T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  Burnett recorded the songs for the cast and crew as he wrote them. Only a half dozen of them ended up being used in the play—not enough for a cast album. But long after the Off Broadway run of The Tooth of Crime: Second Dance ended, he returned to the recordings and discovered they included songs he forgot he had captured. Ultimately, all of the Crime tunes came together, he said, “like a broken mirror”—reflecting, like so much of his work, the many and varied dimensions of myth and reality, dreams lived and dreams misspent. An album of ten of the songs was released on Nonesuch in 2008 under the title Tooth of Crime.

  Despite its sci-fi/noirish song titles (“The Rat Age,” “Dope Island,” “Kill Zone”), bleak scenarios, and sardonic humor (“I’m sober on the grapes of wrath / While running down the psycho path”; “Swizzle stick / And lace your faith with cyanide”), the album contains some of Burnett’s most accessible and even radio-friendly songs. “Kill Zone,” written with Bob Neuwirth, is set to a soaring, never-recorded Roy Orbison melody that Burnett had carried around with him for years. “How much grief and sin / Till a heart caves in,” he sings in stirring, uncharacteristically open, Orbison-style fashion, filling the melody with as much love as hurt.

  On the jazz-influenced “The Slowdown,” Burnett’s electronically treated vocal and Darrell Leonard’s nifty juxtaposition of buttery brass over dissonant reeds impart an unexpected lyricism. And “Dope Island,” featuring a rare vocal duet by Burnett and Sam Phillips, layers Brazilian and Indian melodies over a dense drum sound. You can’t help thinking that outfitting a third dance of The Tooth of Crime with these evolved songs would result in a dreamier but no less biting production.

  The Tooth of Crime: Second Dance opened in December 1996, starring Vincent D’Onofrio (best known as Detective Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent) as Hoss, the fading rock star, and Kirk Acevedo (famous for playing the harried cop Charlie Francis on Fringe), as Crow, the punk. The New York Times’ Vincent Canby wasn’t crazy about the music or the revival as a whole. “Not having seen the original production, I have no idea if the T Bone Burnett score is better than Mr. Shepard’s,” he wrote, “but it doesn’t give much resonance to these proceedings, which depend more on language, style and presence than on music.” Well, maybe Canby, a lapsed film critic who was a bit out of his element on the theater beat, wasn’t ready to be led into “an unexpected shamanistic world of sound in the dark conjure of the blues,” as Burnett described the musical setting in the album acknowledgments. “The best thing about the production was T Bone Burnett’s score, a vast improvement over Shepard’s original music,” wrote the Shepard biographer Don Shewey in American Theater. “Burnett’s witty, spring-loaded lyrics meshed well with Shepard’s made-up argot.”

  In May 1999, Burnett teamed with Shepard again, appearing with him in an evening of spoken words and songs (some from The Tooth ofCrime) at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater. Once again, the existential visions of the playwright and the songwriter couldn’t have matched up better. “Can you speak with one who is no one?” said Shepard, portraying a poor, star-stricken soul. “I am not important, I am a broken man,” sang Burnett, providing a preview of “Earlier Baghdad (The Bounce),” which surfaced years later on The True False Identity.

  Back at Steppenwolf in October of that year, Burnett introduced a newfangled, old-style revue featuring Sam Phillips, Marc Ribot, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and a pair of Nashville aces, the mandolinist Mike Compton and the bassist Barry Bales. “I ripped up everything and started in on something that has nothing to do with rock ’n’ roll,” Burnett told me before the show. He added, “I realize this is completely insane, but at this stage of my life, if I’m not doing something to change the world, to at least attempt to hold back the tide a split second, what am I doing? Show biz has nothing left for me at all. I don’t need anything from culture. If I got it, it would be like, where were you when I needed you?”

  Void, as Burnett dubbed the company, was spread out on couches and chairs. He sat in a straight-back chair in the middle, his vintage guitar plugged into a small old amp that gave his instrument a distinctive rumble and buzz. As prolific a guitarist as Burnett is—and as well-known a collector of old guitars, like the maple-topped Kay Thin Twin, Jimmy Reed’s “ax” of choice, and the Gibson J-45 acoustic model—his extravagant skills on the instrument aren’t often discussed. Perhaps that is because his guitar playing is about tone and what Joe Henry calls “the authority of rhythm” rather than attention-grabbing solos. “I never had the desire to be the lead guitarist or the hot instrumentalist,” Burnett told Performing Songwriter. “I’ve always just gone for the groove.”

  The songs, all Burnett originals, were performed as a kind of cycle. He told me he had been going through “huge shifts” in his life since the birth of Simone—who, he joked, was “hilariously funny but also makes you jump out of your skin.” (“Being a parent is not the most natural thing for him,” Simone Burnett lightly remarked. “It stresses him to be patient.”) Whatever those shifts may have been, much of the material on this occasion was bleak: “You are my darkness / I crawl through you / Feeling my way / To no light”; “People tell me I look like hell / I am hell”; “Strike a match so I can see if I’ve been down here before / Where is the floor? / What is it for?”

  In 2000, Burnett moved on to another Shepard play, The Late Henry Moss, which opened that December at San Francisco’s Magic Theater. Like other Shepard works, notably True West, this one features battling brothers (played at the Magic by Nick Nolte and Sean Penn) and is set in a mythic American West. The work concerns the secrets left behind by a boozing father (played by James Gammon of Major League fame) following his death and the anguished efforts of his sons to come to terms with them and each other. The big-time Hollywood cast also included Woody Harrelson and Cheech Marin.

  As Burnett explains in This So-Called Disaster, noted indie director Michael Almereyda’s 2003 documentary about the making of The Late Henry Moss, he set out to write a score in which the rhythms and tones of the music would go under the rhythms and tones of the dialog. “As soon as you do that, it actually becomes a song,” he says in the film. In an unusual bit of staging, he and fellow guitarist Jerry Hannan performed the music, much of which has a meditative, droning quality, from the side of the stage during each performance. With all those movie stars shouting and making faces and getting physically hurled through space, there was little likelihood that the audience paid much attention to the music. (Burnett’s way-inside joke was that was that everything was in D minor except for the guttural major chord howl Gammons lets out when he makes his entrance.)

  The best the San Francisco Chronicle could say about the “murmurous” music was that it “burnishes the scene.” Variety reported that “Burnett’s sporadic guitar strummings seem hardly worth the bother.” Reviewers were not terribly kind to the onstage action, either, in San Francisco or New York. And revivals of Henry Moss haven’t done anything to correct its standing as one of Shepard’s lesser efforts. However, not yet done with theater, Burnett traveled to Galway, Ireland, with the Steppenwolf cast members John Mahoney and Martha Lavey in the summer of 2001 to perform True America: The Work of Sam Shepard, a basic restaging of the Chicago show, without Shepard. And that September, Steppenwolf’s revival of Mother Courage and Her Children was staged with an original score by Burnett and Darrell Leonard, still close collaborators after all those years.

  As originally written, the music for Mother Courage (as well as The Late Henry Moss) was influenced by Delta blues great Skip James’s unusual use of a guitar tuned to an open E-minor chord. The composers also borrowed liberally from the traditional sounds of New Orleans and eastern Europe. But as rehearsals proceeded—uneasily, in the aftermath of 9/11—and rewrites piled up, the singing actors grew less and less comfortable with the score. Sam Phillips recorded demos of the songs to guide them, but they didn’t help. Finally, the cast started singing whatever it felt like singing and the production shed much of th
e original music.

  Whatever the outcome of such efforts, Burnett was artistically renewed by his involvement in the theater. In an interview with Mark Guarino of the Chicago Daily Herald, he said that writing for characters in a play freed him up creatively and got him out of the singer-songwriter trap, which is “always about you.” He added, “When I started performing, there was a very, very strong tide that ran toward being louder and more treble, and there was this whole aural assault. And after working in the theater you begin to see that there are many, many, many other ways to approach music. Because you’re essentially underscoring this story that’s being told. And that’s what music is at its core: Storytelling. It opened up pure universes of sound to me.”

  As reported in Variety, for the purpose of recording all the music he wrote for The Late Henry Moss, Mother Courage, and The Tooth of Crime in his home Electromagnetic Studio, Burnett purchased the soundboard used at Sunset Sound to record such albums as the Doors’ LA Woman, Janis Joplin’s Pearl, and Led Zeppelin’s II and III and to mix the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street. (According to engineer Mike Piersante, Burnett loved the console’s “big fat tone.”) That promising project failed to materialize. But by then, thanks to an impulsive call he made to the filmmaker Joel Coen, Burnett’s world was expanding in yet another new and compelling direction.

  CHAPTER 17

  Coen Brother

  From the start, Burnett was a big fan of the Coen Brothers. He liked the bold visual style of their 1984 debut, Blood Simple, a postmodern noir shot in Texas (some of his friends worked on it). He was even more knocked out by their fevered 1987 farce, Raising Arizona, in which they made a baby crawling across the screen “look like the apocalypse” and had the cinematic chops to quote Dr. Strangelove (see the scene in which John Goodman’s jailbird sees a reflection of the acronym POE, for Peace on Earth, in his bathroom mirror). He thought so much of those scenes that he called the director Joel Coen out of the blue and arranged to meet him.

  “T Bone was tickled by the fact that we used a banjo to play Beethoven on the soundtrack, a version of ‘Ode to Joy’ which we’d heard Pete Seeger do on a record from the ’50s,” Joel Coen told Richard Harrington of the Washington Post in 2004, referring to Goofing Off Suite (1954). Burnett and the brothers, who had a mutual friend in Tom Waits, discovered they shared many film and music favorites and talked about working together in the future.

  That future arrived in the spring of 1996, when Burnett was in New York working on The Tooth of Crime. He ran into Joel Coen and his actress wife, Frances McDormand, at the Broadway opening of a simultaneous Shepard revival, Buried Child. The Coens were in the planning stages for The Big Lebowski, the ripping farce that foisted the Dude, Jeff Bridges’s pot-smoking 1970s superslacker, on the uptight 1990s. They had already settled on a few songs for the film, including Kenny Rogers & the First Edition’s psychedelic novelty “Just Dropped in (To See What Condition My Condition Was In),” and the Gipsy Kings’ endearingly overheated flamenco-style cover of the Eagles’ “Hotel California” (“such a luvva place”). They invited Burnett (who was known to substitute the name Don Henley when he sang the folk classic “John Henry”) to put together the rest of the soundtrack. The rest is doper movie history.

  Burnett’s previous involvements in feature films included contributing a version of “Humans from Earth” to the German director Wim Wenders’s Until the End of the World (1991), working on songs with the actor River Phoenix for Peter Bogdanovich’s underrated Nashville rom-com The Thing Called Love (1993), and producing the soundtrack albums for Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-Porter (1995) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (1996).

  “I didn’t really mean to get into the film business,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. But after listening to the first Beatles albums to come out on CD, he said, he realized he had to “diversify” because “anybody could have made one of those CDs. It wasn’t like a vinyl album where you had to go out and press it. Anybody could go buy a CD and press it at a workstation. So it was obvious they had released a master of a CD master, and that they were out of their minds. In the short term, record companies raked in a lot of money because of the CD replacement cycle. But it was obvious that they had let the cat out of the bag.” He added, “It was clear even back then that the digital thing was gonna come down like hail on the musicians.”

  More on the perils of digital and the plight of musicians later. The Big Lebowski, about a stoned-out guy named Lebowski who is mistreated by thugs mistaking him for a millionaire with the same name, afforded Burnett the rare opportunity to float through time and memory to come up with cool tunes. Slipping into the Dude’s substance-altered consciousness like Raquel Welch shooting the coronary rapids in Fantastic Voyage, Burnett dialed up the dog-frequency spectacularist Yma Sumac, the misfit blues-rocker Captain Beefheart, and that smoldering genre to herself, Nina Simone. He turned to the 1960s Hollywood songbook for the lush “Lujon,” from Henry Mancini’s album Mr. Lucky Goes Latin, and obscure 1960s Italian spy movies for Piero Piccioni’s faux-funky “Traffic Boom”—the theme of the porno video in which the millionaire Lebowski’s wife, Bunny, cavorts with the cable repair guy.

  And then there is the Texas legend Townes Van Zandt’s cover of the Rolling Stones’ “Dead Flowers,” which Burnett secured for the closing credits after some creative wrangling with Allen Klein. The former Rolling Stones manager owned the rights to the song and reportedly wanted $150,000 for its use. The Coens arranged a private screening of The Big Lebowski for him. As Burnett recounted the viewing for Rolling Stone, “It got to the part where the Dude says, ‘I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man!’ Klein stands up and says, ‘That’s it, you can have the song!’” Even if that’s not exactly how things transpired—Alex Belth, the Coens’ young personal assistant at the time, writes in his 2014 Kindle single The Dudes Abide: The Coen Brothers & the Making of The Big Lebowski that “it didn’t seem as if anything had been resolved with Klein” at the screening—it makes for a good story.

  What makes the soundtrack so good and fresh is Burnett’s (and the Coens’) refusal to program songs that comment directly on the characters or explicitly evoke the era. “I don’t have a lot of desire to sort of reinvent the ’70s, as a lot of these soundtracks are doing, or to republicize them,” Burnett told Entertainment Weekly, alluding to the films of Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson. Rather, he lets his imagination run free, using the trippy, larkish vibe of the film as a thematic umbrella for his selections. “Everything sounds the same now, but everyone’s looking for something different,” he told Spin a few years later. “When you have a choice between *NSYNC and the Backstreet Boys, it’s not like having a choice between Johnny Cash and Duke Ellington.”

  No one could have expected The Big Lebowski, which drew mixed reviews and did middling box office, to become a cultural touchstone. Bridges’s ultra-convincing stoner performance certainly is central to the film’s appeal; part of the fun is wondering how much Dude there is in Bridges, Cal-tanned son of the 1960s, and vice versa. But the songs opened up the film to repeated viewings. Foreshadowing the intense scrutiny of Burnett’s soundtrack for the 2014 HBO sensation True Detective, Lebowski heads pored over the musical choices like treasure hunters examining a rare map.

  Gabriel Rissa, contributing to the LA Weekly’s 2013 “Definitive Guide to the Music of The Big Lebowski,” wrote that Captain Beefheart’s “Her Eyes Are a Blue Million Miles” is “an homage to a rug in the film bearing a blue diamond within an oval.” (The rug, as all Lebowski fans know, is “the impetus for Maude and the Dude’s initial meeting.”) Young grooms of Generation Dude adopted Bob Dylan’s “The Man in Me” (a minor tune from New Morning that plays over the opening credits) as their wedding theme. “One summer a few years ago,” wrote Paul T. Bradley in the LA Weekly, “I attended eight weddings, from New England to Alabama to Southern California, and all but one featured ‘The Man in Me.’”

  Largely because The Big Lebowski lasted
such a short time in theaters, the soundtrack album didn’t sell well. But that curse proved to be a blessing. Had there been a second volume of Lebowski tunes, it would have included the Stanley Brothers’ recording of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” Instead, via a thrilling new recording by Dan Tyminski of Alison Krauss’s band Union Station, the aged folk standard became one of the centerpieces of the Coens’ next film, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the soundtrack album of which sold an astonishing eight million copies, introduced millions of Americans to native sounds they had never heard, and laid the groundwork for the sweeping musical movement called Americana.

  A loose retelling of Homer’s Odyssey set in late-1930s Mississippi, O Brother stars George Clooney as a chain gang escapee in desperate search of hidden loot. For all the history and tradition embodied in the songs, which reach back to England, Ireland, and Wales and the mountain communities of Kentucky, Virginia, and North Carolina—where, unbeknownst to most of America, powerful musical narratives were being passed around during the early years of the twentieth century—this was no archival project. “In recording period music,” Burnett told me, “people usually are so focused on getting the form right that they miss the content. They use the latest digital technology, with a lot of echo and separation, and record the music like it’s by an old-timey band. With O Brother, we used ’30s technology, but we recorded it like a rock ’n’ roll band.”

  This was one film for which the music came first. To enable the Coen Brothers to build their tableaux-like scenes around the songs, the soundtrack had to be completed months before filming commenced. The tracks were recorded at Nashville’s Sound Emporium, Burnett’s favorite place to capture acoustic music. But before a single dial on the soundboard was turned, he and his crew needed to make it known among local musicians that though O Brother was a high-spirited Hollywood comedy, the music would be treated with respect. As a welcoming gesture, the city’s old guard players were invited to a gathering at the Ocean Way Nashville studio, built in a hundred-year-old Gothic revival graystone church on Music Row. With the venerated Ralph Stanley at her side, Gillian Welch played the assuring host. Musicians who wanted to audition for the soundtrack did so in a big room Burnett had set up for that purpose.