T BONE BURNETT

➣ “It’s not some hype or record-business game. I’m not the record business. I’m a hillbilly guitar player,” he laughs, “fghting for good sound.”

What were your frst musical epiphanies? As a teenager, you snuck into Fort Worth clubs with your friend Stephen Bruton, who went on to play guitar for Kris Kristoferson.

There were some great clubs in Como, the African-American part of town. There was a crossroads with two joints across from each other, Mabel’s Eat Shop and the New Bluebird Nite Club, and on another corner, a Zion Baptist church. Down the hill, on Friday nights, there would be this old voodoo lady that sang these beautiful melodies. And downtown, there was a great singer, Robert Ealey And His Five Careless Lovers. [R&B guitarist] Cornell Dupree used to play around there. It was a musical paradise when we were teenagers.

Then there was the Jacksboro Highway where bands were coming through all the time. The Band played out there [as the Hawks] at this place called the Skyliner Ballroom. I remember this Ike And Tina Turner show I’d seen there when I was a kid. It was the early ’60s. Years later, I found a recording of it [Live! The Ike And Tina Turner Show on Warner Bros., released in 1965]. I thought, “Oh, God, that’s the sound I’ve been trying to get on every record I’ve ever made!” Whatever Ike and Tina did that night put some kind of spell on me.

You also saw The Beatles live in 1964.

They played the Memorial Coliseum [in Dallas]. There was a crush getting into the place, and I got caught in one of those crushes. I was actually lifted above the crowd and moved around. I lost a shoe and my belt in that crush. It was mostly teenage girls, so it wasn’t horrifcally scary. But I think I’ve had claustrophobia ever since.

You grew up in a family with strong Christian ties. How did you reconcile that spiritual conservatism with the transgressive appeal of blues and rock’n’roll?

I feel the opposite way, that so much of what is represented as Christianity is transgressive and that blues and rock’n’roll were more welcoming, loving and ecstatic – everything you want religion to be. I felt excluded and judged by the church. I remain a Christian because I believe in the idea of loving your enemy. But I don’t care how Christianity feels about me at all.

Yet there is a strong, moral authority that runs through your songwriting. Your 1980 solo debut was called Truth Decay, and the new album takes unforgiving aim at the partisanship in America and the hypocrisies of populism.

There is a lot of hyper-criticism in what I do. I was talking with my wife Callie this morning. I don’t know how this came up, but she said, “There’s disappointment in your work.” I think that’s right. At the same time, I know that I am optimistic and hopeful, and I believe in love and kindness. I hope that’s under everything I do. I hope that all of these things I do are acts of generosity.

What kind of recording experience did you have before you and some friends bought Sound City in 1965?

I was in a band in high school and to get gigs, we thought we’d record a song. We went into Sound City, and it was ridiculous fun. I thought, “God, we came in here with nothing.” We spent a couple of hours and we came out with an acetate. But they said, “The studio’s for sale.” And I said, “We should buy this.” So we did.

You were 17. What did it cost and how did you pay for it?

As I remember, it cost $20,000. But it was an extraordinary amount of equipment. The friends were older. One of them was this guy

A LIFE IN PICTURESA LIFE IN PICTURES

Courtesy of T Bone Burnett, Everett Collection/ Alamy, Getty x3, Deborah Feingold/ Getty x2, Sherry Rayn Barnett, Josh Cheuse Burnett worth: a taste of T Bone.

1Junior choice: the eight-year-old Joseph Henry Burnett III in New Orleans (guitarist unknown).

2Stormy weather: a scene from Martin Scorsese’s flm Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story, showing T Bone Burnett at lower left next to the piano-playing Dylan.

3From the top: Burnett on-stage with The Alpha Band at Winterland Arena, San Francisco, January 29, 1977.

4Pitch me another: The Alpha Band in 1977 (from left) Steven Soles, T Bone Burnett, David Mansfeld.

5Sunnyside up: Burnett with his Album Of The Year Grammy for the O Brother, Where Art Thou? OST, 2002.

6Fruitful endeavour: Burnett in 1987.

7Kings of America: Burnett with fellow Coward Brother Elvis Costello at McCabe’s Guitar Shop, Santa Monica, CA, June 30, 1984.

8Invisible lights: Burnett with Jay Bellerose (left) and Keefus Ciancia, 2019.

9“I never thought I could be a solo artist”: T Bone Burnett photographed in 1983, upon the release of Proof Through The Night, his third solo album.

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Jimmy Rutledge, who was in a band called Bloodrock. [Their death-rock classic D.O.A. went Top 40 in 1971.] And we had other investors come in. I was there all the time. I started college, paid tuition for a couple of years but never showed up. I found what I wanted to do.

In 1968, you co-produced and played drums on one of that decade’s most unhinged singles: Paralyzed by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. What was that session like? It hardly sounds produced at all – more like you hit ‘record’ and hoped for the best.

At the time, across the hall from our ofce, was a vacuum-cleaner company. These guys came into work one morning, and they said, “Man, we heard this guy last night at the Roundup Inn. He set up instruments for an hour, then he started screaming, and the waitress threw a tray of drinks across the room.” I said, “Bring him in, it sounds fantastic.”

He showed up in a green Chevrolet Biscayne with “NASA Presents the Legendary Stardust Cowboy” spray-painted on the side. There was a map of the moon on the roof. And he had a trunk full of this writing he had done about the Legendary Stardust Cowboy riding his winged horse Pegasus through the universe. He comes in, we turn on the tape machine and that’s what happened.

Incredibly, Paralyzed got picked up by a major label, Mercury.

Our studio was in the basement of KXOL, the Top 40 station in Fort Worth. I took this tape into the programme director’s ofce and said, “Man, you gotta hear this.” He listened to it and went, “That’s it, that’s the new music. I’m playing it tonight at 6 o’clock.” They played it and got 750 calls in the frst hour – more calls than they’d had in two months. And people loved it: “That’s the greatest thing in the world”; “This is something to love about Fort Worth!” Mercury came down and bought it.

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David Bowie [then signed to the label] heard it and it became part of his repertoire.

I have a 1968 album that you produced: The Unwritten Works Of Geofrey, Etc. by a group with the dubious name of Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit & Greenhill. It has obvious Sgt. Pepper aspirations. Did you have your own psychedelic phase – and was acid involved?

No. But I will say that the other guys were taking quite a bit of LSD. I remember Philip White, the bass player, walked in one morning, plugged his headphones into his bass and went, “Man, I can’t hear myself.” I knew we were of to a good start that day.

But working on that record, I was smoking some grass, sitting in the chair and looking at the board, listening through those beautiful Altec speakers. Suddenly these coloured notes started coming out of the speakers, and my chair went up to the ceiling. I was foating around in these notes. I could see each one as it was being played and the colour of it. At that moment I thought, “This is something I will do every day for the rest of my life” (laughs).

What was your working method as a young producer? How did you judge a good take from a bad one, then express it to the artist?

Early on, I used to write everything down. I wrote charts for people to play. I was very controlling. There was a band I worked with called the 3rd Avenue Blues Band – there’s some stuf on YouTube you can check out, a thing called Come And Get It [Uni Records, 1970]. Billy Maxwell was the drummer, and I gave him a pattern to play. He said, “Why don’t you just play it?” I thought, He is so much You used your real name in early writing better as a drummer than me. Why would I and production credits and released your even do this? Why don’t I listen to what he has frst album – 1972’s The B-52 Band And The to say? That was the beginning of me opening Fabulous Skylarks – as J. Henry Burnett. up, working almost exclusively from encour- By the time of Rolling Thunder, you were agement and support, only interjecting myself going by T Bone. When and how did you get when need be. It’s more about trying to ‘listen’ that nickname? the music into being fnished. It’s something I resisted for years because just You came of age in the studio at a time when producers and engineers were stars in their own right: Jerry Wexler and Tom Dowd at Atlantic; Jimmy down the road from Fort Worth was T-Bone Walker, the preeminent electric blues guitarist of all time. It was a name I got as a kid in the neighbourhood, probably when I was six or seven years old. There was a guy named Carl Wayne Hickey. He was called

“I saw The Beatles in Bone, and I was called Bone because we were both

Dallas. I lost a shoe skinny. At some point when we met, I became T Bone. and my belt in that How did you end up playing guitar in the crush. I think I’ve had claustrophobia ever since.” Rolling Thunder Revue? And given that Dylan had Roger McGuinn and Mick Ronson there, what were you adding? I was adding very little Miller with The Rolling Stones; Bob (laughs). There was some stuf I was able to put Johnston with Dylan. Did they infuence down. The way it came about was in 1970 or your approach? ’71, after Janis Joplin died, [Dylan’s then-manThere’s a thing Wexler used to say: “Young producers are track-happy.” I thought that was a very interesting phrase. For years and years, engineers would mix by putting up the bass ager] Albert Grossman called. He’d heard a tape of songs I’d done in Fort Worth. He wanted me to meet the guys in [Joplin’s] Full Tilt Boogie Band to see about joining as a songwriter and singer. So I went up to drum, getting the sound, then the snare – Woodstock. Bruton was living there, and I each individual track. Then they would put up stayed at his house. The frst night, there was a the vocal and try to make it ft everything else. gathering and [songwriter] Bobby Charles was What I learned was to put up the vocal frst, there, guitarist Amos Garrett – and I met Bobby then [place] the other instruments around Neuwirth. He and I became fast friends. the melody so they are not interfering or Later, when Dylan was putting Rolling being discordant. It’s like a painting. You’re Thunder together, Neuwirth said, “Come and blending sounds – like colours – and trying play.” I was living in Los Angeles at the time. to create a feld where they all exist around I came to New York. Dylan was playing a week the storytelling. at the Other End, and that band became ➢

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mine or even an interest. Mass approval doesn’t make something good.

Yet you had a brief rock star phase in the ’80s, opening shows for The Who and making records like [1983’s] Proof Through The Night with all-star sidemen. What changed your mind about that kind of fame?

I really tried to be a public performer. I thought, I’m gonna give this a go. But I never thought I could be a solo artist. It’s a rare, amazing person that can be a solo artist, Bob Dylan being one. He’s written his songs, he’s sung ’em, he’s performed them. He’s done it. I felt I was working more at my speed when I was playing guitar with Robert and Alison on their Raising Sand tour. I thought, I feel comfortable here. I have these great singers, these killer guys I’m playing with. That seemed like the right place for me.

You were an opening act for Elvis Costello before co-producing and playing on his 1986 album, King Of America. Why did the two of you bond so quickly?

Elvis and I both have the streak you were talking about. He writes with a great deal of moral authority. But frst of all, we bonded over loving the same music. He knows more about American music than 99.9 per cent of the people in this country. So we were able to DJ for each other, hip each other to things. We have the same taste. And he’s an artist – an honest-to-God solo artist.

When I interviewed you in 1986 for a Rolling Stone story on Costello, you said this about him: “My main criticism is that some of what he’s done is too facile. He has to be careful with his brain.” And when I mentioned that to Costello, he replied, “I know how to write songs already. What I learned from T Bone was when to leave them alone.”

That criticism doesn’t ring true today. He’s way past that now. It’s been fascinating writing these new [Coward Brothers] songs together. We’re both operating at complete autonomy. Neither one has any objections to anything the other does, which is the way to collaborate. The thing I can’t stand in collaboration, the thing I try to head of at the pass, is when a person says, “I feel very strongly that…” (laughs) As soon as a person says that, I usually say, “This isn’t a time for strong feelings.”

You have long-running relationships with artists, including Costello, Plant and Krauss, John Mellencamp and Elton John. Have there been acts of, say, classic rock vintage who wanted to work with you but you felt didn’t have any more gas in the tank?

Oh, yes, I have.

How do you respond?

Well, somebody else does that (laughs). That might be a curse – the go-to guy – because then there is something expected. Once again, that gets you into the tyranny of the audience. Artists have to be careful – and I say this as a Christian who loves all mankind (laughs). We have to be careful of letting the audience determine what we do. Society is a campfre that people sit around for safety and warmth. They gather, and they stay there. Artists are the ones who hear the scary noise in the darkness, go out and fnd out what it is. If artists just sit around the campfre with everybody else, you just have a bunch of campfre music.

You won your frst Grammy for the 2000 soundtrack album O Brother, Where Art Thou?. Were you surprised by the success of that record, given that the Coen Brothers’ flm was based on music from the Great Depression?

I produced a couple of records in the ’90s: [1993’s] August And Everything After for Counting Crows and [1996’s] Bringing Down The Horse for The Wallfowers. Both of those records were very much like O Brother. There was a continuity in them that had to do with folk music, Dylan and The Band, all of that stuf. We weren’t making O Brother to sound like an old-time bluegrass record. We had this extraordinary group of musicians and singers – Emmylou Harris, Ralph Stanley, Gillian Welch – and I thought, We have a George Clooney movie to put a light on this music.

According to Stanley, who sang that stunning a cappella version of the traditional ballad O Death, you originally recorded him doing it in the style of Dock Boggs, playing a banjo.

He didn’t want to do it that way. He was struggling with the banjo. But this is the thing about being a producer. It’s all about empathising with the performer. I thought, Why are we doing this with a banjo anyway? We should just do this a cappella. I walked

TO THE BONE

T Bone on the menu. Your waiter: David Fricke.

AFTER THE THUNDER! The Alpha Band

★★★★

The Alpha Band

(ARISTA, 1976)

Fresh from the mad-circus energy of Rolling Thunder, Burnett, Steven Soles (vocals, guitar) and David Mansfeld (anything with strings) founded this trio in the same jubilantly confounding spirit, fusing folk roots, country comforts and bar-band hooks with subversive glee and surrealist dread – alternative Americana before there was a name for it. The second and third LPs are just as weird and compelling.

AND THIS IS ME... T-Bone Burnett

★★★★

Proof Through The Night

(WARNER BROS., 1983)

Nothing sums up Burnett’s ’80s firtation with the mainstream better than the modern pop craft in these radio-leaning songs, grounded in a lyric confrontation that suggests Peter Gabriel writing like the ’66 Dylan (the ill-fated tenderness in Fatally Beautiful; the broken promises in The Sixties). Even with a guitar army including Richard Thompson, Pete Townshend and Mick Ronson, Burnett’s best shot stalled on Billboard’s album chart at 188.

THE PRESERVATION ACT Various

★★★★★

O Brother, Where Art Thou?

(LOST HIGHWAY, 2000)

For the Coen Brothers’ prison-escape lark, set in 1930s Mississippi, Burnett revived America’s bedrock hymns and ballads in a vigorous, present tense of progressive country singing (the angelic tandem of Alison Krauss and Gillian Welch in I’ll Fly Away), profound resignation (Ralph Stanley’s O Death), and the improbable surprise of the Peasall Sisters, a young trio with the vocal chops and glow of the Carter Family. [into the studio], and Ralph said, “You know, I would like to just do this a cappella.” And I went, “Great, let’s do that.” (Laughs) That’s collaboration, where you all come to the right conclusion.

What is your take on the current generation of pop producers, such as Jack Antonof and Mark Ronson? And what is the future of record production when young artists think they can do it themselves in their bedrooms?

There are always going to be artists that take whatever technology there is and make mind-blowing music with it. Billie Eilish and her brother [Finneas] are geniuses of digital music. They use that technology for what it’s worth. Mark Ronson’s around town and we’ve got mutual friends. I’d love to do something with him someday. There’s a guy named Bobby Krlic [AKA The Haxan Cloak]. He’s an excellent producer-composer. We hang out and compare notes. He’s studied a lot of stuf that I haven’t and vice versa.

I guess the producer is the one that has to deal with the budget. Other than that, he’s just another guy in the room. At times, young artists need someone who knows their way around the studio. But it’s not about the technology. It’s the artist. Artists can make art out of mud.

The new version of Blowin’ In The Wind was your frst production for Dylan. And you played guitar on it. What was it like readdressing a song that he had already recorded to historic efect?

I was sitting two feet from him. And we played the song. It happened in fve minutes. We did other songs. But this one – I think we played it just once. We all knew it. As you know, Mr Dylan is very discreet. I don’t feel at liberty to say the other songs at this point. But he chose them from all throughout his working life.

Have you and he talked about making a studio album of new material?

No, we haven’t. And how do you produce Dylan? You put a mike in front of him and say, “We’re rolling.” That’s it. He produces himself. If we were to do something more conventionally, we could do it completely simple and straight up.

Is there anybody you’d like to produce that you haven’t worked with yet?

You know who I really love? And I’m going to fnd something to do with her – Miley Cyrus. I think she’s the world’s greatest rock’n’roll singer at the moment. And it wouldn’t be an album. I actually have something I’m gonna call her about. That could be surprising because people think of me… (pauses) I don’t know how people think of me. I’m so disconnected from mass culture. I have no idea what’s going on (laughs). And I don’t care.

Do you sometimes wish you spent more time on your own music?

Neuwirth used to give me trouble for that all the time. I’m sure that I’ve hidden behind other people. At the same time, what I want to do for myself is not anything I would ever earn a living from. There was a time in the ’80s when I was out there, performing, and I was actually pretty good. But I never got anywhere close to the people I thought were good, like Ray Charles, The Beatles, Hank Williams.

I have a new song called Everything And Nothing, and it starts with the line, “Everybody wants to know the truth, but nobody wants to hear it.” (Laughs) I never asked anybody to like me. But I’ve had an extraordinary run. At this point in my life, I have no complaints and nothing but good will. M