The Language of Love

T Bone Burnett is a musician’s musician. Quite accomplished in his own right as a singer and guitarist, his most recent release, The Criminal Under My Own Hat (Columbia, 1992), is one of the most musically fulfilling and lyrically uncompromising offerings in the last decade.

Still, he seems to prefer making others shine at their brightest. In that regard, he is the producer of many recent hit recordings—the Counting Crows’ August and Everything After; Nothing But a Burning Light, by Bruce Cockburn; and Elvis Costello’s Spike; as well as Sam Phillips’ new Martinis and Bikinis.

I was invited last summer by Burnett to attend a concert headlined by Phillips, his wife. After the show, Sam ex-plained to me that T Bone hadn’t had a good day and so was relaxing in the Green Room, away from the backstage crowd. She encouraged me to visit him anyway, just to make the personal connection.

After a few moments of discussing the news of the week—invasion talk of Haiti and the like—we decided to meet at his hotel room. There, energized by a healthy dose of political conversation and a pot of caffeinated coffee, T Bone began searching the room for a Gideon Bible. Finally he found it stashed in one of the many drawers of a large dresser. Once he had it in hand, he headed straight for the gospels, knowing full well what he was looking for—Jesus, especially as he dealt with the Pharisees.

That is where T Bone’s heart is right now; he wants to unmask the Pharisees. And to equip himself, he went in search of Jesus’ methods. Every few verses he would recite with glee the way in which Jesus addressed the Pharisees—directly but not in ways that would make him open to the Pharisees’ traps. No, T Bone reflected, Jesus broke through to a new level using his imagination and ability to cut to the heart.

That is what T Bone wants to do—cut to the heart of things with his music, political activism, and spirituality. He wants to make clear the gospel by offering it in understandable terms, and by making clear exactly what is at stake.

Regular correspondent David Batstone, professor of religion and culture at the University of San Francisco, spent a day with T Bone, discussing issues of the times. T Bone, who was not interested in a traditional interview but rather a "dialogue," invited David to his Santa Monica, California home for the conversation.

—Bob Hulteen

T Bone Burnett: It seems to me that religious people are entering into cultural debates these days motivated by fear and larceny. C.S. Lewis said people who are in love are always willing to give up power, while people who are afraid are always trying to amass power.

I think Jerry Falwell and his ilk are the perfect example of that. They’re not operating out of a world of love; they’re fearmongers.

David Batstone: You sense the fear that’s being generated by the way they talk about the world.

T Bone: I’ve been reading a wonderful book, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, written by a guy who grew up in the Pentecostal Church. He comes up with some really startling theories. He says that since the Scopes monkey trial, fundamentalist Christians see themselves as cultural outcasts. That is why they identify with the fetus in the womb who is just about to be aborted out of culture.

I have some acquaintances who were very deeply involved in the arts in the ’70s, who were trying to be kind of cutting-edge Christians, but weren’t able to succeed in the arts. So they went straight to being ultra-right wing. All of a sudden, anybody who didn’t agree with them was a neo-Marxist. They just flipped because they weren’t able to be assimilated into the culture.

Dave: If you can’t find your place in the culture and you feel that you’re alienated from where the action is, then you have to create a niche for yourself somewhere. Of course, you then also have to develop a heavy coating that protects you from those toxins coming into the womb.

T Bone: I don’t like making dramatic statements, but the Religious Right is using the same arguments—traditional family values, foreign impurity, and the threat of homosexuals—that fueled Hitler’s propaganda. His slogan was, "Children, Church, and Kitchen," which meant the wife stays in the kitchen, the children go to school, and we all go to church.

The Religious Right has co-opted the word "Christian." Those of us who follow Christ and have other values must come up with an effective response. We can’t allow them to go on representing us to society and, even worse, representing Christ, because they’re producing a completely twisted picture.

Dave: Exactly. I think many of us resent feeling reluctant to identify ourselves as Christians, not because we’re ashamed of our own religious convictions, but ashamed of the images that Christianity has been reduced to in popular culture.

But there’s something else that bothers me more. It comes out in a story about my fundamentalist grandfather. Before he died I went to visit him in Massachusetts. While there I also wanted to visit a cousin who was going through clinical depression. But my grandpa had no intention of letting me leave. Every day was a new battle over whether I could go. He always came up with a good reason for me to stay.

So, with my departure date quickly approaching, I decided to use the only language my grandpa could understand: "Listen Grandpa, I think God really wants me to see John today." So this man who always desired to do God’s will looked at me and said, "But David, sometimes you have to just use your sweet common sense."

It doesn’t bother me that the Religious Right has beliefs different than mine; but I am troubled that they so often use religion as a mask. As long as what you want coincides with God’s will, use that language as far as it will take you, then dump it and use sweet common sense. So my gut tells me they’re pushing another trip on me that has nothing to do with the language they’re using.

T Bone: And that trip is fear. How do we come up with a response to fear?

Dave: You need to show there’s nothing to be feared but fear itself. But that goes against the grain of a whole orientation to the world.

T Bone: We’re living in a time when the imagination is under attack. In The Screwtape Letters, there’s a guy sitting in a museum and Screwtape says to Wormwood something like, "Get him out of that museum. Make him think about his bus schedule. Get him back into reality. Don’t let him start thinking about any higher thoughts. He might become inspired if he looks at that painting much longer."

Today, we’ve got a worse problem. We’ve got this incredibly degenerated painting, the television, to keep us totally glued into the system.

Dave: You, via your music, and me to a lesser extent, via my writing, have the opportunity to inspire imagination around things that matter to us. Let’s assume for a moment that the TV’s an idiot box. Nonetheless, the reality in our lifetime is that it is the most important tool for disseminating information and creating perception. What does that mean for us?

T Bone: Well, this is not answering your question, but do you realize that there are about 24,000 media outlets in the United States, and maybe 15 years ago those were owned by some 350 corporations? Today they’re owned by less than 20 corporations; by the turn of the century, they’ll be owned by five corporations. The myth of the liberal media is one of the great jokes played on us. The media are owned lock, stock, and barrel by the right wing, and everything that’s put out by the media is controlled and monitored and weighed for its effect on the populace.

My guess is that there will soon be only two classes in the world—the poor and the Americans. And the Americans will be anyone all over the world who’s hooked up to the cable. We could call it the fiber-optic class.

Dave: If that fiber-optic world is going to be the place where capital conglomerates, is it worthwhile searching for ways to create access, however limited it may be, that can be subversive to it?

T Bone: I think we have to try.

Dave: I don’t think there’s any other option. I realize that most forms of media are owned by a small conglomerate of power. But there are no pure options. You’re always dancing with the devil. It just depends on how much the devil eats you up before you can retreat.

Even on a commodified medium we have a chance to create a subversive moment. That’s what revelation is. It’s that moment of jarring when you have the opportunity to see something different, even if we then go blind again for a while.

T Bone: A moment is all it takes to change one’s vision forever. That is what transcendence does.

Dave: You’ve been a prominent figure in the music scene since the ’60s. What happened to rock and roll? Wasn’t it going to change the world?

T Bone: It’s all been commodified by corporate culture...neutered. Of course, rock and roll in the ’60s was all a myth anyway. I have a record in my collection from 1923 of Bing Crosby and the refrain is, "We’re going to rock and roll all night."

Dave: 1923?!

T Bone: Yes, rock and roll is a very old concept. It’s the same as jazz. They were both euphemisms for that naughty thing that boys and girls do...and boys and boys and girls and girls. What happened in the ’50s was that there were enough young people with leisure [time] after the war that a youth culture was created. And what really was being celebrated was youth culture. It had nothing really to do with the music, because the music’s always been there.

What got scary to those in power is that all of a sudden there were young people who had enough of a mass to start pushing things around. And young people are by their nature volatile. They are idealists; they don’t think in terms of where they’re going to be when they’re 70 and what’s going to happen with their retirement. They just think in terms of, "This is wrong, and I’m going to do something about it."

But what was great about it was that there was a liberating factor in just being able to have your own kind of music, your own world. It became this sort of social glue for youth.

Dave: It seems it was more about sexual and political anarchy, a rebellion against tradition, than any kind of strategic movement.

T Bone: That’s what it eventually came to. The world ended and began in 1956. For each succeeding youth generation, nothing that came before it mattered.

In the ’60s an idea called "free love" came about. The movement was saying that all the strippers and prostitutes, all the Playboy sex-world, are a result of horrible sexual repression. The idea of free love was to let love free in the society, which was a noble ideal. But where is real love in this? Where is the real love between two people?

It was an attempt, once transcendence had been cut off, to transcend. It was appropriated, and we were manipulated by it. But we end up with even more horrible alienation...the Playboy channel.

Now here’s the problem with rock and roll: Every succeeding generation has killed off the generation before it. There are no rules and no foundation. So these touchstones come along and quickly become canon. Chuck Berry writes songs about cars and girls, so people in his generation say, "Rock and roll is songs about cars and girls." Or Neil Young writes a line, "It’s better to burn out than to fade away." People take that line out of context and romanticize it. Kurt Cobain comes along, kills himself, and puts it in his suicide note. It just adds to the myth.

Are these our choices? Either die young or fade away? What about Picasso who made brilliant art until he was 80 years old? There’s a self-limiting aspect to youth culture. This is the great shortcoming of what we call rock and roll.

But I still believe transcendence is available, and that music is an avenue of transcendence.

Dave: I think it is one of the few places I experience it.

T Bone: So the challenge is to continue. I went to see Crosby, Stills, and Nash the other night. It was pretty but it wasn’t...well, maybe it was transcendent for some of their old fans in a nostalgic way. But I’m not sure if nostalgia is transcendence. It’s counterfeit transcendence. Or it’s a longing for the memory of a transcendent moment.

Dave: We can control nostalgia. We can moderate its impact on us, to a certain extent. It is like the Eucharist. "Remembrance of me" is not transcendence. It’s the opportunity for transcendence. It becomes transcendence once you experience that remembrance.

I have a sense that when we talk about music as mainstream or alternative, it is the same stuff behind political notions of cultural and countercultural. It’s all about finding the Promised Land through exile. Do you ever find the Promised Land through exile? Or do you spend 40 years in the desert and find that you end up back where you started?

T Bone: I think I live in the Promised Land. The Promised Land is not what people think it is. I don’t believe it’s a land of no problems, a sort of Walt Disney-type happiness.

Dave: We were talking about youth culture before...the endless summer. The problem with the Promised Land is that it’s a land without seasons. But life is all about winter and summer, as well as spring and harvest. We all have to go through the winter, the death of things that were once summer.

T Bone: What do you think people mean by countercultural?

Dave: I can’t think of any better definition than "a Promised Land apart from the mainstream culture."

T Bone: Well, more power to it. It never hurts to try because this culture is so completely stagnant. But the problem with creating a counterculture is that this culture is corporate; there’s no escaping it. To do art without participating in the corporate world is to be a Zen poet...that is, not even to write the poem down or leave it on a park bench for others to find. Film is a corporate medium. Television is a corporate medium.

We’ve just come up with this thing called the music video in the last 10 years which is the first medium ever invented for purely commercial reasons. Nobody ever hummed a tune and thought there’s a visual image that goes with this.

The corporate culture has a voracious appetite for countercultures. It needs them to stay alive. Once there are five corporations, they’re going to need small independent companies to come up with fresh ideas.

Dave: Many people on the political and religious Left see their mission as to create a counterculture.

T Bone: Well, they shouldn’t advertise it then. They shouldn’t be doing it through the media, because as soon as you identify yourself, you are either incorporated or you’re shot. It has to happen on its own and it has to happen in private. If there is going to be a counterculture invented or engendered somewhere, it’ll probably be a metaphysical one like the Masons, where you have a secret handshake to identify yourself to each other.

I think the early Christians must have been like that in the catacombs era. A real counterculture would be a culture of the spirit.

Dave: I wonder whether there is such a place. I only experience spirit in the middle of culture because that is where I live.

T Bone: Absolutely. The same rain falls on everybody. It doesn’t matter whether you’re in the counterculture or the culture, or a hermit living by yourself, it’s the same rain.

What I’m saying is transcendence isn’t possible only in the counterculture. It happens in funny places. It happens when you’re walking down the street and a car goes by. Or it happens in a backyard and some light shines through some leaves in a certain way and, for a minute, you catch a glimpse of something that always was and always will be.

Dave: A growing majority in our society are alienated from religious institutions. Folks are willing to say they are spiritual, but are reticent to say, "Hey, I’m religious." What’s going to come out of that? I don’t know if it’s going to be an institution that will replace the institutions that exist.

T Bone: I don’t think so. I think it’s too late for institutions. Christ was saying that every moment touches eternity, every moment we live in. "Now is the acceptable time of salvation." That’s because here, this moment, right now, is an eternal moment. And you can touch it.

Institutions are irrelevant at this point. As soon as you come up with another institution, it’s sucked into the same vortex, manipulated in another way, turned into just what it’s always been.

Dave: Traditional institutions are falling apart for a lot of social reasons. Our society is so fluid. One out of every six families move each year. How do you maintain any institution in that environment? It comes down to what kind of community you can create.

T Bone: My community is all over the world really. We’re connected spiritually. We’re not connected by proximity at all. I think the thread is that we’re willing to accept each other’s faults, to be honest about who we are. Truth-telling. We’re not able to live like one-eyed jacks without love.

Dave: That’s the secret handshake. You don’t teach anyone the secret handshake. You just intuitively know how to do it when you’ve been through fire together. You trust them.

T Bone: You just shake hands and it is the secret handshake.

Dave: And it’s who you shake hands with, too. Because in my community now are Latin Americans, blacks, gays; it’s a blood community. I can’t find an institution where that can happen for me. So we just create our own little fragile community. And it sure seems like the Promised Land to me compared to where I’ve been.