T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  In their notes, Burnett and Buckley say they imagined the setting of the performance as a 1940s nightclub, but it feels more like a swank, darkened theater. With the guitarist Bill Frisell, an inspired choice, heightening the dreamy atmosphere with his twinkling high-string effects—and occasional psychedelia—the sound of Ghostlight is so comforting in its shimmer, so alive in the dark, the songs take on an almost lullaby-like quality in seeking comfort in memories. What is this thing called jazz? The easy answer is just about anything you want it to be. But when an artist achieves a true jazz moment, as occurs here more than once, you’re left knowing how futile it is to try and define that triumph in words. As Billie Holiday said, don’t explain.

  CHAPTER 23

  Blues Man

  Rock fans are used to seeing their idols come and go; only a few freakish bands have the dinosaur instincts (and cash reserves) of the Rolling Stones. But it is possible for someone who thrilled to great bluesmen in their youth to be still following them deep into their adulthood. In the case of a precious few of those fans, like Burnett, it is also possible for them to be working side by side with their heroes. He reached such a pinnacle in producing Willie Dixon, widely considered the blues’ greatest songwriter, and B. B. King, the king of the blues in more than name.

  Hidden Charms, Dixon’s Burnett-produced 1988 album, emerged from the two sharing a song publisher, Bug Music, which had just signed a deal with Capitol Records. Dixon had founded the Blues Heaven Foundation a few years earlier to promote the music and help blues artists recover song royalties. Hidden Charms was part of his campaign to reclaim his own compositions. (In 1994, two years after his death, a jury found that he had been duped into signing away a third of his song rights to his ex-manager.) Burnett, who became one of the most outspoken advocates of musicians’ rights, was helping the Chess Records legend fight that good fight.

  Largely consisting of lesser-known originals, Dixon’s first vocal effort in many years was no masterpiece, though Burnett certainly had one in mind when he gathered together the longtime Chess pianist Lafayette Leake; the guitarist Cash McCall, a protégé of Dixon’s; the harmonica player Sugar Blue of fleeting Rolling Stones fame; the jazz bassist Red Callander; and the drummer Earl Palmer. The musicians, who needed time to gel, found themselves at odds with one another in trying to decipher Dixon’s cryptic directions. And Dixon came down with throat problems, sabotaging Burnett’s plans to record the album live over four days with no overdubs.

  On top of everything else, the noted roots music author Peter Guralnick (now best known for his two-volume Elvis Presley biography), on hand to report on the sessions for Musician, took after Burnett for his stressed-out manner, which he wrote “suggests a thoroughly urban insecurity grafted onto the innocent aspect of a Hans Brinker with bangs.” Well, as literary allusions go, it was less predictable than was Ichabod Crane. (David Mansfield was sure to appreciate the skating reference.) And Hidden Charms did win a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. Then, twenty years later, came B.B.

  For Burnett, hearing King live and on record as a kid was life changing. He first saw the “Beale Street Blues Boy” at Dallas’s Central Forest Ballroom and Green Parrot Club and never forgot the “big, dreamy, ethereal sound” of those shows. He also treasured King’s blazing hits from the 1950s on Modern/Crown, which bore the inimitable stamp of the producer-arranger-mentor Maxwell Davis. “I loved those records, their size and freedom and beautiful, beautiful arrangements,” Burnett told me during the recording of what turned out to be King’s final album, One Kind Favor (2008). In producing it, he drew generously from those early memories.

  In the eighty-two-year-old King, who died in 2015, Burnett had one of the most iconic figures, in the true sense of the word, in popular culture. Combining Robert Johnson’s country blues (King’s parents were sharecroppers), Louis Jordan’s party-hearty jump and boogie, and Lonnie Johnson’s single-string, jazz-inflected sound, he was an embodiment of the music in all its geographical and stylistic range. King was also known worldwide for his multitude of genre-crossing duets with Tony Bennett, Luciano Pavarotti, Willie Nelson, and U2, his Kennedy Center Honors recognition, his airline and car commercials, and the Memphis and New York supper clubs bearing his name.

  Various producers over the years had attempted to “update” King, with disappointing results. Since crossing over into the commercial big time with Completely Well, the 1969 album featuring the string-overdubbed monster hit “The Thrill Is Gone”—the culmination of producer Bill Szymcyzk’s own efforts to pry King loose from formulas that weren’t serving him well—the bluesman had largely been heard in compromised settings. As albums like B.B.’s self-produced Blues on the Bayou (1998) attest, he could deliver the goods when he wanted to, but at other times he sounded uninspired, preaching to a choir that didn’t ask much of him. For all his fame and all his honors, many or even most of his followers had never been exposed to the gutty sound with which the Memphis native attained stardom in Los Angeles. Burnett wanted to uplift him by putting him in touch with his roots.

  Burnett sifted through dozens of songs King discovered as a boy and performed in the 1950s. Together, they settled on well-known tunes like the Mississippi Sheiks’s “Sittin’ on Top of the World” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More Years” and lesser-known songs like T-Bone Walker’s “Get These Blues Off Me” and the modern R&B artist Oscar Lollie’s “Waiting for Your Call.” He convinced King to step away from his usual ways of doing things and reflect on those classic Maxwell Davis arrangements, which revealed the arranger’s big band background (he had played tenor saxophone for Fletcher Henderson and arranged for Louis Jordan) and played up King’s love of the swing-era sounds of Benny Goodman, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and Jimmie Lunceford. King agreed to that strategy with a wink and a nod: “I hear a lot of people saying now, ‘Those things you used to do, they’re something else,’” he told the Los Angeles Times. “But they didn’t like ’em when I was doing ’em!” But, he told Rolling Stone, “Those old records still sound pretty good.”

  At Village Recorder in Los Angeles, Burnett created a double quartet for King with Dr. John on piano, Neil Larsen on organ, and Jim Keltner and Jay Bellerose on drums. The presence of Dr. John (aka Mac Rebennack), with whom King had worked previously, was key, reflecting Burnett’s belief that taking an artist out of his comfort zone doesn’t mean removing all comforts. The first thing that strikes you about the music, aside from its density and deep tonality, is the joyful energy that radiates from it, even—or especially—when King is lamenting the loss of a lover (“If you would only listen to me baby / We would still be together today,” he declaims on Lonnie Johnson’s “My Love Is Down”) or contemplating mortality (“See that my grave is kept clean,” he sings on a punchy reading of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s song by that name—the “one kind favor” of the album title). The second thing that hits you is the bruising force of King’s vocals, which, coming from a man on the far side of life, couldn’t sound more alive and present.

  “His voice is more powerful than it’s ever been,” Burnett told Mix. “B.B. is rightly regarded as one of the best guitarists ever, but I also believe he’s a better singer than he is a guitarist, so I really wanted to focus on his singing. His voice has mellowed into this almost Billy Eckstine vibrato, which is deep and rich and powerful.”

  And then there are Darrell Leonard’s impeccable eight-man horn arrangements. On many blues recordings, the horns have a locked-in feel. On One Kind Favor, they play an ever-changing and at times unpredictable role, sometimes appearing for a full chorus and sometimes for a few bars. Tucked behind King, the only soloist on all but one of the songs, the horns act like a platform for his stinging lines. In rhythm, they comp behind him like a pianist behind a soloist. In full swing, they are a moveable feast for King’s vocalizing, pushing him toward jazz. The musicians sat close to one another in a circle, with Burnett positioned between King and Dr. John so he could hear both of them play in
real time. He didn’t bother with earphones. “I knew if I could hear Mac and if I could hear B.B.—I knew they were good, that was a take,” he told Tape Op.

  As you might expect with Dr. John at the piano, there’s a strong New Orleans element to the music, particularly on the title song and “Sittin’ on Top of the World,” which are alive with second-line rhythms and the good Doc’s strolling and strutting figures. In highlighting that part of King’s style, which has long featured a distinctive mambo beat, One Kind Favor was in keeping with Burnett’s ongoing celebration of the borderless glories of American music. Using old, crusty tube amplifiers, among other period equipment, Burnett and his longtime engineer Mike Piersante roughed up King’s guitar, acting in recognition of the fact that for all the technical advances there have been in the modern era of sound, there is no improving on what was achieved at the height of the studio era. You have to think that One Kind Favor would have impressed Maxwell Davis. Young T Bone likely would have been as well.

  So would Tom Dowd, the producer responsible for the Allman Brothers Band’s memorable output at Atlantic Records. When, at the behest of his manager, Gregg Allman met with Burnett in 2009, the bluesy singer-keyboardist was still so shaken by Dowd’s passing that he hadn’t been in the studio as a solo act since and had no desire to end that streak. But during his talk with Burnett, an admirer of Dowd, Allman found they shared similar tastes in songs, album concepts, and recording techniques. “Damned if T Bone ain’t just about like Tommy Dowd!” he concluded, as related to LancasterOnline.

  Allman had a long history of popularizing blues classics with the Allman Brothers: Sonny Boy Williamson’s “One Way Out,” T-Bone Walker’s “Stormy Monday,” Blind Willie McTell’s “Statesboro Blues,” Willie Dixon’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man.” As with B. B. King, Burnett envisioned Allman going beyond such familiar tunes and taking on older, less well-known songs. From an external drive he had acquired containing thousands of old blues recordings—“extreme back-in-the-game stuff,” as Dr. John described them to the New York Times—Burnett chose around two dozen and asked Allman to pick fifteen. Allman hadn’t heard many of the songs, a large percentage of which were swing-mode numbers featuring horns, but after listening to them over a period of six weeks he made his selections, adding to the mix a personal favorite, Muddy Waters’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” “Basically, what I looked for was something I could do justice to vocally,” wrote Allman in his memoir My Cross to Bear, “and also that we could light some real nasty music to.”

  The project hit an early snag when Burnett asked Allman to show up at the studio without his band. It was only after two weeks of mulling things over that Allman agreed. His first encounter with Jay Bellerose may well have made him wonder what he had gotten into. “Jay only used one stick; the other hand would have a tambourine or a maraca,” Allman wrote in My Cross to Bear. “He tied these things to his leg, hollow like wax grapes, with paper clips, match heads, BBs in ’em, and they put little tiny microphones around his feet. When I first got to the studio, there were drums all over the place. It looked like a drum yard sale—not one drum matched another one. Some of them looked like they were from the Middle East or the Far East. I looked for the mounting on them—no mountings, all wood.”

  But his reservations disappeared when he heard Bellerose play—and when he spotted Dr. John, with whom he had been friends since the Allman Brothers opened for him in a Boston club in the 1960s. Rebennack appeared on and cowrote a song on Allman’s 1977 album Playin’ Up a Storm and had worked with him on other occasions. “T Bone knew that him being there would put a certain fire in my ass,” Allman said. “It was so good seeing Dr. John, both of us being sober.”

  From the start, Burnett was up to a spookier kind of gospel than he was on One Kind Favor. The opening tune, Sleepy John Estes’s “Floating Bridge,” has the feeling of odd assembled parts: Dennis Crouch’s super-heavy, popping bass; Dr. John’s slightly distorted piano; Doyle Bramhall’s ghostly, reverberating guitar; and Bellerose’s scraping, scratching, cardboard-texture drums. A new arrangement of “Rolling Stone” is part tribal march and part chain gang exercise. Drumbeats don’t get heavier or more convulsive than they do on the unsung Chicago blues composer Melvin London’s “Little by Little.” Well, actually, the drumming is even heavier on Skip James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” on which Colin Linden plinks out mournful notes on Dobro over what sounds like four or five bass drums.

  With the Brothers, Allman’s vocals, as strong and distinctive as they are, often seem to mark time between guitar exchanges. In this purposefully confined setting, heard up close, front and center, the singing is the main event. You wouldn’t think a man who had been through so much and was in such bad shape physically—a chronic hepatitis C sufferer, he was coming off liver transplant surgery—would sound this good. But there is an ease and clarity in his vocals, without any loss of soulful power, that we hadn’t heard before. “I’m hooked, Lord / I can’t let her go,” he wails in clenched desperation on the Bobby Bland tune “Blind Man,” drawing sympathy from Leonard’s five-piece horn section, here channeling the soulful swagger of Ray Charles’s great late-1950s band. On “Just Another Rider,” a mid-session addition he co-wrote with fellow Allman Brother and Gov’t Mule leader Warren Haynes, he slips into southern rock mode, but anchored by bass trumpet, baritone saxophone, and two tenors. B. B. King’s “Please Accept My Love” gets an unexpected rock ’n’ roll treatment, with a tinge of doo-wop.

  Allman was amazed at—and a little nervous about—how quickly the recording proceeded. “First takes scare me to death, they really do,” he said in program notes for an appearance at the Uptown Theater in Napa, California:

  On about three or maybe four of ’em, Bone comes over to the microphone, “Alright, we got it.” I say, “Well wait, hold it, hold it! What do you mean got it? We just ran it down!” “No, we got it.” I went back in the control room, I said, “Man, I know I can get it better than that.” He says, “What’s wrong with that?” I said, “Well, nothin’s wrong with it, I just think I can do it with a little more interesting feel.” So we went back out there, I tried, man, I tried as hard as I could. Nope.

  “We got 15 masters in 11 days,” he said. “Let me tell ya, they just went Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!”

  If One Kind Favor and Low Country Blues sound like companion pieces, that is because Burnett recorded them with a nearly identical sound field: Dr. John on the left, recessed; vocals in the middle, up front, just ahead of the bass and drums; and guitars and/or horns on the right. “T Bone used these old, ancient mikes, those old square ones with the holes in them—they look like they should be in front of Groucho Marx,” wrote Allman. “He would set those up all around the room; he had a different way of doing things, no doubt.”

  But more than the stereo alignment and choice of instrumentation, it is the spirit of these albums that links them. How often do artists as established as King and Allman have the opportunity to simultaneously reclaim their past and define their present in such timely, relevant fashion? And how often do they rediscover the wonders of the music that drew them to it in the first place? For all of Burnett’s savvy studio strategizing with King and Allman, for all his conceptualizing, it is the purity of feeling that emanates from these recordings, the oneness the artists have with the blues that makes the recordings special. Allman, who said that working on Low Country Blues was “a true highlight of my career,” didn’t win a Grammy for it. Ironically, the album lost to the Tedeschi-Trucks Band’s Revelator, featuring the longtime Allman guitarist Derek Trucks, nephew of the original Allman Brothers member Butch. But the album enjoyed the second-best debut ever for a blues album and charted higher than any of Allman’s other solo records ever had.

  King, who won a Grammy with One Kind Favor for Best Traditional Blues Album, said he was sad when the sessions were over. So was Burnett. “You know, I don’t know how many more albums B.B. is going to make,” he told me. “He’s nearing the en
d of his working life. Going back to the beginning had a lot of meaning, not just for him, but for everyone involved.” R.I.P B.B.

  CHAPTER 24

  Senior Adviser

  In 2009 in Nashville, during sessions for the aborted Raising Sand sequel, Burnett received a call from Elton John. It is hard to imagine they had never spoken or had a personal encounter in all their years in music. At sixty-one and sixty-two, respectively, the American and the Englishman shared many experiences and had many mutual acquaintances. One of those acquaintances was Leon Russell, whom John had idolized as a young singer-pianist during his first visits to the States and Burnett had mixed with professionally during his early years in Los Angeles.

  John, feeling guilty about falling out of touch with Russell, who was living in obscurity and poor health, was putting together a project to restore the Tulsan’s reputation—an album on which the two of them would sing and play side by side. John had become disillusioned with the recording process; however, impressed by the sound of Raising Sand and the albums Burnett had done with Elvis Costello, he contacted the producer.

  Make all the jokes you want about working the AARP circuit (something Bob Dylan was happy to do as cover boy of the membership organization’s magazine). Burnett was at a time in his life where, having dealt with his share of starry-eyed rockers and insecure artistes, he was happy to produce veteran musicians who, while not always a leisurely walk through the park, knew what making records was about. Of all the artists he had worked with, Sir Elton was among the most significant. With his consistently high level of achievement as a singer, songwriter, and hitmaker over the decades, he embodied the dream of self-willed success Burnett once had for himself as a singer-songwriter. An Englishman who embodied the great American rock ’n’ roll myth—“a kid walks out of his home with a song and nothing else, and conquers the world,” as Burnett described it at USC—John had been touched by the countryfied spirit of Sun Records. “We’re both cut from the same cloth,” he told the Hollywood Reporter, referring to Burnett. “We both love the same kind of music.”