Save this storySave this storySave this storySave this story
The interior of Jeff Bridges’s garage in Santa Barbara, California, has the casual feel of an eccentric dorm room: a tiger-print rug, a pottery wheel, guitars, a rogue toothbrush, pasted-together printouts of ideas he finds provocative or perhaps grounding (“Enlightenment is a collective experience”), and stacks of books ranging from Richard Powers’s Confusion to Who Cares? The Unique Teachings of Ramesh S. Balsekar. A black-and-white portrait of Captain Beefheart, dressed in an incongruous suit and tie, adorns the wall next to an electric piano. When I visited on a recent afternoon, I hadn’t noticed the lava lamp, but its presence didn’t seem out of place. A salty breeze rustled loose papers. Bridges was wearing rubber flip-flops and a periwinkle cardigan. He enthusiastically laid out a large fluffy blanket on the chair and invited me to sit down: “Your throne, man!” he said.
Earlier this month, Bridges released Slow Magic, 1977–78, a collection of songs he recorded in his early twenties, a rising movie star who was regularly jamming with a group of musicians and eccentrics from L.A.’s West Side on Wednesday nights. (The jams were organized by Steve Baim, who went to University High School with Bridges; they took place at various beach houses and sometimes at the Village, the recording studio where Fleetwood Mac recorded Tusk around the same time.) Slow Magic is both gorgeous and crazy. In Kong, Bridges recounts a plot he pitched for a potential King Kong sequel (Bridges played the long-haired primatologist Jack Prescott in the 1976 Dino De Laurentiis remake of Kong); The track features animated narration from actor Burgess Meredith, and its lyrics center on the revelation that Kong is actually a robot. “It’s a sad story, but he was just a machine monkey!” Bridges exclaims in a shaky falsetto. (The idea was rejected.) “Obnoxious,” an oddly tender song about feeling sad and sick to your stomach (“I went to the bathroom/And threw up”), has echoes of Frank Zappa and the Band. There’s also an occasional quaalude influence.
What I love most about this album is how social it is: friends in a room, silliness, the occasional (even unintentional) miracle. “As recording technology continued to advance, I was like, ‘Oh, I don’t need anyone! I can do it myself,’” Bridges says, leaning back in his lounge chair. “It was kind of a trap, because even just reading instructions was distracting me from the creative process. I was doing things this way, and it was fun, but it was distracting me from playing with live musicians.”
Bridges is warm, generous, and enviably soft-spoken. We watched YouTube, ate salad by his pool, and spent a few hours talking about art and love, and the interesting ways they sometimes intertwine. “Slow Magic” is out on vinyl for the first time this weekend, for Record Store Day, via Light in the Attic Records. This conversation has been edited and condensed.
Sourse: newyorker.com
