The albums that T Bone Burnett produces — from his new solo release, Tooth of Crime, to the Robert Plant/Alison Krauss smash, Raising Sand, the O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack or his collaborations with Elvis Costello, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Los Lobos — all have a particular sound. It’s a bottom-heavy, reverberant sound full of enough extraterrestrial embellishments to suggest that we’ve entered a different world.
Because Burnett’s sound is at once thick and transparent, listeners often feel as if they’re swimming through it — they certainly feel as if they’ve left the familiar atmosphere and gravity of dry land. And because it seems so otherworldly, that sound easily accommodates the themes favored by Burnett and his collaborators: the religious visions and sci-fi tales, the political Utopias and dystopias, the altered states that love and ambition can induce.
But where does that sound come from? It comes, says Burnett, from the Skyliner Ballroom, an old honky-tonk on “Thunder Road,” the notorious stretch of Jacksboro Highway in North Fort Worth.
“The sound of that room and the way it felt is what I compare everything I do to,” Burnett claims. “I spent many nights at too young an age at the Skyliner Ballroom. Jack Ruby ran it, and his girlfriend, Tammy True, stripped there. It had a huge dance floor, at least 120 feet long, with bandstands at each end. That room was like a guitar, only much, much bigger. The way some guitars sound better than others, that room had extraordinary resonance.
“I saw Ike & Tina Turner on a night they recorded an album there,” he continues. “I finally found it on the Web recently, and when I put it on, I heard the sound of that room and I was 14 all over again. I’ve been trying to get that exact same feeling ever since I began making music.”
T Bone Burnett (he long ago abandoned the hyphen in his first name) hasn’t lived in Texas since he moved to Los Angeles in the early ’70s, but his native state still echoes in everything he does. Because he grew up hearing Bobby “Blue” Bland and Conway Twitty on successive weekends in Texas clubs, it’s never fazed him to oversee unusual projects, such as the recent, unlikely partnership of Robert Plant and Alison Krauss.
“You have two lead singers,” he says with a nonchalant shrug. “One is from the loudest band in the world and one is from the softest band in the world. It was obvious that neither would be able to do what he or she had done in the past, but that wasn’t a problem so much as the challenge that made it fun.
“In a situation like that, I believe in creating an alternate universe,” he continues. “Here’s how the universe might have turned out if Bill Haley had done this instead of that. You can change the past just a little bit to create a whole new reality 50 years later. This is what the great composers have always done — they draw on the past by reimagining it.”
What if the Stanley Brothers had gone electric? What if the Yardbirds had turned into Fairport Convention? What if Jimmy Page had picked up the fiddle? What if Jerry Douglas had become obsessed with synthesizers? Those decisions might have created a world where the Plant and Krauss partnership would have seemed predictable, rather than surprising. That’s the world Burnett created in the studio.
“The connection between them is they can both create these different tones that are mystical,” Burnett says. “She’s probably the best singer in the world right now. She can stand up in front of any number of people, sing a cappella and make them cry; she has that kind of power. Robert’s also one of the great singers in the world, but working with him, I got to see the artist part — the willingness to follow his vision wherever it goes.
“There’s a kind of English person who knows way more about American music than most Americans do,” he continues. “Elvis Costello is like that, and so is Robert. But he had never gotten into this part of it — the Dock Boggs and mountain stuff — and now he’s chasing that down. He’s spent a lot of time in West Africa, and he’s linking up the mystical zone that African music gets to with the zone that mountain music gets to. He’s finding out, ‘Oh, this is where that rock ’n’ roll song comes from.’ When the trail gets longer and broader, it’s more enjoyable.”
Krauss said she wanted to make a dark record, so Burnett compiled a CD of what he considered “dark songs.” There were a lot of teleconference calls between Burnett’s home in California, Krauss’ in Nashville and Plant’s in England. The first song everyone agreed on was “Polly Come Home,” an adaptation of an old folk song by ex-Byrd Gene Clark. “It was the nail,” Burnett says, “that we drove into the wall to hang the record from.”
Raising Sand was filled out with songs from Plant’s bandmate Jimmy Page; Burnett’s ex-wife, Sam Phillips; Tom Petty’s guitarist, Mike Campbell; New Orleans’ Allen Toussaint; Texas’ Townes Van Zandt; Doc Watson; Tom Waits; and the Everly Brothers. The band was a combination of Krauss’ bluegrass buddies (guitarist Norman Blake, bassist Dennis Crouch and banjoist Riley Baugus) and Burnett’s studio pals (guitarist Marc Ribot, steel guitarist Greg Leisz and drummer Jay Bellerose). And the whole thing was wrapped in the sound of the Skyliner Ballroom.
THE SKYLINER REGULARLY featured a jazz pianist named George Campbell, whose drummer was Sumter Bruton. Bruton also owned Record Town, Fort Worth’s hippest record store, where music-obsessed kids like Burnett hung out, listening to everything the shop owner played for them, from Cream to Coltrane. Burnett still remembers when Bruton played an old Dixieland number, “Wrought Iron Rag,” by the New Orleans trombonist Wilbur de Paris. “That was one of the very first pieces of music that blew our minds,” he recalls. “It represented everything we wanted to be.”
Also hanging out at the shop was the owner’s son, Stephen Bruton. Today, of course, he’s known as a respected solo artist, longtime sidekick to Kris Kristofferson, member of the Resentments and producer for such artists as Alejandro Escovedo, Jimmie Dale Gilmore and Burnett, himself. Back in 1964, however, he was an aspiring Dixieland banjo player.
“I’ve known Stephen since we were kids,” Burnett acknowledges. “I remember one time, when I was 16, I got a rock ’n’ roll gig and I had to hire some musicians to do the show. I asked Stephen to play, even though he’d never touched an electric guitar before. I had to strap it on for him, turn it on and get a tone from the amp. But as soon as he started playing, he just ripped it up. He’s taught me more about music than anybody. I owe such a debt to him and his dad.”
It was around this time that Burnett started working at Sound City, a recording studio in Dallas. The country stars who played at the nearby Panther Hall in Fort Worth would come over to Sound City after the show. Everyone would gobble Benzedrine and stay up all night to cut tracks. One such session involved Lubbock singer Norman Carl Odam, who went by the name of the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. The result was “Paralyzed,” a modest hit on Mercury and a legendary garage-rock single.
But Burnett didn’t want to spend his life making cult-classic garage-rock and mainstream country; he wanted to make pop music. So he moved to Los Angeles and released the 1972 album The B-52 Band & the Fabulous Skylarks on Uni. It’s the only one of his records without the “Skyliner” sound, and it’s largely forgettable.
But the ambitious musician soon demonstrated a knack for befriending the talented and influential — landing a guitar gig with Delaney & Bonnie & Friends and bonding with Bob Neuwirth, who got him a slot on Bob Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder Revue tour. Burnett, a devout but unorthodox Christian, is often credited as the catalyst for Dylan’s religious conversion in 1976.
The Dylan association helped Burnett get a major-label deal for his new vehicle, the Alpha Band, a mix of musicians from the Rolling Thunder Revue and the B-52 Band. The group’s 1976 debut, The Alpha Band, provided the first clear evidence of Burnett’s gift for mixing lively roots-rock with strange sci-fi fables. On all three Alpha Band albums, he created unique universes to remind us that history is not predetermined; it’s the result of our choices. And the music was just as strange as the lyrics — a blend of string-band instruments and a booming rhythm section glued together by that Skyliner reverb.
Burnett’s first true solo album, 1980’s Truth Decay, was released by John Fahey’s Takoma label. It is his most straightforward recording — leaning heavily on the rockabilly revival of the day — and maybe his best. Highlighted by such terrific songs as “Drivin’ Wheel” (later recorded by Emmylou Harris) and “Power of Love” (later recorded by Arlo Guthrie), it wrapped Burnett’s perpetual social and spiritual concerns in propulsive, catchy tunes.
More solo records followed: 1982’s The Trap Door (actually a six-song EP), 1983’s Proof Through the Night (with guest guitar by Ry Cooder, Richard Thompson and Pete Townshend), 1986’s T Bone Burnett (a country-music masterpiece), 1988’s The Talking Animals (with guest vocals by Bono, Ruben Blades and Peter Case) and 1992’s The Criminal Under My Own Hat.
To support that last album, Burnett played an outdoor solo set during the 1992 South By Southwest music conference. The 6-foot-4-inch blond with the eagle nose and eagle brow sat in a folding chair with an acoustic guitar resting on his faded jeans. Wearing a black vest over a long-sleeved white shirt, he picked out parts on the guitar and sang in a dry, deadpan voice that sounded like an old Jimmie Rodgers 78. The Colorado River and the Austin skyline shone behind him.
He opened with “River of Love,” his pretty hymn of forgiveness and grace. He followed it by telling the crowd, “If George Bush is here tonight, grab him by the throat and bring him up here.” Neither the elder nor younger Bush was in the crowd, but Burnett seemed to bring them to life by singing “Humans from Earth,” a sci-fi tale about smooth-talking real-estate hustlers snapping up land on other planets. Peter Case, one of Burnett’s production clients, added some harmonica on that number, and Poi Dog Pondering’s Susan Voelz added fiddle on “Over You,” a swinging country-blues lament.
Here were Burnett’s best songs in six years. He seemed on the verge of another burst of creativity. Instead, he stopped altogether.
“I quit music — performing, producing, everything — around that time,” Burnett confesses. “I had been using that part of my brain too much. Plus, the business was obviously getting ready to tank. It had been obvious from the early 1980s. Everything was forced to fit through the same slot, a very narrow slot, the opposite of freedom. So I stopped for a while.”
It was during this period of exhaustion and disillusionment that Burnett got a pivotal call from an old friend. Playwright Sam Shepard had been one of the writers, artists and musicians who got caught up in the traveling circus that was the Rolling Thunder Revue. “Sam and I hit it off,” Burnett recalls. “We both liked words; we both played guitar; and we both liked horses.”
In his book about the tour, Rolling Thunder Logbook, Shepard wrote that Burnett “has a peculiar quality of craziness about him. He’s the only one on the tour I’m not sure has relative control over his violent, dark side. He’s not scary; he’s just crazy.” When Burnett talks, Shepard continued, “it feels like I’m being mugged on the Lower East Side. His Texas drawl cuts into my ear bones.” They became great friends.
In 1995 Shepard was calling because he was rewriting one of his early plays, 1972’s The Tooth of Crime, and wanted Burnett to write some music for it. Shepard had written songs for the original production, but now he wanted new songs to go with the new script. It needed songs because the play describes a battle between a rock ’n’ roll king and his challenger, climaxing in a Wild West showdown where the competitors duel with words rather than bullets. The words prove just as lethal, for once their facades are punctured, these hollow celebrities wither and die.
“It was one of Sam’s great plays from the ’70s,” Burnett explains. “It predicted Mad Max and all that post-apocalyptic landscape that we’re living in now. I flew to New York and worked with him on the songs. Sam would say, ‘We need this kind of song for this moment,’ and I’d go away and write. Part of that process was going out drinking every night till 4 in the morning. We were talking constantly, and it opened up many new possibilities to me that had seemed shut down in the record business.”
The Tooth of Crime (Second Dance) was successfully staged in New York in 1996, using seven of the 10 songs that Burnett had written. The experience re-energized the songwriter, but instead of recording more of his own music, he concentrated on producing. In the mid-’90s, he oversaw such critical triumphs as Elvis Costello’s King of America, Gillian Welch’s Revival, the Wallflowers’ Bringing Down the Horse and Sam Phillips’ Omnipop.
“When I came out of that early-’90s period,” Burnett admits, “I felt like I was learning everything over again from scratch. I didn’t want to do it in public; I wanted to do it behind the scenes. Besides, I’ve always been more interested in other people’s ideas than my own. I love the people I work with; I enjoy the company. I got into that collaborative process early on when I was 15.”
One of Burnett’s key production projects during this comeback period was Jimmie Dale Gilmore’s 1996 album, Braver Newer World. Gilmore had made a series of brilliant records on which the elusive, mystical bent of his lyrics (and those by fellow Flatlander Butch Hancock) contrasted sharply with the down-to-earth country-blues of the arrangements. With this new album, he wanted the music to match the lyrics.
“That’s an accurate description of what pleases me so much about that album,” Gilmore agrees. “I listened to that record for the first time in a long while recently, and I was struck by the ethereal vibe of the music. Sometimes in the process of doing the record, it felt like we were pushing the boundaries too far, but I always ended up loving the end product. That’s what experimentation is all about — overcoming your own boundaries. It wasn’t about, ‘You play this part on this instrument and you play that part on that instrument.’ It was more, ‘Let’s get together and play and see where it goes.’”
“I wanted to come up with a way to make a pop record with Jimmie Dale and his distinctive voice,” Burnett says. “He sounds like who he is — a Texan and a Buddhist, which is a wonderful thing. His songs have this clarity, like Buddhism, that I find very attractive. How do you capture that high consciousness thing without it becoming New-Age? How do we keep the music on the ground but make it much deeper? How do you make a country record in an imaginary world where Roy Orbison had done this rather than that? There was some resistance to the results at the time because it sounded so strange, but now it’s more accepted because it sounds so tame.”
In 2000 came the album that changed Burnett’s life. The Coen brothers were loosely adapting Homer’s Greek epic, The Odyssey, into a prison-break movie set in the 1930s South. Much as Shepard had for The Tooth of Crime, the filmmakers asked Burnett to assemble the music for a soundtrack that would propel the story, rather than merely decorate it. Burnett drew from some aging legends (Ralph Stanley, the Fairfield Four, John Hartford), some contemporary Americana stars (Alison Krauss, Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch), some obscure, long-dead singers (James Carter, Harry McClintock) and even a completely fictional group (the Soggy Bottom Boys).
Burnett managed to evoke not so much the sound of the ’30s as it actually was, but as it should have been. That fit perfectly with O Brother, Where Art Thou?, a movie that recaptured American history not as it happened, but as it should have happened. Here was Burnett’s theory of music as an alternative universe realized more fully than ever before. The movie was a success, but the soundtrack became a phenomenon, selling more than 8 million copies, leading to four Grammy awards and dominating the Billboard charts for a year. It was so successful that Burnett organized the Down from the Mountain tour, a live version of the soundtrack.
When things calmed down, Burnett was finally ready to put out some music of his own again. He released his first major retrospective, the two-CD, 40-track, all-phases compilation Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett in 2006. Last year, he allowed Rhino Handmade to collect the out-of-print tracks from the Trap Door EP, the Proof Through the Night LP and the Behind the Trap Door EP onto a single disc. More importantly, in 2006, Burnett released his first album of new music in 14 years, The True False Identity, drenched in Skyliner resonance.
“I had a lot of things I wanted to say that I didn’t hear other people saying,” he explains. “Sometimes you feel there’s a record you want to hear and if no one else is going to do it, you might as well do it yourself. I’d stockpiled a bunch of stuff, and most of that still hasn’t come out. But when it became obvious I wanted to make a certain sound, I went away for several weeks and wrote some songs that were all about that sound. It’s a blurred sound, more than you can hear all at once."
“That’s the problem with so much music today; it’s so one-dimensional that you can hear it all at once, or you can’t hear anything at all. Good music is more mysterious than that; you put it on and then you want to hear it again. It’s dense and booming and stomping and perplexing. I like to hear into a recording. I like to hear the place where it’s being made. I like to close my eyes and see the musicians and see the place where they’re taking me.”
This year, he followed it up with Tooth of Crime, the 10 songs he’d written for Shepard a dozen years ago, finally massaged into a shape he was happy with. The songs describe a futuristic wasteland reminiscent of the movies Mad Max, Blade Runner and Children of Men, a dystopian world where song titles such as “Dope Island,” “Kill Zone,” “Here Come the Philistines” and “The Rat Age” seem more like reportage than commentary.
“I loved those songs,” Burnett exclaims. “I recorded them back when we were doing the play, making loops and tracks for the cast, and I kept working on them long after the play ended, whenever I could grab a weekend, until they seemed ready for a record. The songs are pretty bleak, but the world we actually inhabit is bleak in many ways. There’s been a complete collapse of the press in this country, and that’s a problem, because the press is a bulwark against this flood of larceny and mediocrity. Never mind the thousands of people dying in the flood; Britney is dining with Mel Gibson.
“At the same time, I don’t think we’re on this inexorable march to doom,” he continues. “I don’t think realities are fixed or that destiny has overtaken us. But I do think we need to change. Everyone is talking about change, but America needs to change the way it thinks, the way we talk to each other, the way we drive, the way we spend our time. If America were a person, it’d be a person with a lot of bad habits that needed to go to Betty Ford. But I think people can change, and I think this generation coming up is pretty incredible; I have faith that they can see through it.”
Although his own recording career is back in gear, he hasn’t slowed down his production schedule. This year he has already produced albums for Joe Cocker, the BoDeans, Elvis Costello, John Mellencamp and B.B. King. King’s album was especially meaningful for Burnett because he had heard King at the Central Forest Ballroom in Dallas in the ’60s. It was a profound experience for the teenaged listener, and the 60-year-old producer wanted to recapture the feeling of that concert, and of the singles King had cut in the ’50s.
“I didn’t want to update him,” Burnett insists. “That’s part of the problem; people are always trying to update him. Like so many people, he’s been victimized by modern recording techniques. It doesn’t get any better than those records he made with Maxwell Davis in the ’50s; the way they sounded meant so much to me. I felt if I could be true to the way he made those records, we could bookend B.B.’s life. We had everyone sit around in a circle — I sat between Dr. John and B.B., so I could hear them play in real time.”
For much of this year, though, Burnett will be out on the road playing guitar behind Krauss and Plant and alongside guitarist Buddy Miller, fiddler Stuart Duncan, bassist Dennis Crouch and drummer Jay Bellerose. As much as he loves Raising Sand, he reports that the early shows have already taken the venture to a whole new level. As Krauss and Plant learn songs from each other’s catalogs, as Krauss learns to let loose and wail, as Plant learns to keen like a mountaineer, as the band learns to shove several songs into sound collages, the project becomes stranger and richer.
“O Brother took over my life for five years,” Burnett acknowledges, “and I’d be happy to have this take over my life for five years. I’m ready to make this my first priority for the foreseeable future, because I really, really enjoy this. There’s a very good chance there’ll be another few records.”
