He’s Just Glad You Noticed

To get an idea of just how far R.L. Burnside has come from the backwoods juke joints of Mississippi, you only have to peek inside the cramped recording studio at Epitaph Records’ headquarters in Silver Lake.

There, the 74-year-old blues artist is being treated like some septuagenarian Caligula. Two women wearing nothing but knowing smiles flank Burnside and occasionally slip a well-manicured hand through one of his red suspenders. Burnside just giddily plucks bluesy licks on an unplugged electric guitar and stage-whispers his signature phrase, “Well, well, well.”

This bargain-basement bacchanal is not a typical occurrence in the life of Burnside. It’s a photo shoot for Hustler magazine, which is preparing a feature on Burnside. The idea is to play with the myth that’s grown around him--that he’s some kind of unrepentant wild man who chafes at decorum and lives by his own primitive code.

In fact, Burnside barely looks up at the models. Instead of leering, he just flashes an occasional thumbs-up at his manager, Matthew Johnson, as if to say, “How am I doing?”

The session takes well over an hour, but Burnside is the picture of restraint. No bawdy jokes or double-entendres, just an occasional, “Well, well, well.” When you’re an in-demand music star, it’s just part of the gig.

Well, well, well. Burnside’s slogan is a joyous exclamation that perfectly articulates his wonder at all that has happened to him so late in a life that easily could have gone in a less fortunate direction. At a time when most men his age are either retired or pondering the idea, Burnside’s popularity as a performer is on a still-rising trajectory.

All this for a sharecropper’s son who didn’t start seriously singing and playing guitar until he was in his late 20s, and recording until his 40s, after working for decades as an itinerant farm laborer.

His early recordings on the Arhoolie label gave him a profile among folk and blues followers in the ‘60s. Burnside eventually became a vital repository of a rapidly vanishing art form: the rural blues that took root in the most isolated enclaves of Mississippi’s hill country north of the Delta in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

An indefatigable performer, the relentlessly touring musician achieved modest fame among hard-core blues aficionados in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, a time when the genre was going mainstream with younger city slickers such as Robert Cray.

But in the mid-’90s, something strange and wonderful happened: Thanks to indie-rock singer-guitarist Jon Spencer, Burnside was discovered by a young, mostly white rock audience. That recognition led to a teaming with one of Beck’s producers, Tom Rothrock, and became a springboard for the inclusion of his song “It’s Bad You Know” in the HBO series “The Sopranos.” The show’s soundtrack album sold 400,000 copies and helped turn him into an accidental blues legend of sorts.

All of which has made Burnside, if not the unlikeliest new music star of the past decade, then certainly the most grateful.

“I’m just glad that all the young folks have discovered the blues,” says Burnside, lounging in Epitaph’s conference room following the steamy photo session. “All the rap kids and the rock kids are now trying to play the blues, because they realize that’s what started all of this.”

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Burnside is nursing a host of ills today. In addition to a nagging ear infection, he’s smarting from a recent tooth extraction, and he feels a cold coming on.

With his rumpled flannel shirt and truck-stop baseball cap, Burnside looks more like a front-stoop philosopher than a blues savior, but it is his complete lack of pretense (call it B.B. King Syndrome) that has endeared him to music fans who demand that their artists keep it real.

“When I first started going to Europe, I would hit ‘em with, ‘Well, well, well,’ and they would just look at me,” says the singer, whose initials stand for Robert Lee. Now, I go there, and they all say, ‘Well, well, well’ back at me!”

Burnside’s journey from farmhand to world-beating artist has been long and arduous. Born in 1926 in Lafayette County, Mississippi, in a tiny farming hamlet near Oxford, Burnside spent his youth plowing bean fields with mules, picking cotton and later operating combines.

Burnside, one of three brothers, continued to eke out a living as a farm worker until he was well into his 50s. He began playing guitar in earnest when he was 26 years old, when his neighbor, blues legend Mississippi Fred McDowell, entranced him with the incantatory power of his country blues sound.

Burnside appropriated elements of McDowell’s approach, which de-emphasizes the four-square 12-bar structure in favor of one- and two-chord vamps whose casual, arbitrary chord progressions can be determined on the spur of the moment at the musician’s discretion.

“I was pretty close to Fred McDowell,” says Burnside, who has been married for 50 years and has 12 living children. “I’d go to his house two, three nights a week just to watch him and people like Ranie Burnette play. It always looked like a picnic at his house. People would be dancing and drinking. So many people would be dancing that they would break the planks in the floor most times. I learned to play just by watching people like that.”

Like millions of African Americans from the South, Burnside migrated to Chicago with his family in the ‘40s. They were in search of better wages, but they encountered deprivation and tragedy. Two uncles, his two brothers and his father were all killed within a year. Burnside, who found menial work in a glass factory, hung around blues clubs, where he soaked up as much music as he could and met musicians such as Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.

“Muddy married a first cousin of mine, so I got to know him pretty good,” Burnside recalls. “He was a good man. Chuck Berry was sleeping in his car at the time, ‘cause he didn’t have no money. But he played real good blues. Got to be a big man in the world, eventually.”

After several years of odd jobs in Chicago and Memphis, and a six-month stint in Tennessee’s Parchman State Penitentiary for shooting a man during a craps game, Burnside moved back to Mississippi in the late ‘50s, where he continued to find farm work and play music during breaks between shifts. His music was changing, informed now by the electric blues of artists such as Texan Lightnin’ Hopkins and Mississippi native John Lee Hooker, both of whom he had heard in Chicago.

“I would write songs by taking the melodies of guys like John Lee Hooker and then changing the lyrics,” says Burnside, who vividly recalls the night Hopkins and Hooker stopped by a Montreal club in 1969 to hear him. “They was waiting in the dressing room, but I didn’t know. I come back there after the show, and Lightnin’ says, ‘Hey, Burnside, I didn’t know anyone could do that but us. I don’t mind people doing it--if they don’t mess it up!’ ”

For decades, Burnside played the juke-joint circuit around north Mississippi, performing marathon sets in ramshackle clapboard buildings tucked deep in the woods and getting $10 a night and all the whiskey he and his band, which included sons Joseph and Daniel and brother-in-law Calvin Jackson, could drink.

“People would come from all around,” he recalls. “There wouldn’t be no fights or nothing, just a lot of gambling and drinking. We would play until the sun just about come up. I had a lot of fun in those days.”

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Burnside and his band, dubbed the Sound Machine, were a minor attraction on the blues and folk-festival circuit during the ‘70s and ‘80s. But everything began to change for him when music historian and rock critic Robert Palmer included Burnside, along with his contemporaries Junior Kimbrough and Booba Barnes, in his 1990 documentary on Mississippi music, “Deep Blues.”

Shortly thereafter, Palmer produced Burnside’s album “Too Bad Jim” for Fat Possum, an Oxford, Miss.-based label founded by Matthew Johnson, a University of Mississippi student who befriended Palmer when the writer taught a class on the history of rock music.

“R.L. is one of the artists I started Fat Possum for,” says Johnson. “He has such a raw spirit, and it’s a spirit that’s kept him alive through a lot of corrupt places, like prison. His music can only come from the kind of life that he’s led. He really just blew me away.”

“Too Bad Jim” attracted the notice of New York musician Jon Spencer, whose band, the Blues Explosion, pays a twisted kind of homage to the genre.

Burnside’s 1996 album, “A Ass Pocket Full of Whiskey,” was a collaboration with Spencer that flashed a bawdy-rapscallion persona. The album was released by Matador Records, once the home of such cutting-edge artists as Pavement, Liz Phair and Yo La Tengo, and it moved Burnside out of the blues club ghetto and into the rock club circuit.

Subsequent Burnside releases on Fat Possum --”Mr. Wizard,” “Come On In” and the current “I Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down”--were distributed by Epitaph, home of such punk bands as Rancid and NOFX.

On 1998’s “Come On In,” producer Rothrock (Beck, Elliott Smith) helped striate hip-hop and techno sounds into Burnside’s gruff trance blues, adding to the artist’s hipness quotient.

“R.L. is an inspirational example of just doing what you do and then having people eventually find you,” says Rothrock. “My biggest concern going into ‘Come On In’ was that I didn’t want to do anything to reduce what he’s all about, but when you have a pure artist like R.L., the artistry comes through regardless of the production or the mix. He just has this unspoken wisdom from having lived such a long life. It just oozes out of him.”

The irony of Burnside’s recent renaissance is that his audience has grown at the same time that he has become a guest star of sorts on his own records. While seven of the 11 tracks on “I Wish I Was in Heaven Sitting Down” were written by Burnside, the hip-hop beats and cut-and-paste production are the work of outside producers and musicians such as guitarist Smokey Hormel and DJ Swamp, who are members of Beck’s band.

Yet despite the pastiche-like nature of the album’s creation, it sounds as organic as Burnside’s earliest recordings.

“R.L. is completely incorruptible,” says Fat Possum’s Johnson. “He doesn’t care if his music is remixed. He’s not gonna be up at night thinking about it. R.L.’s job is to be R.L., and that’s a full-time job.”