Album: Proof Through The Night
Year: 1983
. . .
A lot of people don’t know or remember this, but before he became a Grammy-winning producer — and a leading candidate (along with Rick Rubin) — for Taylor Swift’s next “authenticity” move, T-Bone Burnett was a well regarded musician, who played on Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, as well as released solo records starting in 1980 that were well-regarded until they weren’t.
For me, the only one that ever broke through was 1983’s Proof Through The Night, which featured the closet thing T-Bone ever had to a hit, “The Murder Weapon,” and when I say “closet thing T-Bone ever had to a hit, I mean “I think I remember seeing the video on MTV a couple times.”
It also featured a bunch of ringers, as it was Burnett’s major label album debut, and therefore needed to feature a trio of guitar heavyweights: Richard Thompson, Mick Ronson & Pete Townshend, the final two of which were on my favorite track, the epically ridiculous epic “The Sixties,” which starts with this over a cool cyclical acoustic guitar riff, played by either Ronson or Townshend, though I think it’s more Townshend.
I have a painter friend who says he actually slept with Jacqueline Kennedy
Or was it John Kennedy?
Maybe it was Jacqueline Bisset
At any rate, I can tell I’m startin’ wrong
Let me begin again
The thing I love about “The Sixties” is Burnett’s over-the-top ridicule of the guy in the song, whom if I understand correctly, is basically what we used to call a “yuppie,” whom he describes as a “new breed of man” who’s married with children, but also smokes weed, does coke, dresses casually, wants to fuck girls in cutoffs, and in my favorite sneering aside “drinks things like Cutty and 7, whatever that is.” C’mon, T-Bone, you know exactly what that is!
But the whole song is one big hectoring rant, swinging wildly at about a thousand targets at once, and trying incredibly hard to be contemporary, as evidenced by the chorus, driven by the guitars of both Townshend and Ronson, with what sounds like Townshend singing the backing vocals.
Politicians don’t debate
They transcendental meditate
Stockbrokers aren’t in at ten
They’re all strung out on heroin
Baseball players aren’t so square
They’ve got beards and stringy hair
Car dealers don’t just sell drive trains
They sometimes also deal cocaine
“The Sixties” is the epitome of a song that I love because of the music, not lyrics: the contrast between the quiet, chanted verses over that repeating acoustic guitar and the loud, shouted choruses is basically enough for me, despite the even more ridiculous second verse which, ahem, climaxes with the guy paying a hooker more than twice as much as she’d charge other clients. For reasons, I guess?
Also doing it for me, is the late bridge, which gets even louder and noisier, as either Townshend or Ronson kicks out a solo while everybody else in the studio counts decades. No really.
Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety
Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety
Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, ninety
Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty sixty! SIXTY!, SIXTY!!
In a weird way, this bridge is a precursor to the opening track of The Hold Steady’s Almost Killed Me, where Craig Finn actually describes what happened in each decade, making me wonder if he knows this song. Either way, the final chant of “sixty, sixty, SIXTY!, SIXTY!!” is both incredibly on-the-nose, kinda hilarious, and weirdly affecting.
Also weirdly affecting: the outro, which is basically a gorgeous stop-time chant of “keep all the bad, hey / destroy all the good, la la la” which is clearly the thesis statement of the song, but probably the reason I’m writing about it, as well. Let’s put it this way, on the Nathan Rabin My Year of Flops scale, “The Sixties” is a fiasco. Which is why I love it.
“The Sixties”
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