Though he’s regarded as one of his generation’s most versatile and accomplished actors, Jeff Bridges has always been in touch with his musical side. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, after his older brother, Beau Bridges, exposed him to Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Buddy Holly, the two began fooling around on a Goya classical guitar owned by their father, the late film and TV star Lloyd Bridges.
But it wasn’t until Beau purchased a Danelectro (“one of those ‘lipstick pickup’ jobs you got from the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalog”) and let Jeff have a go at it that “things started to change in a big way,” Bridges says. The early ’60s surf-rock hit “Pipeline” was the first song he learned to play from beginning to end. When the British Invasion arrived in 1964, it seemed to him that music, not acting, was his life’s driving force.
Bridges remembers going to see A Hard Day’s Night with his father and being thrilled at how “he totally got it. The humor, the songs — my dad loved the Beatles. Maybe it was because he was a singer, too.” (The elder Bridges had famously replaced Richard Kiley in Man of La Mancha on Broadway.) “He appreciated their creativity,” he says. “I was fortunate: when other kids’ parents were throwing out their Beatles records, mine were cool with it.”
As he recalls, the first “really good” guitar he owned was a Gibson J-45 that “practically played itself.” Both he and Beau were encouraged to take piano lessons by their mother, Dorothy (“I did for a while,” he says, “and then I quit. She said, ‘You’ll be sorry’ And I am”), but Jeff chose to teach himself guitar. Unlike so many budding axe men of the time, he viewed the six-string as a vehicle for songwriting, not instrumental virtuosity.
“I respected Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix and those guys,” he says, “but I never felt like I wanted to compete with them. Slowing down their records to study their licks? That wasn’t for me. Maybe I was just being lazy, but to me playing the guitar was about having fun.”
That sensibility extended to weekly jam sessions that the teenaged Bridges held at the family house, a tradition that continued for 15 years, “well into the time that we were all men,” he says.
“Our jams were crazy. I played electric, acoustic — it was all very free-form, kind of like Captain Beefheart meets the Talking Heads, if that makes any sense. Singing was encouraged, as was poetry, but we had one hard-and-fast edict: no songs, just jamming. I didn’t like the idea of structure.”
Literally tossed into the acting waters by his father (“the old man put me and Beau in his TV show Sea Hunt. He thought we’d like it better than school”), Bridges extended his “just jamming” ethos to his earliest film roles, which included Oscar-nominated turns in The Last Picture Show and Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.
Because he hadn’t bogged himself down with the “rules” of acting, Bridges went one better and simply was, displaying a naturalism and lack of pretension that led the late film critic Pauline Kael to call him “the least self-conscious screen actor who ever lived.”
Even so, Bridges didn’t know if he was cut out for the life of a movie star. He says that the real decision to throw himself into acting didn’t come until after he’d made “a dozen or so pictures. I dug what an actor did, but it took me a while to feel it, to truly appreciate the craft and the preparation. Plus, I was still playing music a lot, and I guess I had a hard time choosing: Was I an actor or a musician, or could I be both?”
It was on the set of the ill-fated Heaven’s Gate that Bridges began to realize that his two interests could co-exist. While director Michael Cimino spent months (and tens of millions of United Artists’ dollars) waiting for the perfect ray of “magic time” light to descend upon the southern Montana mountains, Bridges bonded with co-star Kris Kristofferson and with various members of Kristofferson’s band.
Kris’s friends were all pretty green on the acting front, and I was green compared to them when it came to music. So we met in the middle and had a ball.”
— Jeff Bridges
Other musicians would visit the location, and many wound up staying. Among them were Ronnie Hawkins (whose onetime group morphed into the Band) and an up-and-comer named T Bone Burnett, both of whom snagged small roles in the film.
“T Bone didn’t do the music for Heaven’s Gate,” Bridges says, laughing. “He actually played my maid, or I guess you’d call him my ‘housekeeper.’ Pretty crazy when you think about it.”
Most nights Bridges, Kristofferson, and the others would break out guitars and jam into the wee hours. Initially, Bridges was reticent about going toe-to-toe with Kristofferson and his crew of heavyweights, but eventually it became clear that the playing field was level.
“Kris’s friends were all pretty green on the acting front, and I was green compared to them when it came to music,” Bridges says. “So we met in the middle and had a ball.”
In doing so, Bridges met Kristofferson’s guitarist (and Burnett’s childhood friend), the late Stephen Bruton, a onetime bluegrass banjo prodigy who shifted to guitar and would become a valued musician and songwriter for Bonnie Raitt, Willie Nelson, Jimmy Buffett, and numerous others in the following years.
“I immediately took a liking to Stephen,” Bridges says. “The guy had it all: he was great looking and funny as hell; plus he was an amazing songwriter and knew everything about the guitar. He taught me so much up there in Montana.”
Bad Blake is one of those ‘Dude’ parts. It’s the kind of part you know you’re born to play.”
— Jeff Bridges
Nearly 30 years later, the lessons would continue, with wondrous results, when Bridges took on the role of Bad Blake, a washed-up alcoholic country singer, for the 2009 musical drama Crazy Heart. Under Bruton’s tutelage, Bridges went from a simple strummer to a highly adept country picker, learning the gritty leads, scale patterns, and chord voicings crucial to Crazy Heart songs like “Fallin’ & Flyin’” (penned by Bruton and Gary Nicholson).
“Bad Blake is one of those ‘Dude’ parts,” Bridges says, referencing what might now become his second-most famous role, that of the White Russian-guzzling kegler layabout in The Big Lebowski. “It’s the kind of part you know you’re born to play. Bad’s the last of a breed, one of those guys they just don’t make anymore — like Kris or Waylon Jennings or Merle Haggard. The role was such an open canvas for me to work with.”
Bridges won loads of honors for his work in the film, including an Oscar for Best Actor. He also established his bona fides as a guitarist, and went on to create his own line of signature model acoustics with Breedlove in 2021.
Notably, Crazy Heart gave him a chance to play some very nice guitars onscreen, including a Gretsch Chet Atkins Country Gentleman — custom-made for the film and given a relic treatment to reflect Blake’s years with the instrument — and a Gibson SJ-45 acoustic. The instrument was on loan from Buddy Miller, who played on the film’s soundtrack and was part of the band Burnett assembled for the 2007 Alison Krauss-Robert Plant collaboration Raising Sand. “It belonged to his wife,” Bridges says. “Man, I fell in love with that thing. Music just poured out of it.”
He pauses a second, then chuckles, “Yep, those were some beautiful guitars I got to play, all right.
“And hey, the chance to actually do my own singing and guitar playing on film!” he remarks, his face beaming. “What a trip!”