thompson at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, 1984. Photo by Sherry Rayn Barnett.

  Burnett with Elvis Costello at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, California, 1984. Photo by Sherry Rayn Barnett.

  Burnett posed at Tuts, Chicago, 1984. Photo by Paul Natkin.

  Burnett at CHART conference, Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, 1986. Courtesy of Chris Stacey (taken from VHS tape).

  Publicity shot for The Talking Animals (Columbia Records, 1987). Photo provided by Columbia/Legacy.

  Polaroid of Burnett at a Fort Worth graveyard, circa 1989. Photographer unknown; photo provided by T Bone Burnett.

  Burnett and Sam Phillips, 1992. Photo by Frank Ockenfels.

  Burnett with Stephen Bruton on the set of Crazy Heart, 2008. Photo by Jeff Bridges.

  Burnett in the studio with Elton John, Bernie Taupin, and Davey Johnstone during the summer of 2015. Photo by Joseph Guay; photo provided by T Bone Burnett.

  Studio shot of Burnett at the sound board. Photographer unknown; photo provided by T Bone Burnett.

  Publicity still for the New Basement Tapes, 2014. Photo provided by Big Hassle Media.

  Burnett performing at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, San Francisco, 2015. Photograph by Peter Dervin.

  CHAPTER 15

  Starmaker

  In 1993, a demo by a highly touted but still-unknown San Francisco band landed on Burnett’s desk. Containing not just a few songs, as was the norm, but more than a dozen, and sounding ten times better than the average demo, the tape had set off a major bidding war. The Geffen executive Gary Gersh—the man who had signed Nirvana—was the winner. After considering other top producers, Counting Crows chose Burnett.

  If they had known what kind of state he was in, they might have gone with someone else. “I was tired of studios,” Burnett told the San Francisco Chronicle pop critic Joel Selvin in 1994. “They reek of despair. It sinks into the walls.” Unswayed by their cheering section, he told the Crows that they needed to come up with a more distinctive sound—“something that sounds just like you,” the keyboardist Charles Gillingham recalled in an interview with the Vancouver Province. And, Gillingham told Musician, “T Bone said you’ve made a demo that sounds like an album, now you’ve got to make an album that sounds like a demo.”

  When Gersh set up the Crows in a rented old mansion in the hills above Los Angeles to rehearse and record, that was fine with Burnett. Dylan and the Band and Big Pink came to mind. Why not think big? When it comes to reekage, great memories beat despair every time. But a small problem arose with one of the more promising songs, “Mr. Jones.” The drummer Steve Bowman, widely considered the most talented member of the band—lead singer and songwriter Adam Duritz included—refused to play on it because he didn’t like the beat. He thought it was too square and too country. Weary or not, Burnett pulled one of his all-time savviest and most audacious moves in the studio—one that anyone with inside knowledge of his methods would have seen coming from ten miles away. He replaced Bowman with the top-notch studio drummer Denny Fongheiser. With Fongheiser at the traps, the Crows nailed the song—the number that made their career—in a single take.

  How distinctive Counting Crows sounded on their debut, August and Everything After, remains up for debate. Duritz’s too-close approximation of Van Morrison’s vocal style drew criticism. Other reviewers heard too much of a debt to Bruce Springsteen and the Band. But thanks to the roaringly infectious “Mr. Jones,” which wasn’t a single until listener demand made it one, and the nearly-as-irresistible “Round Here,” the album overcame its artistic debts, and a pokey start out of the gate, to soar up the charts. And with August, Burnett did some soaring himself—from the ranks of rock’s top producers into an elite group of hitmakers.

  For him, this proved to be not an entirely good thing. After August attained multiple-platinum success, Burnett received an avalanche of demos from bands hoping he would work his magic on them as well. Some producers would have eagerly turned to the next band in line, but he had no desire to babysit undeveloped talent. “A lot of songs that came to me as producer were like 12th generation,” Burnett told Mix. “The kids hadn’t heard of Led Zeppelin, much less Willie Dixon.” However indisposed he was toward working with any more artists who were still wet behind the ears, he was no more able to resist being pulled back into the fold than was Michael Corleone in Godfather III. When Bob Dylan’s twenty-two-year-old son asks you to help him out, there are few circumstances under which you say no. Rescuing Jakob Dylan, labeled a Julian Lennon–type wannabe after his band the Wallflowers’ 1992 debut tanked, wasn’t one of them.

  Burnett, who has known Jakob since he was four, has maintained close ties to the Dylan family; another of Bob’s sons, Jesse, did the photography for Burnett’s 2006 comeback album, The True False Identity. Burnett has covered many of Dylan’s songs and commissioned him to write new ones or provide old ones for film and album projects. While Burnett has never gotten to produce his now self-producing hero (though there has been talk in recent years of him assuming such a role, playing guitar on 1986’s Knocked Out Loaded was the most he’s been involved with a Dylan album), Dylan celebrated their close-knit connection after all these years by letting Burnett produce an album of previously unrecorded lyrics from The Basement Tapes.

  And so, in 1994, Burnett accepted the assignment of helping Jakob bounce back from the failure of The Wallflowers, and Virgin’s dumping of the group, amid reports that Dylan was difficult to work with. There was, indeed, strife within the band as they pursued another label. When Jakob Dylan asked Burnett to produce what in effect would be a second debut—one that would show what he was really capable of as a leader—he did so knowing that with Burnett’s high standards, the band would be upgraded. Sure enough, by the time Jakob and company entered the studio, the keyboardist Rami Jaffee was the only holdover. (“Groups are more difficult to work with, with all the conflicts within the group,” Burnett told Bill Cochran in his 1986 WXRT interview. “Usually there are one or two really good guys and three or four not so good guys. It’s frustrating because you think how good the record could be if there weren’t these guys.”)

  Recorded mostly live in the studio over two years in Los Angeles, Bringing Down the Horse boasted what Burnett called a “hyper-modern folk” sound by strongly featuring mandolin, Dobro, and pedal steel (and Sam Phillips, Stephen Bruton, Gary Louris, and Michael Penn among the backup singers). Working with the gifted young engineer Mike Piersante, who has been his right-hand man in the studio ever since, and Tom Lord-Alge, one of the most creative mixers in the industry, Burnett gave the music a big, vibrant, room-shaking presence. “One Headlight,” a Springsteen-like escape-to-daylight narrative told from the downbeat fringe, made the biggest splash. A No. 1 hit on three Billboard Top 40 charts, it was named by Rolling Stone and MTV as one of “The 100 Greatest Pop Songs since the Beatles.” And the rest of the album, a Top 5 achiever on the Billboard 200, is nearly as good—particularly the rest of the near-perfect A-side, which includes “6th Avenue Heartache,
” a churning leftover from the Wallflowers’ first album featuring a corrosive slide guitar solo by Mike Campbell, and the sly, enigmatic “Three Marlenas,” which combines the literate quality of Dylan Sr. and the power-pop storytelling of Penn—whose narrative-rich 1989 debut, March, provided a kind of template for Bringing Down the Horse.

  Burnett challenged Dylan to up the ante on his songwriting—to make all the tunes on the album equally strong, a standard few young bands set for themselves. While the lyrics on Bringing Down the Horse sometimes smack of dorm room writing (“The only difference that I see / Is you are exactly the same as you used to be”), the album’s melodic intensity and the sneaky urgency of Jakob’s groggy vocals overcome that shortcoming. One of the wonders of Horse is how well it sustains that urgency, even in the quieter moments. Years later, when Burnett and Dylan teamed up on the latter’s country-leaning solo debut, Women and Country (2010), the results were not so great. Even with the sublime duo of Neko Case and Kelly Hogan singing backup—a genius stroke by the producer—this is a pretty sleepy affair. But with its depth of sound—the stage it sets for the singer—the production helped Dylan see himself, as he told the Huffington Post, “as kind of a player amongst other players with the role of narrator . . . a unique way for me to tell stories again.”

  Burnett has always been drawn to storytellers, the darker and more primal the better. Perhaps knowing that, Daniel Tashian urged him to see Gillian Welch, a young songwriter who was beginning to make a noise on the folk and bluegrass circuit with her haunted tales and heartfelt sound. Emmylou Harris had introduced Welch’s gifts to the record-buying public with her beautiful cover of “Orphan Girl” on Wrecking Ball (1995). During a break from recording Bringing Down the Horse, Burnett caught Welch in Nashville, opening for Peter Rowan at the Station Inn, a popular bluegrass venue. In much the same way that Los Lobos turned people’s heads with their unique sound, Welch seemed hatched from mysterious beginnings. Burnett liked Welch and her musical (and life) partner David Rawlings so much, he went backstage and told them he wanted to produce them, ultimately beating out Mark Knopfler for the job.

  Like Jakob Dylan, Welch grew up in Los Angeles, and like him she came from a well-off musical family. But if Dylan’s literate songs could be heard as an extension of his old man’s poetry, Welch’s Appalachian-style originals represented quite a departure from the music her parents wrote for The Carol Burnett Show. Welch, who had signed with Almo, the new label of the former A&M heads Herb Alpert and Jerry Moss, was part of a unique duo with Rawlings, a brilliant guitarist and harmony vocalist who had been a classmate of hers at Boston’s Berklee College of Music.

  Understandably, as artists who thrived on what they call a “tiny” sound that highlights their nuanced interactions, they felt a bit uneasy subjecting themselves to the designs of a man who made arena stars out of Counting Crows. Burnett quickly put them at ease. During their first week of recording, the only person present, aside from the artists and producer, was the engineer Rik Pekkonen. “We got so inside our little world,” Welch told Bill Friskics-Warren, writing for No Depression. “There was very little distance between our singing and playing. The sound was very immediate. It was so light and small.” Within a few days, they had recorded a series of duets.

  Burnett, Welch told the New York Times contributor Billy Altman, “had a deep and abiding concern that I find my way as an artist, that my first record should show the world what I wanted to talk about and what I wanted to sound like. He wants the records he produces to be what the songs want to be. It’s a very transparent production style and very changing from artist to artist. I think it’s one of the reasons he’s so great at making first records on people. He has this crazy knack, even if you don’t know yourself what your core material is, he does.”

  Revival was recorded in Nashville at Woodland Sound, which owed its place on the map to such 1970s albums as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken, Neil Young’s Comes a Time, and Kansas’ Dust in the Wind. Burnett’s original plan was to record Welch and Rawlings on an old Wollensak machine he had found—the kind once used for Hank Williams. But problems with the recording heads forced him to use equipment that was a bit more modern. To heighten the agelessness of their sound, he recorded four songs in mono, including “Orphan Girl,” on which Welch’s rapt vision sails forth on the strength of her strumming. But the song does not go quietly into the acoustic night, undergoing an eerie transformation via optigan (an electronic keyboard originally developed by Mattel) and buzzing electric guitar.

  On future albums, Welch and Rawlings would dispense with electro-acoustic experiments. But Revival is full of such arresting moments. On “Tear My Stillhouse Down,” boasting Welch’s hardest-edged vocal ever, James Burton rips ribbons on guitar and Jim Keltner is at sweeping high tide on drums. On “Paper Wings,” her vocal is treated to the startling, overarching wail of Jay Joyce’s electric guitar. And in what is the most thrilling moment of the album, “Pass You By,” the duo hooks up on fully charged electric guitars with Roy Huskey Jr.’s upright bass. Huskey’s sound was so powerful in a room-filling way that Burnett had to remove his bass microphone and record him through Welch’s vocal mike, about six feet away. “After the take, I remember him putting his bass down and saying, ‘I gotta go outside for awhile,’” Burnett told Tape Op. “And he just put his bass down and walked outside. He walked around for about fifteen minutes—he’d put out so much.” Sadly, it proved to be one of the last recordings by the forty-year-old Huskey, who died of cancer the following year.

  In the end, Welch and Rawlings were left to master Revival themselves. And Burnett, who produced their second album, Hell among the Yearlings (1998), actually didn’t hear finished versions of some of its songs until it was released. If the partners were put out by his early exits, they weren’t saying. “Oftentimes, he is working on a lot of things, and he had a lot more energy at the beginning of these projects than he did at the end,” Rawlings told Tape Op. In an interview with the Huffington Post, Welch said, “When he’s working with someone, he just puts everything into it, and then I think he necessarily has to move on.”

  In the case of artists, like Welch, who have a strong sense of who they are and what they want to achieve in the studio, setting up the recording, getting it going, and then moving on is sometimes the best thing Burnett can do. There are no set rules of conduct to adhere to, simply because different creative types, for better and for worse, have different needs. We certainly shouldn’t overlook Burnett’s efforts to get Welch and Rawlings to think about producing themselves. He talked them into acquiring a recording apparatus for their home. In 2001, they purchased Woodland Sound and converted it into a dedicated analog center. “I kind of learned how to make records from him,” said Welch—when he was there, and then when he wasn’t.

  CHAPTER 16

  Company Man

  Whatever strange vibes existed between them during Rolling Thunder, Burnett and Sam Shepard seemed made for each other as creative partners, not least because they could relate as musicians. Shepard played drums with the counterculture folk duo the Holy Modal Rounders in the 1960s. In a way, he continued pounding the skins as a playwright. “If you take the rhythm out of [Sam’s] plays, there’s nothing left,” Burnett told the Chicago Sun-Times writer Dave Hoekstra. “His dialog is very much like drum solos.”

  In 1996, knowing of his friend’s artistic struggles, Shepard invited him to write new words and music for an extensive reworking of his ripping rock opus The Tooth of Crime. Things had changed in the twenty-five years since the play’s premiere. “It seemed to me that rock and roll, as we had known it up till then, was being transformed into a river of sameness,” Shepard wrote in his preface to the revised edition. “It was beginning to lose its original fire and brass balls.” He admired the way Burnett “went for the throat” as a songwriter. What better way to help him get his songwriting juices going again than with Tooth, a dystopian dissertation on the soul-suck
ing effects of fame featuring a verbal duel to the death between a fading rock star and a gangbanging punk rocker?

  Burnett could relate to Shepard’s vision as much as Shepard could relate to his. Two of the staunchest disassemblers of American myth, the artists operate on surrealistic common ground. Shepard’s eruptive plays are seated on psychological plates whose seismic shifts tear through commonly held values relating to family, social class, and freedom. Burnett’s scabrous, free-associating commentaries shake up our cozy acceptance of false promises and empty values. Burnett, who loves Shepard’s knack for smudging the line between the horrific and the hilarious, deftly plugged into the special language of The Tooth of Crime with his jiving reversals (“Anything I Say Can and Will Be Used against You”), image-conscious themes (“You’ve changed your face you’ve changed you’re scent / You’ve even changed your fingerprint”), and cyber-punk poetry (“I see blowdown damage / Static kill / Mean square displacement baby / Just for a thrill”). When he became stuck, worried that he was losing a handle on his songwriting, Shepard told him, “When you do it, that’s what it is.” The remark freed up Burnett to do some of his best work.