By Lloyd Sachs It's well neigh impossible these days to come across a mention of T Bone Burnett that doesn't begin with "great" or "visionary" or "legendary." No argument here. Unlike so many
of the artists hoisted in today's 24-hour Twitter cycle – how about that reissue by the great Milli Vanilli? – Burnett fully deserves the encomiums.
But it's not just as a record producer – the role for which he is best known – that the Texas native deserves to be considered in such rarified terms. To gaze back at his 40-plus years in the business is to be amazed not only by all the breakthrough albums that bear his signature, but also all his achievements as a singer and songwriter in his own right, as a sound artist and soundtrack auteur, as a theater composer and curator for projects big and small. As I proclaim in my book, T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit, "record producer" can no more contain Burnett than "film director" could Orson Welles.
Can I get an "icon"? It is fascinating to consider the different roles this man of many dimensions has played – and the contradictory sides of his personality that have frequently defined those roles. In calling attention to his multiple identities as an artist and individual, the chapter titles of A Life in Pursuit provide a great template for a playlist of songs he has recorded, produced or programmed. Feel free to hit shuffle. As someone raised on Texas blues, Burnett would take that as a compliment.
"Street in Paris" – Whistler, Chaucer, Detroit and Greenhill (from the chapter Sound Citizen): Written by young Burnett, who produced it at his own Sound City studio in Fort Worth, this melodramatic art-rock oddity by an ad hoc, fake-named band of young locals sounds like a psychedelic hangover from the Legendary Stardust Cowboy's infamous T Bone production "Paralyzed." Featured on The Unwritten Works of Geoffrey, Etc., a 1968 release regarded by some as a cult classic.
"We Have All Got a Past" – J. Henry Burnett (from The Outsider): On his first album, The B-52sand the Fabulous Skylarks, recorded in Los Angeles with a bunch of Texas homeboys, Burnett engaged in a full spectrum of styles. This rollicking, gospel-driven tune reflects his debt to the Leon Russell/Mad Dogs and Englishman school of blue-eyed soul.
A car stereo, a great music mix, and a good long drive can put everything into perspective and nobody knows this truth better than West Texas musicians. Why? Well, let music writer John T. Davis explain through this ultimate West Texas driving mix inspired by the subject of his latest book, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again.
A West Texas Driving Mix By John T. Davis
Route 66…That hard-assed Amarillo Highway…the Loop…the Strip…the Lost Highway…the Eight’r From Decatur…
Roads aren’t just strips of asphalt in West Texas—they are lifelines and metaphors and escape routes and the promise that lies somewhere over yonder. In a dusty and isolated landscape where so much seems fixed in place, there’s healing power in movement. Terry Allen, the artist and musician who has spent his creative life in a love/hate relationship with the Texas Panhandle and the South Plains once said, “No one with access to a car and a good radio station should ever need a psychiatrist.”
The Flatlanders, whose personal and musical journey I’ve chronicled in a new book, The Flatlanders: Now It’s Now Again, grew up driving the highways, ranch roads and farm-to-market byways that surrounded their home in Lubbock, Texas. The “road,” both literal and metaphorical, has always informed the music made by the group and by its three central figures—Joe Ely, Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. Even today, says Joe Ely, when he needs musical inspiration, he’ll take off and drive the grid of tiny back roads that thread their way across the empty plains. It’s a big, blank reservoir of silence, begging to be filled with music.
In that spirit, I’ve put together a mix tape for driving across the plains of West Texas—it’s been a long day behind the wheel, the sun is finally beginning to set and the lights of a small town glimmer on a distant, ruler-straight horizon. The road, as Tom Russell likes to sing, it gives, and the road it takes away.
Access the playlist on your Spotify account here. “Amarillo Highway”—Terry Allen (from Lubbock On Everything): “I’m a high straight in Plainview/Side bet in Idalou/And a fresh deck in New Deal,” sings Allen against a honky-tonk piano and steel guitar. “Some call me high hand/And some call me low hand/But I’m holding what I am—the wheel.” US Hwy. 87, about which Allen was singing, has been supplanted by modern Interstate 27, but the groove is still the same.
“Rave On”—Buddy Holly (from the album The Buddy Holly Collection): Because, duh. Lubbock native Holly set the template for the modern rock band, scored huge hits, inspired the Beatles (and the Flatlanders) and became the first rock ‘n’ roll martyr, all by age 22. Roll down the window, crank it up and let ‘er rip.
When I was asked to compile a list of Austin musical moments related to my new book Progressive Country: How the 1970s Transformed the Texan in Popular Culture, I decided to take a broad approach to the task. Thus, this list isn’t exhaustive or definitive; I’m not going for the ten absolute best or most significant moments in the life of Austin music in the 1970s. Rather, these are ten moments that I find particularly interesting, that complement the narrative of Progressive Country, or that otherwise capture something of the scene’s flavor. Lists like this are never finished works; they are invitations to a conversation. So, if we run into each other at a show someplace, feel free to bring up some other moments you might have chosen. —Jason Mellard
1
Janis Joplin’s last visit to Austin, July 1970
The connections between San Francisco in the ‘60s and Austin are dense. (The South Austin Popular Culture Center has even mounted an exhibit on the subject, on view through January 2014). Migrants from the Texas capital and elsewhere helped define the West Coast counterculture, and blues queen Janis Joplin may well be the poster child for these developments. Long before wowing the crowds at Monterey Pop, Joplin held court with Lanny Wiggins and Powell St. John in Kenneth Threadgill’s North Lamar bar. Her last visit to town honored Mr. Threadgill on the occasion of his birthday, at a concert in Oak Hill helmed by Shiva’s Headband. Her set was short and messy, but she also introduced Austin audiences to Kris Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee.” The show also provided a taste of things to come, as Daily Texan journalist Roger Leinert wondered at the strange crowd of “longhairs and rednecks, hippies and businessmen.”
2
Dripping Springs Reunion, March 1972
By 1973, Willie Nelson’s Fourth of July Picnics would ramp that hippie-redneck rhetoric to its fever pitch, but the first Central Texas “Country Woodstock” was the Dripping Springs Reunion of March 1972. The concert ably matched Nashville’s old guard with its new wave of singer-songwriters. Tex Ritter, Roy Acuff, Hank Snow, Bill Monroe, and Dottie West appeared alongside Merle Haggard, Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Willie Nelson, and Waylon Jennings. Threadgill was there, too. Willie would play the Armadillo World Headquarters for the first time a few months later, sealing an alliance that would launch the first Willie Fourth of July picnic at the same Dripping Springs site in 1973.
3
Austin Music Has a Lot To Be Grateful For, Thanksgiving 1972
By November 1972, enough young artists in Austin had turned to country that this new, rootsy, rock-inflected “progressive country” sound could produce a little bit of magic on any given weekend. Thanksgiving that year was one such time. The Grateful Dead were in town to play a show at the Municipal Auditorium. Word got around, and Doug Sahm, Leon Russell, Jerry Garcia, and Phil Lesh, joined by members of the 13th Floor Elevators, Shiva’s Headband, and Greezy Wheels gathered for an impromptu jam session at the Armadillo World Headquarters. Sahm led the supergroup in rousing renditions of everything from Hank Thompson’s “Wild Side of Life” and Chuck Berry’s “Roll over Beethoven” to Kristofferson’s “Me and Bobby McGee,” and a little bit of everything in between. In the same weekend, the United Farm Workers held a benefit concert that brought Willie Nelson, Steve Fromholz, and Greezy Wheels together with Alfonso Ramos, Vida, and Teatro Chicano. These two events show that what was going on in Austin music was not divorced from the national music scene or from the decade’s tumultuous politics. The Dead and Russell thought highly enough of Sahm to follow his lead on a tour through musical Americana, while progressive country stalwarts Nelson and Fromholz lent their substantial talents to the Chicano Movement resonating in the Lower Rio Grande Valley and San Antonio. Download the full Thanksgiving Jam on adioslounge.com >>
