PROOF THRU THE NIGHT: T-BONE BURNETT OFFERS 100%

PROOF THRU THE NIGHT: T-BONE BURNETT OFFERS 100%

by

Cynthia Rose

Rock music may know few true gentlemen. But those it does possess are liable to embody the best of that extraordinary flamboyance, imagination and hope rock can lend all our lives. Take J. Henry Burnett from Fort Worth, Texas.

To rock cognoscenti (and Hollywood’s hipsters), J. Henry is better known as TBone Burnett: a musician’s musician and a sophisticate of both second innocence and music’s best blood truths. Since high school days a producer of r’n’b by Texas’s best acts (and recently, L.A.’s most eclectic), T-Bone is the guitar ace recruited by friend Bob Neuwirth for Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue.

A few years later, with a jaunty little caution of a tune called “Quicksand,” Burnett prefigured the way bands like Rank And File, Lone Justice and X would survive to goose the essential ethic of C&W with the energies of punk. Who is this mystery man? His face is one you might have glimpsed onscreen in Heaven’s Gate or Renaldo And Clara. He was a founder/disbander of the legendary Alpha Band (LPs: 1976: The Alpha Band; 1971: Spark In The Dark; 1978: Statue Makers Of Hollywood). Nickname: “The Lonesome Guitar Strangler.” Weapon of Choice: Wit. Circle of friends: Wide enough to stretch from Warren Zevon and Pete Townshend through Sam Sheppard and Texas Chainsaw Massacre-maker Tobe Hooper, as well as the mechanic who fixes his treasured ’65 Cadillac (“sometimes I just pray for the thing to break down cause that guy is so great to talk to.”).

With his new LP, Proof Through The Night, T-Bone Burnett has at last released himself on his own recognizance into the mainstream of rock. Proof— for once correctly tagged in its ad copy as “the finest American pop work since Springsteen’s Nebraska”— is the third installment in an American trilogy of records begun with 1980’s Truth Decay (Takoma) and last year’s Trap Door (WEA). All are records of inexhaustible insight and interest: classics.

During T-Bone’s recent Manhattan shows at the Bottom Line (where he was doublebilled with folk king Richard Thompson), the lanky Texan cake-walked a lengthy table of record execs while executing a prolonged one-note guitar solo; rendered a “La Bamba” which could cut Richie Valens’s; and came up with a 15-minute re-write/update of “Gloria” which encapsulated both the disintegration and regeneration of rock’s visions. In London to play Dingwalls a few weeks later, he gave what he termed a "raggedy, beatnik” show—composed of dedications “to Joe Orton,” a cappella versions of jukebox classics like “King Of The Road’ and s> a'killer “Not Fade Away.” Then while the $ normally-catatonic British audience ecstati“ cally crooned “You Are My Sunshine” along J with him, Burnett cannily slipped out a side ^ door.

“You Are My Sunshine” is T-Bone’s 3 favorite song but he’s as likely to dedicate ° a number to “my ex-wife, Mamie Van Doren” as to a tragic British playwright. For J. Henry is a man plagued by the loss of a certain character in America, and he has decided to step into the breach. To will it into continued existence. T-Bone Burnett is a self-determined figure, waging a singular fight against fatigue of the soul.

To see how this might manifest itself outside the antic array of concern which (thanks to the Burnett songwriting skills) coalesce beautifully into Proof Through The Night, I call on T-Bone himself. Lounging over a Glenfiddach whiskey in a Fort Worth honkytonk, he looks like a prosperous 1940s stockman: cowboy boots and a loose grey suit. Only his pale, pink-framed glasses offer a giveaway; that and the fact that mostly we talk about psychiatry and religion. Religion (T-Bone is Episcopalian) tends to crop up a lot in discussions of the Burnett ouevre...partly because of speculation about its author’s persuasive personality vis-a-vis Dylan’s post-Rolling Thunder conversion.

It’s not a label T-Bone likes. (“Just because I write about all these low lives, these pimps and junkies and dealers and debutantes, someone’s putting out the word that I’m this real fierce moralist. Well, I write about those people because I love ’em: I AM one of ’em.”) And he’s more pleased to have Proof judged “controversial” than “compassionate. ”

But T-Bone’s already onto his next step, writing a song called “The Willie Dixon Story” and another, “My Life And The Women Who Lived It.” The latter—described by its author as “learning to grow up and learning to give credit where credit is due”—stunned the audience at its U.K. premiere.

“It’s the beginning of my new regime,” TBone announces now. “I’m gonna say just exactly what I mean, as directly as I can. Maybe just me, an upright bass and some bongos. This has to do with Charles Dickens .or something. He was a wild man, you know? But he somehow touched people’s humanity in a way that...cut real deep.”

TURN TO PAGE 66

T-BONE BURNETT

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 26

Where there is division, confusion and perversion

Let there be unify, clarify and purify.

That’s a quote from an old Alpha Band sleeve, but its theme of rock as the builder of community is still the cornerstone of TBone’s aims: “It’s hard to say so it doesn’t sound reactionary or hackneyed but—I do believe the audience and performer together can create a sense of real community, of belonging and understanding.

“The most important thing I’ve learned in the past year though, has been that truth does not reside in numbers, that truth resides in the individual human being. We live in a materialistic age which is always trying to prove the truth by numbers and that’s a disease which strikes down the human spirit.”

It’s a theme T-Bone has often dwelt upon in his work, from Truth Decay’s “House Of Mirrors” right through last week’s “My Life And The Women” etc.

“Well,” he says now, “it’s just that we have to look at things as they are; these things affect even the people who don’t ‘approve’ of them. Even they dress a certain way, drive a particular car—in essence, get their sense of self-worth from what is outside themselves.

“The way we live in the world today, you know, someone will say to a guy ‘nice shirt.’ And he’ll say ‘thanks’—as if he had made the shirt or had anything to do with it. It’s like we’re grasping for a sense of worth so much that identity comes from ‘I drive a Mercedes, I wear a Mohican, I buy Versace suits.’ And that’s a very cheap substitute for a real feeling of worth in yourself.

“That’s what all three of my records are about,” says T-Bone. “That we’re becoming a world of images rather than ideas.”

And nowhere more so than...

“The world of rock, yes.” T-Bone’s round blue orbs light up. “Can I pontificate for a moment on the state of the union?”

By all means.

“OK, what I want to say is that.. .a lot of the founding fathers of rock ’n’ roll are either dead or, no longer potently involved. Chuck Berry goes round with a pickup band; he’s no carrier of the torch. Jerry Lee is in and out of country music and hospitals; Elvis is—deceased. Little Richard has gone (a slow smile) who knows where.

“The second generation—the Stones, Dylan, Townshend—are all 40 now and they’re dealing with that in all sorts of different ways. But all of them are trying to deal with getting older and what that is really doing.

“The generation which came after them, which I guess is Bowie, the Eagles, Elton John—I sorta missed them, didn’t really enter into that. But this generation, for whom Adam Ant is a model of celebrity: for them it took the Sex Pistols about eight months to do what the Beatles spent a decade on.”

T-Bone leans forward intently. “And now these new revivalists like the Stray Cats are actually a good metaphor for much of the music scene these days. Because they’re taking the veneer of what the beginnings of rock ’n’ roll was about without making it mean anything really important to now.

“When Chuck Berry sang ‘School Day,”’ he continues, “It wasn’t a revolutionary statement, it wasn’t a heavy statement. But it was a statement that went right into the heart and veins of the audience. ‘Sexy and 17’ is basically a remake of ‘School Day’ but it fails to do that. And Berry did it with real finesse; so it created a genuine feeling of ‘we are a community, we’re a generation, we have worth.’ The Stray Cats, though that guy is a wonderful, guitar player, are only making music that’s clever and smart. It doesn’t say anything.”

But you don’t see the present as bleak, musically?

“Oh no, there are still people carrying the torch; people who know that to disregard Hank Williams and Jimmie Rodgers and the Stanley Brothers and Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters is...a big mistake. Because that torch goes way back, and it is American, it’s folk music. Even the Beatles—they played some pop music, but they played folk music most of the time.”

T-Bone studies his Aubrey Beardsley-size hands. “The distinction I would make is that there’s folk music and there’s popular music and those are the two generic types. And rock ’n’ roll from its inception was folk music, although people have used a rock ’n’ roll form for pop—take Journey, for instance. If you want to be clearer about it, look back to the ’30s: to the difference between Jimmie Rodgers and George Gershwin. Folk music was always basically more for the country and pop music as such was meant for city people.

“But you know,” T-Bone pauses dreamily. “There’s a place where a river runs into an ocean; there’s a part of it where the salt water all gets mixed up together. And that’s what America' is about and that’s what American music is about and that’s what rock ’n’ roll is about. It actually wasn’t invented by anyone and it’s not just black and white, either. It’s Mexican and Appalachian and Gaelic and everything that ever came filtering down that river.”