Jeff Bridges: A Vibe of the Times

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“Aye, wh-a-t’s up?” Jeff Bridges says, greeting me on Zoom from his Santa Barbara garage. He’s blissed out on a weekday lunchtime, just two weeks away from Light in the Attic’s release of Slow Magic, his album of “lost” songs recorded between his roles in King Kong and Heaven’s Gate. To no one’s surprise, the actor is as casual and droll as his character in The Big Lebowski, his voice deep and scratchy. He gives off an aura that suggests the role being more autobiographical than his Oscar win for Crazy Heart, or his lauded turns in The Contender, True Grit, and The Morning After.

Bridges’ music—zen-filled jams recorded to a cassette tape in, supposedly, “July 1978”—falls in line with the taste that The Dude was peddling 28 years ago: New Morning-era Bob Dylan, Captain Beefheart, Booker T. & the M.G.’s, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Townes Van Zandt—unkempt, rough-around-the-edges, and undeniably groovy, even in haste. I tell Bridges that my favorite music falls somewhere between Beefheart and the Eagles—the “sweet spot,” as he calls it. “Speaking of the Eagles,” I continue: “Do you hate them in real life?” He lets out a laugh, the kind that you summon—not pull—from the pit of your stomach. “No, no,” he brushes. “What The Dude is talking about… They’re so perfect. He’s more of a… Well, Creedence Clearwater Revival, they’ve got their own brand of perfection.”

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Recently, Bridges appeared on the new Japanese Breakfast album, performing the “Men in Bars” duet with Michelle Zauner. On paper, it was good PR ahead of Slow Magic’s exhibition, but I wouldn’t read too much into that. Bridges recorded Slow Magic by the seat of his pants and, true to the form, is releasing it as such. “It’s funny,” he tells me, “I completely forgot about these things. But ‘Slow Magic’ is a tune that I’ve been playing throughout the years.” He has been performing music often since 2020, when he was diagnosed and treated for non-Hodgkin lymphoma and production of his now-cancelled FX series The Old Man was paused because of the WGA strikes in 2023.

He made five volumes of three-song EPs called Emergent Behavior, the first of which features a New Age-style re-recording of “Slow Magic.” “I completely forgot that I had done it almost 50 years ago. That volume is, sort of, an extension of Slow Magic—in that it’s a collection of unpolished songs.” You could ask Bridges about his motivations to release Emergent Behavior or Slow Magic, but his response would be the same for both: “They’re just songs that I wanted to offer. I’m 75 years old, and I didn’t want to take up all that time to perfect these things. So, I just put it out.”

Last September, we lost Kris Kristofferson. Bridges and Kristofferson—whom he calls a “humble cat” and a “man of the people”—were good friends, having worked together on Heaven’s Gate in 1980. The late songwriter has been heavy on the mind for many, especially Bridges. “Stephen Bruton passed away [in 2009], and I remember going over,” he remembers. “Kris was there, and we looked in the mirror at each other. We said, ‘We gotta play brothers, man. Look at us.’” When Scott Cooper and T Bone Burnett were creating the character of Otis “Bad” Blake for Crazy Heart, they dubbed him “the fifth outlaw.” Bridges tells me that he “thought a lot about Kris” when he took on the role. “He was one of a kind. I was at the CMAs recently, and his song from Fat City, ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night,’ was featured there. It was so beautiful.”

BRIDGES’ PARENTS, LLOYD AND DOROTHY, were in showbiz and hoped the same outcome would emerge for their second son. The family lived in Holmby Hills on Los Angeles’ westside, and Jeff’s older brother Beau had become a paternal figure to him while their father worked on the East Coast, playing the lead in Sea Hunt and later replacing Richard Kiley in the Broadway production of Man of La Mancha. “He was very much into showtunes,” Bridges recalls, turning to a memory of flautist Meredith Wilson coming by his home and wanting Lloyd to play Professor Harold Hill in The Music Man. “This was right around when Sea Hunt was happening, and it didn’t work out. It was played beautifully by [Robert] Preston, but one of my earliest memories is Meredith singing ‘(Ya Got) Trouble’ and slapping little eight-year-old me and looking at me in my eyes.”

By 17, Jeff and Lloyd toured together in a production of Anniversary Waltz, but Bridges quickly shipped off to New York City to study acting at the Herbert Berghof Studio before joining the Coast Guard as a boatswain’s mate in San Luis Obispo, just east of Spooner’s Cove and Morro Beach. Mike Campbell told me once that it was impossible for a young kid to not get turned onto music in the 1960s. Whether it was Dylan rewriting the blueprints or the Beatles and the Beach Boys trying to one-up each other from both sides of the Atlantic, it was a marvelous time not yet replicated. Bridges was in his teens during the post-Buddy Holly renaissance of rock and blues music, 14 years old when the Beatles went on Ed Sullivan. “You’d go to school and the radio hooked us all together,” he says. “Now, it’s all spread out. Buyback in the day, every day you’d hear a new Beatles song or a new Dylan tune. I used to go to sleep with the radio on. Hearing ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ I said, ‘Wh-aaat? Oh my gosh.’” Bridges wasn’t the type of kid to go to the record store and pick up a new .45 the day it came out. He was a real liner notes reader—which he lovingly dubs albums “with all the information on it.”

At the children-of-the-stars-studded Uni High west of Japantown, Bridges and his friends, Mike Portis and David Greenwalt, enrolled in Caldwell Williams’ DAWN (Developing Adolescents Without Narcotics) program, going on desert retreats full of sleep deprivation to dismantle ego and tame drug dependencies. They didn’t kick the habits, but they pursued art that was far more enmeshed in transcendental meditation, bowling over James Brown and John Coltrane more so than the Brits. They were unpopular kids hot-boxing Bridges’ Buick Skylark, dreaming of their soon-to-be life playing in psych-rock bands around Los Angeles. While they were channeling Frank Zappa, their friend, Stan Ayeroff, went to school at CalArts and joined Richard and Danny Elfman’s avant-garde outfit, the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

After receiving a Best Supporting Actor nomination at the Oscars, a newly 21-year-old Bridges bought a home in Rambla Pacifico, in the Malibu mountains, and, along with Greenwalt and Baim, would surf, spend hours in the hot tub, and play music deep into the night. Songwriting and improv were symptoms of the hangouts, not side-effects. They started having jam nights in La Costa, dropping acid and chasing free-form euphoria. “Those instrumental jams, it’s like Rashomon,” Bridges says. “Everybody’s got a different story of what actually went down. I said, ‘Oh, those instrumentals [on Slow Magic]. Were they recorded at the jams?’ Ken Lauber, the guy who produced all of the songs on the album, says, ‘No, I remember when you guys started doing that, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening.’”

The “jams” in question had one rule: no preconceived songs were allowed. “That was maybe the only rule,” Bridges elaborates. “Singing was encouraged, and writing on the spot was encouraged—just expressing was encouraged! You couldn’t say, ‘Let’s do “Shake It Up, Baby,”’ or something like that.” He had a few dozen songs written by 1972, and he and Greenwalt formed a band called the Furry Brothers. They’d play Monday Hoot Nights at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, even though their music careers didn’t explode quite as memorably as those of Jackson Browne or Linda Ronstadt. “What a great venue,” Bridges declares. “They housed all of the famous guys, but they were also open up-and-comers like us. To be in that atmosphere, that was wonderful.” One of their songs, “You Could Be Ready,” is a twangy, ramshackle singalong on Slow Magic.

Lauber and Bridges would connect in 1974, when Bridges was filming Hearts of the West (with Greenwalt as his stand-in) and trekking to a studio to play “Obnoxious” and “Attitude” for the engineer and so-called “silent member of The Band,” who was scoring the movie and had recently joined Dylan on Planet Waves. Bridges would rent an art studio in a Venice warehouse, set up a four-track Tascam recorder, and write and play songs with the guys a few times a week. Somewhere in there, Slow Magic began germinating. Then came sessions at the Village Recorder on Butler Avenue, where Bridges and the band would make “Here On This Island” and “Kong,” an 8-minute, absurdist drama undoubtedly based on his role in King Kong.

In the noise of the song, a familiar, acerbic voice enters: Burgess Meredith, Bridges’ co-star in the unfinished movie The Yin & Yang of Mr. Go, delivers a spoken-word poem about the titular ape on fire. “He’s burning!” Meredith shouts. “He burst into flames! He’s falling from the tower!” “Isn’t that a beautiful poem?” Bridges asks me. It’s unsettling, I say. “Like all of us,” he continues, “we have many facets and, often, one or two of our facets is more apparent than others. But, gosh, Burgess was such a talented, incredible character who turned me on to so many things.”

For many, Meredith is the bombastic, saltine cracker-eating Mickey from Rocky. For me, he’s Grandpa Gustafson from Grumpy Old Men. For Bridges, he’s the guy who turned him on to sensory deprivation tanks, the findings of psychonaut John Lilly, and neuroscience. Meredith’s “wonderful jam quality of encouraging people to express what they’ve got,” too, became a tome for Bridges, who remembers an exchange he shared with him on the set of The Yin & Yang of Mr. Go: “In the middle of it, he says, ‘Oh, you write songs. Let’s make your character a guy who writes rock operas.’ He encouraged my music. I haven’t seen the movie in so long. I can’t remember how it all worked out, because it was really a fiasco.”

BRIDGES TOOK A SHINE TO the electric haunts of Washington Boulevard, a part of Culver City “where all the big studios were.” It’s where Baim’s house was, and where the “July 1978” tape likely got labeled, though the exact year of its recording remains something of a mystery. In reality, Bridges and his buddies likely added to it over time, beginning years before whatever handwriting graced the label. What the end product became is, if you will, a greatest hits collection of out-of-tune guys chasing an in-tune buzz. But you can trace the band’s “Wednesday Night Jams” back to Washington. “There was a spiritual aspect to those nights,” Bridges reveals, “being an authentic representative of who you were and who all your friends were, and just showing up and jamming together.” And, much to my chagrin, Bridges tells me that the Wednesday Night Jams are still ongoing—that he just brought a new member into the stable: Chris Pelonis, who helped the actor put together his Santa Barbara band the Abiders.

But when I ask Bridges about the mysticism of mid-1970s Los Angeles, he says it’s hard for him to “look back on all that,” but not before diving into a tangent about the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo and Bright’s bassist-to-Hollywood arc. “If you want some weird, visual, acoustic stuff to wash over you, check out a movie called The Forbidden Zone,” he says. “Bright wrote The Forbidden Zone, and my wife Susan was a dancer on that. Baim’s wife Arla was in it. Rick Elfman directed it. That really will give you a vibe of the times.”

Slow Magic is the unpolished document of a cassette tape nearly lost forever. It’s a bunch of beach bums singing wild abandon and leaning into each other’s self-serious glories. One moment, they’re all doing Zappa on “Space 2.” In the middle, there’s some Terry Riley influence. By the album’s end, Bridges and his boys are cracking up and letting us all in on it. Horns from the Boingo sound like guitars and doo-wop oo-wee-oos ring out on “Obnoxious,” as Bridges sings about doing quaaludes before party chatter fills the crannies. On “Attitude,” he waxes poetic about The Man, or a lover, taxing his Grape-Nuts and “gassing” his soup. Slow Magic sounds youthful and drunkenly random, like a couple of guys finding something close to God in a mid-week epiphany. Though, they’d all probably deny finding anything there but the music and each other.

Upon completing The Last Picture Show and buying his property in Malibu in 1972, Bridges considered taking a break from Hollywood and lending his full attention to music. Though it never happened that way, the intention would have never been to land a record deal or become a hit-maker, but to get to a profound place that most expressions of the human soul can’t quite reach. “My dad loved showbiz, but he particularly loved acting and really encouraged all of his kids to go into it,” Bridges remembers. “I said to him, ‘Dad, I’m thinking I might go into music.’ He said, ‘Jeff, don’t be ridiculous. All of your interests will be called upon when you’re an actor.’ And you know what? He was right. I’ve done a lot of music in my acting, so it’s not an either/or kind of thing. Well… in a way, I guess it is. I went with the path of least resistance. I did the acting thing first. The music, thank God, still lingered in my soul and wanted to pop out.”

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.

Jeff Bridges: A Vibe of the Times

The actor-musician spoke with Paste about growing up with showbiz parents, following the improvisational muse in Culver City, remembering Kris Kristofferson, and the release of his “lost” music, Slow Magic.