Tag: Billy Bob Thornton

Billy Bob Thornton lost three close friends in quick succession. Warren Zevon, John Ritter and Johnny Cash were all collaborators and confidantes, and their deaths — within four days of each other — left the Arkansas–born actor thinking more than ever about mortality.

“It sure does bring it all home to you,” Thornton says. “Because when we were 25, we didn’t think about this kind of stuff. Now, it’s like your friends are dropping like flies all around you, it’s right in your face.”

The Edge of the World, the 48–year–old Thornton’s second album, was released this week. On Sept. 7, he had just finished a cross–country tour with his rock ‘n’ roll band when the news came that Zevon had lost his battle with cancer. The Oscar–winning writer, director and star of Sling Blade maintains a healthy second career in music, and he sang on Zevon’s final album, The Wind.

In a phone interview from his Los Angeles home, Thornton recalled first encountering Zevon in the late 1980s at the mailbox outside their apartment complex.

“It was just so fantastic to meet somebody else who had obsessive–compulsive disorder,” Thornton said. “Because he saw me taking my mail out, putting it back in, taking it out and locking it twice. And he said ‘So you got that too, huh?'”

So developed a fast friendship. “It was pretty amazing knowing Warren. You know when you meet somebody who thinks differently than everybody else? They have their own thing that just doesn’t exist anywhere else. I just loved being around Warren. Dwight Yoakam and Warren and I used to hang out a lot together.”

In 1992, Thornton got one of his first Hollywood jobs, in the cast of John Ritter’s sitcom Hearts Afire. Between takes, Thornton liked to crack Ritter up with the mentally challenged hillbilly character he’d use four years later as the centerpiece of Sling Blade.

Thornton wrote another character in the film, the neurotic, gay grocery–store manager, with Ritter in mind.

“I knew what he could do, but he wasn’t given that chance very often,” Thornton said. “Everybody pigeonholed him into that guy that trips over the furniture.

“He used to do this weird thing where he would be sitting next to you someplace, and all of a sudden his hand would creep onto your knee. When you’d look at him like ‘What the hell are you doing?’ he would say ‘Oh, yeah, like I’m gay.’

“And his body language — I knew he could play the guy. Once I started writing the script, it was him all the way.”

For the film, Ritter was given a really, really strange haircut, a sort of regulation–Army buzz gone bad.

“The first thing we shot together was that scene in the diner, where he tells me he’s gay,” Thornton recalled. “And he just couldn’t hold himself together. He’d just look at me — I was in character — and bust up. So he had to get past that, and he said ‘Man, I hate you for this. For the haircut and everything.'”

The pair worked together again in director Terry Zwigoff’s comedy Bad Santa, which will be released in November. Ritter played the mall manager who hires Thornton, a con man, to play Santa Claus.

Thornton said Ritter got him back for the Sling Blade episode. “The facial expressions he does in ‘Bad Santa’ are priceless,” he explained. “I couldn’t keep a straight face. And here I’m supposed to be this dry guy who can’t stand him. I couldn’t even do the scenes with him half the time, just the way he stood, and rubbed his hands together.”

On Sept. 11, Thornton was home and thinking about Zevon, who’d passed away four days earlier. Someone called and told him Ritter had died suddenly, from an undiagnosed heart problem.

Yoakam — the country singer who’d also starred in Sling Blade and knew Ritter well — called next, and he and Thornton spent four hours on the phone, talking about their fallen friend.

“The next morning, I woke up and Cash had died. It was so numbing. I had just talked to Cash a few weeks ago.”

Johnny Cash died Sept. 12 after a history of illness.

Around 1998, Cash had sought Thornton out. “He called me and wanted to know if I would autograph a copy of U–Turn,” Thornton said. “He loved that movie. Cash was an edgy guy; he loved anything kinda offbeat. And I couldn’t believe he even called me, let alone wanted one of my movies.”

Thornton said Daddy and Them, which Thornton also wrote and starred in, was another favorite at Cash’s house.

“We just started talking on the phone a lot, and when I’d go to Nashville I would see him. He and I ended up doing a duet together on a song, and he was going to record my song ‘Private Radio.'”

The flood of bad news came just as Thornton was about to re–enter the limelight; he has a small role in the Coen Brothers’ Intolerable Cruelty (Oct. 10), then Bad Santa, followed at Christmas by Disney’s The Alamo, in which he stars as Davy Crockett.

The Edge of the World, he says, is “a veiled concept record, meaning it’s not as obvious a concept record as, say, Tommy or Red Headed Stranger.

“It’s the story of a broken man on his way to healing. It’s a guy who has a desire for love, for some sort of life, and then he dies.

“And in the end, he realizes what’s really important, which is your home and your family and being able to walk out the door every day and be alive.”

Thornton’s divorce last year from Angelina Jolie has fueled speculation that the more somber songs on The Edge of the World might have been inspired by the breakup.

“It’s pretty damned autobiographical, but it’s not all a specific reference to something that people would actually know. For instance, they’re already talking on the entertainment shows about the song ‘The Desperate One,’ about why I’m so desperate to get back with Angelina. And that’s just not true. That was someone totally unrelated to her.”

Jolie was seemingly on every magazine cover in the United States over the summer, talking about the couple’s less–than–amicable split.

Thornton swears he didn’t read any of it. “She doesn’t mean any harm toward me,” he said. “I mean, I know that. I know her. She’s not going to say anything about me, and if she does I’d be very surprised. We were friends, and hopefully will be at some point in the future.

“So it’s not surprising to me that she’s not slamming me because I don’t think that’s her style. And I wish people would leave her alone, too, I really do.”

Billy Bob Thornton isn’t thinking about it these days.

“I didn’t lose it at John’s funeral until I was walking out with my two little boys,” he said. “We were passing the casket, and I saw John’s kids sitting there in the front row of the church. And I made eye contact with Jason, his eldest son. When I looked at that kid, I couldn’t hold myself together.

“I went to Warren’s memorial. And I heard about Cash’s. People were kind of settled into the fact, I think, because we knew these guys were going to die. But at John’s funeral, it was just a bunch of people walking around stunned.”

@2003 Bill DeYoung (published by Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers)

“Music’s always been my first love,” says actor Billy Bob Thornton, one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. “I’m almost a music geek.”

Thornton’s third album, “Hobo,” comes out Tuesday. Unlike its predecessors—both of which achieved gold–record status—this one has no rock or country songs, focusing instead on dark, smoky, half–spoken narratives.

“In this day and time, you can’t do eclectic records,” Thornton, 50, explains by phone from his Los Angeles office.

“We decided this was the thing we do best. I thought, ‘There’s plenty of people out there doing rock songs, and doing ’em well. But the fact of the matter is that my strength is as a storyteller, so let’s just stay with that.’ ”

The album, which Thornton originally wanted to call “California Possibilities,” is essentially a series of songs about one person’s exodus to the Golden State—similar to the one Thornton took in 1981, from his home in Arkansas.

“It’s really the story arc for everybody who comes out here,” says Thornton. “My other records have been very personal, and this one can literally be about anybody.

“It’s not that I didn’t have all these experiences, but I didn’t set out to write about me. It just kind of came out that way.”

Thornton was drumming for a ZZ Top tribute band when he went west in 1981, looking for work in music, movies or whatever came his way. “Sling Blade,” which he wrote, directed and starred in, brought him the 1996 Academy Award for screenwriting.

Since then, he’s been through the celebrity fodder machine—via his brief but doomed marriage to Angelina Jolie,—and a series of smash films including “A Simple Plan,” “Primary Colors,” “Monster’s Ball,” “Bad Santa” and this year’s “Bad News Bears.”

His next movie, “The Ice Harvest,” co–stars John Cusack, and will be released Nov. 23.

He still, however, considers himself a musician who got lucky in the movies. Indeed, Thornton likes to talk about the Band and the Allman Brothers more than his filmography.

“I still read liner notes,” he enthuses, “and when I’m up at night and my girlfriend’s asleep, I figure out different ways to categorize my CDs and my vinyl. I’m like, ‘Let me put my Porter Wagoner statue over here on this shelf, and I’ll put all my Frank Zappa records right here.'”

New arrivals to the west often are in for a culture shock, Thornton says. “Not all of California is full of swimming pools and movie stars.”

In such songs as “El Centro on $5 a Day,” he assumes the role of a state trooper telling a new arrival about the harsh realities of small–town life in the Golden State.

“Everybody who comes to California has such great expectations of what it is—and what they’re really talking about is L.A.,” Thornton says. “California’s a very diverse place; these towns could be in Kansas, they could be in New Jersey, or Florida or whatever.”

For the record, Thornton says he loves his adoptive home. “The fact of the matter is, my dreams were realized out here,” he explains. “I look at L.A. like that uncle you dread seeing at the family reunion, but at the same time there’s something about him you love.

“I wanted to pay tribute to this great old weird place, and at the same time point out all the miseries and troubles that you deal with.”

Thornton and his band will hit the road in February, playing small theaters on an intimate, living–room stage set, avoiding the big halls they’ve played (and sold out) in the past.

“I think I can tell my stories in that format better than any other way,” he says. “It’s not that I don’t sing rock ‘n’ roll songs—in our live shows, the high–energy, up–tempo songs go over better. Because audiences are out there throwin’ beer cans at each other’s heads; they don’t want to listen to some smoky, moody song.”

@2005 Bill DeYoung (published in Scripps Treasure Coast Newspapers)

For all his acting chops, screen presence and resumé of hit movies, Billy Bob Thornton considers himself a musician. Although he’s got five new films stacked up like planes over LAX, Thornton would rather talk about “Private Radio,” his very first album, released this week on the Nashville–based Lost Highway label.

“Music’s really my first love,” says the Arkansas native. “It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and that’s what I was doing when I got into the movie business.”

Thornton left Hot Springs for Hollywood in 1981, and after a few years of scrambling hit the jackpot when he starred in 1996’s “Sling Blade,” which he also wrote and directed. “It wasn’t like I gave up music to become an actor. I just came to California to see what I could get going anywhere, in any way.”

“Private Radio” has a smoky, neon–and–beer feel to it; Thornton’s singing voice is somewhere between Merle Haggard and Leonard Cohen. He talk–sings many of the songs over a sinewy, noir country groove provided by producer Marty Stuart and a band of Nashville pros. He’s well aware that the road is littered with albums made by movie stars who thought they could sing, vanity projects by people with no business in a recording studio. “If I were going to make a vanity project, I would have made something far more commercial than this,” Thornton, 46, says. “This is honestly what I wanted to make.”

Thornton, whose most recent films were the back–to–back hits “A Simple Plan” and “Pushing Tin,” found that his cinema celebrity allowed him the time to write and record his album.

“These days I have the luxury to pick and choose, and I can do one or not do one if I want to,” he explains. “And my wife and I bought a house about a year and a half ago, and it had a world–class studio in it. That’s the main reason we bought the house, really. We loved the house, but that was a big selling point.” The house’s former owner was Guns N Roses guitarist Slash, who built the studio.

Thornton’s wife, as the world knows, is actress Angelina Jolie. Two of the “Private Radio” songs — “Angelina” and “Your Blue Shadow” — were written for her.

“She was there the whole way,” Thornton says. “What was great about making the record in the house was, she’d be upstairs watching TV or whatever, and every now and then she’d drop down to the studio. She cried the first time she heard the record.

“Since she’s been with me, she’s gotten a sort of musical education to some of the old music. She’s an Allman Brothers fan now, too.”

Thornton grew up with his parents’ Jim Reeves and Haggard records, but once he heard the Allman Brothers Band, his world shifted.

“Growing up in the South, we all wanted to play music,” he says. “Music was such a huge deal to us. We all grew up listening to what our parents did, and so we heard a lot of country music. But we kind of wanted, as kids, to separate ourselves from country music because it’s what our folks listened to. So there was some rebellion — and when the Beatles came along, we said OK, this is my music.

“But they were English. So I think when Southern Rock came along, that was the most direct place for us to plug in. It was not what our parents listened to, but it was still from down here with us. It’s like our own thing, and yet it’s rock music. We could still feel rebellious and yet loyal to our place, because it did have a Southern flavor to it.”

Thornton started playing drums and singing, and he went through numerous local bands. “We were so into hanging out with everybody,” he recalls. “And I never wanted anybody to leave. When we were all together, I was always one of those guys who never wanted to sleep, I wanted to stay up all the time.” Of course, he says, in the early ’70s there was plenty of chemical support for musicians.

“So when I saw the Allman Brothers, and you opened up the record cover and everybody’s there — they got a ranch where they all live, with wives and babies and friends … I can remember as a teen–ager, we didn’t give a sh–– if somebody could play something or not, they were in the band. We’d have a band with 15 guys in it sometimes; we’d have like nine conga players.”

Eventually, Thornton and two buddies put together Trés Hombres, a ZZ Top tribute band (as the drummer, he was the only one who didn’t have to grow a long beard). Today, several members of his regular film crew are musicians, and Thornton is famous for his weekend jam sessions — stress relievers during production.

Most of his friends are musicians, he says, and he’s well–known for showing up, unannounced, to introduce ZZ Top or Lynyrd Skynyrd to a delighted audience.

Starting next month, he’ll be all over movie screens: The Barry Levenson comedy “Bandits” (with Bruce Willis) comes out Oct. 12, followed by the Coen Brothers’ “The Man Who Wasn’t There” on Halloween.

“Daddy and Them,” which Thornton also wrote and directed, will be released in early 2002, along with the drama “Monsters Ball” (co–starring Halle Berry) and the comedy “Waking Up in Reno” (with Charlize Theron).

“I guess when people are aware of you, and you’re in the papers all the time for whatever the latest crazy thing I supposedly did, people assume you’re out there all the time,” Thornton says. “But I haven’t been in a movie since ‘Pushing Tin,’ and that’s been damn near three years ago.

“I’m so proud about this stuff coming out. Everything we got coming out is real strong.”

What Thornton wants most of all is for his fans to give “Private Radio” a shot — check it out for the music, not because he’s got a famous name and face.

And anyway, that’s how he built his reputation — on the work. “I’m real lucky, because I didn’t make it as a superstar,” he says. “I made it as a character actor. So once I became a movie star, people forgive me more in terms of the kinds of parts I play.

“They don’t want Mel Gibson to play anybody but Mel Gibson. I’m fortunate enough to be able to play all kinds of different things, so my choices are a little more open.”

 

@2001 Bill DeYoung (published in the Gainesville Sun)