T Bone Burnett: A Life in Pursuit (American Music) by Lloyd Sachs

Author:Lloyd Sachs [Sachs, Lloyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781477303771
Amazon: 1477303774
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 2016-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

Soundtrack Auteur

As a film fan who came of age in what is now widely regarded as the golden era for American cinema, Burnett was exposed to pop soundtrack masters like Martin Scorsese, whose jukebox fantasies permeate the working-class struggles of his characters in Mean Streets; Robert Altman, who brilliantly matches song to narrative in Nashville; Altman’s protégé Alan Rudolph, whose use of Marianne Faithfull on the title song of Trouble in Mind epitomizes his skill at thickening atmosphere; and Jonathan Demme, who mixed ethnic and rock tunes in Something Wild. Here were filmmakers who were not looking to pump up the commercial potential of a project by stuffing the soundtrack with marketable songs—as so many were asked to do in the wake of the Bee Gees’ mega-selling Saturday Night Fever score. They saw the music as an integral part of the film, a cog in the storytelling process.

With his soundtracks for The Big Lebowski and O Brother, Burnett served the Coen Brothers’ surrealistic vision. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), the Steel Magnolias–style southern dramedy based on Rebecca Wells’s beloved novel and stories, presented him with different challenges and opportunities. The film was the directorial debut of Callie Khouri, Burnett’s future wife, who won an Academy Award in 1992 for writing Ridley Scott’s iconic female buddy movie Thelma and Louise. Divine Secrets cuts between 1990s New York, where the successful playwright played by Sandra Bullock reveals that her miserable upbringing in the South was her greatest source of inspiration, and 1930s Louisiana, where we witness what the playwright’s mother (played by Ellen Burstyn) insists was an ideal childhood.

Divine Secrets did well at the box office but was not well received by critics. There is an awful lot of talk in it but, wrote Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times, “not a character in the movie with a shred of plausibility, not an event that is believable, not a confrontation that is not staged, not a moment that is not false.” But as phony-sounding as the southern-fried chatter of the sisterhood is, listen to the words of womanly wisdom, beauty, and resolve that anoint the film courtesy of Mahalia Jackson (“Walk in Jerusalem”), Macy Gray (a spiffy new version of Billie Holiday’s “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law,” Linda Thompson (rebuking her estranged spouse Richard with his own heartbreaking composition “Dimming of the Day”), and Ann Savoy (lending Cajun flavor to “Lulu’s Back in Town”).

In the hands of a programmer with Burnett’s superior taste and instincts, a mediocre film can be a good excuse for an enriching soundtrack, as further demonstrated here by Tony Bennett’s eloquent, first-time-ever recording of Nat King Cole’s 1940s favorite “If Yesterday Could Only Be Tomorrow”; Taj Mahal’s rollicking, genre-crossing version of Fats Waller’s “Keepin’ Out of Mischief Now”; and Bob Dylan’s newly written Cajun waltz “Waitin’ for You.” This lackluster film also occasioned the restoration of landmark roots recordings—something that doesn’t happen every day in Hollywood, particularly if the subject isn’t a roots artist.

While working on Divine

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