T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit

by Lloyd Sachs

  Oscar Isaac Hernandez, born to a Guatemalan mother and Cuban-Jewish father and raised in Miami, was trained at Juilliard and mastered the Travis fingerpicking style of Dave Van Ronk, whose real-life story informs the film. (His posthumous autobiography The Mayor of MacDougal Street, compiled from interviews by Elijah Wald, was a primary source for the Coens.) But he was not familiar with the music in the film or the artists the characters were based on, however loosely. Burnett had him immerse himself in Tom Waits recordings to expose him to the kind of durable, artfully forged identity the filmmakers wanted his character to project through his songs. (To these ears, the intensity and gorgeously closed-in quality of Isaac’s vocals bring to mind Joe Henry’s style of folk-based music.) Going beyond archetype, Burnett and the actor spent months building a backstory for Davis—who his parents were, where he grew up, where he went to school—and deciding how he should dress and wear his hair and carry his guitar case.

  After it was established that Davis was from Queens (where both Woody Guthrie and Louis Armstrong lived during those years), Burnett had Isaac siphon some of the doo-wop and R&B that was popular in the borough. As with O Brother, all the songs were prerecorded, but only as templates for the live performances. Burnett was amazed by Isaac’s ability to perform as many as thirty run-throughs of a song the same exact way, in the same exact tempo, without the help of a click track, to allow the Coens to cut between takes. Dylan fans are accustomed to hearing him perform vastly different versions of a song from one night to the next. But during the early 1960s, the songs were carefully arranged; sometimes the shape of the arrangements projected more individuality than did the singing and playing.

  Burnett highlighted that aspect of the music with his clever arrangement of “The Death of Queen Jane,” a transformed English ballad that Davis performs at his big Chicago audition for F. Murray Abraham’s impresario Bud Grossman (based on Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman, he utters the much-quoted line, “I don’t see a lot of money here”). With its nods to Dylan’s “Queen Jane Approximately” (from the 1965 album Highway 61 Revisited) and Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane” (from the Velvet Underground’s 1970 gem Loaded), the arrangement speaks to the enduring legacy of the folk revival as it was absorbed by folk-rock and then underground rock.

  There is no lack of gloom on the soundtrack—“The Death of Queen Jane,” “Hang Me, Oh Hang Me,” “Fare Thee Well.” That suits Isaac’s hapless character, whose musical partner (voiced by Marcus Mumford) broke up their act by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. The more you get to know Davis, the more you think it was a mistake for him to have his first solo album titled Inside Llewyn Davis: Who would want to go there?

  For all the film’s depressive airs, it was a “mini-masterpiece of ludicrousness” (Huffington Post) that became the popular centerpiece of the film. Written in baton-passing bursts by Burnett, the Coens, and Justin Timberlake (he plays Jim to Carey Mulligan’s Jean in a straitlaced duo), “Please Mr. Kennedy . . . Don’t You Shoot Me into Outer Space” was based on a chain of 1960s novelty tunes. On Larry Verne’s “(Please) Mr. Custer,” from 1960, a knee-knocking cavalryman begs not to be sent into battle. College attractions the Goldcoast Singers recorded the Cold War–themed “Please Mr. Kennedy” in 1962 (“I don’t want to play no Russian roulette . . . I’m too young to die yet”). And on another song of the same name, released in 1961, the Motown singer Mickey Woods fervently argues that if he is sent to Vietnam, his girlfriend will run off with someone else. In one of his . . . lesser achievements, the label head Berry Gordy Jr. dashed off the lyrics to that version.

  Burnett got the ball rolling by writing a dozen verses in his best Ogden Nash style (“My wife is young, with a healthy libido / And I don’t want her to be a widow”), also paying homage to the political satirist of the day, Tom Lehrer. While shopping for an instrument for Timberlake in Tarzana, Burnett and the former *NSYNC idol retreated to the office of Norman’s Rare Guitars, where Timberlake constructed a melody around Burnett’s words and set them in a Coasters-type groove. Burnett’s “takeoff on a parody of a satire,” as he put it, became another of his multiple-layered games that leaves the listener to decide what is disposable and what is worth saving. The Coens rebooted, rejiggered, and recalibrated the lyrics, and “Please Mr. Kennedy” was further dumbed up in a chaotic studio session that had the cowboy-hatted Adam Driver (of Girls fame) throw down strangeness with his bass vocalisms from another planet. “It was fucking crazy, what was happening,” Driver told Vulture.

  Inside Llewyn Davis may not be the Coens’ most eventful film, but it is their most deeply felt in its lyrical treatment of both the failed hopes of the folk revival, and the promise embodied in the movement’s messiah, Dylan. The Town Hall concert produced by Burnett featuring cast members and a slew of name artists including Gillian Welch, Conor Oberst, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists, and Jack White was even whiter than an episode of the 1960s TV series Hootenanny. Aside from the Carolina Chocolate Drops’ Rhiannon Giddens, whom Burnett was grooming for stardom, the only featured African American performer was Keb’ Mo’. That was an odd blemish considering Burnett’s commentary on the film’s website about how “the liberal world” had taken the folk standard “500 Miles”—which he hears as a slave song—and made it “part of the culture in a way that people could hear it, you know, and not be too guilty.” Considering the lengths to which Burnett has gone to elevate great voices of all colors in our culture, it would be churlish to read too much into this imbalance, particularly considering how pervasively present the spirits of Lead Belly, Robert Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller and Blind Lemon Jefferson—to name a few of Dylan’s great heroes—were in the music.

  Has there ever been a time when Dylan wasn’t on Burnett’s mind? Oh, to have been inside his head in early 2014 when he received a box of newly discovered unfinished lyrics from the hallowed Basement Tapes sessions, with instructions from Dylan that he was free “to do what he pleased” with the scribblings. For Burnett, who calls Dylan the Homer of our times, this was like receiving a fresh batch of Dead Sea Scrolls in the morning post. Imagine, he would say, having the opportunity to collaborate across time with the twenty-seven-year-old Dylan as he settled into one of his most prolific periods?

  When news of the recovered lyrics broke, the question on everyone’s mind was, were these lyrics vintage Dylan or slush-pile rejects? The answer was, Who cared? Anything Dylan wrote, even if it was scrawled in the margins of the comics section, was treasurable. In the spirit of the original Basement Tapes sessions, which took place in a house (called “Big Pink”) in upstate New York during the summer of 1967, when Dylan was holed up with members of his touring band—soon to be known as the Band—Burnett assembled a team of exceptional young artists and had them bring the lyrics to life over a concentrated two weeks in the studio. This all-star ad hoc band included Rhiannon Giddens, Marcus Mumford of Mumford & Sons, Jim James of My Morning Jacket, and Taylor Goldsmith of Dawes—plus the grizzled veteran Elvis Costello.

  Hiding from the hordes outside of Woodstock as he recovered from a motorcycle accident, Dylan wrote songs at a faster clip than at any other time in his career. He and his cohort—Levon Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, and Richard Manuel—recorded them demo style with no intention of releasing them. The plan was to supply Dylan’s music publishing company with material for mainstream pop artists to cover—a goal realized via such recordings as Manfred Mann’s “Quinn the Eskimo” and the Byrds’ “You Ain’t Goin’ Nowhere.” But of course the Woodstock recordings did see the light of day via early bootlegs; The Basement Tapes, a double album released by Columbia in 1975; more bootlegs; and then, in November 2014, the authorized 139-song mother lode, The Basement Tapes Complete: The Bootleg Series Vol. 11.

  A template was in place for Lost on the River: The New Basement Tapes, as the Burnett project was titled. Working with previously unpublished lyrics by Woody Guthrie, the British folk-protest singer Billy Bragg and the progressi
ve American rock group Wilco set them to music on Mermaid Avenue, an enthusiastically received 1998 release that spawned two more volumes. Dylan’s own Columbia-distributed Egyptian label had released The Lost Notebooks of Hank Williams (2011), on which Dylan, Merle Haggard, Levon Helm, Jack White, Rodney Crowell, and Holly Williams (Hank’s granddaughter) set to music a dozen newly discovered Williams lyrics. And Wilco leader Jeff Tweedy’s former Uncle Tupelo band partner Jay Farrar, accompanied by such artists as Jim James (going by Yim Yames), released another batch of previously unrecorded Guthrie lyrics, New Multitudes (2012).

  What made Lost on the River different, aside from the fact that its benefactor was still alive and well, was its art-by-subgroup approach. Dylan’s jotted-down lines, steeped in fate and fame and romance, American history and geography (Kansas City, the Florida Keys, and rivers play lead roles), were divvied up and passed around, in some cases leading to multiple adaptations of the same lyric. For the speed-writing savant Costello—who recorded Secret, Profane & Sugarcane with Burnett in three days—setting the lyrics to music and recording the songs, live, in two weeks, was not so daunting a challenge. But for his young bandmates, all of them multi-instrumentalists, this crash course in Dylanology got pretty intense. They had never worked together before, nor had they ever worked so quickly. In requiring them to do so, Burnett was not only making them reach inside themselves to discover untapped abilities, he was also introducing them to the way great artists once worked when they were turning out an album or two every year rather than one every three or four or five.

  Recorded at Capitol’s state-of-the-art facility, Lost in the River had little chance at—and little interest in—capturing the scruffy vitality of the music Dylan and the Band captured in their musty cellar. Featuring a generous number of outside musicians (was that really Johnny Depp on guitar?) and backup singers (including the Haim and Levell Sisters—and S. I. Istwa, the pseudonym of Simone Burnett), this was a highly polished production. No matter how much the musicians say they were able to channel the loose, off-the-cuff vibe of the Big Pink sessions, it is clear from the Showtime documentary Lost Songs: The Basement Tapes Continue, that they had to overcome fits of self-consciousness. (Though that was not always such a daunting task: Goldsmith, who professed believing he was the contributor from whom the least was expected, makes good on his determination to prove himself worthy of inclusion. His impeccable melodic touch is responsible for a pair of grabbers: “Card Shark,” which boasts the strongest melody on the album, and “Liberty Street,” which boasts a surging gospel chorus. And the frettingly out-of-her-element Giddens, who had no experience in this kind of setting, brings depths of mystery and womanly resolve to the folk tune “Spanish Mary” and a soaring, heel-kicking energy to “Hidee Hidee Ho.”)

  The 107-minute Showtime film, of which Burnett was one of the producers, squanders a golden opportunity to convey to viewers exactly what this studio superstar does, on a project in which he has a personal as well as business investment. We can see that he delegates a lot of responsibility to the artists—James is seen doing much heavy lifting as an arranger and psychedelic sound strategist. And Mike Piersante, Jay Bellerose told me, did heroic work in overcoming sudden technical snafus that might have proven too much for another engineer. But Burnett’s screen time is largely limited to smiling comings and goings and asking artists if they want to record another take. Even taking into account the possibility that his subject was too busy with other projects to be fully engaged in this one, the director Sam Jones (known for the Wilco documentary I Am Trying to Break Your Heart) had an obligation to get him to weigh in on the making of this unexpected “sequel”—and his relationship with Dylan.

  In the end, The New Basement Tapes is a more interesting tribute album than most, with some smartly crafted songs and a deep, reverberant sound. But for all the hype it got, it is an overly polite footnote to Dylan’s Tapes (which did Lost in the River no favors by appearing in its mega format the week before the Burnett album came out, leading some consumers to think they were one and the same). One was left wondering how much livelier The New Basement Tapes—and the New Basement Tapes, the awkward name given the band for its late-night talk show appearances—would have been had Burnett himself stepped into the breach.

  That would have been a bold move to be sure, especially for an artist still torn between the desire to perform and the need to work on the sidelines. But Burnett had proven himself an excellent interpreter of Dylan’s songs. He had in his kill squad a tight-knit unit with Band-like range and flexibility. And the audience that Burnett had developed for himself as a “legendary producer” might well have paid to hear him ripping into those never-before-heard Dylan lyrics that so transported him: “I see by the papers that / He came from the old religion but possessed no magic skill / Descending from machinery he left nothing from his will.” Burnett might have found one of his most rewarding new beginnings.

  But like most great artists, Burnett is too committed to his own vision to step more than momentarily into someone else’s. In his guise as king of Americana, he draws greater personal rewards from elevating gifted young artists and seeding the future with singers and songwriters who will carry our great music tradition forward than he does from massaging his own reputation. And for an artist who moves from job to job as freely and mysteriously as he does, even hanging for a prolonged stretch with the seriously talented members of the New Basement Tapes band would tax his patience. Just how uncomfortable he is being boxed in was made clear when network television tested his staying power.

  CHAPTER 27

  Televisionary

  In October 1999, Burnett carved a little piece of TV immortality for himself by appearing on the ABC sitcom Dharma & Greg as a sideman of Bob Dylan. In the closing scene of “Play Lady Play,” a rather cheery Dylan auditions the drummer Dharma (Jenna Elfman), who thinks she has found her calling after subbing in her teenage neighbor’s garage band. Seated in a chair, sporting his familiar dark shades and black suit, the poker-faced Burnett plays lead guitar on a polka-style tune and a lively little blues instrumental. A year later, it was announced that Burnett and Elvis Costello had created an hour-long comedy-drama series for the WB network about “four models turned rock stars.” If ever a release had prank written all over it, this one did. But what if? Charlie’s Angels meets Josie and the Pussycats? The Runaways on the runway? Nothing came of that project. But the signs were there that a guy who hadn’t seemed to have a future in TV was eyeing the medium as another way to diversify.

  In late 2009, he became an executive producer and executive music producer of Tough Trade, a Nashville-based series about a country music dynasty “with a penchant for drink, debauchery and divorce.” The series, to star Sam Shepard as a singing legend and the real-life country star Trace Adkins as one of his brood, was green-lighted by the fledgling cable network Epix as its first original scripted series. But the show got axed after its pilot was shot and four other episodes were written. Two years later, Burnett picked up where he was let off when he joined the screenwriter Callie Khouri, whom he had married in 2006, as one of the creative forces behind the ABC series Nashville.

  Not counting a nonstarting pilot she had created several years earlier with the producer Steven Bochco (of Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue fame), Nashville was the first TV venture for Khouri, a native of San Antonio who was raised in Paducah, Kentucky, halfway between Nashville and St. Louis. Burnett saw in the show the potential for depicting Nashville artists and their creative process in a more realistic way than had been done before, and for giving a national platform to young musicians who were badly in need of one at a time when it was almost as difficult to get on the radio as on American Idol. He and Khouri worked closely in choosing songs for their cast, which largely consisted of actual musicians, and developing their characters’ backstories.

  Things got off to a great start. Burnett spoke of happily deferring to Khouri’s vision while he and co-producer Buddy Miller
, a stalwart singer, songwriter, and guitarist, undertook the recording of dozens of songs, many of them new and most of them performed live—an unheard-of approach for a TV series. Envisioning themselves as producers at a hit factory like Stax or Motown, Burnett and Miller turned out a succession of collections from the show.

  Burnett cast his net wide for songwriters, old and new, established and rising. Among the seasoned pros he and his staff enlisted were David Poe, Vince Gill, Elvis Costello, Patty Griffin, Steve Earle, and the great Ray Price. The smart, emerging talent he called on from the Nashville community included Kacey Musgraves, the Pistol Annies member Ashley Monroe, the Civil Wars’ Joy Williams, Hillary Lindsey, and Cary Barlowe, whose “Telescope” was a rough and ready, finger-popping high point for Hayden Panettiere’s character, Juliette. (In a rare prime-time victory for the blues, Burnett also snuck in Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Matchbox Blues” as a feature for Chip Esten’s character, Deacon, an ace sideman with dreams of stardom and drinking problems, who may have been partly inspired, like Bad Blake, by Stephen Bruton.)

  Burnett’s vocal coaching notwithstanding, Connie Britton’s character, Rayna Jaymes, wasn’t convincing as a Shania Twain–type star. But the pop-influenced music—which he pointedly said was not country—was a cut above the TV norm, and the show’s glimpses into the songwriting process were reasonably convincing. His hopes that Nashville would “strike a blow for the importance of music in our country,” as he told Rolling Stone, were lifted by the show’s popularity.