The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  The first song I played for J.D. was “Yesterday’s Gone” by Chad and Jeremy. I said, “Let’s record this and see what happens” and we did. I said, “I like this. All the guys I play with in my solo band, they all live everywhere, all around the country. Do you know anybody locally?” He knew this guy Mike Butler, who’s a terrific guitar player. He came over and we formed the Boxmasters. Brad Davis, a great bluegrass player who played in my solo band, he plays with us now. Brad and I have been playing together for thirteen or fourteen years. The Boxmasters are me, J.D., and Brad. We make the records, the three of us. When we tour, there’s six of us in the band.

  The Boxmasters started out as a thing that was a combination of hillbilly music and the British Invasion. I’m not talking about country music like they have now, but actual hillbilly music and country music of the fifties and sixties. Webb Pierce, Del Reeves, guys like that who we really loved. J. D. Andrew and I put this band together to mix that music with the music of the Animals, the Beatles, and the Kinks, with the Rolling Stones thrown in for good measure. The sound has kind of grown to where we want it to be, which is more just like a sixties rock-and-roll band, without so much hillbilly in it. We first signed with Vanguard, which is an old-school label, and because it was an old-school label, they let us use their original label on our records. For our first two albums, we put a bonus CD in there of covers that all the Boxmasters fans love to hear us do live. We ended up doing three albums for Vanguard and we had a great time there. Except for the bonus covers, we did all original music. I’ve probably written close to a thousand songs. The Boxmasters now have about eight or nine records in the can. Our next one comes out this year (2012).

  Geoff Emerick, who was an engineer for the Beatles, said one of the things he loves about our band is that we have a backbeat you can hear. That was a great compliment. We have a great fan base. There’s not many of them, but our fans really love us, and we sell enough to keep afloat. If we had come along in 1967, we would have done pretty well I think. Some people are really going to take exception to me saying that, but I don’t give a shit because I believe that 100 percent. If we had come along in the mid- to late sixties, we would have been a big band. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. We write a lot of good songs, and frankly, we’re a pretty damn good band.

  A couple of years ago, for old times’ sake, I called Larry Byrd, one of the Yardleys, and I flew him out to play organ on the Boxmasters’ record Holy Toledo with J.D., Danny Baker, and myself. Generally, the guys in the Yardleys wouldn’t talk to me when I was growing up, but they were my heroes, and Larry was always kind of nice to me.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Providence”

  It seems like happiness ignores all navigation

  Sometimes freedom comes when you have lost your way

  I changed the course of my imagination

  And took a turn that leads to come what may

  I don’t know where I’m gonna go

  Right now that’s about the only thing I know

  —“Providence” (Thornton/Andrew)

  I DIDN’T GROW UP WANTING TO BE AN ACTOR OR DIRECTOR BECAUSE WE didn’t have that many movies where I grew up. We had one movie theater where I would go and see Don Knotts in The Reluctant Astronaut, but that’s all I knew about.

  I did my first play when I was in the third grade. Our class did “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” If you remember, it was a kids’ story about three billy goats that were trying to cross a bridge where a troll lived, but the troll wouldn’t let them cross because it was his bridge. I played the middle billy goat in that. It wasn’t anything big—it was just a little classroom play—and after it was over, I never thought about it anymore.

  When I was in the fourth grade, I was a shepherd in the school Christmas play, and that was the first play I did in front of an audience. It was my first big role. I wore a burlap bag they had made into my costume, and I had some kind of a stick for a staff. The first word I ever uttered onstage in front of an audience in a play was “Hark.” That was my one line. After I delivered my one line, another shepherd was supposed to say something, and then the guy playing Jesus got all the rest of the lines. On my cue, I stepped out with my staff and my burlap clothing and I said, “Harp.” I had this one-word line, and I said it wrong. Instead of “Hark,” I said, “Harp.”

  I was really shy in large groups of people. I was convinced that everyone else’s family had more money and that my peers had more acclaim than I did. I wasn’t the captain of the football team or the president of the student council, I wasn’t any of that shit. I was just this bucktoothed hillbilly kid that lived in town and was never picked out for anything. Later, I started playing baseball, and I was successful at that so I became more popular among some people, but most of my friends were rejects like me. We had guys in my high school who were really outgoing. Guys who would get up in front of class and sing a Perry Como song. I would always sit in the very back of the classroom.

  My parents were both college graduates—my dad was a teacher, my mom was an English major—and I was a dumb ass. I had a learning disability that I didn’t even know about at the time. I’m severely dyslexic and can barely read. I also had what they now call ADD, I guess, because I don’t retain what I can read. But I just wasn’t generally interested in school, except for history. I thought history was a subject that was worthwhile. I never understood quite why math and algebra and all that shit was important, unless you wanted to be an algebra teacher.

  One time I said to my Algebra II teacher, “I don’t understand a subject where they give you the answer and you got to figure out how you get the question. That doesn’t make any sense to me. I know how you add one and two, I understand that. But how do you add an x to a y? It’s like saying, how do you add a cow to a tomato?” She told me, “What if you want to be a building engineer one day?” I said, “Ma’am, I promise you, I swear to you on my life that I’m not going to want to be a building engineer.” As far as I was concerned, I was going to be in a rock-and-roll band or pitch for the St. Louis Cardinals. Those were the only things I had any interest in. But she never did like me, she was always mean to me. I think the real reason she didn’t like me was because one time I was wearing some double-knit pants, as we did in those days, and there was this girl in our class who was amazing. She was like Elke Sommer. I was at my desk and she was at the board, working out a problem. She had this little skirt on, and it kind of went up when she would reach up there. I got a hard-on in my double-knit pants, and then I was called to the board and it wouldn’t go down. It was kind of like something out of Porky’s. So I went to the board and I just stood out there, like a whole tent in my double-knit pants, because they had a lot of room in them. I didn’t ask for this thing to do that. It’s later, when you get older, then you start asking it to do that. But back then, at that time, I did not ask to get up in front of the algebra class with a tent in my double-knit pants.

  After that incident, that algebra teacher just really wouldn’t tolerate me, but I passed that class somehow, with Ds. Maybe she just wanted to get me out of the school, I don’t know.

  Needless to say, I made shitty grades in everything. When I saw that you could take drama class, I thought, This will be great. There will be chicks in there, and maybe I can even get a good grade because how hard can it be to get up and be the scarecrow in some fucking play?

  The woman who taught my drama class, and this is a name I’m happy to mention, was a woman named Maudie Treadway. Mrs. Treadway wanted people to be who they were and not just sit there with their thumbs up their asses. When I started this class, I didn’t know anything about drama, so I would sit there and write short stories and things like that. The class would be doing a scene on the stage, and I would sit there in the back of the classroom alone and write on my own.

  One day I was writing a play about a bored guy and his wife in a Kmart. We didn’t have a Kmart in our town, and going twenty miles away to Kmart in Hot Sprin
gs was a big deal. I wrote this story about Kmart with all this funny dark shit, and Mrs. Treadway came back and got on my ass about not paying any attention to what was going on onstage.

  “If you don’t want to be in this class, you don’t have to be,” she said in her booming voice. (Mrs. Treadway was a big woman, with a big voice.) “What are you doing back here anyway? Doodling?”

  “No, I was writing this story,” I said.

  “Oh, really? Let me have it.”

  She took my notebook away from me, and I thought it was going to be one of those “if it’s so important why don’t you share it with the rest of the class” kind of things, but it wasn’t. She kept it, and the next day she came up to me and said, “I read your story and it was brilliant, I love it. How would you like to do that onstage?” This high school drama class, in Arkansas in 1972, wasn’t exactly the center of the theater world. The curriculum was fairly standard. We had the different textbooks where we’d learn about who all the playwrights were, and at the end of the year the class would put on the senior play, which was always some kind of goofy shit, and then that was it.

  All of a sudden, Mrs. Treadway was doing something that was unheard of. She was asking a student to do his own original story that he had written in the back of the class and play the character. High school drama teachers didn’t do that in Arkansas in 1972, but Mrs. Treadway did, for me. Everything I’ve accomplished since, I can trace back to this woman, Maudie Treadway.

  Mrs. Treadway cast a girl from the class, and this girl and I did the story I wrote, which was about a bored husband and wife going through Kmart. I figured Mrs. Treadway must have liked how it turned out, because after that she started letting me direct my own scenes in class.

  One day she kept me after class and said, “I’ve been teaching high school drama for a living for a long time. You don’t know what it’s like to be a drama teacher in a small town in Arkansas where nobody really cares, but let me tell you right now …”—and I was sixteen years old when she said this, and this is an example of how acting teachers can be helpful—she said, “Let me tell you something right now. You can do this. I’ve never had a student in one of my classes I actually thought was a real actor. You are. And you’re a writer. You ought to try to do this one of these days.”

  Later, I starred in my senior play. I originally took drama class because there were girls in there and I thought it would be an easy A, but it turns out I liked it and I was good at it.

  Mrs. Treadway died not too long after I graduated from high school. I was a pallbearer at her funeral.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  My Unremarkable College Career

  Imagination climbing up the walls

  Remembering a little of my fall

  Reality feels liquid in my hands

  Thoughts take off in flight but never land

  Memories for me just come and go

  It seems that I recall a brilliant show

  Striking swirling colors that I used to know

  Now are just a dull nerve-wracking glow

  —“Psychedelic” (Thornton/Andrew)

  I WENT TO HENDERSON STATE COLLEGE. IT WASN’T AN EXPENSIVE COLLEGE, but it was a good college. It was the same place my mom and dad went to. My mom ended up being an English major there when it was called Henderson State Teachers College. In 1967 it became Henderson State College, then in 1975 they changed the name to Henderson State University. A lot of people from my town went there. My niece, my brother Jimmy’s daughter, went there, and she told me they have a plaque at the college that has my name on it, about fulfilling your dreams and how you can be whatever you want to be. That’s kind of ironic considering I never graduated because I was too drunk most of the time. But it’s a cool, creative school. If you went to Henderson, it meant that you were the real deal. Not in academic terms, necessarily, but it meant that you were a hippie or you were a football player or you had some edge to you.

  I mostly hung out with the music majors. I didn’t really want to hang out with the jocks, even though I had played baseball in high school. I was never the jock type, like the kind of guy you see in a sports bar. I was the long-haired hippie guy who happened to play ball pretty well. Those music guys were the perfect people for me to hang out with because we all had the same ideas. Some of them were a little squirrelly, but a lot of them had bands that I played with off and on. Some of the first sound jobs I worked when I was a roadie were at the gymnasium at the college. And they didn’t have shit bands play there, either. They had bands like the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. I remember Blood, Sweat, and Tears playing there, too.

  In the nineties and up until a few years ago, I always had an easier time hanging out with musicians, until I got my first major record deal. Since then, I’ve found it easier to hang out with actors. Much easier. It’s them being pricks because they don’t want me to make records. Mick Jagger is one of the more iconic guys that I used to hang out with a bit—he’s a fucking Rolling Stone and he doesn’t care about actors being musicians. If I sold ten million records, he’d be all for it. There are a few good ones who are all for me. Levon Helm is all for me. Warren Haynes is all for me. Rickey Medlocke, the guys from Skynyrd, ZZ Top, Billy Gibbons, and Dusty and Frank, they’re all old friends and real terrific to me. But I’ll never get a Grammy, I’ll promise you that. I’ll guarantee you that. Not that I want one. I’d probably melt it down and fix my fucking carburetor with it.

  Anyway, Henderson State was a great college, but if we’re being real honest, I pissed my opportunity away. Besides playing music from time to time, I didn’t do much of anything there but fuck, drink, and shoot pool over at the Minute Man. I think I only had two classes that I actually earned grades in—Psychology and Western Civilization. The rest of them were incompletes. That was in a year and a half—three semesters if you’re keeping score.

  When I was at Henderson, I messed around with this chick and got into some trouble with her boyfriend, who was on the football team. He used to chase me around the campus all the time, so I spent most of my college days outrunning that son-of-a-bitch. I’d see him on campus and I’d haul ass. He finally caught me in the room where the mailboxes were. I thought, This is it, he’s going to beat my head into one of these mailboxes.

  “Hey, man,” he said, “you can stop running from me. I broke up with that girl. Sorry I’ve been chasing you all this time, but I was real pissed off at you then. Now I see how she is.”

  One day a friend of mine said, “Let’s go to the Minute Man and shoot pool and eat those forty-five-cent sandwiches from the menu because we can’t do anything else.” I had no money. The first semester I was there, I was living with my aunt and uncle who used to live in that town. I slept in this extra room of theirs. So my buddy and I went to the Minute Man, and he said, “You’re just a dumb ass like me. Let’s pledge a fraternity.”

  “A fraternity?” I said. “Are you high? Look at us. Aren’t those like Joe College guys?” He goes, “Fuck no, there’s all kinds of people. There’s this one fraternity here, they got a house on this street over here. They’re the ones always having parties and fun. Let’s go to one of their parties!”

  So we went to a party, and the guys in the fraternity turned out to be pretty cool. It was rush week, and they talked me into being a pledge. I said to my friend, “What does that mean? What do I have to do?” And he said, “You stay drunk all the time and you get a lot of chicks.” I said, “Well, shit, sign me up.”

  We actually considered two or three of the fraternities. One of them was a bunch of jocks, which, as I said, wasn’t our scene. Another one was a bunch of Dilberts. That wasn’t our scene either. But that first fraternity was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Just right. So I pledged to this fraternity, and felt really accepted for a change. They all liked me, and there wasn’t one person in that fraternity who was “typecast.” It really was like the movie Animal House because you had the Belushi guys, the James Widdoes guys, all kinds. Some fraternities
would make you light a match, put it in your teeth, and say the Greek alphabet however many times the fraternity brother told you to say it before the match burned your lips. Our guys, they would always take things a step further than anybody else. These were the baddest sons-of-bitches on campus. I don’t mean they were the meanest, I mean they were the coolest fucking fraternity. It was kind of an honor to be around those guys. Our fraternity brother would step up to the pledge, strike the match, put it between his own teeth, and tell you how many times to say the alphabet. If he burned his lip, he would beat the dog shit out of you. My big brother in the fraternity was a cool dude that I worshipped, who put me through the mill. He would take me by the ankles, turn me upside down, and hit my head on the porch. But I loved him and wanted to be just like him. Because of him, I got to where I could say the Greek alphabet three times before he burned his lip. I can still recite the Greek alphabet to this day.

  Every year the fraternity held a dance called the Swamp Stomp. They’d gather up cane poles and put up this big fence around the backyard of the fraternity house. They’d hire a band—I actually played a time or two—wet the yard down to get it all muddy, and do a dance called the Gator where you’d get down in the mud, drunk, and flop around like you’re an alligator up on the bank. They’d raise their mugs and sing drunk songs like fraternity guys would do. “Last night I stayed at home and masturbated. It felt so nice, I did it twice. It felt so neat, I used my feet.” Shit like that. The song leader was a guy who had a big walrus mustache. He was kind of like Chuck Negron from Three Dog Night.

  Anyway, there was this girl that went to school there. She was way too good for me, but I wanted her more than anything in the world. I didn’t think she would ever talk to a dirtbag like me, but a friend of mine knew her and got her to say yes when I asked her to the Wine Festival, which happened every winter. This was literally like if I had asked Raquel Welch out at the time and she said yes. It was a big deal.