T Bone, Well Done
He's been the invisible hand behind hit records by the likes of Roy Orbison, Elvis Costello, and Los Lobos. But at 53, Fort Worth's T Bone Burnett is finally a star in his own right.
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And soon I realize that T Bone considers anything intriguing to be genuinely possible. I had heard that in the fall, he would be the executive producer and the music producer for a television show called Archangels—with songs written by Elvis Costello—in which a girl band “goes on adventures.” I ask if it’s true. “Yeah,” he says with a wry smile. “I guess they announced it.” When he talks about the reasons a 78 rpm record sounds better than a CD, I ask if he’d ever release his own recordings on 78. “Yeah, I’m considering it pretty seriously.” So it’s not really a surprise that his answer to “What’s good about being T Bone Burnett?” is “Never bored,” and the answer to “What’s bad about it?” is, muttered with a deep chuckle, “Never bored.”
After the play, the cast members and their guests saunter into an Italian restaurant named Scala’s Bistro to talk about the performance and munch on calamari under the high ceilings and gilt mirrors. Groupies in hot pants pace, planning the remainder of the night on their cell phones, in a whirl of so many celebrities that I start thinking there are actually clones of each of them hovering around a long row of tables against the wall. Cheech is over there—nope, nope, he’s over there; Bonnie Raitt is visiting with Sam Shep—nope, she’s over there now. Drinks are passed. Glasses clink.When T Bone slouches sideways on a banquette and pulls his glasses off, Penn picks the plain specs up, winds the wires behind his ears, and broadcasts, “So this is what the world looks like through T Bone’s eyes.” He surveys the room with his hands on his hips. “Pretty good.”
What T Bone used to see when he was growing up in Fort Worth—back when his family lived on a hill and he could watch clouds roll in from all sides—was this: “It was gray. I remember—remember that great scene in The Last Picture Show when they show Ben Johnson just sitting there, and you can’t distinguish the water from the sky? That’s how I remember growing up.”
He was born Joseph Henry Burnett, though he says people started calling him T Bone when he was a kid (he’s not sure why). In those days he listened to a lot of Buddy Holly and Jimmy Reed records. As a teenager, he wrote and played blues and rock and roll in his bands, but it was the production studio that became his laboratory. Over the years, he found he was good at it. Very, very good at it. And true to the notion that one has to leave his home to find his identity, T Bone drove out of Fort Worth in the early seventies, when he was in his mid-twenties, and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where production work rolled in like clouds over the plains.
Seeing him in a social situation, one can appreciate why he would be an ideal helmsman for creative people: Besides having keen ears, he laughs a lot; a performer in a studio would feel at ease. Plus, he’s interested in a wide range of topics—thirties music and Arvo Pärt and Lydia Mendoza and presidential elections and the new Macintosh computer and the myth of Orpheus and the colors that compose images on a television screen. Early in the morning, when Scala’s has just about cleared out, Shepard is talking about New Orleans pianist James Booker. Shepard demonstrates on the table the way Booker would play his left hand off his right, and I glance over at T Bone, who promptly gives me the “Don’t look at me; pay attention” elbow in the ribs. These are the fascinating things—everything buzzing around him.
The next day, he’s in a bookstore looking for Stanley Bing’s satirical instruction book What Would Machiavelli Do? and James Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. As he’s poking around the tables with new releases, he picks up Nancy Reagan’s I Love You, Ronnie and makes a comment that would cause eyes to roll in most liberal artist circles: “I have a lot of respect for Reagan. He really did a lot for my parents’ generation. He wrapped up the World War’s loose ends.” No sarcasm follows. He just gives that eyebrow-raised “You know what I mean?” look and keeps strolling, brushing his long fingers on the book covers.
Later that day, when we talk about a letter he wrote in 1999 to Jerry Falwell that criticized the reverend’s teachings, he starts talking about why, in an industry not known for its fondness for religion, he has stayed an outspoken, religious man. Sometimes this has confused his admirers who may equate his marriage to former Christian-only pop singer Phillips with a right-wing stance. “Why do some of your fans think you’re ‘born again’?” I ask.
“There are so many parts to it. One is: People look for handles. It makes you safe. If they can put a handle on you, they can pick you up and move you. But there are a lot of parts to that answer. Some of it had to do with Dylan and that whole period of time when we went on the road with him in ‘75 and ‘76—probably ten or fifteen people who were on that tour started going to church again,” he says. “It’s corny to say, but religion is important to me, and as far as I’m concerned, the more organized the religion the better. When people say, ‘Well, I’m religious but I don’t like organized religion’ I think, ‘Alright, well, cool, great,’ and I put my wallet in my boot”—he laughs—“because I know what’s going to happen.”
The only subject he doesn’t seem to get excited about these days is production work. “Kids today—it’s funny, because now I’m a record producer, and I’m the one who has to make an argument for art. When I was growing up, it was the record producers who were commercial, and the musicians had this notion that we were making art—those producers thought that was ridiculous. The music must be transcendent. I still believe that.
“That’s why I’m not producing anymore. That’s why I’m going in this other direction. I’m too old to be messing around with this. At this point the records have got to be really good or else why am I doing it? I don’t mean to sound pompous. At this point, though—I don’t need to do it to figure out how to get a drum sound. I don’t need any practice getting drum sounds. I should be making my own records even if they don’t sell and I go broke.” The final night I’m in San Francisco, after the last act has finished and the audience is long gone, he bounds down the stairs from backstage and hustles out of the theater. It’s chilly outside, and he’s striding quickly in long paces down the street with his hands in his pockets, amused, giddy. It has been said that men do their best work after fifty. He has heard this and is convinced it’s true. He’s a producer to pay the bills, but a writer’s only a writer when he’s writing. If that’s what T Bone is, time’s a-wastin’. Let down the wall; this is the great mid-life rush. Never bored.It’s about two o’clock in the morning. Back at the hotel, he pulls out a small-bodied guitar and starts whisper-singing songs from The True False Identity. It’s conjuring music, slow, dark, and sad, and he rocks back and forth slightly as he picks through. “You are my darkness / I crawl through you / feeling my way / to no light.”
Before I leave, I ask what other projects I should expect him to be revealing. “There are so many things, but I don’t know what they are yet,” he says, punctuating the response with a big guffaw.
“Yeah, that’s really the straight answer to that. There are so many things that I want to do.” It seems like at this moment, in this answer, he knows every single thing about being T Bone Burnett.
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