T Bone Burnett looked out at his invited audience. "We're all in show business," he said with a rueful smile, to an approving murmur from a few dozen listeners.
He was performing at the Magic Castle, a venerable West Hollywood club where pronouncing "open sesame" opens a hidden door to a warren of bars and lounges. Inside, magicians perform card tricks and displays commemorate vaudeville and movie illusions. On one of the club's small stages, Burnett cradled a vintage Kay K161 guitar with a tiger-striped pickguard and played a handful of songs from his new album, The True False Identity, and from an anthology being released simultaneously, Twenty Twenty: The Essential T Bone Burnett, that sums up his long career in 40 songs full of questions, tribulations, sly humor and down-home guitars.
Chatting before he went onstage, he flinched slightly at the word "career." A tall but not overbearing man with understated, almost old-fashioned clothes, he has the reassuring presence of a country doctor in a black-and-white western.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
"I never thought of it as a career," he said. "I've always just been completely occupied taking care of the thing that's right under my nose. I had no plan, no arc, no retirement plan. It was just the thing that came along and attacking it with my whole heart. That would be my career if I had one."
He was playing for a gathering of Hollywood insiders: illusion manufacturers. Many of his listeners were music supervisors for film and television, the people who choose songs for soundtracks and shows like The O.C. Burnett was promoting himself but not pandering. The songs he performed were bluesy, droll indictments of human nature and media delusions.
In his own way, Burnett, 58, is a Hollywood insider, too. He has lived in Los Angeles since the early 1970s and works in Los Angeles' top studios. The hits he has produced -- like the multimillion-selling soundtrack for O Brother, Where Art Thou -- have bought him a comfortable house in Bel Air. He has a personal assistant.
Yet he is anything but a slick Hollywood type. He's a voracious reader who casually quotes the Bible, Andy Warhol and the Chinese philosopher Lao Tse. He still pays his way into clubs and concerts,
remembering his own days as a working musician. He tries not to say an unkind word about anything except, when pressed, the longtime business practices of recording companies. "Honesty is the most subversive of all disguises," he sings in Hollywood, Mecca of the Movies on his new album. "I said goodbye a long time ago/You must not have heard me."
In the many projects Burnett has worked on through the years -- from backing up Bob Dylan on the Rolling Thunder Revue tour to producing Elvis Costello, Los Lobos and Gillian Welch to assembling soundtracks for films -- there's a consistent streak of what might be called American magical realism. The music he makes is deeply rooted but never simply a throwback. He prizes the simplicity and audacity of classic Americana, from blunt heartbreak songs to surreal tall tales. But he has no interest in recreating the past. Instead, he's mapping old-time integrity into the complicated present tense.
"I want the music to be authentic, but I want it to be authentic in the moment you're doing it." he said. "I want to be honest to God in the moment of the thing when it's happening. So you do toy with it, or play with it. It's not replicating something, it's breathing new life into it -- being true to the thing without trying to duplicate it."
Even the homey sound of O Brother was untraditional. "That record, and that movie, they were never intended to be an authentic traditional bluegrass album," he said. "That was intended to be a rock 'n' roll record. The feel of Man of Constant Sorrow, for instance, is very much a rock 'n' roll feel, it was an exciting, jazzed-up version. Whether you have a guitar playing the backbeat or a snare playing the backbeat, it doesn't really matter. It's just where it's hit."
Costello, in a phone conversation, described Burnett's approach as "making a sense of time and place, but at the same time dislocating it slightly to give a sense of the unease that we're living in."
Burnett has held onto the courtly manners and leisurely drawl of his Texas upbringing. He grew up in Forth Worth, where T-Bone was his childhood nickname. After being derided by Texas musicians who thought he was comparing himself to the great blues guitarist T-Bone Walker, he at first used his given name, J. Henry, then returned to T Bone minus the hyphen. He bounced between the coasts, playing with Bob Dylan in Bleecker Street clubs and then with the Rolling Thunder Revue. The revue's band turned into the Alpha Band and made three albums featuring Burnett's songs in the 1970s.
On his first visit to Los Angeles, Burnett happened into a jam session with Taj Mahal and Delaney Bramlett that lasted all night long. Right there, he decided that Los Angeles was less cliquish than Fort Worth and a good place for a musician. He's settled, but still ambivalent, three decades later.
"I absolutely can't stand the hierarchy of show business," he admits. "One of the things that happens in this town is that every day some really bad guy gets some big deal. And it's frustrating, and there are really beautiful artists who can't ever work in town because all these people are eating up every bit of attention and money. That stuff is awful. But on the other hand, there always is a large group of incredible artists in town. And there's a whole group of down-to-earth artists in town. Yet at the same time, it's a dangerous place and will devour you."
The True False Identity is Burnett's first album of his own songs since 1992. "I've been waiting to hear from him,"
Costello said. "I wondered whether we had lost him as a recording artist to the world of production and film." To make the album, he assembled a band around three drummers and the spiky, twangy guitarist Marc Ribot, who has worked regularly with Tom Waits. With the drummers constantly knocking the beat around, the songs ride vamps that shuffle and lope, steeped in blues and reggae. His voice echoes Bob Dylan and John Lennon as Burnett sings absurdist rhymes, sociopolitical observations and haunted lost-love songs, sparing neither himself nor the flawed world around him.
Burnett is openly Christian, though decidedly nonfundamentalist. In Blinded by the Darkness on the new album, Burnett declares, "In seven days God created evolution" shortly before the song explodes into a vertiginous jam.
The long gap between albums was partly the result of his many other projects: not just films but a Grammy-winning duet album by Tony Bennett and K.D. Lang, and Cassandra Wilson's new album Thunderbird. For Cold Mountain, he wrote the Oscar-nominated song The Scarlet Tide with Costello, and he remade Johnny Cash and June Carter songs with Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line. He is now working on Across the Universe, a Julie Taymor film built around Beatles songs.
The delay between albums was also a response to the times, he said. "There was an honest-to-God revolution in the 1960s, or what was called the 1960s, though it began before then," he said. "The world's a lot better place for it. And we've been living for the past 30 years through a classic Maoist counterrevolution, trying to undo and take us back to some time in the past. But the counterrevolution has run out of gas, literally."
"I felt the brick wall crumble that we've all been facing, and I felt freedom rushing in on me," he added. "Freedom with my instrument, freedom with my voice, freedom with my words." He sequestered himself for two weeks in Northern California, near Big Sur, and "I wrote 200 pages of stuff, just solid," he said. "There was no effort whatsoever, no force. One of the things I've learned is that if you cooperate with the universe it will cooperate with you."
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