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he first Coen Brothers’ film that T-Bone helped out on was The Big Lebowski, for which he selected the back- ground music. “After I saw Raising Arizona 25 times, I said ‘this is ridiculous. I have to call these guys up because I like them too much, they’re too goddamn
funny’, really. So I just called them up and invited Joel out to din- ner, talked, and we became friends. Then I met Ethan and we became friends. Ethan loves to play guitar, so we started playing guitar a lot together and about ten years later we started on The Big Lebowski. Before they shot it, they called and said ‘We’re doing our first sound-track movie, do you want to do it?’ Their pictures are always just like that. For O Brother, Where Art Thou? Ethan called and said, ‘We want to do a movie about the history of American music.’ I said, ‘OK, let’s do that immediately.’ But it’s always real clear… their starting points are really simple and clear. For Inside Llewyn Davis, it was, ‘a folk singer gets beaten up behind Gerde’s Folk City. Why does that happen?’”
“I had not read Mayor Of MacDougal Street, but I think I will. I’m starting to learn so much about it I’m going to have to read it. Yes, it gets more and more interesting. I’d been down to Green- wich Village in the late ’60s… probably ’67 was the first time I went and it was still going on, but already changing. That particu- lar part of the music world has never been a primary interest of mine, I’ve always been much more interested in the groove world… the groove and the sound. I never understood English folk music… that translation into American folk music. It’s just some- thing that I missed. Now I’m starting to understand it much better. I just didn’t get that kind of folk music, it just didn’t speak to me. High Heeled Sneakers was my kind of folk music, Jimmy Reed was folk music for me, and John Lee Hooker.”
“I was familiar with the ’50s, ’60s folk scene, but from my friend Steven Bruton and his family in Fort Worth, Texas, who had a record store and had an interest in that music. In those days there were small record stores with mom and pop owners who would be curators, who would have specific points of view and tastes in music. They did that ‘if you like that then you might like this’ thing. They carried a lot of Folkways and Arhoolie stuff. Chris Strachwitz is someone I admire greatly.”
“Steven was a banjo player and loved Ralph Stanley and Bill Monroe, so we got into it from that direction. I got into Spider John Koerner and people like that who were more of the blues part of it than the Pete Seeger part. It never hit me until much later what they were even doing. I missed the whole Communist scare and all of that. I grew up in Fort Worth, mostly with my par- ents’ record collection. They had a beautiful collection of 78s and I spent a lot of time with those and that was Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday. For me the ’30s is still the greatest era of recorded music in our country. But then rock’n’roll happened and I started getting into that.”
In the early ’70s T-Bone, a self-taught guitarist (“I had a lot of teachers along the way, but, yes, I taught myself”) scored a gig as a guitarist in the backing band with Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Review. “We had mutual friends and Dylan had heard some of my songs and we met I think in 1971 or 1972 and talked. We plough the same field, Bob and I like the same stuff musically… we have the same tastes. When he and Bob Neuwirth were up in New York putting together the Rolling Thunder Review, they called up and said ‘Hey, come and do it, come and be a part of this’.”
“That was a tour that was also a masterclass in art and music and show business and theatre. I spent a lot of time talking with Jacques Levy about the way he ordered the show, the way he sequenced it, what the meaning of the show was, how it all bal- anced and the story that was getting told, because the story in a live show has to get told as well. I learned about directing live the- atre really from that tour and I’ve done quite a bit of that since. In September we did a beautiful show in New York with the Punch Brothers, Marcus Mumford, Jack White, a big, huge line-up. Joan Baez was there; it was a version of the Rolling Thunder Review, a review-style show where a community of musicians all play together in different forms.”
With two other musicians (David Mansfield and Steven Soles) from the Rolling Thunder Review, T-Bone formed The Alpha Band. The group recorded three acclaimed albums before Burnett embarked on series of albums under his own name, the first of which was Truth Decay released in 1980. T-Bone’s signature rever- berating guitar sound is stamped all over the album and is still evi- dent on such later recordings as Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s 2007 album Raisin’ Sand on which he plays guitar. Where did his love of reverb and echo come from?
“There are two things that I can point to. One, I was at a
friend’s house up in north Texas, there was a Gibson guitar leaning against the wall and I just hit the string and it made this sound, the box of the guitar’s a reverb chamber. After you start hearing that,
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