In Jeff Bridges‘ 1977 Rolling Stone cover story, the actor plays “Kong” — a truly wild and oddly impassioned song he wrote and sang, inspired by the lead creature of the King Kong remake Bridges was filming at the time — for writer Tim Cahill. Nearly five decades later, the world is getting to hear that long-lost track and 10 others, all recorded by Bridges and a musically gifted group of friends from high school. Bridges’ Slow Magic, due April 12 in record stores and April 13 online, is a deeply enjoyable collection that unearths the stoned camaraderie of some profoundly chill Wednesday-night hangouts.
It all showcases Bridges’ genuine gifts as a singer-songwriter, in a considerably looser and more psychedelic format than the rootsy studio albums he went on to release in the 21st century. “Kong” and another track, “Here on This Island,” even feature striking spoken-word monologues from the late Burgess Meredith, best known to modern audiences as the Penguin on the Sixties Batman TV show.
In a Zoom from his L.A. home, wearing a very Dude-like house sweater, Bridges talked about the album — all sourced from a single rediscovered cassette — plus his wild Seventies, surviving Covid and cancer, the future of his career, and more. (Bridges also just announced five California screenings he’s hosting of The Big Lebowski, where he’ll talk about the making of the movie.)
I was really sorry to hear that you had a house burn down recently.
Yeah, it was our family beach house. Gone. Just a couple of days before that fire, we drove the kids from Santa Barbara down to Santa Monica. We drove right past our house, but all these buildings that I grew up with, the country store, all these wonderful memories, poof.
I didn’t know what to expect from this music. I’ve heard your latter-day records, but this is cool stuff, man.
Oh, you dig it? I’m glad.
Listening to it, you also feel like, “Oh man, it would’ve been fun to hang out and be part of this.”
I hold my dear buddy Steve Baim responsible for a lot of that vibe. We used to meet every Wednesday night at Baim’s house. We would jam, and there were rules. No [cover] songs allowed, but singing was encouraged, and you could jam with your voice and make up shit, but no planned songs. But I was writing songs at that time, and I would invite these guys over to do my songs, too. And then we got in cahoots with this guy, [musician and composer] Ken Lauber. I was doing a movie called Hearts of the West [released in 1975], and I met Kenny. I played him some tunes in my trailer. He said, “Oh yeah, let’s record these.”
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I’ve got another person I hold majorly responsible, [film composer] Keefus Ciancia. After [2009’s] Crazy Heart, which T-Bone Burnett was instrumental in producing, I said, “Hey, Bone, I got a batch of songs, man, do you want to go back into the studio and do it?” So I went back there with the same band that did [Robert Plant and Alison Krauss’] Raising Sand. And during that session, I met this guy, Keefus Ciancia, who played keyboards and does music for True Detective. And then a few years after that album, we did a thing called Sleeping Tapes.
That was your ambient spoken-word work.
It’s this weird little series that we did on the cuff. It’s in the same spirit as the Wednesday-night jams. So Keefus and I did that together. We had a ball, and then Keefus says, “Hey, why don’t we come into the studio and let’s just see what comes out.” So I went there with all my tunes that I had written, and he fell in love with this material. And I played him this album, which consisted of a little cassette. We had to find a way to play it. He loved it. And without telling me, he sent it to his buddy, Matt Sullivan, at this outfit called Light in the Attic that is into archival music. And he ended up digging it and wanted to make an album. And I said, “You’re kidding, man.” He said, “No.” I said, “OK.”
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I’ll ask a very stupid question. What would the Dude think of this music?
[Laughs.] Oh, he would dig it right along with the whales, man.
That’s right. It’s perfect for the bathtub.
Put those jams on loop, man.
There’s a Dylan line about how he saw his songwriting as “more confessional than professional.” Since none of this came out for so long, maybe that’s how you were approaching things.
Yeah, it’s mysterious to me. Unlike a lot of showbiz parents, my dad, Lloyd Bridges, wanted all his kids to go into showbiz. He loved it so much. I wasn’t sure. I was into my music and into painting and all these different things. He said, “Jeff, don’t be ridiculous. That’s one of the wonderful things about it is as an actor, you’re going to be called upon to get into all these interesting things that you’re into.”
I’m so glad I listened to him, because Crazy Heart is a perfect example of that. But the music thing was always bubbling in me. And it comes out in these weird ways. I look at all the different things, painting, ceramics, acting, music, it’s all basically the same stuff. The assignment: Get out of the way, let the thing come through, that’s it. That’s how I approach all those different things I’m interested in.
Looking at your Seventies Rolling Stone cover, you were obviously going through a period of self-examination. You were doing Est and isolation chamber stuff. I do hear maybe some of that psychic exploration in this music.
I’m still interested in all of that stuff. That interest in “what’s it all about,” I’m still curious about all that. That remains, just like the music and other creative impulses I have, trying to figure out, “What’s it all about, what’s going on here?”
The weirder stuff on the album — the fringier, experimental stuff — what were you listening to that led you in those directions? I hear Captain Beefheart in there, maybe.
Yeah, Beefheart. I loved Beefheart. Also, you know who Moondog is? T Bone used some Moondog in Lebowski, so we got to relive that excitement. But I remember as a young kid, going into New York, and I think it was on Avenue of the Americas, somewhere around 60th. I remember the Hilton Hotel being across the street, and there was this giant guy — he was over 6 feet— dressed up like a Viking. And he’d be passing out pamphlets. I thought he was, like, a homeless guy. And I would see him there every time I would go to New York. One day I went into a record store. And I said, “Oh, look, there’s that guy.” And I flipped over the cover, and Leonard Bernstein wrote the liner notes, saying this guy is the real shit. So I became a fan of his and I’ve been following his story all these years. And his music was very exciting to me.
And [more broadly], my brother, when I was growing up, Beau is eight years older than me, so when I was a kid, coming out of his room was all the early rock & roll, Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly, and all those guys. That was a great period. It doesn’t get better. That’s top shit. But my era, the Beatles and Dylan? Come on, man. Can you imagine every day going to high school and here’s the new Beatles? Just boom. So intense.
The first single, “Obnoxious,” reminded me of the band My Morning Jacket. Do you know them?
I know the name more than the music.
You psychically predicted them somehow.
You know, it’s doo-woppy, right? The chords are the basic — let’s see, walk down to A minor, F…. A lot of songs have that structure to them.
You mention Quaaludes on that song, which is a drug experience that was lost to future generations.
Yeah, that’s a long time ago for me to conjure it up. I remember I liked it, it was fun. “Hey, ludes, man,” yeah. But there were some terrible drugs, angel dust, all that stuff. I can’t remember. It was a bit like being drunk, but a little in a different way. I can’t quite remember what Quaaludes were like.
The track “Slow Magic” itself is really great, almost a Van Morrison vibe. Tell me about what you remember about that one.
Yeah, that’s a song that’s stuck with me. I did a newer version of it too. I formed a band called the Abiders. There’s nothing like playing with a bunch of guys, man, a band. God, it’s really just a wonderful thing. So I toured a bunch with these guys, the Abiders, and made another album with them. And then I got sick and I got cancer. And then at the chemo place for the cancer treatment, I got Covid that made the cancer look like nothing. I had no immune system, I thought I was very close to dying. I thought, shit, this is it, people die, and this is me doing that. And then I got better! And then the music started to… I got all these tunes and I started to look through my list of tunes and I said, “Gee, man, I’m 75. I don’t know if I have the energy to get into the studio and do all these things. Maybe I’ll just release all of this stuff, and not be so precious.”
So I got this idea of doing this series of tunes called Emergent Behavior. And it’s all this unperfected stuff, some live recordings with the Abiders, some stuff from my GarageBand, and I released it on my site. So there’s a version of “Slow Magic” there as well.
Is the “Kong” song really based on an idea you had for a sequel to the movie you made?
So I’m doing King Kong and I get a call to come into Dino De Laurentiis’ office. I think, “Am I getting in trouble?” And he says to me, “Jeffy.” He called me Jeffy. “Two words, Jeffy. Kong-a Two.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “Kong-a Two.” I said, “Oh, a sequel!” And he says, “Think about it,” I said “OK.”
So I started thinking about it, and I had this wild idea. Because we hadn’t shot the big ending of the movie with the monkey falling off the trade towers and crashing to the ground. And my thought said, what happens if the monkey crashes to the ground, and it turns out to be a machine? And all this oil is on the ground, and it all burns. We end the movie there.
Then the sequel is Charles Grodin’s character gets the carcass of this machine and starts to tour it around, and rebuild it and animate it — and religions form around it. And then here come the fucking aliens that say, “This is ours.”
And I pitch this to Dino and he just looks at me with this implacable expression, just like a statue. He didn’t dig it at all. But I said, I’ll write a song about it and I’ll get my buddy, Burgess Meredith, who wrote, directed, and produced my second movie, called The Yin and Yang of Mr. Go. I’ll have him come and do [a version of] the Hindenburg broadcast. And so that’s what we did. That was probably the most professional thing on there, but there’s all kinds of musical clams and shit. We didn’t perfect that.
Burgess must’ve been a cool guy to keep up with you when he was so much older than you.
Oh, he was a friend of my parents, but a very cool dude, man. He turned me on to the isolation tanks. Dear friend and incredibly talented. What about that poem he says in the album? Isn’t that beautiful?
It reminds me a little of how they use Vincent Price on the Thriller album. You were ahead of that too, by a few years.
Yeah. That poem is quite remarkable.
So you never lost this cassette, you had this cassette the whole time?
At some point I must have digitized it, put it on my computer, because I don’t know where the original is, but we looked for it. We couldn’t find it. But life has its way with you, man. You lose all kinds of shit.
Do you have any thoughts about performing some of this stuff live?
Funny how impulses come and go. My music left me for a while. Now it’s starting to come back, and I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’ve been jamming more on GarageBand, writing and mixing new stuff. I don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s up for grabs, at this point.
Listening back to this, especially in this remastered form, it’s probably sounded better than it ever has to you. How did it affect you to listen back and go through this stuff?
I was just so thrilled with what Light in the Attic did as far as the album cover and the booklet in there and the mastering of it and all of that. One of the main threads through all of my music is this dear friend of mine, John Goodwin, who’s an incredible songwriter. He wrote the tune “Light Blues” that’s in there. And that’s one of his kind of lesser songs — some of his tunes are just remarkable. That fired up all these tunes that we’ve written together that haven’t been realized. Actually, when the Abiders and I went out and played, about half our songs were written were John Goodwin tunes.
I was sorry that The Old Man got canceled. I was really enjoying that show.
Yeah. The best thing about that show for me was the people. I got to work with Jon Steinberg, the showrunner, and [John] Lithgow. Oh God, it was wonderful working with all those folks. So it’s sad that way, but the fact that it’s cancelled — I’m occupied with all this auxiliary stuff. It takes time for these things to surface, the music, the painting, the ceramics, gardening. All these different things take time to have gestation periods, and so I’m happy that now I can do all this other stuff that I’m interested in.
You’ve obviously been through a lot the past few years. Is retirement anything you think of, or do you want to just keep it going as long as you can?
My dear friend Bernie Glassman, we wrote a book together called The Dude and the Zen Master. Bernie would talk about retiring. He says, that’s just like going into a tire shop and putting on some off-road tires. And that’s how I feel about retiring, that I’m just putting on different tires and I’m heading out in the hills, man, and seeing what’s over that next one.
So maybe it is on your mind a little bit?
But not what the classic thinking is. I heard another definition of retiring. Because retiring means stop working, right? And in a way, I’ve never worked. I invented a couple of words, either plork, plorking, or “werelay.” It’s a combination of work and play. Acting — let’s do a play, it’s a play, there’s a playfulness to it. So I try to have that operating in my life all the time.
But retiring, my definition of retiring? I’ve been retired since I’ve been born. I heard a famous tennis player give a speech, but he said, “No. It’s like graduating. I’m graduating.”
I’ve always been tough to drag to the party, do something, do a movie or whatever. I’ve been resistant because I know what it means. It means if you do that, you can’t do all this other shit. You’re away from your family. So I’ve always resisted it. And now I noticed I’m even resisting more because there’s all kinds of other stuff I want to do. I’m still open to do movies, but it’s got to be one that tickles me to the depth. It has to tickle for me to do it.
