T Bone Burnett_A Life in Pursuit Read online

  AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

  David Menconi, Editor

  T BONE BURNETT

  A Life in Pursuit

  LLOYD SACHS

  University of Texas Press

  AUSTIN

  Copyright © 2016 by Lloyd Sachs

  All rights reserved

  First edition, 2016

  Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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  University of Texas Press

  P.O. Box 7819

  Austin, TX 78713-7819

  http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Sachs, Lloyd, author.

  Title: T Bone Burnett : a life in pursuit / Lloyd Sachs.

  Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

  Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2016.

  Series: American music series

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016005519

  ISBN 978-1-4773-0377-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)

  ISBN 978-1-4773-1155-4 (library e-book)

  ISBN 978-1-4773-1156-1 (nonlibrary e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Burnett, T-Bone. | Sound recording executives and producers—United States—Biography. | Musicians—United States—Biography.

  Classification: LCC ML429.B927 S23 2016 | DDC 780.92—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005519

  doi:10.7560/303771

  To all the ink-stained writers I have been lucky to know

  CONTENTS

  Introduction. Opening Chorus: On Top of the World (or Close)

  1. Sound Citizen

  2. The Outsider

  3. Player in the Band

  4. Alpha Male

  5. Spiritual Gumshoe

  6. Master Builder

  7. Co-Conspirator

  8. Seeker

  9. Svengali

  10. Imagist

  11. Native Son

  12. Mentor

  13. Hit Man

  14. Reluctant Artist

  15. Starmaker

  16. Company Man

  17. Coen Brother

  18. Soundtrack Auteur

  19. Minimalist

  20. Lead Actor

  21. Alchemist

  22. Jazz Man

  23. Blues Man

  24. Senior Adviser

  25. Audio Activist

  26. Dylanologist

  27. Televisionary

  28. Back to the Futurist

  The Kill Squad: A Short List of Longtime Musical Associates

  Acknowledgments

  Selected Discography

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Opening Chorus

  ON TOP OF THE WORLD (OR CLOSE)

  Fish were jumpin’ when T Bone Burnett conducted his first conference call with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant to discuss making an album together. The famed producer was up in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the Capilano Salmon Hatchery, perhaps thinking of Lou “The Salmon King” Kemp, the tour manager of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue. Surrounded by God’s wonders—steep granite cliffs, lush rainforest vegetation, roaring waterfalls—the spiritual seeker who some people think led Dylan down the path of Christianity was in an elevated state when he connected with Krauss, who was in Nashville, and Plant, who was in Bali—“or somewhere,” as Burnett would later say.

  The geographical distance between the artists was a perfect metaphor for the vast stylistic distance between Krauss, a bell-toned sweet heart of modern bluegrass, and Plant, the leonine former wailer of Led Zeppelin. The thought of Krauss putting fiddle to the metal on “Black Dog” was only slightly odder than the thought of Plant going back porch. But Krauss, who grew up not in bluegrass country but in the university town of Champaign, Illinois, was a heavy metal fan. And Plant, a blues-loving native of England’s Midlands, was such a fan of hers that he had asked her to perform with him as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 2004 American Music Masters Tribute to Lead Belly.

  “Singing that Lead Belly stuff wasn’t in the right range for us,” Krauss said in a 2008 press teleconference, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the encounter piqued the singers’ interest in further collaborations, and naturally led them to Burnett. He had recorded Krauss for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the 2000 soundtrack album that ignited the roots music revival. And Burnett had been in talks with Plant about producing a sequel to The Honeydrippers: Volume One, the 1984 EP of fifties-era rock and R&B that the Brit recorded with his former Zep mate Jimmy Page. Krauss told Burnett that she wanted to do something darker than usual. Plant said he wasn’t interested in recording a conventional duo album. Leave it to Burnett to satisfy both their visions while surprising and challenging them with one of his own.

  For Burnett, who with his vast knowledge of American music redefines the old throwaway line (and Dylan cover title) “I forgot more than you’ll ever know,” everything starts with the song. He went into full scuba mode, diving down deep into the vast stream of recorded history for tunes he envisioned Plant and Krauss covering. He came up not with a mere handful of singles and the like but with stacks of them. Listening to playlists ranging from the 1950s R&B group Li’l Millet and His Creoles’ tune “Rich Woman” to the prototypical alt-country artist Townes Van Zandt’s “Nothin’,” Plant felt as if he were attending a master’s class in spinology. “I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about American music, but I’d missed out on an entire area,” he told Jon Pareles of the New York Times. “I now know that American music is a total panorama. I was cutting it off and thinking it was redneck hell down there.”

  Collaborations between well-known artists frequently go awry either because their styles don’t jibe (as with Eric Clapton & Wynton Marsalis Play the Blues), because there is too much of one star and not enough of the other (as with All the Roadrunning, on which Emmylou Harris disappears for long stretches opposite Mark Knopfler, who produced the recording), or because there is no chemistry between them (as with virtually all the cuts on Frank Sinatra’s phoned-in Duets). Burnett, however, heard Raising Sand less as a collaboration than as a convergence—a meeting of open-minded artists for whom one plus one equaled not two but one. If Plant and Krauss had any second thoughts about softening or departing from their signature styles to level the interpretive playing field, the relaxed atmosphere Burnett created in the studio enabled them to get past their doubts. Both were rewarded by finding sides of their talents of which they themselves had perhaps been unaware.

  Plant was an obvious choice to sing Little Milton’s “Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson,” a mid-1970s B-side delight from the blues and R&B artist’s years with the Stax label. But Burnett asked Krauss to sing it instead. She initially begged off, feeling “too white” to do it (as she told National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Sunday). Prodded by the producer, however, she rose to the challenge, bringing a soulful depth to what became a plucky, Loretta Lynn–type vehicle. Plant, rock’s quintessential lead singer, had rarely sung harmony, but opposite Krauss, a skilled arranger who showed him how to sing his parts, he sounds as pure as a choirboy. Their hushed communion on “Killing the Blues,” on which Greg Leisz’s sighing pedal steel arches over the singers like a rainbow over gold, is spine-tingling. Burnett first heard that song decades earlier when its composer, Roly (Rowland) Salley, Chris Isaak’s longtime bassist, played it in the Bay Area home of the Chicago-born bluesman Nick Gravenites.

  As we will see, great music producers approach their work as uniquely as great film directors approach theirs, employing different methods to get the best performances out
of their actors, different levels of formality to frame the performances, and different conceptions of the imprint they should or shouldn’t leave on the finished product. Burnett now carries such weight in the entertainment capitals of Hollywood and Nashville that the title “record producer” can contain him no more than “film director” could contain Orson Welles. His O Brother soundtrack altered the landscape of American music so markedly that it may well have affected our culture as significantly as Citizen Kane did. From his own critically acclaimed work as a singer and songwriter to his close associations with Bob Dylan and Sam Shepard—one of the greatest songwriters of our time and one of the greatest playwrights—to his outspoken efforts to overhaul digital recorded sound, Burnett’s accomplishments have made the musician-producer one of the most significant figures in popular culture during the past forty years.

  His success is particularly amazing because, in many ways, he is an outsider playing an insider’s game. A fierce intellectual, he finds cultural enrichment in a paradise of anti-intellectualism. A man of deep religious faith, he thrives in a den of moneylenders. Burnett is part Don Quixote, charging at digital windmills in his quest to restore analog truth, and part Southern politician, crossing palms with hyperbolic play money: he says that Justin Timberlake is “the closest we have to Bing Crosby,” claims the mandolinist Chris Thile is “the Louis Armstrong of his time,” and calls Alison Krauss “the one . . . [just as] Ray Charles was the one.”

  For all that, Burnett has never been able to get past his own self-consciousness and self-doubt as a recording artist. While scoring success after big-time success for others—whether breaking bands, such as Counting Crows, or reviving legends, such as Elton John—he is stuck as a singer-songwriter on the mezzanine level of critics’ favorite. As acclaimed as some of his albums are, they have all withered on the commercial vine. That the once rail-thin, six-foot-five Texan has never been comfortable performing before crowds hasn’t helped.

  That isn’t to say he hasn’t invested each of his own albums with high hopes. Such was the case with his 2006 effort, The True False Identity—his first album under his own name in fourteen years, and, alas, his last major one at this writing. Standing in an alley outside Chicago’s Vic Theater that May, a few hours before launching his first concert tour in nearly twenty years, he was wired with expectation. With a newspaper photographer preparing to take aim, he fidgeted against a brick wall, tugging at a pesky nose hair, a study in spasmodic motion. Gone for a fractured moment was the fastidious image the once scrawny, mop-topped Burnett had created for himself with his Miles Davis sunglasses, perfectly parted and tossed hair, and regal, high-button outfits. Gone was the music industry sophisticate, chased by a minor eruption of what Sam Shepard once called his “peculiar quality of craziness.” I imagined the competing aspects of his outsize personality speeding through him like the notes of his favorite Charlie Parker solo, the one on “Night in Tunisia.”

  Burnett had called earlier in the day to invite me to the sound check. I had interviewed him several times for the Chicago Sun-Times, where I was a music columnist, and No Depression magazine, where I was a senior editor. He had always made himself available—sometimes on short notice—not only for pieces I was working on about him or his former wife and close collaborator, Sam Phillips, but also for ones about artists he had produced. I had visited him after one or two shows in the Windy City and met him for lunch in Los Angeles. As enthusiastic a listener as he is a talker, he laughs at all your jokes, making you feel like you’re the sharpest tack in the box. A bookish Lenny Bruce, he’s a spritzer who fills the air with quotations from literary figures, philosophers, and jazz greats—not to show off but rather because he just can’t help himself and also, one senses, because he feels a personal need to elevate words and ideas at a time in our culture when they are taking it on the chin from visual images.

  For all that, when I approached him in the summer of 2008 to propose writing a book about him—not a commercial offering, which would have entailed digging through his personal life, but a critical appreciation of his extensive body of work as an artist and producer—he hemmed a bit and referred me to his manager in Los Angeles. Well, I hadn’t picked the best time or place to talk book: backstage at the Ravinia Festival in the Chicago suburbs following a Raising Sand concert. Burnett, who had played a supporting role on guitar, was wiped out from the heat. In subsequent weeks and months, determined to sell him on the book directly rather than go through the guy in charge of his business affairs, I made numerous attempts to follow up on our Ravinia conversation. But he was never at the numbers he told me to call, and he didn’t respond to my e-mails. I wasn’t yet familiar with his Houdini-like proficiency for disappearing.

  Finally, he sent me an e-mail saying that he just wasn’t ready to have a book written about him, that he still had a lot left to accomplish and didn’t have time to gaze back at his past. “He dreads shuffling off this planet, and the thought of anyone writing his story makes him queasy,” Phillips told me many months later, during a long lunch in the Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel. On another occasion, his seventeen-year-old daughter with Phillips, Simone, speculated that I might have just asked him on the wrong day. “Once he says something, he always feels like he has to stick to it, to uphold his reputation,” she said.

  Aside from a few seasonal greetings, Burnett and I had no further contact for the next few years. I have to admit that when the University of Texas Press, with whom I had been discussing possibilities for its American Music Series, expressed interest in a Burnett bio in early 2014, I groaned. As much as I still wanted to do the book, I had no desire to go on the chase again. And I certainly didn’t want to make an enemy of Burnett, whom, I felt, I could call a friend, at least on some level.

  But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t shake the fact that he was the artist—the cultural force—I most wanted to write about. Only a small percentage of music fans, even those who considered themselves deep into “Americana,” had ever heard or heard of such acclaimed albums of his as Truth Decay, T Bone Burnett, and The Criminal under My Own Hat. I had the opportunity here to awaken the public to the complete T Bone. And however universally he was known as a producer—rarely did his name appear in print without “legendary” or “visionary” before it—few people understood what a crucial role he had played in furthering the larger cause of American music, which he views not through the museumy lens of Ken (Jazz) Burns but as a collection of living and breathing documents of who we are.

  When I contacted Burnett to tell him I had agreed to do this book, with or (sigh) without his participation, and proposed that we meet over lunch to talk things over, he wrote back, “We can have lunch any time you’re not writing a book about me. (Insert smiling type face deal here.)” Saying he had no time at that moment to “look backward,” he added, “The one thing I will say is, if you do this, please don’t say I have had a career. I haven’t had a career. That is not what I did.”

  I later found out that Burnett has been rejecting the notion of a “career”—he prefers “pursuit”—since he and his artist friends in high school struck the word from their vocabularies. I also realized I needn’t feel spooked by his use of the past tense. For all the times he has talked about walking away from producing or recording or performing—“The door has closed behind me to a life in music,” he told Rolling Stone in 2012—he has rarely been without a full dance card.

  Still, the man was approaching seventy. Who knew how long he could continue waging war against the technology community, which he called out in a 2014 op-ed column in the Los Angeles Times for devaluing music? Who knew how much longer this radical in plain sight could rage against government corruption and surveillance and the slavery of outsourcing? “T Bone is always advocating for musicians and artists,” Phillips told me. “He’ll never stop. A lot of people come to mind who don’t like him because he is kind of a wild man. He’s always fighting to make things better, to achieve
breakthroughs, whether that means fighting himself or the people he loves or butting heads with the company men, the business people, the people who aren’t treating his crew right.”

  Burnett, whose Christian mysticism shares a lot with Zen, believes in the discipline of “beginner’s mind,” the basic tenet of which is to treat every moment as your first, not as a preparation for or a bridge to the next moment, and to keep starting over from square one. For all his successes, for all his clout, he is still finding his way, still stopping and starting over in pursuit of a higher truth in art and life. “That’s the only way to really learn,” he once said. The closed door is actually open. The end of the road is actually the beginning. Consider this book one longtime follower’s modest attempt to chart the progress he has made so far.

  CHAPTER 1

  Sound Citizen

  In September 1983, a $5.5 million avant-garde arts center and performance space called Caravan of Dreams opened in Fort Worth, Texas. Designed by an architect with a degree from London’s Institute of Ecotechnotics—where they “integrate the ‘ecology of technics’ and the ‘technics of ecology’”—and financed by Ed Bass, one of the city’s oil-rich Bass brothers, the facility boasted a nightclub, a restaurant, an art gallery, and studios dedicated to recording, dance, and karate. On opening weekend, the free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman, a Fort Worth native, was honored. Among other offerings, he had a string composition of his performed in a rooftop garden boasting a thirty-two-foot-high, neon-lit geodesic dome and a cactus preserve. Beat movement hero William S. Burroughs also attended the festivities.

  For all the cultural clashing occasioned by this zany convocation of business leaders, artist types, and ecotechnicians, locals cheered the transformation of what had been a desolate stretch of Cowtown into a much-needed cultural attraction. But it wasn’t long before reports of a bunch of weird stuff—like the chanting of Tibetan mantras in the restaurant and bizarro theater productions about the end of the world—had people thinking that “Caravan of Pipe Dreams” (as it was dubbed by Texas Monthly) was a sham, perhaps even a scam. And then things got even stranger: “Edward Bass Funds ‘Intellectual Cult,’ Ex-Members Say,” read a headline in the March 30, 1985, edition of the Dallas Morning News.