T Bone Burnett: Perfection Is Second-Rate

00:00:08Speaker 1: Pushkin. Just a quick note here. You can listen to all of the music mentioned in this episode on our playlist, which you can find a link to in the show notes for licensing reasons. Each time a song is referenced in this episode, you'll hear this sound effect. All right. Enjoyed the episode, I thought, this is it man Los Angeles. Quincy says, you know, I'd rather live in Los Angeles than Heaven. That's t Bone Burnette in conversation with my Broken Record partner Rick Rubin. We took a hilarious picture of Rick and t Bone after they taped this interview. Rick is in a T shirt and shorts. Naturally, t Bone towers over him, dressed impeccably in a white shirt and a black suit like some old school blues player. I think of t Bone as Rick's spiritual father. He's a generation older, in his early seventies, but he's had the same kind of extraordinary, behind the scenes influence on the music we all listen to. T Bone is probably most famous for helping launch the careers of artists like Los Lobos, Counting Crows, and Gillian Welch. Also for producing albums by Brandy Carlyle Elton John and the masterfully executed Raising Sand collaboration between Alison Kraus and Robert plant Oh. He also produced and performed on My favorite Elvis Costello record of all time, King of America. Then there's this film and TV credits which are insane. He partnered with the Coen Brothers' music supervisor on The Big Lebowski. He worked on Oh Brother, Where art thou walk? The line? Crazy Heart, jew Detective. The list goes on. He's a new record out called The Invisible Light Acoustic Space available wherever you get your music. It's the first in a series of records T Bone will be putting out this year, an incredible outpouring of songs coming out of a play he's providing the music for. I only met him onths years and years ago. What was the most stars studied dinner party I've ever attended? It was in La I got invited by accident. It was wall to wall movie stars and t Bone Burnett, and the only person I wanted to listen to was t Bone Burnett. You're about to understand how I felt. I'm Malcolm Godwell, this is broken record and I'm heartbroken. I didn't get to join in on this conversation here in conversation at Shango Law Studios in Malibu, Rick Rubin and t Bone Burnett. Are you always writing songs? No, you know, I took a job about three years ago Marshall Brickman. Do you know Marshall Brickman an incredible character. He was one of the original folkies in New York City and I didn't know that. I only know him as a as a writer. Well, in the fifties he was one of the cats in Washington Square Park and he played on Judy Collins records. He played, he was a session musician. He played all that. He played banjo and fiddle and guitar and mandolin. He was the guitar player on Dueling Banjos for Deliverance. And by the time he was twenty three, he was the head writer on the Johnny Carson to Night Show. And then he invented The Dick Cavett Show. And then he wrote those movies with Woody Allen that you would know, The Annie Hall in Manhattan, and then he wrote Jersey Boys, which is amazing, you know. So he's transitioned into theater. And he called me up and he said, do you want to write a musical about the people who played Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, and do you remember them at all? So Roy Rogers was from my generation, the biggest star in the world, you know, all through the fifties. He had a television show and it was an interesting idea. He's in the Country Music Hall of Fame because he's a great He was a fantastic singer. But I always thought he was Roy Rogers, and I always thought Dale Evans was Dale Evans. But they were two actors. I didn't know that. Yeah, nobody knows that. So this is a story about the people who played them. And so they were like the monkeys, yeah, a little bit. Yeah, except she wrote happy Trails. She was a great songwriter and he was a great singer. But they were cast, yeah, into those parts. Yeah, and the whole character was made up. Yeah, the whole character was unbelievable. I brought a song to play for you. Do you want to play me the song? Yeah? That's a nice nice yeah. Yeah. Where will that fall into the story, I don't know. I think it's early when he's I think he's maybe auditioning for a radio show or something. He sings that song but yeah, I think it's in the first act. Great, yeah, really good. Do you have to write? Are you to point now where you know sort of where the songs fit? And is there ever a calling to like say, okay, in the end of the second act, we need to add a song in this spot and this is what it needs to accomplish in the story. Yeah. In fact, I just wrote. We did a twenty they called it a twenty nine hour reading, which is you get all the actors up on their feet and they read the parts and you sort it. You do it without costumes or without sets, but you get the you get the gist of it, the tempo of the thing. And I realized after the last one that there I didn't have a beginning song for Roy, and I didn't have an ending song for Dale. So I went back and I did that. I wrote, I wrote a good song called out of Nowhere for Roy to start off with, so you meet him in strength, and then Dale needed a song at the end of a heavy duty number at the end. So yeah, And I'm sure we're gonna open it in Atlanta and twenty twenty in the fall of twenty twenty, and I'm sure once we get into the process of really getting it up and getting in front of audiences. There'll be a lot more changes to come. Yeah beautiful. I love the piece and surrender line really good, Yeah, really good. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, and I love the tagline. The hook line is great. Yeah, everybody wants to live for but nobody wants to get over. So good. But when I accepted this commission to write these songs for a musical, and I've done a lot of work with Sam Shepherd. He and I'd done a lot of things for plays, but a musicals different because every line has to be intentional. You know, you can't write just a cool Yeah, it's narrative. Yeah, it is narrative. And it became it was It sobered me up quite a bit, and I started reading. I read Sondheim's books, and I started studying Frank Lesser, who I think was the greatest of all the Broadway composers, and Learner and Low and all these cats. And it became clear that I was going to have to dance or get off the floor. So I started waking up every morning at four in the morning for about a year solid and writing when it was quiet. And then when I got through writing the twenty songs for the musical, I couldn't stop writing. So I've written now I don't know how. We've recorded about two hours of music that we're going to start putting out at April twelfth. Is the process of writing a song for a musical different than writing a song otherwise, Yeah, it is, yeah, because it does have to move the story along. But do you start with the music first or do you start with the lyrics. I started with the lyrics because it's, as you say, it's part of the book. It's part of the narrative, so you'd write it like a poem basically. Yeah. Would you have a melody in your head? Yeah? Yeah, you know, melody is really just codified inflection. So it's your storytelling no matter what, so that every sentence has a certain melody to it. And so I was doing that. I was writing, but I would have a sense of melody as it was going down, and then you know, I wrote, we're putting out We're starting to put out records. I'm putting out three double records in the next year. This year, I'm going to kind of work hip hop because I see these cats they just put stuff out constantly, so we've recorded a lot of these tunes that have come afterward. Yes, I stopped. I really stopped producing other people for the most part. Although interesting, I've just made a record with Sarah Burrellis that's really beautiful. She's a beautiful singer, unbelievable. And she's also gone through the experience of writing a play. She wrote a musical of Waitress and it raised the stakes for her too. Her writing has become much more resonant, deeper, and higher. It's interesting to hear her growth through the process. How is the collaboration with her different than her other records? Would you say we did it more live? Which is what I mostly do. That's the thing I like most. The thing I love about making records is when people are playing and singing all at one time and you get they get finished, and you say, yeah, that's great. You know, it's such a great feeling. It's such a There's something about people playing together that no amount of getting it right, yeah, counters the energy of the interaction. Yeah. Perfection is a second rate idea, and the computer is a to put out perfect music all day long, but it's not nearly as interesting. It's like those Johnny Cash records you made with him, just sitting in a room with some people, turning them onto a song, you know, and turning the whole then turning the whole world onto the song the same way. So that's that's the process I like the most. And I think the band was great. She you know, it was the same, essentially the same band that was un Raising Sand. Jay Belrose played drums and Dennis Crouch played string bass and Rebo played guitar. I love that album so much, Raising Sand. I love it. Isn't that a beautiful record? So beautiful? Yeah, it really took me by surprise. I don't know, I wasn't expecting it to be so beautiful and just blew my mind. Well, you know both that both of them have mystical, beautiful voices. Yes, and and it was interesting to hear him soften up. Yeah, but on paper it wasn't necessarily a mustlessen thing, and then hearing it it was mind blowing. I also didn't I didn't know most of those songs, so I didn't know that they weren't original songs. Yeah, so they were original for most people, yes, Yeah, but uh, it's got some of that same Sarah's record has some of that same that one come together Robert Allison really, I think Bill Flannagan. You know Flannigan, don't you. Flannagan was doing that show Crossroads, and I think he wanted to do a Crossroads with Robert and Allison and it ended up being a record, and then we did a Crossroads later. But I think they met from that idea of Flannagan pitching them on doing it. They met and they did a They did a tribute to Leadbelly or something or somebody up up in Cleveland, I think, and they enjoyed it. And then they called me up and said, you want to you want to make a record, And I sent him those two Gene Clark songs. Those are the first two things I sent them Through the Morning Through the Not and Polly, which I thought had those that Jane had that dark mystical vibe that they both have. You know, it's interesting now to hear Robert sing low and soft like that and go back and listen to led Zeppelin. It's so beautiful. He really showed another side and it felt like a side that just the timing of it was right for him, you know, like to hear him sound like that was a revelation. Yeah, well he sounded like a grown man. Yeah, made sense when before. I mean, he says himself that the early led Zebelin records he sounded like a castrato or something. You know, he was singing so high. Yeah, and I imagine that when he sings like that now, it's more like he's imitating the old hymn, whereas raising Sand sounds like more believable now. Yeah, I don't think. I really don't think he could sing those songs. He couldn't sing him in the range he used to sing him in. You know, same with Elton. You know, Elton's voice is dropped good octave or something like that, and he's got this beautiful, deep resonant baritone now, and you listen to some of the old records, he sounds like he's on helium or something. After after getting used to his voice now and loving it and going back in hearing them, not that they aren't absolutely classic and great for the same. Was there any reason you didn't do a second one with a follow up to Raisins. I don't know. I think we may. I think we may do one days. I love that maybe we should do Maybe we should do it together. Let's do it. It's such a beautiful album. Yeah, I would love to do one again. We went in and recorded some songs, and having been through all the success, so to speak, the steaks seemed different when we went on the in the second time, and it didn't feel I don't think any of us felt the same kind of freedom that we'd feel. So interesting, isn't it interesting how how the stakes changed the whole process. Yeah? Yeah, but but I think now it's been long enough so we probably could go in and just just play. You know, that'd be great. Do you have ideas of songs? I hadn't thought about it that much. I mean, I've just there have just been rumblings about about it. So we'll see. We'll see where it goes. Have you done any other collaborations like that where it's been two artists who don't normally work together. I don't think I have Have you done that? Hm? When I see it, remember I've done I've done quite a few, you know. The Rolling Thunder review, which was this studio was part of that whole time. Yes, that was a beautiful experiment and it was a master class in art and show business. I mean, there was every Alan Ginsburg and Anne Wallman were there. Sam Shephard was there. There are incredible musicians. Joni Mitchell was there, and Joe Bias and Howie Wyeth and David Mansfield one great musician after the Mick Ronson and people from it. Yeah, people from all different parts of the world and different disciplines in different places, but everybody came together and collaborated and it was a it was a tremendous learning experience that I've replicated or tried to replicate several times with like the Roy Orbison Black and White Night Show, and that was incredible too. That was a beautiful, incredible and uh I saw it the other day. I was watching it. Leonard Cohen was in the audience. I'd forgotten that. I think that idea of like Aerosmith and run DMC. Did you have anything to do with that? I suppose, so, yeah, I forgot. Yeah, it's hard to think, you know what I mean, it's hard to think about projects. Yeah, I know exactly. It's hard to even look back at all, and I rarely do. Yeah, me too, but but that was certainly one of those that changed everything. Yeah, and the boys, you know them, doing I'm Down. Yeah, did you ever hear that? Oh? Yeah, it never came out. It never came out. It never did no, no, no. We couldn't get permission. It was supposed to be on that first album, Licensed to Ill. It might have been the last thing we recorded for it. We couldn't get permission and it never came out. But I think it's on like YouTube or somewhere. I heard it. Steve Rabovski played yeah when it just then yes because guy, yeah, yeah, and it was I'm really d you know fully, d fully fully remember that's so funny, so funny man, they were cutting up. Yeah, I did that. I did the guitar solo in the organ solo. Neither are instruments that I really play, and it really shows, you know. It's like when we come back. T Bone Premiere is another brand new song for us, but first we pay the bills. We're back and T Bone has another new song to play for us called Out of Nowhere, another number from the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans musical he's writing for. This is the song I realized I needed a song to introduce Roy. I didn't really have a powerful number to introduce him, and as I said. The guy who played named Leonard Sly was a It was a soulful, beautiful cat. He wasn't at all like the swashbuck buckling cowboy, you know he was. He was different, and so I wanted to write something from inside him. Not not about him, yes, but for something that he was feeling about his life and about where he came from. So this is a song called out of Nowhere. Back to that idea you were talking about about the way art happens. Yeah, right, once you define a thing, you lose it. Yeah, it's really hard. Yeah, it's really hard. That's right. Yeah, I mean it's it's I think in retrospect, after the moment of inspiration, where the thing that wants to be revealed is revealed and we know we like it, then we can maybe try to figure out why we like it and you know, and then it's okay. But I think the other way around is very difficult. Yeah. I don't know if it even happens. I don't know what I think artists do. I think all really artists do is we're going down a road and we we mark things, we say at this day, I was at this place and I saw this thing and it was beautiful. Yes, And so I'm gonna mark this so that maybe you don't miss it when you're going by. That's I think that's the real, the real journey of an artist. I can remember seeing French Impressionist paintings of trees in the French countryside. I'm thinking it's a very strange decision that the artist is making, you know, putting all these different blotches of color to make the tree. It's very poetic and beautiful, but it's, you know what, a wild imagination. And then it went to France. I saw the trees and it's like, oh, that's what they actually look like, you know what I mean. It's like it seemed like the lyrics of songs hit us in this sort of poetic, magical way, when often if we hear the story of them, they turn out to be very ordinary descriptions of what really happened. It's I guess maybe it's the information that's left out that makes them seem so magical. Yeah, I think that's right. I do think that's an interesting observation. I do think that's right. In this song that you just sang, the hook has a repetition of a phrase the first song you play did not have that. Isn't it interesting that when writing words that certain words can be repeated often and it feels really good, And other words you repeat them and it feels like you can never repeat them. Some thing's become a chant and they've fallen really naturally. Yeah, it's the melody of the thought. It's the melody of the of the of the expression. Yeah. Maybe the phrasing as well, the way the way they work rhythmically. Interesting. You're pretty good at this. That's very interesting. Never thought of it at all, neither. I'm thinking of it right now. Part of the conversation. That's what's coming out from listening to the song. It's like, excellent, how does that work? How do we do that? I've noticed the difficulty in it, but I've never thought about why. But that one, this one here, I don't know. That's just something that became very important to me, that idea, and it was important in context. It was important for Roy Rogers because he for him, everything just happened out of nowhere. Yes, right, so it was important and for him to embrace that idea. And but then it happened, I mean, the Raising Sand record happened out of nowhere. Yeah, right, just I think the best the best things do. Yeah, that's right, they really do. They're not they're not they're not conceived or exactly, they're just they're helped and do existence. Yeah, And the intention behind them is a beautiful intention. But the intention didn't control it happening. It's more like maybe it allowed it allowed it to be revealed. Maybe just got to roll in in the first place. And also in the first song, if we were making a record together and if I was producing it, I would have suggested repeating the tag at the end of the first piece, I'll do that. Well. Well, it depends though, because in the context of it, and I was specific about if we were making a record together, it would be the purpose of the song would be different than the way it would be in a play. Like in a play, I don't know, I'm just thinking about it. It's like the structure and a play might be different than the normal song structure wants to accomplish a different purpose and we won't know until we get it up and we're Yeah, I think the idea of making art, like you were saying earlier about on the Raising Sand album, mistakes got high, and then it changed because there was an expectation. I like to say, and I have said it before to artists that I've worked with, is when we're making these things, the audience comes last. That's what I think too. I agree, I agree. I don't believe you can do it for the audience, No, because I don't think we're I know that if we can make something that we like, there's a better chance that someone else is going to like it than if we make what we that we don't like, but we think someone else is going to like, that seems impossible. That's that's one of the problems with you know, working in television is there's a there are a lot of people that think they know what the audience wants, and they're always trying to get you to do the thing the audience wants. And television is a big collaborative medium, and you know, I love to collaborate, and I love to collaborate with large groups, but it is it's a process of it's not a process of starting with the audience and then working backward. If you want to make something good, right and and what audience is like is something good? Absolutely, so your real your real obligation or responsibility to the artist is to make a thing you really love that. If you do that, then there's a really good chance they'll really love it as well. Hopefully, so at least chance. Yeah, at least you've got a chance. And I feel like as a record producer, I often feel like a proxy for the audience, you too, Right's I'm not really a musician, So all I am is a glorified fan, you know, That's really what I am. Well, you're a listener, Yeah, that's it. Yeah, I listen and I try to understand. I can tune into what pulls me into something and what pushes me away, and I just really trust whatever that is. Yeah, right, I don't. I never know why. Yeah, but you've learned to trust your instincts. That's a valuable that's a valuable thing. Most people don't. That's one of the things. One of the things an artist tests to know how to do is trust his instinct. All the best art is second nature. It's made by second nature. It's not made consciously in that way. That's why I say artist. The artist role is the goal of artist to create conscience, not consciousness. Yeah, it's to create it's to create the thing where you feel, the thing, where you where you empathize, where you say yeah, that's right, that's true, or that's beautiful. You don't do that. That's not a conscious decision. It's an internal, instinctive, instinctual decision. Yeah. It was something that I noticed relatively early in the working with different artists. That was interesting was one of the bands I worked with was called Slayer, heavy metal band, very one of the inventors of black metal or you know, like very very aggressive metal, and the lyrics were really dark and heavy, and to some people, they would look at that as negative content. And then I would go to a concert and I would see an arena full of kids who were very much like the guys in Slayer, who were so filled with joy listening to this music. It was speaking directly to them. It completely was nourishing them. Right. Kumbaya would not have reached them, just made them angry. Yeah, So it's like it's almost like beyond what the actual content is, it's more like how does whatever the art is resonate with other people? And you know, I personally don't like to see horror movies. I don't like to see images of violence at all, horror violence or any So I almost never go to the movies other than maybe documentaries. But for some people that experience of feeling the thrill, they really that really moves them. They like it. But again I don't I don't know that there's a there's not a right and a wrong, and there's not a positive and a negative in it. It's more like it really is what entertains people and whatever stuff happened in their life that led them to a place where this darker thing speaks to them. In their case, it's it's healing to hear it. They don't they feel less alone? Right, Yeah, that's right, that's you know the I've called my new but the new stuff I'm working on with Kifis and Jay, I've called it the Invisible Light. And I feel that it's because of that very thing you're talking about, because the what it's say, the words are very dark. The world it's talking about is very dark. But if you listen into it, there's a great deal of light. Invisible light, yes, right, beautiful, but you have to find your way into it. If you just if you just take it all at face value, or if you try to approach it pedantically, You'll just say, well, this is this is a dark, dark world. Well, it is a dark world, but there's also you know, there's all of that. There's the ocean, in the trees, in the sky, and I think it's all it's all like like I said earlier, I think it's all just a reflection of what's going on. You know, It's like, that's right. There's tremendous beauty in the world, and there's really bad stuff going on, and all of that warrants being reflected back. It's interesting, you know. I was I've been going around recently and most of the music I'm hearing in supermarkets and department stores and those things, just going around life. Most of it that I'm hearing is from the nineteen sixties, and I'm curious about that because the nineteen sixties were maybe the last time there was this sort of exuberance about art. I was at Whole Foods the other day and they were playing good Love and I Want to Hold Your Hand and those kinds of songs, and it was it lightened the feeling in the place. And there really hasn't been that particular aspect of music since the nineteen sixties that I can think of, no, And it's also it's also a time beyond what the lyrical content was, when the industry was still small and the stakes were low, and the people making that music probably were making it for themselves or for their friends or for you know, the high school dance. They weren't making it to sell out arenas, because nobody had done that exactly everything. It seems that anything when it starts, it's small and has beautiful intention and integrity in it, and then when it gets big and a lot of people are involved, that just dissipates. Just in any organization. This is one of the reasons I love as a producer. I love making records with first records with artists because you're dealing with an artist who's been working under complete autonomy for a number of years and he doesn't have experts telling him what the audience wants, for instance. Yes, So I've had very several, very sick, successful first records with artists that were tremendous fun and I still love today because because of that, they're not they're unself conscious. Yes, no baggage, right, Yeah, I've worked with both artists for the first time many artists and many successful artists, and it is you know, existing artists. And it's definitely true that with a new artist there's a freedom of how is this going to work? Whereas with the with the established artists, there's often a lot of bad habits to have to unlearned. Yeah. Yeah, just playing in front of twenty or thirty thousand people will create something that does something to your brain. Well, it makes you, it make it can make you be too broad. Yeah. And in the studio this is you know, the studio is like a it's like a film, you know, like you get right in on a person, you're closer right by them, you're you know, they're singing in your ear. In a large concert, you know, it's like a theater, it's a you're projecting out into the last row. Yes, So it's a very different it's a very different discipline. And playing for large crowds and having to gm them up night after night could really give you some bad habits. On the other hand, working with seasoned artists can be absolutely the best because there because they're just good. Absolutely. I was going to say when you mentioned the work that I did with Johnny and a lot of a lot of especially in the beginning when we started working together, it was getting him to perform the songs less. Yeah, you know, sell the songs, just to tell it. Just tell me. I'm sitting right here next to you. And then we were sitting on a couch just seeing me this, just tell me the story of the song. You don't have to perform it. And his recordings because the tape was rolling all the time, and he would always say to himself, get off stage, cash, get off stage. Yeah. He was a character, wouldn't what a lost? Tremendous loss that was, Yeah, beautiful. He was amazing. Yeah, I think he would have been. Anything he would have done would have been good because it was him. It wasn't. It wasn't that he was the best musician or the best singer. It was he showed through what he made. He chose that. But anything he would have chose would have been great. You know, Sam Shepard and I were doing a play up in New York Tooth of Crime, and he called me up to write music for it. And I was at the time in my life when I couldn't I didn't know what music was anymore. I couldn't tell why one note should be here, and another note should shouldn't be there. You know, every note was the same, and no notes were even notes. I was let I was letting go of the idea of pitch entirely and just working purely off tone. And I was at sea, and I said, and we were sitting in a theater somewhere, and I said to say, I mean, you know, I don't even know what music is anymore, man, And he said, well, when you do it, that's what it is. And that that was the most freeing thing anybody ever said to me in my life. And and and that's what I think. That's the thing we can help artists get to that point. I want to help other artists with that same that same vote of confidence or that same lack of questioning. We'll be back with more of Rick's conversation with t Bone after this. We're back with more Rick Rubin and t Bone Burnett. What was your entry into music? I don't know any of it. I don't know. I mean, I've known you for so long, but that I know you as de Bone Burnett, I don't know how you became Well, my first entry into music was my parents had a great seventy eight collection, and I used to sit down and listen to all the Lewis Armstrong records in Ella Fitzgerald the song There were great American songbook records in Texas, in Texas and Fort Worth, and and and I was. I was moved by the way there was a song, there was a cold Porter song I think called begin the Beginning, you know that tune, and I would listen to it and I'd be immediately transported to some tropical island somewhere, And I was. I was amazed at the way music could create place, could create an atmosphere and an environment, and you could close your eyes and I would no longer be in Fort Worth, Texas, which was to me a great relief. Fort Worth at the time had a very low ceiling, and it felt like it felt like anything that was happening in the world was happening somewhere far away, and there was no way to get there. But music was a window or a door out into the into these other places, into the world. And that that wasn't the music of the day though, No, it was that you were listening to older even then it was old music. Yeah, yeah, it was old music. Then what was what was the music of the day when you were young. Well, it was like Elvis Presley and Ricky Nelson. I loved Ricky Nelson, I love personally. I loved Ricky more than Elvis because he was on television and he sang a great song every week. And I didn't I didn't really understand Elvis. He seemed he seemed broad to me, whereas Ricky was cool and understated. You know, so my aesthetics sort of went that direction. I learned to appreciate Elvis, of course, much more later when I when I got when I got way into the especially that stuff he did with Sam Phillips, who was also It wasn't Sam Phillips a great inspiration to you. I mean I feel like, you know, he was a guy who, like you, didn't recognize race boundaries. He was he was. Sam Phillips was a great civil rights leader. Actually, you know, he had the first all women radio station, w h e R in Memphis, and he brought he brought Helen Wolf into the studio when Helen Wolf might have scared the pants off of most white people at the time. I mean it was a big, tough, strong black man in the South. But he but Sam embraced him, and embraced Ike Turner and brought all these incredible musicians into the studio and opened up the world to them and them to the world. You know, absolutely, and I admire that you've done very much the same thing. You you just you've crossed those boundaries just naturally, like I have eclectic taste and I follow my taste. And it's not there's no political underpinnings, no, you know, it's just we also had Sam yeah, you know, to start at start it that way, and John Hammond before him, Yeah, John Hammond incredible. John Hammond was a uptown New York establishment guy who went down to the village and found Billie Holiday. And you know, music's always done that though. Music the thing. Tony Bennett, you know, has an art school and he says the great thing about art and he's a good painter, He's a very good painter. He says, a great thing about art is you're either good or you're not good. And it doesn't matter where you're from, or what what your ethnicity is or any of that. It's just good or not good. And it feels like the the relationships that I have with artists have have nothing to do with anything other than our love of music. And it doesn't you know, it doesn't matter where they're from or what the back ground is, or it doesn't matter. Right, we're not talking about that, you know, We're talking about music. That's right, and we're either on the same page or not, and that's all and that's good too, Like whether we are or not, it's all fun, you know exactly. I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything. Yeah, that's right. Willie Dixon. I got to work with Willie Dixon at and one of the things he would say is if that's the way you like it, I like it. Yeah, And I love that. Yeah, that's that's generous. That's a deep generous yeah, you know, yeah, so beautiful. Okay, So Elvis is on the radio and Ricky Nelson's on the radio. You're listening to seventy Big Band seventy eight's, yeah, stuff like that. What was your first music related gig and your first instrument? Oh, well, you know, I was one day. I was at a friend's house and there was a Gibson guitar much like this one leaning against a wall and I hit the east like that, and oh it just just something about hitting that one note was like a key that unlocked a door that led me through my whole life. And once I started playing guitar, when I was about twelve, I started listening to guitar players, and that's when I, you know, I learned how to play wildwood Flower by the Carter family, which Maybell Carter is essentially the mother of rock and roll guitar. You know, every rock and roll guitar player I know learned to play wildwood Flower first or very soon thereafter. And so I started listening to the Carter family, and I started listening to Hank Williams and that stuff because it was on the radio and there was a lot of interesting pop music. There was. Peggy Lee was interesting at the time of the fifties. She was really killer great. And then the Beatles happened, you know, and that changed everything. That that really did, that changed the world. I look at those I look at those clips now, the Beatles playing for audiences of young girls, and the girls are screaming, and some of them look like they're screaming at a horror movie. And I and I feel like there was that moment, there was that confluence of events of the Kennedy assess the first Kennedy assassination, and the Beatles coming out in the wake of that. That was was once again them Metalloys. Yeah, it was it was them. It was a Catharsis in them mythologizing this horror for us in a in a beautiful way and and singing these joyful songs in the wake of this, of this great tragedy. And again, you know, none of these like again, looking back, we can see just happened, and this was we can call it a reaction, but I don't think it was a intellectual reaction, not at all. No, nobody was connecting the two at the time. But I think in retrospect it's hard not to connect with right, It's fascinating. So yeah, so those those things, I mean, sometimes we can see around corners, I know, you see around corners occasionally and you think, oh, I see where this fits and this works. I've had that happen a couple of times, but most of the time I certainly didn't. With raising Sand for instance, I didn't see around that corner. I just thought this is something to do. Yeah, yeah, these two sound good together, absolutely absolutely. But so did you join a band Yeah. Then at that point I was already I was already in a little band, and we were playing mostly surf music at the time. Because I got an electric guitar, I got a melody maker, playing flat, flat wound strings on a melody maker, and there were all those great surf to dunes that had they were all in the big string. Oh, I left out Jimmy Reid. Who Jimmy Reid for me was that's actually probably ground zero. That's after I learned may Bill Carter. I learned Jimmy Reid, and then that opened up a whole other world of R and B deep R and B and how old were you about this time, probably twelve or thirteen, you know, And the Beatles. Actually, one of the things I loved about the Beatles was they sounded like Jimmy Reid. They played the low strings on the guitar, they played flat wound strings on the bottom of the guitar like Jimmy Reid. And he also it was also just the groove, you know, the pocket. They played in a similar pocket to him. I feel like they must have listened to him. I certainly. Once I got into Jimmy Reid, I devoured everything, everything I learned every possible song and Chuck barring that was the other kid. The swing of the Beatles is undeniable. People don't really talk about it. Yeah, yeah, the songs are killer, but you know, and Ringo was you know he played with sister Rosetta Tharp when he was the house drummer. Yeah, when he was the house drummer at the Cavern Club. He played with all the R and b X that would come through, So he got a real he had it. He's probably just innate with him, but he swung so hard. And I was watching Ron Howard's documentary of Eight Days a Week about the Beatles, and I realized, Oh, the three geniuses up front were killing, but Ringo was supplant. Was all the electricity was coming out of Ringo. He was blowing everybody's mind without us even knowing it. Now, looking back on it, after all these years of listening to everything, I can see it. At the time, I couldn't. Well, I knew. I love the way he I loved the way he attacked his high hat friends, and he just had it kind of going solid. It wasn't it was, you know, So that supplied a lot of electricity and excitement, but also just his just his yeah, his thing. You know, he would hit the bass drum boom, you know, it's just like kill it. And the other cats were killing it too, but he was just he was the really electric part of it, I thought, and but so yeah, so when that happened, then then you know, Oh, the other guy before the Beatles was Buddy Holly, who they also wanted to be. You know, we were playing Buddies from Texas. So was there this feeling of definitely he was one of the cats that that made me feel like, oh, I can get out, I can get out from under this low ceiling. Yes, Buddy Holly could do it. Yes, you know it's it's possible. Yeah. That was T bom Bernett talking with my co host Rick Rubin at Shanger Law in Malibu. His new album, Invisible Light Acoustic Space is out now and available wherever you get your music. You can also visit our website to find a Spotify playlist for the album and also a playlist for some of our favorite T Bone productions. Broken Record is produced by Justin Richmond and Jason Gambrel, with help from MEA Label, Jacob Smith, Julia Barton, and Jacob Weisberg Special thanks to my co hosts, Rick Rubin and Bruce headlam Our Broken Record theme music is by the great Kenny Beats. Be sure to check out his new album with rapper Rico Nasty. Also be sure to check for next week's episode with Linda Perry. She talks with Bruce about being the first woman nominated for Producer of the Year at the Grammys in fifteen years. That's next week for Pushkin Industries. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.