The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  I think it didn’t do better at the box office because fourteen-year-olds go to movies and fourteen-year-olds don’t give a shit about history anymore. I think if the whole movie had been about a battle, it might have been different. But it wasn’t. The Alamo was about waiting. It was thirteen days there in that fort, and people don’t want to watch the waiting-for-thirteen-days. Well, that’s not the whole movie, but today’s audiences just want to see somebody get stuck with a bayonet and a bunch of shooting. I think if that movie had come out in the seventies, it would have done very well.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  “There’s Always Somebody Watchin’”

  I can’t pee in my bathroom

  I can’t pee in my yard

  Can’t get in my house

  Can’t get past the guard

  Can’t have an affair

  Can’t color my hair

  ’Cause there’s always somebody watchin’

  —“There’s Always Somebody Watchin’”

  (Thornton/Andrew)

  NOWADAYS YOU CAN BE FAMOUS BECAUSE YOU ATE THE MOST WORMS, or get a record deal because you lost two hundred pounds on television. So what is fame anymore? When we were growing up, we would be ashamed if the way we got famous was by winning a talent contest. Nobody ever became the biggest fucking rock star on earth from being on Ted Mack’s The Original Amateur Hour. Those were people who had a poodle and a kazoo or something. I didn’t make it by skateboarding down a banister and landing in a pile of watermelons on YouTube in a minute-and-a-half video. It took well over half my life to get to where I am today.

  The fact of the matter is, the audience is now the star.

  Reality television shows and TMZ are on major networks now, and the point of these shows is so America can look at stars being ridiculed and made fun of and have cynical things said about them. But it didn’t just come along with the computer, it was already happening. What I’m talking about is cynicism. I’m cynical about cynicism. Cynicism has become popular, funny, and entertaining, so in order to combat it, I then have to become cynical about the perpetrators.

  This goes back to my thoughts on the loss of heroes. Our children are never going to enter a record store and flip through every record and go, “Oh wow, Dickey Betts, Gregg Allman, Billie Holiday!” or whoever it is, read the liner notes, and get so excited to save up their three dollars and eighty-five cents—yes, ladies and gentlemen, it was three dollars and eighty-five cents for a fucking record album—so they can take it home and play it. You wanted to like it. You wanted to like it so fucking bad.

  Today I feel like audiences go to movies and buy records to be, like, “Okay, let’s see what this motherfucker’s done this time.” It’s like, “Fuck these motherfuckers, I’m going to buy this record and rip it to shreds.” As a result, today every cartoon you see on TV, every TV show practically, is mean-spirited and designed to cut somebody to pieces. And it’s funny to people.

  When people go to a movie today, some random person with a blog will point something out about it, and then the next thing you know that becomes the thing every article is about. “Did you notice how the continuity was horrible in that movie?” When I was growing up, we didn’t care. We went and saw a movie, and if we liked it we liked it, and if we didn’t like it we didn’t like it. Now we live in a society that drives artists inward, and so the real artists do not have the inclination to keep doing their art. They’re afraid of getting their hearts broken. That’s what happened to me anyway.

  The point is, when the audience is so critical of the people who are still making the movies or making the records or writing the books or painting the pictures, they’re hurting entertainment, they’re hurting art, and they’re hurting themselves, mainly because they’re never going to feel that magical thing we felt when we were growing up.

  I challenged this girl one time who was arguing with me saying I was some kind of dinosaur. I said, “Here’s an experiment for you. Take a sheet of paper and, starting with about 1980, write down all the songwriters, singers, and bands who, one hundred years from now, will be in the books as being incredible legendary performers or songwriters. Write them down.” She started throwing out names like Michael Jackson and Bruce Springsteen, and I said, “No, you can’t count them because they started out in the late sixties. I’ll give you REM and U2, because I’m trying to give you something. I’ll just say, if you take a sheet of paper and, starting at about 1975 and going back to the turn of the century, write down names, you don’t have enough paper in your house to write them all down.” There’s something to that.

  I ain’t no dinosaur and I ain’t acting like my daddy. My daddy didn’t like the Beatles because my daddy came from a long line of Irish sawmill workers who were, you know, rednecks and shit, but they were all fairly well educated and came from a time when there wasn’t any child abuse—that didn’t exist as we know it. You messed something up, you got your ass beat with a razor strap, period. I had mine beat many times. If I made too much noise when he was on the graveyard shift when he worked in a factory, he’d fly through the room in the middle of the day and just beat the living dog shit out of me. That’s where I come from, and he came from something even worse than that, and his daddy came from something even worse than that.

  When the Beatles came along, do you think my dad was going to like the Beatles? He didn’t care if they were good or bad, he wouldn’t have known it. My dad didn’t even like music. My dad was the only person I ever knew who actually didn’t like music. It’s not that he didn’t like rock and roll—he didn’t like music. Actually, no, he liked two songs: “Easter Parade” and “Puff, the Magic Dragon.” Those are the only two songs my dad liked. I’ll never know why. One’s from a musical, and the other one was supposedly about smoking reefer sung by a folk trio. My dad didn’t give a fuck about Peter, Paul, and Mary. If my dad ever ran into them, he’d beat their ass right in the street.

  My dad didn’t like the Beatles because they were threatening to him, because they were young, nice-looking boys who were playing this strange outer-space music he didn’t know anything about, and it didn’t have anything to do with working or football or anything like that. He didn’t like them, but not because he thought, Oh, look at those simple lyrics, “If I fell in love with you would you promise to be true.” He just didn’t like them and went about his business liking other stuff.

  Armchair critics have always been there, tearing apart lyrics like they know something though they’ve never written a song, and tearing apart a movie though they’ve never made a movie. Generally these guys are envious or jealous of the motherfucker who made it. But why did we not know about these guys before about ten years ago? Because of that fucking thing—that fucking computer right there. It’s like, “We’re gonna let everybody in the world have one of these machines here, and we’re gonna let every one of you call yourself whatever you want to call yourself. You are an Internet critic, you are a blogger, you have a title, you’re somebody.”

  So, I’m just going to say I’m a research scientist. I’m going to tell everyone I’m a theoretical physicist. If some drooling idiot sitting in his basement writing reviews can call himself a legitimate movie critic, I’m going to start calling myself a theoretical physicist, and I’m going to say, “It’s my theory if I go outside to my swimming pool right now, stare at it long enough, and throw a softball in it, the United States Senate will appear on my lawn.” That makes me a theoretical physicist. We’ve let anyone call themselves whatever they want to call themselves, and the scary thing is that people listen to them and they’re missing all the goddamn magic in life because of it.

  Having said all that, I want to point out a cat like Harry Knowles. I know him, he’s a good dude. He was a kid in Texas who started his little Ain’t It Cool News, and he used to sneak into screenings, then go put the word out on great movies before they came out. He’s a critic on the Internet, but Harry is a great guy who loves movies and wanted to spread the word a
bout movies that maybe not everybody would see. Unwittingly, he was like Sam Peckinpah, the first guy to show blood squirting out of people in slow motion. That spawned a lot of bad blood-squirting movies, but Peckinpah did great ones. The problem is, every motherfucker with drool running out of his mouth is a critic. They’re not all Harry Knowleses, but they think they are. That’s how that shit happened.

  I’ve always wished that critics were people who just talked about what they liked so they could present it to the people; it’s like, “Hey, you may not have heard this, and I think you should check it out,” as opposed to writing about stuff they don’t like so they can sound clever and cynical. I don’t even know why you would waste your time. If you don’t like it, don’t worry about it. It’s just like a “punish honk” in traffic. People want to punish now. We grew up just wanting to love everything, and if you didn’t, you simply didn’t pay much attention to it. To these so-called critics on the Internet, it’s not your sole responsibility in life to warn the public about this dreadful thing that’s going to make your ears bleed or your eyes burst. Is that what you really think? That you have a responsibility to the public to protect them from this horror? It just seems weird to me, and it’s a slap in the face to real critics.

  I’m not saying that good critics don’t exist anymore. There are some terrific critics out there, and there are even some good ones that do it on the Internet. People who know what they’re talking about, so it’s kind of a slap in their faces because they’ve been doing this for a long time. They were there back in the day, and their profession is being watered down because of jealous hacks.

  Bob Geldolf came on some TV show, I think it was Craig Ferguson, who I happen to really love—he kind of takes the piss out of people and society in general—and right in the middle of J.D. and I writing this rock opera about this very subject, Bob said, “Does nobody understand that this is an emergency? Why is nobody saying we’re turning into a bunch of morons?” He actually said it. And Craig Ferguson said, “Yeah,” and the audience cheered. If you bring people together and say this stuff, they cheer you too, and yet they keep doing the very thing they seemed to agree in the moment they’re not supposed to be doing. Nobody with any power is saying this. I don’t have any power, but maybe someone who does will put an end to this shit someday.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I Don’t Hate Canada

  Honey, don’t buy what you saw on TV

  I know it’s got a lifetime guarantee

  But when it falls to pieces you’re gonna see

  Why handling and shipping it ain’t free

  Folks don’t watch the news and expect to find

  Anything important or anything of use

  Walter Cronkite died on July 17th Oh-Nine

  His memory is buried under gossip and abuse

  Welcome to Justice

  Welcome to fair trade

  Welcome to the memory of when we had it made

  —“Welcome” (Thornton/Andrew)

  FORGIVE ME WHILE I CLEAR THE AIR HERE. MAYBE YOU CARE ABOUT this story, maybe you don’t, but I had this incident happen in Canada when we were touring, opening for Willie Nelson, and it’s gotten completely out of control because of the Internet. Basically, a guy on the radio up there didn’t do a very simple thing that we asked him to please do for us, before the interview, on air. So when he’d ask me a question, I wouldn’t play his game.

  One way or the other, all of a sudden we got like millions of hits or whatever on the fucking Internet because supposedly I went crazy.

  To me it wasn’t a big deal, but now supposedly I’m some Canada hater. I’ve always been a Canadian supporter and done movies in that country. A lot of my friends are from Canada. Montreal is like my favorite city in the world, I love that city. But the next thing you know, I’m some asshole who doesn’t like Canadians when the truth is, I took exception to a Canadian. I wouldn’t give a shit if he’s from Topeka, Kansas. I was just shocked that was actually news. I love Canada.

  See, if it was only newspapers and magazines now, it would’ve never been news. That a guy got pissed off at a radio guy and wouldn’t answer his questions is news enough to get five million hits on the goddamn Internet? Are you serious? But now it’s important to people to find out what star shit himself in a restaurant yesterday.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  My New Year’s Resolution: Try to Calm the Fuck Down

  What a good life

  I’ve made here

  But what I really miss tonight

  Is a smoke and a beer

  —“The Good Life” (Thornton/Andrew)

  I THINK THE WHOLE SMOKING THING IS A WITCH HUNT. YOU CAN’T smoke in West Hollywood anymore. You cannot smoke in West Hollywood, California, in the United States of America. You can’t even smoke in certain places in Dublin and Paris—cities where all they do is smoke. I’ve been to some of those places, and goddamn, smoking is like their life, and all of a sudden it’s banned. Well, I never smoked a cigarette and had a head-on collision. But I’ve seen motherfuckers drink half a bottle of bourbon and do just that, and there’s a liquor store on every corner.

  What happened in L.A. was they decided that smoking is the number-one killer of everybody. “Well, look at the sign over there in Westwood,” they point out. “It says, SMOKING DEATHS THIS MINUTE: 852 BILLION.” How the fuck do they know that? What I know is, I know a guy who smokes from the time he gets up in the morning to the time he goes to sleep. He also drinks tequila all day long. I saw him not too long ago, and God bless him, he’s eighty-some-odd years old and still going. I’m not saying, “Hey, kids, run out and smoke,” that’s not my point. I’m saying, if I want to smoke outside in a town that I live in, in a town I pay taxes in, I should be able to. If you want to talk about instant death, just mix people and cars with liquor stores and payday. When those guys came up with this smoking ban, did they really think it through all the way? Let’s say that during their committee meeting they voted to ban smoking in West Hollywood. To celebrate their new law, they decide to go out and have a cocktail party that night. Now, let’s say two hundred of them are at the party. One hundred ninety-eight of those motherfuckers are so drunk they can hardly get out the door after the cocktail party. And then, still hypothetically speaking, let’s say eight are in an accident that night and four people die in those eight accidents. Not one person at the cocktail party smoked a cigarette, but four people died. They’re not banning liquor, though, are they? I don’t think so.

  Our band has played a few charity gigs for the American Whatever Association, and we were onstage playing for a room of like five or six hundred shit-faced doctors. They’re drunk off their asses, but for some reason, smoking is bad. Those doctors tell us, “You’ve got to quit smoking,” and they quote that sign in Westwood—852 billion or something died from cigarette smoke. They say, “It’s true. We’ve proven it.”

  Have they proven it? I bet if somebody dug into the AMA hard enough, they would also prove that there’s been a cure for cancer and AIDS for a long fucking time, and they won’t tell anybody because if they did, their business is over. Can you imagine if there was a car made that never fucking needed a repair and it never broke down? You got one car the rest of your fucking life and it can fly and do your dishes and shit like that? Never has a problem? Can you imagine the automotive industry? Do you think they’d want you to know about that car? You think the oil companies want everybody to drive a fucking electric car? Of course not. And doctors, you go to an orthopedic surgeon and tell him your shoulder hurts, and he’ll cut your fucking arm off. But you go to the holistic guy, and he’ll say, “Why don’t you chew on this sassafras root twice a day.” Then, on the other hand, you go to one of those cats and they’ll muscle-test you by giving you a bottle with nothing in it and a label on it that says BLACK PEPPER. They get you to hold it in your hand, and they test to see if they can put your arm down when you’re trying to hold your arm stiff. If your arm goes down, it means you
’re allergic to black pepper or something. Who the fuck knows if that means anything? I know one thing: if you do get your arm cut off at a fucking sawmill, don’t go to a holistic doctor, go right to the horrible pricks who want to cut you to pieces, because they’re the only ones who know how to sew it back on.

  It’s real confusing about these doctors, but I’d suggest to everyone, if you get the chance, go see both of them. Go to those fucking underhanded guys, the so-called real doctors, if you’ve got an amputated limb or a stomach with a hole in it. If it’s just some weird shit and you’re not quite sure what it is—you’re tired, no energy—go see the alternative doctors because they’re not going to just dope you up right away. The drug companies, they really want you to take their medication, and then this is what happens: you take a pill for your arthritis, well, that drives your fucking blood pressure up or down. Now you got to take a fucking blood pressure pill. The blood pressure pill hurts your stomach worse than the arthritis one does, and now you got to take a stomach pill, and so on. They get you hooked on this shit. They’ve got you on twenty pills all of a sudden, and now, in order to stay alive, you have to keep taking these motherfuckers forever, and every one of them makes you sick so you got to take something to prevent that sickness that that fucking pill did to you. These pharmaceutical companies want to keep you on dope so bad—you go to a doctor, and they tell you to take seven of these today and twelve of those tomorrow and fifteen of these on Saturday. Then later you see the commercial for this shit, and it says, as I heard on The Simpsons one time, “Causes loss of scalp and penis.” The commercial will say shit like “increases risk of stroke, heart attack, depression, suicide.” You ask them why their drug does all this bad shit, and they’ll tell you, “Well, we have to put that on there.” Why do you have to put that on there? Because it’s happened to people, right? “Well, yeah, but their percentages are very low.” Okay, you know what? I don’t give a fuck if it’s a half a percent. If you happen to be the motherfucker who’s in the half percent, that sucks for you. In World War II, the fliers would go out on a bombing run over France or Germany, and they used to say, “You’re only on a milk run”—well, it’s only a milk run if you make it back. It’s not a milk run if your airplane gets shot out of the fucking sky. That’s why percentages don’t mean shit to me. I’ve said it before, it’s like the weather. There’s a 25 percent chance of rain. A 30 percent chance of rain. The fuck does that mean? There’s a fifty-fifty chance of everything, all the fucking time. That’s the way it is. It’s either going to happen or it’s not. That’s fifty-fifty, so I don’t get it—motherfuckers and their percentages. Doctors. Lawyers. What assholes.