One Chicken-Fried T-Bone Comin' Up

One Chicken-Fried T-Bone Cornin' Up

T-BONE BURNETT Truth Decay (Takoma)

Robot A. Hull

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Right off the bat T-Bone Burnett has three things going fo^ him: He was born in Tokyo (home of the Jolly Green Godzilla); raised in Fort Worth (Dallas's understudy), and he co-produced the Legendary Stardust Cowboy’s “Paralyzed” (which, actually, was more of a precursor to ’70’s punk than tbe Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie”). His musical career, though, is largely based upon an underground repg§| his, first LP on Uni (J. Henry Burnett’s The B-52 Band and the Fabulous Skylarks,/released in 72, way before the debut of a certain East Coast beach band with a similar name), his brief stint with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, and his three records with the overly mellow Alpha, Band.

Like Delbert McClinton, Burnett is a studio veteran of countless Ft. Worth sessions, and he brings that expertise to Truth Decay, but more importantly, he disguises it in such a way that his album sounds as if it were recorded in the passion of a passing moment somewhere be. tween the garage and the bathroom. On the album cover, T-Bone looks like a forlorn Deputy Dawg with a hangover, but his music summons forth more heroic Texas figures: Jim Bowie, Sonny Fisher, Preston Jones.

Truth Decay is .a. cryptic work— you begin to suspect that Burnett must imagine that the answer to the riddle of the Sphinx iss buried beneath the soil of his sprawling Lone Star State. The album builds upon contradictions—it begins with the assaulting echoes of Bobby Fuller’s unapproachable 1 Fought the Law

(“Quicksand”) yet concludes in the sublime reverie of the Byrds’ Sweetheart of the Rodeo (“I’m Coming Home”). Imagine Warren Zevon with pistols loaded, stranded in the desert, with nobody to shoot at.

Burnett’s songs never really misfire—they just take getting used to. It is a weird songwriter indeed who can transform what at first seems to be another “The Beat Goes On” into an apocalyptic spew a la Dylan preaching behind a burning cactus plant (“Talk Talk Talk Talk Talk”). His) images have a mystical bent that occasionally even go beyond the pale. On “Love at First Sight,” a lover pursues his obscure object of desire only to discover that, as she kneels to wash his feet, she has assumed the persona of a female Christ. On “Madison Avenue,” Burnett sings with the vengeance of a McCartney with a vulture on his back but conceals his protest beneath a blanket of enigmatic metaphors; thus, advertising becomes “a search for a historic Jesus” or “a death cult that terrorized a town” (surely that’s not, what Stan Freberg had in mind).

I’ve listened to Truth Decay over a dozen times and it still seems as

elusive as, say, Skip Spence’s Oar— an elusiveness that comes deep from the heart of that warm; paradoxical giant of a state which could give us both Buddy Holly and Sam the Sham. While a ghost pounds the empty skull of a coyote on “House of Mirrors,” Tex-Mex rnythms lazily drift across the border. “Tears Tears Tears,” Conveying heartbreak with no oasis in sight, could be the modern equivalent of Rudy Martinez’s popular sob story (which means perfect material for , Joe “King” Carrasco to boot). “Power of Love” is an obvious tribute to Doug Sahm, and “Come Home” heads in the direction of “Linda Lu” by Ray Sharpe (who, like Burnett, was also from Ft. Worth) but soon becomes a Scorcher all its own. Further, Burnett risks everything by allowing Texas chauvirtism to rear its ugly head on “Pretty Girls” (“gee, Brian, they just don’t grow ’em in California like they used to”).

And for those who don’t happen to feel that Texas is the coolest state, Burnett offers “Driving Wheel,” a neo-rockabilly song cowritten with Billy Swan that, although not as authentic as 'Billy Hancock’s current double-sided bruiser (“Miss Jessie Lee/I’m Satisfied,” Ripsaw 215), does provide Burnett with the opportunity to express himself with the two-gun madness of a cornered outlaw. “All I want is a love that’s hot,” he sings, taking a potshot at a meandering armadillo. “Love that don’t try to be something it’s not.” And that, in a horned toad’s swallow, is the beauty of Truth Decay: It’s nothing less than real music for real people, and Burnett has assimilated his roots with the love and devotion of. a genuine connoisseur.

Now if Only someone would really shoot J.R.