The Unfocused Creativity of Jeff Bridges
To the huge fan base that has seen his many films, Jeff Bridges is an actor who plays a little music on the side. Like Russell Crowe or Robert Downey Jr., Bridges’ hobby is considered a charming footnote on his Wikipedia page, though certainly not a skill to be placed alongside such dramatic achievements as winning an Oscar for his role in Crazy Heart or his other acclaimed roles in The Last Picture Show, Fat City or The Fisher King. While musicians-turned-actors can, with some struggle, gain respect in both fields (Sinatra, Will Smith, Mark Wahlberg, Cher), movie stars remain a stubbornly fixed cultural icon, their self-expression unacceptable without the mask of a well-written character.
Bridges seems not to care. In the last few years, as he has stepped into his salt-and-pepper age, his appearances have increasingly been linked to his non-film work. On NPR, he spoke with Terri Gross about a book of his photography and the accompanying gallery exhibition in New York. He hosted Saturday Night Live with an acoustic guitar, crooning ‘Jingle Bells’ like a contemporary Burl Ives. Much of the recent press surrounding the success of Crazy Heart, in which he inhabits the role of a road-worn country singer, is among the first to ever discuss his own music, though Bridges has been an active, widely released songwriter since the ’60s. His brother, Beau, refers to him as a Renaissance man, and perhaps it is not such an overblown statement since, in addition to music, acting and photography, he paints, throws pots, makes an abundance of ceramic heads and builds labyrinths in his backyard. “I really try hard to swerve,” Bridges says.
Jeff Bridges’ musicianship, however, remains his earliest passion. It began in the likely way, with failed piano lessons, and then, in high school, with his older brother’s coveted Danelectro guitar, which Jeff adopted as soon as Beau lost interest. At first, he played “surf tunes, The Ventures’ ‘Pipeline’ and all that,” and cites Captain Beefheart and Thelonious Monk as essential early influences. In 1969, through his family’s Hollywood connections, Bridges had the opportunity to perform for Quincy Jones, who was then preparing the soundtrack to Peter Yates’ film, John and Mary. Jones used Bridges’ song “Lost in Space,” a swimmy psychedelic country tune, to set the mood for Dustin Hoffman and Mia Farrow’s first romantic encounter. His vocals float in a thick atmosphere of tremolo guitars and dark reverb, and he croons up to the high notes with the charming over-reach of David Byrne, never quite missing the notes, but arriving at them with pleasant indecisiveness. He sings, “My mind is jagged/My body’s jammed with hate/Satanic powers rule me/is the hand reaching out far too late?/Lost in space, I’m invisible, and the merriment goes on.”
The year of his first musical success is also the year Bridges fell into what his family calls an “undisciplined life, just dabbling in art and music,” at which point, according to his sister, he announced to his parents: “I don’t dig you guys anymore. I just don’t dig your company.” In some ways, Bridges can be said to have continued the path of an undisciplined dabbler, his choice of a career in acting merely “the path of least resistance.”
His first speaking role on the 1950s TV show Sea Hunt was a step into acting that was “enthusiastically” (but not forcefully) encouraged by his father, Lloyd, the star of the show. According to Bridges, the experience was unpleasant, though he enjoyed performing. As teenagers, Jeff and Beau played the “supermarket circuit,” pulling into parking lots, picking fake fights with each other and once the crowds had gathered, launching into Shakespeare or a scene from Catcher in the Rye. Once the cops arrived, the brothers tried to bring them into the act, assuming that the world possessed the sort of natural proclivity toward drama that they did.
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