CRITICAL MASS : Sound man
Posted on Tuesday, May 23, 2006
Someone has stolen my identity and I feel sorry for him.
— T Bone Burnett Funny thing about art, you can live with it — expose yourself to it — for years and think things like “that’s a nice painting” or “that’s a pretty piece of turned wood” or “that Bertolt Brecht, what a card” and then, one day when you least expect it, you look at it or listen to it and you find it changed, like the 3-D sailboat in those Magic Eye stereograms that were all over the shopping malls in the Clinton years. And you think to yourself, “Oh, so that’s what that’s all about.”
But it’s not the art that’s changed. It’s you. Some people might say the art improved you. Others might argue that the art corrupted you — and that they ought to lock the art up for that, or at least put it away behind the counter where impressionable children and sensitive, decent people won’t accidentally see it and be changed. Maybe such things are worth arguing over, maybe you ought to be 18 or 21 or 37 years old before you can legally listen to Miles Davis committing his lonely murders on the soundtrack to Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows while Jeanne Moreau creeps around gray Paris looking for her lover.
Because if you get the good stuff early and often, maybe you end up like this T Bone Burnett fellow, trying to live your life as an artist yet fully cognizant of all you cannot do. Burnett, who released The True False Identity, his first new album in 14 years, last week, along with a two-disc retrospective of his career called 20 / 20 — The Essential T Bone Burnett, blames his parents for their good taste. They let him listen to Louis Armstrong and Howlin’ Wolf when he was little. And it instantly humbled him because he knew that no matter how long he lived, how much he learned, he could never do what those old geniuses could do. A crime was committed against his self-esteem; good taste was installed in the Burnett boy.
Or you could look at it another way.
Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry said a man’s got to know his limitations, and Lucinda Williams as herself said limitations can be liberating, that a real artist can make of those inherent limitations an asset, and anybody who has ever heard poor damaged Daniel Johnston sing and play guitar knows that’s true. And though young T Bone — young J. Henry Burnett — knew he couldn’t be The Beatles, because there were four of them, he could sort of do something like what they were doing. He could do himself, and he had a whole life ahead of him to sort out who that was.
“I was determined to try to live my life as an artist,” he says, on the phone from Los Angeles, where he has lived since the early 1970 s. “I’m aware of how that sounds.”
Of course he is — he’s aware of how everything sounds. T Bone Burnett is a sound man.
By the time he was 17 he owned a studio in his hometown of Fort Worth.
The first tour he ever played was with Bob Dylan, a little something called The Rolling Thunder Review. He was in the Alpha Band in the 1970 s with his friends Steve Soles and David Mansfield. He put out a handful of great records under his own name, enlisting the help of talents like Ry Cooder and Richard Thompson and Pete Townshend. He produced Elvis Costello and Los Lobos and Gillian Welch.
He got in the movie business with the Coen brothers and put together a soundtrack for The Big Lebowski and recorded one for O Brother, Where Art Thou ?, a project that brought him more attention than anything he’d done previously. (And if you really want to be blown away, check out his gospel soundtrack to the Coen brothers’ The Ladykillers. ) He wrote some songs for Cold Mountain.
It was Burnett who put Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon in a studio with vintage recording equipment and alchemized them into Johnny Cash and June Carter-like critters — not mimics, but characters with breath and voices of their own — for Walk the Line. A lot of people know who T Bone Burnett is, or at least they think they know — he’s the guy who does the great soundtracks.
He has always been a recording artist first, more than a guitarist or singer-songwriter, who works with reflected sound, with columns of vibrating air, with frequencies and aural fabrics. He is a writer too. Probably he draws a little; there might be some canvases stashed away somewhere.
More than anything else he brought a sensibility to everything, something that you could — if you were in the business of describing things — describe as American Mystic Naturalism. You listen to T Bone Burnett for long enough and you hear conversations between Thomas Merton and Woody Guthrie, between Walker Percy and W. C. Handy. His stuff is organic and informed by a passionate Christian humanism.
(I know, it’s getting thick here. But let’s put it this way — it’s like T Bone Burnett is Frank Gifford and your humble scribe is a lowergrade Fred Exley. I put his records on when I was an impressionable youth, and I got them and they got me. Just so you know. )
There are stories in the press about Burnett right now, and a lot of them say the same things about him: He’s an international man of mystery, emerging from a self-imposed exile from the pop music circus. He last put out an album in 1992; after that, he says, the whole singer-songwriter puts out a record and tours behind it thing just stopped working for him. He didn’t know why one note should follow another. It sounds a little like a golfer losing his swing, a writer being blocked. But a few years ago, he started feeling like he could work on his own stuff again.
“I feel like the last 10 years I’ve been in a master class, I’ve learned so much,” he says. “Working with the Coens, with Ralph Stanley, with Sam Shepard, Wim Wenders, so many good and committed people.”
He worked with Shepard on a play called Tooth of Crime. In the theater, even more than in movies, the performance of the music has to support, without overwhelming, what’s happening on the stage. Music can smuggle in emotional content almost subliminally, in a way that lyrics, that words, just can’t.
He rediscovered it was all about storytelling, about serving the characters and propelling the narrative. It really had nothing to do with you — you could be just the stenographer, the recorder. Making art was just something you did, and it didn’t really matter whether it matched up with the forms and conventions established by the people who had a stake in whether it was successful in the marketplace. So Burnett, always known for his lyrics, started to immerse himself in sonic textures, in silences and carbon black notes that hang like storm clouds. He listened to Skip James, to Haitian music, to the Delta-rooted New World masters. He took a 1930 s Roy Smeck guitar that Jackson Browne had given him and started writing.
His new album reflects this apprenticeship; Marc Ribot’s guitar forks across the blue-black sky like heat lightning, drums rumble and march and rattle and limp. Somewhere, far off, then closer, then closer still, a bass dopplers to and fro. The whole album is percussion, a blow to the gut. It’s an itinerant beat wandering and shuffling through the streets of Memphis and Port Au Prince and Palestine, Texas; through shanty towns and graveyards on the edge of snaky woods. A sun ascends, warms the sky to orange and... it’s morning in America.
You can feel the national shoulders shrug, some kind of yoke slipping off. Burnett says he feels like the counter-revolution is definitely over now. The forces of oppression are on their last legs, being devoured by their own appetites. The American people are awake, alert to the new day that has arrived — as Tony Soprano says — like a gift on their doorstep. You don’t have to be afraid anymore.
That’s what it’s like — sort of, the best I can do anyway. You can talk about the lyrics, about Burnett’s sinewy, unadorned voice, a rawhide instrument that is often compared to Dylan’s, and like Dylan’s is often underrated. You can list the song titles, you can explicate the themes, acknowledge the dark comedy, name the cadre of drummers and other worthies who contribute to the sound, but in the end none of that is a substitute for sitting down and exposing yourself to the art of T Bone Burnett.
It might take a while before it reveals its secrets to you, but it’s worth the wait. It was worth the wait. E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline. com
FEEDBACK:
Something to say about this topic? Submit a Letter to the Editor online
