Lloyd Sachs - T-Bone Burnett; A Life In Pursuit

AMERICAN MUSIC SERIES

David Menconi, Editor

T BONE BURNETT

A Life in Pursuit

LLOYD SACHS

University of Texas Press

AUSTIN

Copyright 2016 by Lloyd Sachs

All rights reserved

First edition, 2016

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Sachs, Lloyd, author.

Title: T Bone Burnett : a life in pursuit / Lloyd Sachs.

Other titles: American music series (Austin, Tex.)

Description: Austin : University of Texas Press, 2016.

Series: American music series

Identifiers: LCCN 2016005519

ISBN 978-1-4773-0377-1 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1155-4 (library e-book)

ISBN 978-1-4773-1156-1 (nonlibrary e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Burnett, T-Bone. | Sound recording executives and producersUnited StatesBiography. | MusiciansUnited StatesBiography.
Classification: LCC ML429.B927 S23 2016 | DDC 780.92dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2016005519

doi:10.7560/303771

To all the ink-stained writers I have been lucky to know

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Opening Chorus

ON TOP OF THE WORLD (OR CLOSE)

Fish were jumpin when T Bone Burnett conducted his first conference call with Alison Krauss and Robert Plant to discuss making an album together. The famed producer was up in Vancouver, British Columbia, at the Capilano Salmon Hatchery, perhaps thinking of Lou The Salmon King Kemp, the tour manager of Bob Dylans Rolling Thunder Revue. Surrounded by Gods wonderssteep granite cliffs, lush rainforest vegetation, roaring waterfallsthe spiritual seeker who some people think led Dylan down the path of Christianity was in an elevated state when he connected with Krauss, who was in Nashville, and Plant, who was in Balior somewhere, as Burnett would later say.

The geographical distance between the artists was a perfect metaphor for the vast stylistic distance between Krauss, a bell-toned sweet heart of modern bluegrass, and Plant, the leonine former wailer of Led Zeppelin. The thought of Krauss putting fiddle to the metal on Black Dog was only slightly odder than the thought of Plant going back porch. But Krauss, who grew up not in bluegrass country but in the university town of Champaign, Illinois, was a heavy metal fan. And Plant, a blues-loving native of Englands Midlands, was such a fan of hers that he had asked her to perform with him as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fames 2004 American Music Masters Tribute to Lead Belly.

Singing that Lead Belly stuff wasnt in the right range for us, Krauss said in a 2008 press teleconference, according to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, but the encounter piqued the singers interest in further collaborations, and naturally led them to Burnett. He had recorded Krauss for O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the 2000 soundtrack album that ignited the roots music revival. And Burnett had been in talks with Plant about producing a sequel to The Honeydrippers: Volume One, the 1984 EP of fifties-era rock and R&B that the Brit recorded with his former Zep mate Jimmy Page. Krauss told Burnett that she wanted to do something darker than usual. Plant said he wasnt interested in recording a conventional duo album. Leave it to Burnett to satisfy both their visions while surprising and challenging them with one of his own.

For Burnett, who with his vast knowledge of American music redefines the old throwaway line (and Dylan cover title) I forgot more than youll ever know, everything starts with the song. He went into full scuba mode, diving down deep into the vast stream of recorded history for tunes he envisioned Plant and Krauss covering. He came up not with a mere handful of singles and the like but with stacks of them. Listening to playlists ranging from the 1950s R&B group Lil Millet and His Creoles tune Rich Woman to the prototypical alt-country artist Townes Van Zandts Nothin, Plant felt as if he were attending a masters class in spinology. I thought I was pretty knowledgeable about American music, but Id missed out on an entire area, he told Jon Pareles of the New York Times. I now know that American music is a total panorama. I was cutting it off and thinking it was redneck hell down there.

Collaborations between well-known artists frequently go awry either because their styles dont jibe (as with Eric Clapton & Wynton Marsalis Play the Blues), because there is too much of one star and not enough of the other (as with All the Roadrunning, on which Emmylou Harris disappears for long stretches opposite Mark Knopfler, who produced the recording), or because there is no chemistry between them (as with virtually all the cuts on Frank Sinatras phoned-in Duets). Burnett, however, heard Raising Sand less as a collaboration than as a convergencea meeting of open-minded artists for whom one plus one equaled not two but one. If Plant and Krauss had any second thoughts about softening or departing from their signature styles to level the interpretive playing field, the relaxed atmosphere Burnett created in the studio enabled them to get past their doubts. Both were rewarded by finding sides of their talents of which they themselves had perhaps been unaware.

Plant was an obvious choice to sing Little Miltons Let Your Loss Be Your Lesson, a mid-1970s B-side delight from the blues and R&B artists years with the Stax label. But Burnett asked Krauss to sing it instead. She initially begged off, feeling too white to do it (as she told National Public Radios Weekend Edition Sunday). Prodded by the producer, however, she rose to the challenge, bringing a soulful depth to what became a plucky, Loretta Lynntype vehicle. Plant, rocks quintessential lead singer, had rarely sung harmony, but opposite Krauss, a skilled arranger who showed him how to sing his parts, he sounds as pure as a choirboy. Their hushed communion on Killing the Blues, on which Greg Leiszs sighing pedal steel arches over the singers like a rainbow over gold, is spine-tingling. Burnett first heard that song decades earlier when its composer, Roly (Rowland) Salley, Chris Isaaks longtime bassist, played it in the Bay Area home of the Chicago-born bluesman Nick Gravenites.

As we will see, great music producers approach their work as uniquely as great film directors approach theirs, employing different methods to get the best performances out of their actors, different levels of formality to frame the performances, and different conceptions of the imprint they should or shouldnt leave on the finished product. Burnett now carries such weight in the entertainment capitals of Hollywood and Nashville that the title record producer can contain him no more than film director could contain Orson Welles. His O Brother soundtrack altered the landscape of American music so markedly that it may well have affected our culture as significantly as Citizen Kane did. From his own critically acclaimed work as a singer and songwriter to his close associations with Bob Dylan and Sam Shepardone of the greatest songwriters of our time and one of the greatest playwrightsto his outspoken efforts to overhaul digital recorded sound, Burnetts accomplishments have made the musician-producer one of the most significant figures in popular culture during the past forty years.

His success is particularly amazing because, in many ways, he is an outsider playing an insiders game. A fierce intellectual, he finds cultural enrichment in a paradise of anti-intellectualism. A man of deep religious faith, he thrives in a den of moneylenders. Burnett is part Don Quixote, charging at digital windmills in his quest to restore analog truth, and part Southern politician, crossing palms with hyperbolic play money: he says that Justin Timberlake is the closest we have to Bing Crosby, claims the mandolinist Chris Thile is the Louis Armstrong of his time, and calls Alison Krauss the one... [just as] Ray Charles was the one.