T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  As difficult as it was to spend all those hours together recording A Boot and a Shoe, Phillips told me, doing anything else didn’t make sense: “In T Bone fashion, there was method to his madness. At that point, we had worked together so long. As luck would have it, we were growing apart, but he felt we should get out there and try. You go and record, that’s what we did. Though he did stay out for a lot of the recording, which was unusual.”

  Phillips’s emotional state comes through measured and clear on songs such as “How to Quit” (“Can’t get free from freedom / When I refuse to choose”), “Open the World” (“My life went on without me till pain brought the house down”), and “Infiltration” (“If you’re a dead man then stick to being dead”). But in the end, A Boot and a Shoe was a remarkably civil affair—nothing like the trading of shots that was Richard and Linda Thompson’s splitsville masterpiece Shoot Out the Lights, or the open expression of marital discord on Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell’s “divorce albums.”

  “I can’t remember once having an argument with [Sam] in the studio, even during this last record,” Burnett told Chicago Tribune critic Greg Kot. “That’s been the easiest part of our life together.” Now the question was, how would he fare in the studio alone, applying what he learned making Fan Dance and A Boot and a Shoe to his first solo recording since he dared to look under his hat?

  CHAPTER 20

  Lead Actor

  In early 2005, Burnett retreated to the woods of Big Sur in northern California to “disconnect.” Living alone in a tent, he said, without a guitar or any other instrument, he spent a month listening to blues, New Orleans soul, Appalachian folk, and Haitian music. He wrote down anything that came into his head, mostly in the form of couplets and verses. Back home in Los Angeles, he sifted through his jottings, devising song lyrics from them, and set them to music. He was finally ready after fourteen years—a stretch of time in which sports dynasties rise and fall and rise, Jewish boys attain manhood, and three leap years occur—to make a T Bone Burnett album.

  Artists “disappear” for different reasons. The blues singer Alberta Hunter, considered the equal of Bessie Smith, left music at the height of her powers in 1950 to become a nurse and remained in “hiding” for nearly three decades. The British film director Michael Powell was blackballed by the film industry after audiences were scandalized by his final major work, the creepy 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom. The comedian Dave Chappelle quit Comedy Central over creative differences, reportedly walking away from a $50 million deal, and dropped out of sight in South Africa. It is reasonable to think that Burnett disappeared from his own recording career because he was tired of rejection and weary of competing for attention, convinced he wasn’t cut out to join the Elvis Costellos, Warren Zevons, and Jackson Brownes of the world. And, of course, he was so busy producing other people, it was difficult to find time to devote to his own work.

  But it is also important to consider that in producing exceptional albums by such artists as Costello, Los Lobos, Gillian Welch, Sam Phillips, and the company of O Brother, he was making artistic statements that were as personal as the ones he made under his own name. He hadn’t disappeared, he was just using those outside projects as conduits for his artistic voice. “I think he sees less and less separation between what it means to be the producer and the singer-songwriter,” Joe Henry told me. “He’s a record-maker. He’s in the business of conjuring.”

  As an artist who, like his mentor, has mastered the art of sublimating his personal vision in the work of others, Henry knows something about this duality. He takes great satisfaction in knowing that, even if it is not immediately evident to listeners, his exceptional touch made gems like Allen Toussaint’s 2009 piano masterpiece The Bright Mississippi what they are. Without Henry imagining that album—the New Orleans R&B great’s first and only foray into jazz—into existence and steering it down the right paths, we likely would never have been exposed to this side of Toussaint’s extraordinary talent. But unlike Burnett, Henry thrives on whatever opportunities he gets to perform and make contact with his devoted fan base. He learned long ago to stop worrying about making a commercial mark; he wouldn’t be the artist he is if he did. (He had no illusion that the boost he got from his sister-in-law Madonna’s recording of his song “Stop” was more than a single strike of lightning.) In the end, it is a question of constitution.

  “Fran McDormand said an extraordinary thing when we were doing this movie, [the Coen Brothers’] Inside Llewyn Davis,” Burnett told the Hollywood Reporter. “She said, ‘The reason so few great actors make great musicians, and so few great musicians make great actors, is they’re completely opposite disciplines. The actor submerges his own personality and projects another personality, and the musician projects his personality. So while the musician is projecting his personality, the actor is suppressing his.’ It’s difficult to do both things at once. It’s like rubbing your stomach and patting someone else’s head—in a different country. I’m not comfortable getting out in front of people and making the great gesture or anything. So maybe I’m more of an actor!”

  When you factor in Burnett’s comments about self-consciousness being the enemy of the artist, and the act of self-revelation being so difficult, the idea that this man, who once described himself to me as “the most embarrassed person I’ve ever met in my whole life,” is more of an “actor” certainly rings true. For Burnett, being a “musician” unavoidably takes him to a dark place. That is where he finds his artistic voice, but it is also where he struggles with doubt. How much can he safely reveal? When is he being honest and when is he evading emotional truth, dancing away from it with irony and sarcasm and other writerly tricks? Does safety matter? Being an “actor,” he assumes another identity, moves into the light of helping others, bringing out their best, facilitating their grand gestures. And yet few singer-songwriters in pop music who double as producers have compiled a body of work of their own that is as impressive as Burnett’s.

  Burnett tipped that scale when he returned from Big Sur and recorded his boldest, bravest, and most bewitching effort, The True False Identity (2006). With its massed percussion, tribal rhythms, and subterranean tones, this is jungle music for the ambient crowd, recasting the blues somewhere between Tom Waits’s Bone Machine and King Sunny Ade’s Juju Music. It is an album on which he catches up to his radical sound vision as it catches up to him. Good music should be “dense and booming and stomping and perplexing,” Burnett told Texas Music. Judging by the free improvising that took place during the recording, and the cutting and pasting of recording tape that followed, à la Bitches Brew–era Miles Davis, good music should also be able to redefine itself on the run.

  “I told my three drummers, Carla Azar, Jim Keltner, and Jay Bellerose, ‘We’ve already heard every beat, so let’s not have any beats,” Burnett told Sound & Vision. “Let’s just rumble, let’s just all create a big thing that’s too much to hear . . . make it so we and all the people out there listening are like beads inside a maraca and let’s just shake it like that!”

  With its depth charge tones—heavy acoustic bass plus heavier bass drums—and spooky effects, “Fear Country” is a searing State of the Union address. “I gotta tell on you,” he sings, in a sly homage to Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, warning us that “nobody knows what’s going down, but it’s going down.” The religious right gets it in the chin on “Palestine, Texas,” a spoken word commentary with jiving rhymes (“Phyllis” and “bacillus”) and references to the Rat Pack (Frank, Dean, Sam, and Peter). “When you come out of this self-delusion / You’re gonna need a soul transfusion,” Burnett says over a crunching, Beefheart-like beat and wailing psychedelic guitar. He saves his greatest cynical ripostes for the place he works, “Hollywood Mecca of the Movies,” where crime, drugs, cheating, and spying are proof that “Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises,” and targets the opportunistic “black mass media” on “Zombieland.” “Accentuate the positive / Destroy all the negatives,” he sing
s, riding a click-clacking dub/reggae groove like a wave.

  In vivid contrast is “Earlier Baghdad (The Bounce),” a darkly glowing, blues-based reverie by a broken man who “lost sight of the light.” With its lovely melodic riff, it is Burnett’s most affecting tune since “Madison Avenue.” He finds solace and security in the shuffling “I’m Going on a Long Journey Never to Return” and the elegant Johnny Cash / Sun Records tribute “Shaken Rattled and Rolled” (the album is dedicated to the legendary Cash bassist Roy Huskey Jr.).

  It wouldn’t be long before Burnett was telling interviewers he didn’t like recording or processing music, but coming off The True False Identity, he exulted in the possibilities of the studio. “I love sound and being able to bend it with precision, or imprecision if you like,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 2006. He added, “The idea of going out and doing that live now is very exciting. There’s some kind of focus I have now regarding playing live that I never had before.”

  His nearly two-hour performance at Chicago’s Vic Theater, attended by a modest but demonstrative crowd, was rough around the edges. The band hadn’t had much time to rehearse, but the looseness of the performance proved liberating. Rapping for all he was worth on the spoken material and tearing into “Blinded by the Darkness,” his account of the unholy turf war in which the laws of man go up against the laws of God, Burnett sounded rejuvenated, his evangelical self returning in style. For once, the musician in him trumped the actor and had everyone singing his song. However quickly it fell from view, The True False Identity went a long way toward capturing his true true self. But it was, indeed, back in the studio, as an “actor” working with one of the most unusual star pairings in pop history, that he went on to make one of his greatest statements.

  CHAPTER 21

  Alchemist

  Such a tight lid was kept on the recording of Raising Sand, according to the Sound Emporium studio manager Juanita Copeland, that no one in the outside world knew that Robert Plant and Alison Krauss were there making a record together. Even people on the inside were kept in the dark. The drummer Jay Bellerose thought he had come to Nashville to record separate Alison Krauss and Robert Plant albums. And there was no guarantee the right kind of chemistry would exist between the singers—or between them and the producer. When the trio descended on the studio from Krauss’s Nashville-area home, where they chose songs and came up with basic arrangements for them, the plan was to cut a few tunes and see how things went. “People were muttering things to each other,” Copeland told me. “They didn’t see it working.”

  When Burnett’s gear started arriving from Los Angeles in huge crates—one giant, coffin-like container held no fewer than forty of his guitars and assorted string instruments—it was clear that the game was on. But as these things went, it was a rather quiet game. Burnett had gone to school on Roy Orbison’s remarkable ability to attain maximum power on record through minimal exertion. Orbison sang so softly in the studio that you could barely hear him from a few feet away, but captured on mike and turned up in the engineering, his vocals came through in all their strength and tonal richness. Based on the same principle, Burnett had his drummers play softly. “The more quietly you play, the less attack and more tone there is,” he told Performing Songwriter. “If you hit a guitar too hard, it chokes the note off; the volume of sound that’s attempting to escape from the box turns in on itself and cancels itself out, so the sound just collapses. The same with a drum: If you hit it too hard and leave the stick there, nothing happens. But if you tap it softly, you actually get a much fuller sound.”

  For Burnett, Raising Sand was a watershed project in fully realizing the promise of his low-end vision. To create “a new dimension in sound” he had experimented in creating “volume by depth”—increasing and expanding the infinite overtones down at the bottom rather than cranking up the decibels. A high percentage of modern music wastes the dynamic range of a CD and cripples the sound by pushing everything, including the lower/softer parts, into the upper dB range, to make it as loud as possible. “It’s a question of finding how much low tone you can put on, at what volume, and at what relationship to the high tones,” Burnett told Tape Op.

  “If you’ve ever been to a football stadium and heard a marching band . . . there can be 25 tubas blowing their brains out, but at the top all you can hear is the one guy playing a triangle.” He added, “Those triangle sounds go fast. In the time it takes a single 100-cycle tone to complete, 100 ten-cycle tones have completed. So it’s zoom, the high sounds go. You can put them way, way back there and they’re still effective. It’s a question of now, in this new medium, of looking for the new balance. What makes sense in this medium as a balance? We’re experimenting all the time—it’s all completely experimental.”

  Raising Sand was recorded live to tape, but in a departure from O Brother’s on-the-floor vocalizing, Plant and Krauss sat in a booth, half-facing each other at a 45-degree angle. As if guided by a harmonic divining rod, they gravitated toward the sweet spots of Burnett’s resonant chamber sound—those overtones, in constant, reverberant bloom, those guitars gloriously a-tremble. A number of songs were cut in one take, immediately after the singers ran through the arrangement with the band, though there were occasional vocal retakes and a good deal of overdubbing. Marc Ribot would return to Sound Emporium at night, sometimes working on his ideas with the audio engineer Mike Piersante until the early morning hours.

  One of Burnett’s most string-centric productions—keyboards are absent on all but one of the songs—Raising Sand is an album of emotional extremes. At one end are the pure longing of Sam Phillips’s Kurt Weill–inspired number “Sister Rosetta Goes before Us,” on which Krauss speaks with piercing clarity to the “echoes of light that shine like stars after they’re gone,” and “Please Read the Letter,” a sepia-toned lament Plant wrote and recorded with Jimmy Page during their post-Zep partnership. (His brief interjection of mentholated blues moans—“Well, well, well, well, well, well”—only serves to remind us what a different singer he is here.) At the other end of the spectrum are the stark denial of Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’,” which receives a swarming, fuzz-toned, psychedelic treatment on which Krauss cuts loose on violin, and a theatrical reading of Tom Waits’s “Trampled Rose.” The mood is subdued throughout: Not until the irresistible fifth song on the album, the Everly Brothers’ “Gone Gone Gone (Done Moved On),” on which Burnett and Dennis Crouch double up on bass to give extra oomph to the beat, does the tempo quicken.

  Bellerose, among others, was struck by the sheer range of the music. “It covered every moment of my life, every influence,” he told me. “Watching [drummer] Paul Humphrey on Lawrence Welk, my brother’s influence in turning me on to Gene Krupa, my band director with his Chick Corea charts, and T Bone referencing Sandy Nelson [of “Teen Beat” fame] on ‘Gone Gone Gone.’” The drummer was equally impressed by the opportunity to plug into those sounds, and respond to them, in his own idiosyncratic, spontaneous way: “I had started to give up hope. I mean, I was ready to start making records at the end of an empty room with a click track. I had these weird dreams before that first session with T Bone and decided that I was just gonna be myself, playing the way I think. His first response was, ‘That’s great.’ I felt like I had found home.”

  Raising Sand, the album some people thought had little chance of succeeding, found many homes. Released on October 23, 2007, on Rounder, an independent, roots-oriented label not accustomed to making such a loud noise, it opened at No. 2 on the Billboard charts, the highest Plant or Krauss had placed as a solo act and Krauss’s first showing in the Top 10. It received a big boost fifteen months later when it shook up the Grammy Awards by winning Album of the Year (beating out efforts by Coldplay, Lil’ Wayne, Radiohead, and Ne-Yo) and Best Contemporary Folk/Americana Album and trophies for three of its songs. “Please Read the Letter” won Record of the Year, “Rich Woman” Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, and “Killing the Blues” Best Country Collaboratio
n with Vocals. Burnett, an equal partner whose name deserves to be on the cover of the album along with those of Plant and Krauss, did not win Producer of the Year (in the nonclassical field). That award went to Rick Rubin, largely because he worked on five different albums (including Jakob Dylan’s first solo effort, Seeing Things), though none of them in the same class as Raising Sand.

  When Plant and Krauss toured in support of the album, Burnett accompanied them on rhythm guitar. As with Rolling Thunder, albeit in a very different guise, he got to sing a couple of his own songs. There were widespread hopes for a sequel to Raising Sand. In 2009, following the Grammy sweep, Burnett did in fact return to the studio with Plant and Krauss, but not surprisingly in the case of such a special undertaking—and one involving such sizable egos and delicate balances—the magic wasn’t there the second time around. Neither was the fun. “There was this sense that there were too many cooks in the kitchen,” Bellerose told me. “The first time, the whole thing was a bit of a mystery. T Bone was in command. But after being on the road with the album and having been through it, Robert and Alison and everyone all had an idea of how things should go. That clogged the process up, slowed it down.”

  Plans for a follow-up were dropped—or so it seemed. In a May 2014 chat with Rolling Stone, characterizing Burnett as “very elusive and incredibly hard to find,” Plant said that he and Krauss had gone into a California studio with Daniel Lanois after the Raising Sand tour, but the new songs he and Lanois had written together “didn’t really lend themselves to a vocal collaboration.” Regardless of whether subsequent talks about a Raising Sand redux will lead to anything, the trio will always have Nashville—and Los Angeles, where during a break from adding final touches to the album at Electromagnetic Studio, Krauss started playing “Whole Lotta Love” and an impromptu Led Zeppelin hoedown broke out. Talk about a song never remaining the same.