- [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare, and by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

- Music is certainly the language under every language, because Ian McGilchrist in his book "The Master in his Emissary" posits that human beings sang to each other for thousands of years before he innovated the technology of language.

One of the implications of that is that when we sang to each other like dolphins or whales, everyone knew what everyone else was saying.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (bright music) - Welcome to the LBJ Presidential Library.

I'm Mark Updegrove.

Since the Library was dedicated by our 36th president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, over a half a century ago, it has hosted some of the biggest names and best minds of our day to discuss our nation's rich history and the issues of our times.

Now we bring those conversations straight to you.

T Bone Burnett is one of American music's oracles.

The Grammy and Oscar-winning producer has been a force in the music industry for over half a century.

Tonight, my interview with Burnett comes in two parts.

In the first part, Burnett is joined by legendary Beatles drummer Ringo Starr.

I talk to the two about Ringo's latest album, "Long Long Road" produced by Burnett and reflect on why the Beatles continue to capture our imagination nearly 60 years after their breakup.

And in part two, Burnett discusses what he learned as a guitarist for Bob Dylan and what makes American music American.

T Bone, you grew up with a lot of musical influences, but you were particularly influenced by The Beatles.

So what was it like to work with Ringo Starr on his last two albums, "Look Up", and his most recent, "Long Long Road"?

- Well, he's ruined me now, because I can't play with any other drummers.

So seriously, you know, I've said a couple of times that growing up, when I was a kid, we played Buddy Holly, we played Chuck Berry.

We played basically the same.

- Yeah.

- We were in different cover bands together when we were kids.

But there's a field that I identify as having a lot to do with Texas, which has to do with, you know, the North Texas where Lubbock is and South Texas where Mexico is.

South Texas is Mexico in fact, you know.

In fact, all of it is.

But the feeling that Ringo plays with is very much the feeling that I've been playing with my whole life and it also has to do a lot with Motown, I have to say.

- But you've said that popular music didn't really influence you with the exception of The Beatles.

- Yeah.

- Why The Beatles?

- Well, they were an art band that happened to have incredible success.

It was a fluke, it was a weird, like, how did Paul McCartney, how did these four people come together in this little town in North England?

It's more of a miracle than a fluke.

But I look at it as, it's one of one, you know?

And they just were the best, they were the best, they were the rockiness band.

They invented heavy metal music, they invented... It's true.

They invented country rock.

We're gonna be doing a lot of stuff about country rock, right?

- Yeah.

- Like, "I Don't Want to Spoil The Party" was probably the first country rock song.

That guy, Willie Cantu, who played with with Buck Owens started playing the way he played, because of the way Ringo played.

So Buck Owens became like a country rock band, because Willie Cantu played hard.

Most country drums were played very lightly.

In fact, in the beginning, they wouldn't even let drums- - No, they wouldn't let the drums on the- - Yeah, exactly.

- Grand Ole Opry.

- Ringo, did it feel like you were reinventing popular music when you were doing it?

Did you know what you were doing would be so seminal?

- We knew what we were doing, but not where it was going.

- Huh.

- It was just we're doing this track to the best of our abilities and with that feel to it.

And you know, it just, it worked.

And you can see how the times were changing from '62 and, you know, '66 with the flower power, the hippie and all that.

It was like a change was going on and we felt a change in... We'd moved to London by then and there was a change going on there.

It's like a, you know, not just us.

We were sort of pushing people to change, I think, with the music.

But it's you know, as Bob said, "The Times Were A-Changing."

- Yeah, but T Bone, I asked Ringo what his legacy was.

Ringo did not have an answer.

We think about Ringo's legacy, but Ringo may not.

How will Ringo Starr be remembered, do you think?

- Well, he'll be remembered as the best rock and roll drummer of all time, for one thing.

He'll be remembered for reinventing drums.

But he'll, you know, he's a great singer.

He's a great songwriter.

Well, it's true.

- Yeah, I know, but I haven't got to get to that point yet.

- Well, he doesn't like his own singing.

I love his singing, because- - What makes him such a distinct singer?

- He's a great storyteller.

And singing, one of the things I try to do with singers is I try to say... Well, when you're making a record, you want the singer to be big in the frame, because you wanna listen to the song.

So the first thing you wanna hear is the song.

And the singer is a vessel for that, for the song, what the story is.

When singers are drawing too much attention to themselves, I try to convince them or I try to help them to have all the arrows pointing toward the audience rather than all the arrows pointed to them, because if the audience is listening to the singer, they're not hearing the song.

So in my philosophy everything has to do with telling the story.

And Ringo, the way he plays drums tells the story as well.

- But Ringo, you serve the song.

You've never been one to have to be out front.

You serve the music.

- No.

- Is that what makes you distinct as well?

- It's one of the reasons.

I mean, I play with the singer.

If he's singing, you don't need me bashing them.

You know what I mean?

He has the space then.

I'm just holding the band together and then I feel it a little, pur-dum, bah, bah-dum, bah-dum, would help, you know?

You know, it's like, I wish I could, like, say, "Well, you know, it's because of this number one and then it's because of that too."

Just that who knew I got a kit.

And I was stupid as, my stepdad got me a great old kit, but they were dirty and muggy and I sold them and got an Ajax shiny kit, one-headed, you know, top head, no bottom head.

And forever I've been trying to get those old drums back (group laughs) which is a great sound, you know?

I've got a similar one I play.

If I make a record or anything, I do it at home and I've got these crazy drums, old.

- I have a question.

I was looking at, on The Ed Sullivan Show, you were about six feet up in the air.

And I wonder, I'd never seen that before.

Did you do that before The Ed Sullivan Show?

- No, I made a point of talking to them.

I didn't wanna be on the floor like you are in clubs and, you know, and our gigs were getting bigger and we didn't know anything about Ed Sullivan.

And it's the biggest TV show in the world.

Anyway, we got up there to do it and I said, "Get me a rostrum.

You know, put me off a bit."

And you know, the guy, everyone's looking at me now.

(group laughs) It was so high.

But, you know, I wanted to be part of it, not like, oh, the drummers were usually dumped in the back there to do their job.

And I said, "No, we're gonna move out of that."

So after that, I had rostrums.

- Ringo, when did you know you'd made it?

Was there a time when there, when you said, "Oh, I can do this for the rest of my life.

This is not just a..." - I made it the first day Brian Epstein, when I joined, gave me 25 pound, you know?

(T Bone chuckles) - That was some real money back then.

- Yeah, I was in the factory making, five.

And anyway, that's just a joke, really, but it was like, "What, let's go."

- Well, it looks like it's all worked out.

Ringo Star, T Bone Burnett, thank you so much for being with us.

- Hey, thank you, brother, and everyone out there.

- [Announcer] And now, part two of our interview with T Bone Burnett.

- T Bone, we talked to Ringo Starr about The Beatles perhaps the most iconic act in music history.

But you worked with another musical icon.

You worked with Bob Dylan in 1975 and 1976 as part of his band, The Rolling Thudner Revue, the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue.

- The infamous Rolling Thunder Revue, yeah.

- What did you learn from Bob Dylan?

- Well, you know, I learned from Bob enough that it sustained me through 60 years in show business.

I mean as a person of medium talent, I would say, I've been able to somehow survive for 60 years in one of the most treacherous businesses capitalism has ever devised, you know, the record industry it's called.

But I learned how to do a show.

I learned how to put on a multi-artist show, you know, which that was, we had Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez and Bob Neuwirth and Ramblin' Jack Elliot and Roger McGuinn and we had all these really wonderful artists at that time who all meshed together, who all collaborated in different configurations.

And, you know, I learned that generosity is the hallmark of an artist.

That was a very generous time for Bob when he brought all these people from his past in.

So that was something I learned from him.

But I learned a lot about songwriting.

I learned a lot about performing.

I mean, one of the things I learned from Bob is that it's very difficult to get him to commit, but once he's committed, he's fearless.

And so, I adopted that as a philosophy.

Like, don't be easy to say yes, but once you do, send on bravely, you see.

- What makes him great?

What makes him singular?

- Well, you know, Bob is like The Beatles in a way.

The Beatles were the first rock and roll band.

Before The Beatles, there were singers, Elvis Presley, Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly, but they were always singers with sidemen.

The Beatles were four front men.

That's why we were talking to Ringo about how he got up on a six-foot riser or something.

So he was just as present as the rest of the band rather than being back behind them.

So that was the first time and almost the only time that particular thing happened.

People have tried to duplicate it and with some success, but never the kind of exhilarating invention that The Beatles went through over about a five-year period.

Just this crazy new world that they were encouraging.

Dylan was the opposite in a way and the same.

He was a rock and roll band that was just him.

He played folk music, but he played it like rock and roll.

So he wasn't one of those really clean folk singers that, you know, Tom Paxton or these wonderful singers, but they were very clean, everything was clear.

Dylan was gnarly.

He was already punk rock even in '61 or 2 when he was just getting started.

He was punk rock except it was called folk music.

But a lot of the folk music people couldn't stand him.

They were, it was like, "That's terrible.

He can't sing, he can't play, he can't play harmonica."

Although he did all of that brilliantly.

He did all of it better than anybody, just as the Beatles did that better than anybody.

And they didn't do it, because they were the most proficient musicians.

They did it because of their belief.

Their belief in each other, their belief in themselves, their belief in the music above everything else.

Their belief in the power of music to change the world.

- You've said, "American music is a continuum that's being reinvented every few years."

How so?

- Well, so there was a great period of time... If you look at the New York in the 1940s, there was an extraordinary period of time where at the jazz clubs, Marlon Brando would be there and Truman Capote would be there and Jackson Pollock would be there.

And there would be bebop happening in these little basement cabarets that were, you know, people were living in the buildings above them.

That's why snapping happened, because if you applaud it, it disturbed the people staying upstairs.

So they would snap just for approval of what the band was doing.

And the bands had been dance bands, Billy Eckstein and all of that sort of music.

But when everybody went away to war, there weren't dances anymore.

So the musicians came into these little cabarets.

And you know, Dizzy Gillespie started wearing a beret like Jean-Paul Sartre.

He, you know, started wearing those glasses like Sartre would.

And the artists were saying, "No, we're not a dance band.

We're serious artists.

We're reinventing music.

We're inventing a new kind of music called bebop."

And if you look at Jackson Pollock, his paintings are like bebop.

His paintings are it's like being in the middle of an atom bomb explosion as all the molecules fly apart.

- Frenetic.

- Yeah.

- Yeah.

- And all of that art that happened in the '40s was a response by the artists to atom bombs, because it was clear that that was a way that humanity couldn't go.

So the music reflected that.

The music reflected we're gonna get past this atom, this sort of energy, this destructive energy.

The beat generation was all about that.

And in the wake of the beat generation, rock and roll happened, which was very much predicated on bebop and the energy of bebop.

Whereas bebop would be the saxophone, rock and roll, they wouldn't have a saxophone usually so they would use a guitar, which became the saxophone for the rock and roll bands.

And rock and roll took bebop and brought it to this younger generation who was suffering under this idea of we're all gonna be annihilated by nuclear weapons.

I mean, we all, growing up in the '50s, we all would have those drills where we would kneel in the hall, you know?

- Duck and cover.

- Yeah, as if that was gonna help in a nuclear explosion.

But we all grew up with that, especially in Fort Worth, which was at Carswell Air Force Base and General Dynamics were there.

So we were part of, "The military industrial complex," as Eisenhower called it.

So, you know, then all of that, out of that came the 1960s, which was a rejection of war, which was a rejection of the sort of autocratic tendencies that we have in this country.

Certainly the South has been an autocracy for the whole history of this country.

I mean, me and my friends, us white people, we talk about living in an autocracy now.

The black people have been living in an autocracy for the whole history of this country.

And that was another big part of it.

Civil rights, Lyndon Johnson, I must say, you know, was a big part of bebop to rock and roll to then what eventually became rock music.

But at the time, it wasn't rock music.

I think of rock and roll as swing music, 'cause like where I'm from, Fort Worth, there was Milton Brown and the Brownies were a seminal swing band in the '30s.

And at some point, a martial element took over in swing music and it became rock.

But there are only two kinds of music, I think, sex music and war music.

And rock and roll is sex music and rock is war music.

And so we started moving out of rock and roll back into this more martial kind of music that ended up in 1980 with a takeover of the country, really.

And in the '60s and '70s, there were journalists that were uncovering corruption and talking about life as it was.

By 1980, we moved into another period where everybody wanted everything idealized.

But you can look through the history of art and see periods of time when people wanted things idealized and when they didn't.

The '40s, '50s, and '60s were impossible to idealize, you know?

In the '70s, we started moving in that direction and we've been living in a very idealized version of the United States since the 1980s, you know, the thousand points of light in the city on the hill.

And some of that's true and some of it's not true.

You know.

(Laughs) - [Mark] What makes American music American?

- Well, one of the things I've said in the past, and I will continue to say, is that if you wanna know what's good about the United States, I hear a lot of people saying bad things about the United States now and certainly there are bad things, you know, we blow too much stuff up, no doubt about it.

But if you wanna know what's good about the United States, listen to our music, 'cause music doesn't lie.

Actually, I found this out after I've been on the bandwagon about it for years, but Confucius said, "If you wanna know the truth about a country, listen to its music."

So I say the same thing.

And I say, what we have in this country is a pluribuzunam.

Out of many, one, we've had people come from... You know, in the Revolutionary War of the United... I'll get back to the question, but in the Revolutionary War of the United States, what we call now the United States, the beginning of it was 13 colonies that went right down the Atlantic seaboard.

It was bordered on the east by the ocean and on the west by the Appalachian Mountains.

And the Eastern border was well-fortified, but the Western border, the mountains weren't.

So Benjamin Franklin, fearing that the English would mount a rear attack through the mountains, imported tens of thousands of Scots and Irish people and put them right down the Appalachian Mountains.

So in that way, Benjamin Franklin is the father of country music, you see?

So we have that music coming from the islands, from Great Britain, from the United Kingdom.

We have, you know, there were Africans brought over here to work in the agricultural industry in the south and the textile industries in the north.

And they brought their music with them.

We have the music coming up.

You know, mariachi music, they're called mariachis because when France controlled Mexico, they were French wedding musicians.

So Mariachi comes from Mariage, which was the French influence.

The German influence brought the harmonica to Texas.

So, you know, Blind Lemon Jefferson has that song, "The blues came from Texas loping like a mule."

Well, you could say that the harmonica is where the blues started, which came from Germany.

You have this Hawaiian music coming over, Polynesian music, which was music that was written to peace.

When the Polynesians got to Hawaii, they thought they had discovered the Garden of Eden from the Hebrew Bible, they called it.

And they started composing all this music to peace.

Well, they thought they were gonna spread the peace of that island around the world with the soft power of Hawaiian music, which I still believe they will and are.

At any rate, and then from there you have the slide guitar coming into the United States.

So the steel guitar, you have the harmonica, you have the drums, you have the fiddles, you have all of these divergent cultures coming together.

And what makes it unique is that we've listened to each other.

The key to life is listening.

Underneath everything, music is underneath everything.

In fact, string theory says that all the things we see are notes of the strings vibrating beneath them.

So if that's true, then you and I and all of this, all of these cameras, everything's made of music.

And music is certainly the language under every language, because Ian McGilchrist in his book, "The Master and his Emissary", posits that human beings sang to each other for thousands of years before he innovated the technology of language.

And one of the implications of that is that when we sang to each other like dolphins or whales, everyone knew what everyone else was saying.

So we had to invent language in order to be able to keep secrets, in order to wall off information.

That's why we have all these different languages, Cyrillic and French and, you know, and Mandarin and all these divergent languages, because it's all to keep secrets.

It's all to wall off information and to lie for that matter.

So language at its core is for non-communication.

Music is the true communication under language.

And it's not to say that poets can't take language and change your life way for the better with it, but it also, their politicians can use it to destroy countries.

So listening, if you listen to tone and you don't listen to words, no one can lie to you.

So underneath all of these words is tone and that's what music is.

So we've listened, we've all listened to each other, because in music, you're either good or you're not good.

And if you're good, it doesn't matter what skin color you have or what country you just came from.

Even better that you have a different skin color, because that's exciting that I'm learning something that I didn't know before.

So you have all these divergent types of music coming together and forming this one music that's American music, that's jazz and blues and country music and rock and roll and hip-hop.

Certainly hip-hop is the predecessor of rock and roll, you know?

I mean, that's a long answer to your question, but it's a good question and it deserves a- - Comprehensive answer.

- A real answer.

- And the answer ultimately is out of many, one.

- Yeah.

- T Bone Burnett, thanks so much for being with us.

- Well, I've had a great time.

Thanks for inviting me.

(dramatic music) (dramatic music continues) (dramatic music continues) - [Announcer] Funding for this program is provided by Panonica Foundation, Judy and Peter Blum Kovler Foundation, Ascension Seton, BP America, Laura and John Beckworth, St.

David's Healthcare.

And by... And also by... A complete list of funders is available at APTonline.org and LiveFromLBJ.org.

(bright flute music) (upbeat music)