Jeff Bridges, a lucky star at 75, and making music

Big Lebowski star Jeff Bridges has survived cancer, Covid and bushfire disaster – and released an album.

Jeff Bridges attends The 58th Annual CMA Awards at Music City Center on November 20, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee. Picture: Jason Kempin/Getty Images.

You only see the magic of life when you rub up against death

Actors rarely like to be mistaken for the characters they are most famous for portraying. In the case of Jeff Bridges and the Dude, the laid-back hippie Californian of The Big Lebowski fame, however, even the man himself can see more than a passing resemblance.

“When I read the script to The Big Lebowski, I said to the Coen brothers, ‘Were you spying on me?’ ” Bridges, 75, drawls in a good-humoured growl, as he sinks deep into a reclining chair from what looks like his garage in Santa Barbara, California.

“Did you hear those tapes I made back in the 70s?”

Much like the Dude, Bridges has a way of taking fate in his stride. In 2020 he was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Contracting a serious bout of Covid the same year left him “on death’s doorstep”. Then in 2025 the Bridges family lost their Malibu home to the California wildfires.

The litany of disasters certainly hasn’t left him feeling sorry for himself. “Only when you get to rub up against that shit,” he says, “do you see the magic of life.”

Rubbing up against death also encouraged Bridges to return to a lost project from his youth, which brings us to those tapes from the 70s. Starting in 1974, carrying on during breaks from filming a blockbuster remake of King Kong in 1976, and ending in 1978, shortly before contributing his part in Hollywood’s downfall with the studio-destroying disaster Heaven’s Gate, Bridges jammed with a bunch of friends each Wednesday night in a Malibu pad.

Towards the end of that period he recorded a handful of songs that emerged from those sessions and now they’ve been released for the first time on an album called Slow Magic: 1977-1978. Loose, playful and lightly surreal, they sound like Creedence Clearwater Revival jamming with Frank Zappa, or some particularly stoned outtakes from Bob Dylan and the Band’s late 1960s recordings The Basement Tapes. Exactly the kind of music the Dude would make, in other words.

“There is certainly a Dude-esque aspect to this music,” Bridges agrees. “When I take on a movie, I find elements of myself that align with the character. With Lebowski, all I had to do was think back to those early days. Listening back to the tapes now, it makes me think: if I hadn’t become an actor, I would have ended up like the Dude.”

The story of Slow Magic begins with Crazy Heart, the 2009 movie in which Bridges played a boozy country singer on the wane. He struck up a friendship with a musician called Keefus Ciancia who was working on the film, and when Ciancia heard the rough recordings of Bridges’s old songs a couple of years ago he sent them to Matt Sullivan of Light in the Attic, a reissue label specialising in unearthing hidden gems from rock’s past.

“Suddenly I get a call from Matt, saying, ‘Hey do you want to make an album of this?’ You’re kidding me! It’s filled with clangs and it’s certainly not polished. But then I thought: ah, what the hell.”

Jeff Bridges in 1998’s The Big Lebowski.

What the songs lack in slickness and professionalism, they more than make up for in charm. “I was drinking a little too much. I was thinking about another Quaalude,” Bridges drawls insouciantly on Obnoxious, which indeed sounds like the kind of jokey strum-along a bunch of friends might make together after too many joints and white Russians.

Then there is Kong, a saxophone-laden piece of soft rock that Bridges wrote in the hope it might be used as the theme tune to a King Kong sequel (the sequel never happened). “He wants to establish himself as a monkey man. He wants to be a New York citizen,” Bridges sings. While maybe not up there with Dylan or Joni Mitchell’s finest couplets, the goofy humour is undeniable.

“It all started with an old schoolfriend called Steve Baim,” Bridges says of the sessions. “He was always a little bit crazier than everyone else, and we would meet at his house each Wednesday night where there was one rule: no songs allowed. It was all improv.

“At the same time I was actually writing songs, some of them inspired by those Wednesday jams, while filming a movie called Hearts of the West. There is so much music around movie sets: actors often play guitar and you have a lot of down time between scenes. It came from that period.”

Bridges was a big star at the time. In 1971 his performance as the luckless Duane in The Last Picture Show, Peter Bogdanovich’s dreamlike ode to small-town America, earned him an Academy Award nomination, and by the time the sessions got going three years later he was famous.

It seems like he was operating in two worlds: the high stakes of Hollywood and the fun and games of amateur hour rock ’n’ roll.

“Yeah, but two of the people in those jam sessions, David Greenwalt and Matthew Bright, went on to become successful filmmakers,” Bridges says. “It was all connected.” He was also exploring a very Californian, 70s, consciousness-expanding lifestyle, from smoking grass with Hollywood legends such as Burgess Meredith and James Mason to exploring altered states in isolation tanks.

“It was wild times,” Bridges confirms. “There was a freshness, an experimental quality to the era, and it is worth bearing in mind that all of the guys in the band graduated from University High School in 1967, the Summer of Love. Can you imagine going to school every morning and hearing a new Beatles song? It had an effect on us. Every generation thinks they got the best music but come on, man!”

Jeff Bridges as Dan Chas in his latest TV series, The Old Man. Picture: Prashant Gupta/FX.

He takes a moment to unleash a quick rendition of some Fabs faves, including Paperback Writer and All You Need is Love.

“A lot of good things came out of that period. I got involved in Werner Erhard’s EST (Erhard Seminars Training, a self-improvement system based on Zen Buddhism, later accused of being a form of mind control).

“EST became controversial, but it led directly to my starting (food poverty charity) the End Hunger Network. We were looking at better ways to live.”

Being the child of actor Lloyd Bridges and actor and writer Dorothy Bridges, their son was also in the unusual position of actually being encouraged to be an actor; a career seen by most parents as a route to financial and psychological disaster. He had other ideas.

“Our parents were gung-ho about their kids being actors. But what kid doesn’t want to rebel against their parents?” he asks. “I was thinking I would go into the music thing because it looked a lot more appealing, and I only accepted my fate after making The Iceman Cometh in 1973. It was a four-hour adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s play and I was working with old masters like Fredric March and Lee Marvin. These guys were still full of angst about getting it right, after decades in the business, and that’s when I realised: it’s OK to be fearful. It was a big shift in my mind.”

Does he still get nervous? “I still get it, man, big time!” he says, releasing a phlegmatic laugh at the thought of all those nerves. “With my daughter Jessie I go out with a band called the Abiders” – Big Lebowski fans will spot the reference there – “and we’ll sit in the wings before the concert and say, ‘What are we doing? This is terrible!’ You just have to laugh. I get a great opportunity like Crazy Heart and it makes me even more nervous because I don’t want to mess it up. At first I turned the role down. I wanted to keep it in the dream realm where it was safe. When you move it into reality, the dream can fail.”

Bridges is not actually the Dude. The former is a celebrated actor of five decades standing. The latter’s biggest achievements are making it into the finals of a bowling tournament and not spilling a white Russian while he is bundled into a car. Bridges has been married to his wife, Sue, since 1977 and they have three daughters. The Dude is a single man and not entirely house-trained.

Bridges and his wife Susan Geston at the Emmy Awards in 2024 in Los Angeles. Picture: Frazer Harrison/Getty Images.

“I’m a big fan of marriage,” Bridges says, by contrast. “There is a Leonard Cohen song called Waiting for the Miracle, about waiting for the perfect thing when it is right in front of you. That sums it up for me.”

Bridges learnt to play Waiting for the Miracle on guitar after his cancer went into remission in 2021, appropriately enough. I ask how getting so close to death changed his attitude to life. “Well, it’s interesting,” he replies. “The very things you are trying to avoid – cancer, death, whatever – are where the gold is. You become privy to stuff that you can only realise in that situation: how much you love and are loved, how willing you are to let go, understanding death, all those spiritual things we dabble with. When it really gets down to it … Whoo! It’s tasty.”

Now that Slow Magic has come out after all these years, you have to wonder if, at this late stage, Bridges might realise his youthful dream of being a touring rocker after all. “You know, the music comes in seasons,” he says, considering the prospect. “It goes away for a while, it comes back, now it is bubbling up again. Maybe I’ll polish up these songs and go out on the road with a band … I don’t know what’s going to happen next, man. I think I’ll just have to relax and let the music have its way with me.” Truly, spoken like the Dude.

THE TIMES

Slow Magic, 1977-1978 by Jeff Bridges is on Light in the Attic.