Four tributes to T-Bone Burnett:
Rock 'n' roll has always been about what's going on in the town," T-Bone maintains. 'It always had a lot to do with journalism. Rock 'n' roll is a form of folk music. It came from a very American idea of 'All people are welcome here. White people fried to sing black music. The earliest mention I've heard of rock n' roll was in a Bing Crosby song from the 1920s, when he was a hot dance band singer. That was the urban jazz version, when the white kids started getting up and doing the dance band stuff. Jimmie Rodgers, the father of country music, was another version of a white kid singing black music, and it got passed on through Hank Williams and Elvis Presley and Dylan and John Fogerty into today. Now we have, in the U.K., U2 and Big Country and the Alarm.
"The Violent Femmes have a song called 'Country Death Song.' It's a very hip piece, 'cause there's a whole Appalachian tradition of 'I left my babies at the house while I ran down to the store to get some groceries. When I came back the house had burned down and all my babies are dead. It's God punishing me.' The Violent Femmes song is in that tradition.
'Lyrically, rock 'n roll has always been very tied to what's going on. Chuck Berry's 'School Days s a straight piece of journalism He wasn't a kid, but was writing about what he saw the mood of the country, the town. It's about what people are going through. It started Out much more simply with Jimmie Rodgers singing When its peach picking time in Georgia or Hank Williams saying, 'Let s get in my car. I know a place where they ye got some soda pop and some dancin'
Elvis Costello s a really good example of a modern day folk artist. 'Peace In Our Time His lyrics are very complex but that's appropriate Because the world is so complex right now
T-Bone Burnett is in a hotel in Boston. It's the spring of 1984 and he's opening for Costello on a two-man acoustic tour Burnett and Costello are lust getting to know each other just discovering how much a lanky, sociable Texan and a smaller more introverted Englishman can have in common.
Cut to the summer of 1985 and a small theater near London's Covent Garden. Many in the audience wandered in out of the sunlight and paid five pounds to see this performance by the Coward Brothers, a lunatic version of the Everlys. Henry and Howard Coward offer sweet country harmonies and a string of gags about their separate backstage suites, which brother's smarter, and how quickly this latest British reunion tour had to be thrown together when the money from the last one ran out.
Most people in the audience probably know that the tall Texan and the wise-cracking Brit aren't really brothers. Most people know the Coward Brothers are really Elvis Costello and T-Bone Burnett. Maybe a few even own the Cowards' British single, "The People's
Limousine" on Imp (as in "impostor") Records. T-Bone and Elvis have written a whole album's worth of songs together. In late July they headed out to Los Angeles where T-Bone started producing Costello's next album.
Yeah, producing. This is 1985, T-Bone's year of productions; 1984 was his year as a solo troubadour. Burnett's work falls into year-long cycles. Most of his fans are still waiting for a sequel to 1983, his last year of making albums and touring.with a band. T-Bone figures it'll be time for that stuff again in '86. This year he's a producer. Already having knocked off Los Lobos, Marshall Crenshaw and ex-Plimsoul Peter Case,
Burnett comes back after the all-star game with Costello and, maybe, one more real big name before Christmas.
Then he figures he'll have enough money to cover his family back in Texas while he goes off on another of those expensive years of album-making and band-fronting.
I can see I'm starting wrong; let me begin again-The Sixties"
Let's backtrack for those who still aren't sure which T-Bone we're talking about; not the old blues man, not the bassist with Hall & Oates. J. Henry Burnett grew up in Texas and learned his way around a mixing board while running a little recording studio there. He released an album of his own songs that didn't get too far, but his knack for being in the right place at the right time paid off when a long night in Greenwich Village found him in on the formation of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue. T-Bone was one of the small army of guitar players who got to step out of the background to sing one song per show. That was T-Bone's first band.
His second was a spin-off. Arista Records gave a deal to three Rolling Thunder vets under the name the Alpha Band. T-Bone was the center of attention through the Alpha's three LPs. The material he wrote for that group was quirky and erratic. Little was as honest or powerful as the songs Burnett introduced on Truth Decay, his 1979 solo album. That hard-to-find disc won him a cult following (T-Bone sometimes steps down from the stage to ask his audience, "Are you a cult?") and reams of critical praise. That led to an EP on Warners, a bigger cult, more reams, and finally, in 1983, Proof Through The Night, the only major-label T-Bone Burnett album and a masterpiece. Pete Townshend and Richard Thompson joined in to help T-Bone fashion an album of uplifting folk rock with Beatles harmonies and Byrds sonic shimmer. Burnett recreated the songs brilliantly onstage with a backing band that included Heartbreakers drummer/singer Stan Lynch and two sons of Andy Williams (and they were good!).
Burnett's lyrics fit his own criterion; they were about what was going on in the town, in America. In his songs weak men blackened their souls lusting after wealth, glamour, and unattainable women. Strong men fought off loneliness while refusing to be immobilized by life's contradictions. Even Burnett's funniest lyrics had poignant flip sides. The creeps in his songs weren't Randy Newman caricatures-they were so real that onstage Burnett (not wanting to condescend) often switched their stories into the first person and some listeners thought him sincere. "The Sixties" was a scathing portrait of a materialist who used the jargon of liberation as an excuse for hedonism. But it was so perfectly realized that dimmer members of Burnett's audience sometimes cheered the character's vices, thinking T-Bone was extolling the protagonist's sleazy pastimes. That song contained a line that could make half a generation wince: "Here's your brave new world.. .on the mirror."
Obviously Burnett was right on top of his game. So of course Warners dropped him in their great artist purge of '84. After a lot of argument within the company, the bottom line won and T-Bone went.
But when that happened Burnett was already into his year as a troubadour. T-Bone would pull into town alone on a train and bring his suitcase and guitar over to the best hotel. He'd go to the local club without sound man or roadie and perform. Then he'd collect the money and go on to the next town.
Playing without a band, Burnett squeezed unexpected dynamics out of his 1938 Gibson J-45. He played all of "My Life And The Women Who Lived It" on the low E string; he'd sing at least one song without any guitar at all, relying on the audience to provide back-up parts; when he got to the solo section of "Trap Door" T-Bone stopped playing chords and switched to lead. When he finished his solo and went back to chords and vocals, people cheered.
"Playing with just one guitar lets you get into all the subtleties," Burnett said. "A stop with one guitar becomes gigantic. It's a real joy of playing to be allowed to play very quietly and draw people in. In bigger places an audience often won't let you do that."
Hard to believe that the Alpha Band's early gigs were so loud that even those with greatly diminished hearing sat with fingers in their ears.
"I saw an article where Keith Richards said, 'Charlie Watts is the Rolling Stones,"' T-Bone offered. "I thought, good grief, has it really come to that? Charlie Watts is great, but would people actually pay twenty-five bucks to go see a drummer for an hour and a half? In swing bands the drums just came out at appropriate times and were very exciting. Chuck Berry records just grooved; the drums weren't loud at all. Drums have taken way too big a piece of what rock 'n' roll is these days. Who said that had to be? When you go into a studio they spend two days getting a drum sound and an hour on the guitar. It's gotten so far removed from Duke Ellington's band. The drums were there to supply the pulse, but what people were really interested in hearing was Paul Gonsalves wail for 13 choruses-and all the harmonies, the complexities.
"And lyrics are gone. When you go to a big rock 'n' roll show you never hear a word. When the audience wants too much, all the sensitivity goes. In my next band I'll make sure I don't lose what I've learned from the solo shows."
The solo shows were indeed personal in a way modern rock rarely manages, In every town, T-Bone seemed to connect straight into a network of like-minded musicians. Often they'd join him onstage. If the town were London, the guests might be stars like Townshend and U2. If the town were, say, Providence, T-Bone would find the best local rock 'n' roll songwriters and get them up with acoustic guitars to share his spotlight. In addition to performing with the locals, Burnett would come down off the stage and hang out at the bar with fans when the performance was over. When T-Bone got on his next train, he'd leave the local scene buzzing with fresh ideas, new friendships, and what the hippies used to call good vibes. Burnett's troubadour year generated a lot of warmth. It was a million miles from being part of a big hype on a major record label, Burnett's past and almostly certainly his future.
His year of production, by contrast, is generating more business. In the spring of '85, Burnett sits in a Manhattan recording studio while Marshall Crenshaw leads NRBQ's rhythm section- Joey Spampinato and Tommy Ardolino-through the third take of a new tune. T-Bone and visitor Skeeter Davis vote for keeping the first version, full of energy and high spirits Crenshaw wants the second, saying the musicians were tighter. Everyone agrees the third take's too sterile, so there's a deadlock over which of the first two was better. The whole time the point is debated, Spampinato sits with headphones on, unaware of the argument. Finally T-Bone and Crenshaw signal him to take off his cans and tell them which take he prefers. "I like the third one" Joey says. (Moans all around.) Finally T-Bone offers to edit the best parts of the different takes together to make an acceptable whole. It's a compromise that allows work to continue, though not necessarily one he'll stick to
"I'm getting really interested in making hits," Burnett explains The success of his Los Lobos production, together I with these votes of professional confidence from Crenshaw. Costello and others, have made Burnett a popular guy in some of the very corporate corridors that once equated T-Bone with that bane of commerce, art. Burnett's hooked up with U2's management, and even old Warners is starting to hint that they'd still sort of like first crack at T-Bone's next LP
Brings to mind something Burnett said right after Warners gave him his walking papers last year He was philosophical about losing that deal.
"Warners just don't know what to do right now," Burnett said "If these big record companies put out an album that sells 200,000 copies. it doesn't put a blip on their computer They're not really making money on it Not when you figure in all the salaries and expense accounts. They have to sell a million records to start really showing a profit. Which is death to an artist."
Burnett sighed and then summed up the whole dilemma in one line: "If an artist doesn't have the freedom to fail, he has no freedom at all."