We didn’t have black people in Alpine. We didn’t know anything about black people or segregation until we moved from there. Up until I was twelve or so, we had separate drinking fountains in public places, and when you went to the doctor’s office it had different entrances—a regular entrance for white people, then on the other side of the building you had COLORED ONLY.
After that, we moved to Malvern. It’s about forty miles from Little Rock, which is about an hour and a half from Memphis. My dad got a job coaching at a little school called Rural Dale, in the town of Lonsdale, which was right outside of Malvern. This was in 1963, so I would’ve been in the third grade when we moved there. I thought it was funny that the school was called “Rural Dale” but the town was called “Lonsdale.” I always wondered how it went down during the school-naming meeting:
What should we call our school?
Fuck, I don’t know.
Hey, our town is called “Lonsdale,” so why don’t we name the school “Rural Dale”!
Yeah!
Rural Dale it is. Meeting adjourned.
Malvern had a population of about ten thousand people, so to us that was like going to Paris. It was one of those typical Southern towns—in fact, it’s actually the town I wanted to base Jayne Mansfield’s Car on. The town we shot in, Cedartown, Georgia, is very much like Malvern was. For a town that size, Malvern had a crazy number of bands, which was great for me, because I loved music, even at that age. I met my writing partner, Tom Epperson, in Malvern. He was our neighbor.
I saw segregation in Malvern and that separation of races was most noticeable to me at the Ritz, our one movie theater in town. I loved movies, and I would go to the Ritz Theatre as often as I could. Sometimes they’d have a food drive for “the needy”—that’s what they called the poor then—and you could see a movie for bringing canned goods and nonperishable food. In those days, on Saturdays, they would almost always show a double feature, so you could go and see a movie, stay and see a second movie, and they didn’t kick you out. You didn’t even have to pay to stay and see the double feature again if you wanted to. We would stay all fucking day Saturday and Saturday night if it was something we wanted to see. We’d sometimes see a double feature three times in one day.
When you went to the Ritz Theatre, the white people came in through the front by the popcorn stand and the black people went in another entrance in the alley that had a staircase going into the balcony. When you watched a movie, there was this whole white audience downstairs and this whole black audience upstairs. And black people were very vocal—especially in horror movies. White people didn’t say much, but black people were like, “Girl, you better not go in that basement, he’s gonna kill you like he killed that other girl!” You’d hear all that extra commentary going on up in the balcony during movies. So our experience with black people, up until they integrated the schools, was pretty much when we would hear them talking up there in the balcony.
The thing is, when you’re a kid, you don’t know all this shit. You don’t understand that Doctor So-and-So is having an affair with the real estate agent’s wife or any of the other goings-on in town. You think all adults are responsible people who take care of shit while the kids just run around. It seemed weird to me that black people and white people were separated, but as a little kid, you didn’t sit around and dissect all this. You just lived your life and did your thing, and I was a kid doing my thing. I liked everybody.
“THE TOM EPPERSON STORY” BY TOM EPPERSON
(AS TOLD TO TOM EPPERSON)
Part II
Growing up in Arkansas in the fifties was not unlike growing up in apartheid-era South Africa. The racism against black people was out in the open. It was proud and it was smug and it was ugly and it was defiant. It dared you to say something different. I knew from an early age that it was wrong, but nobody around me (and I mean not one person) seemed to agree with me, and I learned then a very important lesson: never take anybody’s word for anything. A single person can be right, and a whole society can be wrong. Indeed, society is probably usually wrong.
CHAPTER NINE
“In the Day”
Do you remember in the day
All our crazy summer ways
And those guys that were our friends?
The red and yellow windy falls
When we seemed to have it all
And it was never gonna end
The girls we loved that came and went
All the idle time we spent
Playing records that we’d borrowed
Now it kinda hurts to think
Every time I take a drink
That this would be tomorrow
—“In the Day” (Thornton/Davis)
STARTING IN JUNIOR HIGH SCHOOL, A LOT OF MY FRIENDS WERE BLACK. I was fucked with at school about hanging out with them, but music is where I connected with the black kids. I was in a band that formed from a band called Blue and the Blue Velvets, which was all black except for me. It was a band called Hot ’Lanta, which was about half and half. Actually, all through high school—up until I was about twenty—I played in either all-black or part-black bands.
We lived near downtown, in the white part of town, which was just a main street with a Western Auto, an Otasco, and a Ben Franklin. Unlike the black neighborhoods, the white neighborhoods weren’t named. You just lived out on Highway 9 or you lived “in town”—unless you were a doctor or a dentist or something like that. Then you’d live with your family in our one rich neighborhood, Reedwood. You might look at one of these Reedwood houses today and say, “I could set that goddamn house in my kitchen,” but back then we thought the houses in Reedwood were fucking mansions.
I tried to get every Reedwood chick I could. For some reason rich chicks always liked me. I guess to them I seemed like some kind of rebellious, edgy guy. I was an innocent kid in a lot of ways, but I was also the kid who got into fights.
We were poor people who lived pretty close to the tracks in Malvern, near the black neighborhoods. There was West End, East End, a neighborhood called Cross the Creek, and Perla, which was out by the brick plant. I fell in with this group of black cats who lived in East End, which I’m going to write a movie about one of these days.
East End was the heavy-ass neighborhood. That’s where you went if you wanted pretty much anything. There was even a bootlegger there, a big black woman who shall remain nameless. When it was cold, we’d warm our hands by a fifty-gallon drum with a fire in it. Kind of like the doo-wop guys would do in New York City. The sign that someone was a bootlegger was that they had a pop machine on their front porch. And by bootlegger, I don’t mean moonshine. Moonshiners lived outside of town. Bootleggers were people who sold beer, whiskey, and wine, but they sold it for twice the price it would cost at a liquor store.
We lived in a dry county, so the bootlegger was for people who didn’t want to drive to fucking Hot Springs a half an hour away and get in a drunken head-on collision on the way home.
Hot Springs, where I was actually born, is a resort town—sort of the Miami of Arkansas. It has a colorful history: Jesse James hid out there; Al Capone had a house there. There were a lot of Jewish people, too. They even had a couple of synagogues. We had one Jewish family in Malvern, but we didn’t know they were Jewish, we just thought they had a weird last name.
I was playing in a band with black cats who mostly lived in East End. Now, the difference between a white band and a black band, at least in my town back then, was, if you were a white band, your biggest trouble was if the parents of one of the guys in the band had some other shit they wanted them to do that night, like go to the Old West dinner theater in Little Rock to see a play or something. Even if the gig was scheduled and you were about to get in the car to drive to Batesville or Fort Smith or Memphis or wherever, then you didn’t have a guitar player that night. The biggest problem with a black band was, when you were supposed to get together and rehearse, usually at one of the guys’ houses or out at the barbers
hop—there was this old black man in East End who owned a barbershop and would let us rehearse in there sometimes—you could never find any of them. Like, even if the last time you saw them you said, “All right, Wednesday night at eight,” and they said, “All right, man, see you then.” Without fail, I would wind up in my ’67 Buick Wildcat with bucket seats and a factory eight-track tape player, driving all over the fucking town trying to round these guys up. I’d try the barbershop, and they wouldn’t be there. Then I’d go to one guy’s house and his wife would say, “I think he’s over in West End.” Then I’d get back in the car and drive over to West End, check around, and they would say, “I think him and a couple of guys were going over to Hot Springs.” It wasn’t beyond me to drive to Hot Springs to look for them.
You have to understand, all I wanted to do was play music or listen to it, one or the other. I couldn’t wait. That was the highlight of my day, every day. I even went to pick up one of the guys one night and he was in a fight with his wife, and she shot at him with a .22 pistol and hit the couch about a foot from where I was sitting. He and I ran out the front door and hid down a bank across the railroad tracks. I said, “Do you think we can make it to the car?” which was between us and the house. And he said, “We better not. She’ll cool down in a little bit. Besides that, my bass is in the house.”
From the ditch we watched her go back inside the house. We waited around and waited around until she finally came out and started cussing at him. He kind of came up from behind the tracks and started yelling back. They cussed back and forth a little bit until, finally, he went up there. They talked calmly on the porch and then went inside. He came out after a little bit with his bass, like nothing happened. We got in the car and left.
Now, in itself that may not be that interesting a story, but this kind of thing happened all the time. Not the getting shot at part, necessarily, but it was never “we’re going to rehearse at eight” and everybody would be there.
Nevertheless, they were the most interesting, fun, talented sons-of-bitches I ever met, but they were the kind of guys who were scared to leave home. There are people in little towns in this country who are so much more talented than any of the people we hear playing in bands today, but they grew up the old-fashioned way. They’re terrified to leave their little town. You get a job over at the ball bearing plant and you know you better keep it.
CHAPTER TEN
“Saturday Afternoon a Half a Century On”
… Paula’s record shop, with rows of records waitin’
For dreamers to flip through them one by one
Hey, there’s one we just saw, on Bandstand they were ratin’
Just look at all those labels, like Roulette and Sun.
Saturday afternoon a half a century on
Bewildered ghosts line all that’s left of Main Street
The magic left with the digital dawn
The remnants pass as whispers in retreat.
Yeah, I’m gonna have the nerve to say
That those were the days
And I’ll say it right in your face
Yeah, I’m gonna have the nerve to tell
A story that’s hard to sell
To the Bank of Wireless Wizards and their fools
That bought this place
—“Saturday Afternoon a Half a Century On”
(Thornton/Andrew)
THE TIME I REMEMBER THE MOST IN MALVERN WAS MY LIFE IN MUSIC, because that’s all I wanted to do. I grew up hearing my uncle sing songs by Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Jimmie Rodgers. That kind of country music was really my first music; we didn’t know anything about the blues.
And then Elvis came along.
When we finally got electricity at my grandmother’s house, we got a radio, and that’s how I heard Elvis Presley. Elvis really did something to me. I heard his songs on the radio, and I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. These days it’s real easy to think that Elvis Presley was just this fluffy kind of deal, but when he came along, he changed things. Elvis didn’t write songs, so he wasn’t a songwriter. He was just this big star and he was sexy. A lot of people don’t really know who Elvis’s real influence was, but I do because I’m close to a lot of people who were close to him because I grew up near Memphis. They tell me that who he really wanted to be like was Dean Martin. People always say that Elvis’s big influence were the black gospel singers, and he did love that stuff. But if you listen to Elvis sing, and then you listen to Dean Martin sing, you’ll notice that. Listen to “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.” You’ll get it.
My uncle gave me a little Roy Rogers guitar that had a picture of Roy Rogers and a little rope on it. I would bang around on that. One Christmas somebody gave me one of those little washtub things made out of tin that looked like one of those pedestals in the circus, that the elephant puts his foot up on. In fact, it did have some kind of circus shit on it; it was pink and blue with a picture of elephants on it. It was one of those things you could stand on and pretend you’re in the circus. The first song I ever wrote was called “Cat Shit on a Rat Box.” That was the only line, and I even remember the melody, it kind of sounds like a Chuck Berry song. I would stand on that elephant stand and bang that song out on my little Roy Rogers guitar, over and over and over.
In 1964 the shit hit the fan in music. My brother Jimmy and I were instantly rock-and-roll junkies, and when we saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, that’s what changed my life; you try to tell a kid nowadays what it was like to see, with your own eyes, history being made—most of them don’t get it. My son Willie gets it, which is great. I can tell him about it and he’ll listen to it. By the time he and his brother, Harry, were seven and eight, I turned them on to Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, and the Bonzo Dog Band and all these people. I think that’s why they “get it.”
Anyway, I remember when Jimmy and I first saw the Beatles on our old black-and-white Zenith TV. We were literally lying on our stomachs on the hardwood floor, looking like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, watching the fucking Beatles when they first came to America. I’ll never forget that shit as long as I live. They did “She Loves You,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”—they were such heroes. When I saw them that day, I knew that was what I wanted to do. When the Beatles came along, their sound actually changed the world. I mean, even though they were playing their pop songs at that time, it changed the world. Their sound was completely different—they were influenced by skiffle music they had in England, along with listening to Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, which is ironic because here, nobody gave a shit about Little Richard or whoever until the Beatles. The British Invasion was good for this reason. English bands who grew up listening to American music on the radio would listen to all this wild shit and they would take a Chuck Berry song, or a Little Richard or Carl Perkins song, or whoever it was, and they’d play it in a way that was palatable and acceptable to the people in America on the radio. But the way they played, it didn’t sound like Chuck Berry. It sounded like them doing that. So the way that sounded was just this perfect mixture of things that created what we know as sort of pop-rock music. It was an amazing deal.
So then, of course, every night Ed Sullivan was on, my brother and I were in front of the TV. We saw the Animals, the Kinks, the Stones, Freddy and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, all of them, and that became my obsession. We started our first band with no instruments. We used cardboard boxes for drums and we sang with a pretend microphone, a mop or whatever it was. We took rubber bands and stretched them over cigar boxes. The Dave Clark Five was one of our personal favorites, so the first songs we probably ever played as a band were on cardboard boxes doing “Glad All Over” and “Catch Us If You Can.”
I got my first drum kit when I was nine. It was from a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog. It was this little kid set with cardboard heads that I broke real quick. Later, when I finally got a real set, it had Mylar heads. I thought Mylar sounded pretty
fancy, like something Dave Clark played on. Of course I broke those in half pretty soon too.
When I was thirteen or fourteen, there was a kid named Don who had a red sparkle Ludwig drum set—“kit” didn’t come along till later, they called it a drum “set” when I was growing up. Don and I played against each other in Little League—we were both pitchers—and I used to go hang out by his house to watch him play left-handed drums with his band, and I would be eyeing that red sparkle Ludwig drum set.
I begged my parents, and I had to work it off, but they paid $150 for this used Ludwig red sparkle drum set without a high hat—just one cymbal and four drums. I’ve got a picture of that somewhere.
MY FIRST REAL BAND WAS CALLED THE MCCOVEYS BECAUSE IT SOUNDED like the McCoys. The McCoys were a band from Union City, Indiana. They did “Hang on Sloopy,” which hit number one on the Billboard charts in 1965. Their guitar player was Rick Derringer, who later on became a big guy with Johnny Winter. In those days we had one amplifier and you plugged two guitars into it, each in a different channel. We had no bass player. I played drums. We played instrumentals because we didn’t have any microphones. We loved the Ventures so we would do “Walk, Don’t Run,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells. We did an instrumental version of “Ballad of the Green Beret” by Sgt. Barry Sadler. The whole point of the song is the guy doesn’t sing, he talks. And it’s a story about this guy talking about “fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die” … See what I mean? So it’s kind of pointless to do the song without the words. It’s like “let’s do an instrumental version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”
The big band in my town was called the Yardleys. The British Invasion was in full swing at the time, and they named themselves the Yardleys because it sounded British, like Yardley of London that made all the perfume and scented soap. The Yardleys were Steve Walker, Larry Byrd, Bo Jones, Bucky Griggs, and Butch Allen. They had a Farfisa organ, bass, guitar, drums, and Bo Jones played the trumpet. They played original songs and actually made a couple of 45s that were played regionally, but they may as well have been the fucking Rolling Stones or the Beatles as far as I was concerned.
The Billy Bob Tapes Page 4