The Dude was having a senior moment. He couldn’t remember which Disney cartoon character said it — Goofy, he thinks — but it pretty much sums up how he’s rolling these days.
“One guy says, ‘You know you’ve got some stuff you want to do, you better hurry up and do it because the clocks ticking.’
And the other guy says, ‘Will you please just relax. Do you want the rest of your life to be one giant homework assignment where you’re just achieving, and doing, doing?’”
“That’s kind of where I am right now, man,” the Dude says. “I’ve got both those streams going through my head. I’m like an outfielder with 10 fly balls coming at me. That doesn’t stop so it’s just how you relax in the midst of it. The way you roll.”
And Jeff Bridges — the “Dude” to just about every American male of drinking age who’s seen the movie “The Big Lebowski” probably 20 times — has been rolling pretty good these days.
He looks like a guy without a care in the world on a Monday afternoon, strumming his guitar while sitting outside the music studio he built on his 19-acre compound in the hills above Santa Barbara.
Still the laid-back Dude — only now he’s living on some of the richest real estate in the world.
But that’s a big part of Bridges’ charm, isn’t it? He doesn’t come off as rich or reclusive. He comes off as one of the boys — your buddy from high school who always said the craziest things and meant every word.
How many actors would sit down with a reporter and quote Goofy?
Bridges moved up here after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake. Four years later “The Big Lebowski” opened to so-so business but soon caught fire and became a cult classic — elevating Bridges from respected actor to the American icon of slacker hip.
He had us the minute he walked into that supermarket in his bathrobe and wrote a check for 69 cents for a quart of milk.
In early November, Bridges is swinging through L.A. for a few concerts with his country music band — Jeff Bridges and the Abiders — named after the signature line in the movie — “the Dude abides.”
He formed the band after filming the 2009 movie “Crazy Heart,” which earned him an Academy Award for best actor playing an over-the-hill, hard-drinking, cowboy singer named Bad Blake.
“I got kind of itchy for the music thing after that and figured if I was ever going to get a band together, now’s the time,” he says. The shows will feature new songs from the band’s soon to be released album “Live.”
There are a couple of things you can take to the bank at his concerts. Twenty guys will show up wearing ratty, old bathrobes like the Dude’s, and the bartenders at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills and Saban Theatre in Beverly Hills will make more White Russians — the Dude’s favorite drink — in one night than they’ve made in their entire careers.
Yep, the Dude still abides as he closes in on his 65th birthday Dec. 4. Still running his fingers through that lion’s mane he calls hair, and looking like a new Cadillac El Dorado with only a few thousand miles on it.
“Do you ever get up in the morning and pinch yourself?” I ask him, half joking.
“Yeah, I know, man, crazy, isn’t it?” he says. “Good genes or something. Whatever.”
Perfect answer from the Dude. Whatever.
When he’s not acting and singing, he’s publishing coffee table books of his black and white photographs taken on the set of his movies, with all proceeds going to charity. The rest of the time he’s working on his “No Kid Hungry” program.
“That’s the most important stuff I’m doing, really,” Bridges says. “I’ve been working on hunger in this country for 30 years, trying to make sure all the kids going to school have the proper nutrition to learn. Seems so obvious, but in too many parts of this country it isn’t.”
When he takes the stage with the Abiders on Nov. 1 and 2, the audience will start chanting for the Dude, like they always do.
Bridges says he doesn’t notice, but he must. For all the great roles he’s had, it will be as the Dude that people will remember him, not Bad Blake.
But when he slides that guitar strap over his shoulder, the Dude takes the night off and Bad Blake goes to work.
He’s not acting, he’s singing. He’s not down at the bowling alley with his buddies, Walter and Donny, rolling a few frames — he’s in a dark theater picking guitar with some great musicians behind him — trying to relax while catching those fly balls coming at him.
“I love playing these gigs,” Bridges says. “It’s like improv up there. Just me, the band, and the audience partying together.”
Finding the sweet spot in that giant homework assignment Goofy was talking about.
For more information on both concerts, call 888- 645-5006 or go online to www.canyonclub.net.
Dennis McCarthy’s column appears on Friday. He can be reached at dmccarthynews@gmail.com.
