Music with Meat

Sam Shepard, the only Pulitzer Prize winner to also be an Oscar-nominated actor, debuted his play, The Tooth Of Crime, in London in 1972.

The story told of a dsytopian future in which musicians competed with each other in the manner of gladiators, and it reportedly sent audiences fleeing in disgust from its American premiere. Referred to as “the gifted problem child” of his oeuvre by the New York Times, it was widely regarded that Shepard the composer lacked the spark and literary imagination of Shepard the playwright.

Skip forward to 1996, and Shepard has condensed and partially rewritten his play, and jack-of-all-trades T Bone Burnett contributes new music and lyrics. Skip forward another twelve years to the present day, and an album of Burnett’s compositions is finally released as an album in its own right.

While this reviewer cannot attest to the familiarities and disparities between album and play, and to what extent the songs complement and contextualise Shepard’s vision, but Burnett’s Tooth Of Crime stands alone on its individual merits. Certainly Burnett has worked on this project for long enough to achieve this aim, resurrecting songs dropped from the stage production, and retooling those that were used. Of course, in recent years Burnett been busy acting as producer for both artists (Bob Dylan, Elvis Costello, and last year’s collaboration between Robert Plant and Alison Krauss) and soundtracks (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Walk The Line) so the delay is understandable.

With a core trio of Burnett, Marc Ribot and Jim Keltner – his wife Sam Phillips duets on Dope Island– the musicianship on display is beyond reproach, and the production is perhaps best described as “3D noir”. The lyrics alternately capture this sensibility (“I can stir you like a Bloody Mary”) in turn with nods to Shepard’s post-apocalyptic vision (“I was conceived in a behaviour station, light-years from civilization”).