T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  The Union, the John-Russell collaboration, got underway in January 2010. If ever a project testified to Burnett’s resourcefulness as a producer, and his Zen-like (and Pollock-like) openness to letting a recording unfold on its own organic terms, this was it. The sixty-eight-year-old Russell, who was in frail shape to begin with, had to have emergency surgery for a brain fluid leak shortly after the sessions began. Unavoidably, what was to have been a bilateral co-starring effort became an advanced exercise in music minus one. Backing tracks were recorded during Russell’s absence for him to sing and play over when he returned. But when he did, ten days later, he was not up to speed. Most of the songs, written during the sessions, ended up being composed by John and his longtime lyricist Bernie Taupin. For those who expected a set of rollicking, gospel-charged, dueling-piano numbers, the concentration on ballads had to be disappointing, notwithstanding the deep emotions of the Civil War lament “Gone to Shiloh” (featuring Neil Young on vocals) and “When Love Is Dying” (featuring Brian Wilson).

  For all that, The Union is a buoyant effort, especially when its roof is being raised by the drumming of Keltner and Bellerose. With its gospel swagger on tunes such as “A Dream Come True” (inspired by a Mahalia Jackson video Burnett played for the artists), the album sometimes recalls The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks. It’s a gesture of affection and respect for Russell not only from John, but also from Burnett, who had to be gratified by the role the album played in leading to the 2015 release of Les Blank’s long-lost documentary about Russell, A Poem Is a Naked Person.

  Burnett’s subsequent solo project with John, The Diving Board, is a very different kind of album. Recalling the thrills of John’s American debut, a six-night run at the Troubadour in August 1970, Burnett convinced John to return to the stripped-down, piano-trio format with which he announced himself to the United States but had never documented on a studio recording (the trio album 17-11-70 was taken from a live radio broadcast). His instrument up front in the mix, John gets to flaunt his musicianship, something that had been buried beneath lavish production schemes in the past. His vocals, too, come through forcefully, animating with clear-eyed intensity his song cycle about an artist looking back and wanting to return home. Even when he adds an instrumental effect or two for atmosphere, Burnett keeps the focus where it belongs. John has never sounded more radiant.

  The Burnett-John partnership lives on. In the summer of 2015, the artists completed work on a follow-up to The Diving Board. “That one was a parlor record,” Burnett told Billboard. “This is a festival.” They also worked together on American Epic, a documentary miniseries and recording project about the recording industry during the 1920s executive-produced by Burnett, Jack White, and Robert Redford. As part of the filming, John, Beck, Alabama Shakes, Merle Haggard, Nas, and other guests recorded on the primitive equipment producers used in the field in the early part of the twentieth century in their search for undiscovered talent. “He got my love of recording back,” John told the Hollywood Reporter. Just imagine: making an album could be fun.

  CHAPTER 25

  Audio Activist

  “People in Hollywood, we should go up there with pitchforks and torches to Silicon Valley,” Burnett rabble-roused in October 2013 in a Hollywood Reporter story. This the day after that trade publication and Billboard honored him with the Maestro Award, given annually to “artists who have made a lasting contribution to film and television music.” What had him riled was the “assault on the arts by the technology community,” as he put it a few months later in an op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times—an attack he said has resulted in inferior sounding recordings and a systematic devaluation of music in the name of profit.

  As he told the Reporter:

  If somebody had come down from Silicon Valley 30 years ago and said “I’ve got this new technology, and you’re gonna be able to see all around the world, transfer your stuff all over the world, you’re gonna be able to send things, you’ll be able to see your friends, you’ll be able to hear music—all you have to do is give up your privacy and your royalties,” everybody would have said,” Get the f out of town! Right now! Get out of here!” Instead, these guys came down with their shtick, and everybody went “Well, how can we make money from this great new technology?” “Oh, you’re not gonna make money from it. Everything’s gonna be free. Just give us the intellectual property we can send around in our pipes, everybody will subscribe, and then we’ll be rich. Not you, though.”

  Considering how content today’s earbudded listeners are to sacrifice high fidelity for convenience, and how indifferent those who see free downloads as part of their birthright are to the underpayment of musicians, there may be no greater end in sight to Burnett’s war on MP3s (“the worst blights ever on Earth”) than there is to the “war on drugs.” Do Sam Smith and Foo Fighters fans really care that MP3 was, as Burnett says, “never intended as a standard for audio sound”? Do Kendrick Lamar and Chvrches fans really care whether streaming is undermining the perception that there is “an inherent value placed on art”?

  More than three decades into the digital era, most listeners equipped to make an A/B comparison would agree that CDs, which contain only 15 percent of the information contained on the original master tracks, lack the warmth, clarity, and depth of analog recordings. Most discerning listeners would also agree that MP3s don’t sound as good as CDs because the compression of the music in standard formats allows even less information to come through. But for all the hope invested in rising vinyl sales, only a small percentage of music consumers (a term Burnett hates as much as his friend Elvis once hated “mature”) are investing in turntables. It is tough strapping those things onto your back for the daily commute. And as politically charged as Burnett and other veteran artists including Rosanne Cash, Neil Young, and Prince are about equitable revenue sharing, young musicians are divided on the issue. “Obviously I wish that everyone would pay for the art that they enjoy,” the singer Torres told Newsweek in an informal 2015 poll of indie artists. “But that was never an expectation for me, and I’m not naive enough to believe that selling a few thousand copies of my record is going to be enough to sustain myself in this industry.”

  As a sound artist, Burnett sees himself as a descendent of Bill Putnam, founder of Chicago’s vaunted Universal Recording and Hollywood’s United Audio, who redefined recording with his bold innovations in studio design and engineering (he broke new ground in such areas as mastering, multitracking, reverb, separation, and isolation). Burnett didn’t know Putnam well—the man credited with creating the modern recording console died in 1989. But Burnett was schooled on his methods and philosophies by Allen Sides, an acolyte of Putnam’s who bought United (by then known as United Western Recorders) in 1984 and renamed it Ocean Way.

  For Burnett, Putnam’s analog recordings (of Frank Sinatra, Count Basie, and the Beach Boys, among others) set an imposing standard that even the best and most sophisticated modern technology is unable to approach. For a producer who you sometimes suspect hears notes and tones the way the Norse god Heimdall heard grass growing, the transfer of classic albums to CD—which Burnett compares to taking a Polaroid of a painting and throwing out the painting—was nothing less than a national disgrace. “We have better stuff in the iPhone now to make records with than when they were converting all these beautiful analog records that were made over a century,” Burnett told the Hollywood Reporter.

  Put on the mono vinyl version of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he said, and you hear the room sing. But turn up the early CD pressing of “A Day in the Life” and the distorted high notes make you leave the room. Digital sound, he told Sound & Vision, causes stress via its sampling technology by requiring your ears to “fill in the blanks.” He claims it can actually harm you with its harsh underlying noises, which you may not be able to detect through your handheld device but can hear on home systems. The jury is out on those charges and, with all the money invested in digital music, likely will remain
out until there is sufficient anecdotal evidence—or until listeners start bleeding from the ears.

  For many years, recordings were held to uniform standards set by the Recording Industry Association of America and National Association of Broadcasters. But because digital music is heard on so many different devices and in so many different formats, no such standards now exist. Their absence was painfully evident when, in 2007, Burnett got back the first pressed copies of Raising Sand from the plant. He was dismayed to discover that the CDs sounded noticeably worse than the master tapes he had sent out. He discovered that the operators at the plant, faced with a backlog of orders, had taken it on themselves to speed up the pressings of Raising Sand by reducing the time of the stamping process for each disc. Instead of following the required four-second CD setting, they had switched to the two-second CD-ROM setting, which made a significant difference in the quality of the sound.

  “For someone who’s been doing this for 40 years and spent so much time trying to get the sound right, the way we want it, to have it then leave our hands and have maybe 10 people with no connection to the work making important decisions about how it sounds is unacceptable,” Burnett told Mix. Using the filmmaker George Lucas’s surround sound technology, THX, as a model—as evident by Metallica sounding appreciably better via video game technology than on CD, the film business holds itself to higher sound standards than does the record business—Burnett worked on a new “proprietary audio technology.” He called it XOΔE, based on the Greek letters for CODE. It was unveiled in 2008 via John Mellencamp’s starkly powerful album Life, Death, Love and Freedom, a collection of postcards from purgatory that hark back to the parched ballads of Woody Guthrie, the prison blues of Son House, and the death laments of Dock Boggs.

  In a jointly signed note, Burnett and Mellencamp promised that CODE, imprinted on a standard DVD-Audio disc, gave the music “a resonance, depth, and presence that is unprecedented in the digital age.” For audiophiles numbed over the years by a never-ending parade of gold CDs and Super Audio Compact Discs, “definitive” remasterings and remixings, umpteen releases of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, green applicator pens that promised to make CDs sound as warm as vinyl—and let’s not forget Quiex II Limited Edition Pressings of promotional copies of Proof through the Night—the selling of CODE smacked a bit of P. T. Barnum. And, in fact, CODE used the same basic 24-bit/96 kHz technology as the DVD-Audio and SACD releases of the late 1990s. (Bit rates are the amount of data processed each second. Sampling rates are the number of samples, or measurements, taken each second from a recording. The higher the rates, the better the sound.)

  Chesky Records, the independent New York jazz and classical label, had already “astonished even the hardest-to-please audiophiles” (or so its promotions read) with its 24/96 audio DVD recordings. (The astonishment wore off: “We are still in the Stone age of audio,” wrote the label co-founder David Chesky on Facebook in 2015.) And Neil Young drew on the same technology for his late-arriving, Kickstarter-funded Pono music system, which promised “a revolution in music listening” but instead delivered what the leading tech writer David Pogue characterized as an update of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” (While acknowledging the pricey Pono’s limitations, various recording personnel said that anything pointing in the direction of improved sound was worth supporting.)

  Surprisingly, Life, Death—an album that might well have benefited from more of a push on its artistic merits—turned out to be the one and only Burnett production released in CODE. Though songs from Elvis Costello’s Secret, Profane & Sugarcane were offered as demonstration models in that format when the technology was first trotted out, the full recording was issued as a conventional CD. So was Mellencamp’s Burnett-produced 2010 album No Better Than This (recorded with a single mike on an old Ampex tape recorder in a Savannah church, a San Antonio hotel room, and Sun Studios in Memphis), and his 2014 effort Plain Spoken, for which Burnett ended up in the diminished role of executive producer.

  The only other CODE-certified albums are also from 2009: Moonalice, by a retro-psychedelic California group of that name led by the venture capitalist Roger McNamee, a friend of Burnett’s; and the Boston rocker Will Dailey’s Torrent, Volumes 1 & 2, a compendium of EPs that Burnett was not involved in recording. Mike Piersante, whose collection of Grammys reflects his own importance in the industry, said that Burnett’s retreat from CODE was due in part to the awareness that other people in the field with greater resources were working toward the same end. “We feel that CODE propelled the technology, and offered a higher standard,” Piersante told me. “Everyone’s starting to do it. It’s all gonna come to fruition, better sound. It’s really happening.”

  Ultimately, Burnett’s devotion to higher recording standards is about more than sound—and an industry “bent on self-destruction.” His activism speaks on a loftier level to the nature and value of art, the nobility of the artist, respect for the consumer, the ongoing enrichment of civilization. Testifying in 2006 before the National Recording Preservation Board in Los Angeles, he quoted a favorite line from the abstract expressionist Barnett Newman: “Time washes over the tip of the pyramid.” As an artist, he aspires to achievements that sit near that tip, where they will survive the passage of years. When he was recording bands at Sound City, he told the NRPB, “the idea was to get it on the radio and make some money and move on. . . . Nobody thought rock and roll would last. So there was no sense of permanence. And maybe that was one of the good things about it too; there was no self-consciousness about its place in history or anything like that. But at this point, I’m . . . 58 years old. . . . You begin to realize that the things you do in your life actually have meaning and are important.” (“Today’s digital formats are not inherently safe harbors of preservation,” concluded a study commissioned by the NRPB.)

  An indication of Burnett’s commitment and/or obsession with the cause was reflected in his responding to just about all of the mostly snarky remarks posted on the music industry web log hypeblot following his appearance at the 2010 Future of Music Policy Summit in Washington, DC. There, he told young musicians to “stay completely away from the Internet,” that putting their music on the web or otherwise allowing it to be distributed in “unlistenable” MP3s degrades their efforts and music in general. “Sorry,” posted Shiloh, “but that is really bad advice for artists—at least those who want their music to be heard by other people.” Added Cathy, “I guess carbon paper is also going to make a comeback now. Should we stop using fire too?”

  During the long flight back to Los Angeles, Burnett did his best to turn the other cheek in responding to such comments. “Would you consider the possibility that I wasn’t saying something stupid?” he replied to Kevin, who was quick to call him exactly that.

  If you are a musician, I am on your side. I am fighting for a fairer, more ethical future for musicians. I have been doing this for a long time, and I have to say, in all honesty, that as larcenous as the record companies have been, the Internet makes them look like Robin Hoods. I am fully aware of the possibilities of putting together and managing a database on the Internet. The Internet is a powerful tool for sharing information—great for research. It is, however, an indisputable fact that digital technology does not capture music as fully as analog technology. . . . Digital is not the end of technology. In my view, for music, it is a detour.

  “If I were just starting out today,” Burnett continued, “knowing what I know now, I would have nothing to do with the Internet. (I would probably have nothing to do with selling recordings—at least in the framework we are currently laboring under.) I would not advertise myself. (The Internet, at the moment, most closely resembles an advertising platform. The goal of most Internet companies is to narrow our focus. Does that sound like an advance to you?) I would not market myself. I would spend every minute of the day I could playing and listening to music. Learning. Getting better.” And, he wrote to the user EarOnDalton, “I hope the best for the future, but I do no
t have the kind of fervid belief in technology that causes the citizens of iTopia to behave in as close minded, threatened, and hostile a way as fundamentalists in any other religion.”

  “No battle that can be won is worth fighting,” posted Burnett, in a classic T Bone–ism. However you choose to read that, there can be no doubt that, CODE or no CODE, he is in the fight for the long haul.

  CHAPTER 26

  Dylanologist

  “I was well on my way to being a chronic and world class ne’er do well when Bob Neuwirth called me to come play the Other End in the Village with him,” Burnett writes in his foreword to Sam Shepard’s Rolling Thunder Logbook, recalling his years of “knocking around the high studios and low dives of Bohemian America making ketchup tomato soup and sleeping in guest rooms.” When he came face-to-face, as it were, with the scuffling folkie played by Oscar Isaac in the Coen Brothers’ film Inside Llewyn Davis, he recognized the reflection.

  Like Llewyn Davis, Burnett struggled for recognition when he first hit the Village. How could he not have, lost in the shadow of Bob Dylan? Though Inside Llewyn Davis is set in the winter of 1961, before the arrival of Dylan (and Neuwirth) on the scene, Isaac’s character is framed in the context of the Dylan legend. A good but not great artist whose major gift is for alienating those around him (sound familiar?), he, too, like young Burnett, has many limitations he must face. What better coach could Isaac have had than this advanced degree holder in Dylanology, who was not only a living witness to important chapters of the man’s career and an inhaler of his songs but also knew what it was like to try to compete with him.