The Billy Bob Tapes

by Billy Bob Thornton

  The Yardleys used to have these street dances, and they would rope off the main Dollar Store and Safeway parking lots. It cost fifty cents or a dollar to come inside the rope and dance in front of the band. Me and my buddies, we were just little kids who wanted to be in a band. We only wanted to hear the music. We were like “Fuck, we don’t have fifty cents to pay just to step like two feet from here and get inside the rope.” I used to just stand out on the sidewalk outside the ropes, listening and watching every move they made.

  I was so mesmerized by these guys. I was in this little band that nobody gave a shit about until later, and the Yardleys were these older, sophisticated guys—seniors, when I was in junior high. Most of my days in junior high and high school were spent trying to figure out how you get chicks that looked good, and just standing there watching these bands like the Cadets, LSD and the Illusions, the Senates, the Yardleys, and the Beethovens.

  Later on, this band called Brass Button came along. These were guys in my class and they became the big band in town. They were a horn band. They did Chicago; Blood, Sweat, and Tears; and all that stuff. I was always real jealous of them because they were the big thing in town and it was harder because they were my age. It wasn’t like The Yardleys, who were years older than me. It was like “GODDAMMIT! These guys!” Rick Dial was in the Brass Button; he’s an old friend of mine who passed away recently. He was in Sling Blade; he played the heavyset guy who ran the Fix-It shop. He was going to be in Jayne Mansfield’s Car, too.

  My brother started a band and then I had my band. My brother and I never played in a band together. The guys in his band were a couple of years younger than us so we always had this competition. Their band really hated our band so we never played together. My brother and I used to fight all the time. I loved this kid, but we still fought.

  Bucky Griggs was the drummer with the Yardleys. Bucky had glasses that came way down on his nose that he kind of peered out through. He had this real hot girlfriend named Joan. She was beautiful. Her little brother was a friend of mine, so I used to go over and sneak around his house just to look at her.

  I remember when I was twelve years old, going to a Yardleys dance at the old gym, which was just a concrete floor. Joan came over and said, “Do you want to dance?” I started shaking like a leaf and sweating and shit. I was like, “No, that’s okay.” But she got me by the hand and pulled me onto the dance floor in front of the Yardleys. I never moved because I didn’t know how to dance, I still don’t. I always thought people dancing looked stupid, especially from up there onstage where you can see them making faces or whatever. Anyway, I stood there sweating while she danced around me.

  Speaking of hot girls, I have to mention a girl named Donna. She was a senior when I was in the ninth grade, and to this day I still think about her. She was like a cheerleader or something. Pep club gal. She wore an ankle bracelet. You could put an ankle bracelet on a kangaroo and I would hit on it. There was just something about those ankle bracelets that always did something to me. But I never said a word to her. When I’d see her, I’d just start sweating. She was my big crush all through school, and I’ve never spoken to her once, to this day.

  Just as memorable as the night Joan made me dance with her was when the Yardleys were playing a cover of “Cold Sweat” by James Brown. Steve Walker, the guitar player, landed on a nail on the wooden stage during his guitar solo. When he got back up, his pants were ripped and he had this bloody knee but he kept playing. I was like Yeah! This is what I want to do one day! I want to cut my fucking leg open and play rock and roll!

  Whenever the Yardleys would rehearse at Bo Jones’s house, I would go with a couple of buddies and we would hide in the hedges outside the living room and listen. Bo Jones lived in a three-bedroom brick house, which was the ultimate thing you could have back where I came from.

  When the Yardleys would see us standing out there in the hedges, they would usually chase us off. But one day Bucky Griggs came out on the porch and said, “How come y’all always hanging around out here?”

  “We just want to hear y’all play,” I said.

  “Y’all want to play in a band?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you play?”

  “I play drums.”

  “You want to come in and look at my drums?”

  “Yeah.”

  But like I said, to me, at that time, it was like Ringo Starr just said, “Hey, you wanna come on in and play my drums?” I guarantee it was every bit that big in my mind. Bucky had a pristine red sparkle Ludwig kit with Zildjian cymbals. It was amazing.

  “You can sit down and play them if you want to,” Bucky said. I couldn’t play much at that point. I could play stuff like “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James, or “House of the Rising Sun,” shit like that, but I didn’t want to embarrass myself in front of Bucky, so I just sat down, took the sticks, timidly tapped each drum a little bit, tapped a cymbal real light. He goes, “No, go ahead, you can play them,” and I mumbled, “Nah, that’s okay, thank you,” and I got up and hauled ass out of there. That was my brush with the Yardleys.

  IN MALVERN WE HAD ONE RECORD STORE IN TOWN. IT WAS CALLED Paula’s Record Shop. Paula was an older lady even back then when I was in junior high school. She was a little gruff and bossy, but she was great. She really loved her little record shop. My brother Jimmy and I used to go in there all the time, and we usually didn’t have the money to get anything, but once in a blue moon when we did we would go inside and buy something. I think a 45 was fifty cents and a record album, in the early to midsixties, was probably anywhere from $1.99 to $3.99. We couldn’t wait to get in there and just thumb through all the records. Some of the 45s had a white paper sleeve and you could see the label through it, and others would have a full picture on the sleeve. I remember a few of the Beatles 45s had a full sleeve with a picture on it. We would stare at the pictures and read what liner notes we could without opening the record up, which we couldn’t do, obviously. We’d read the back and look at anything that was on there. Sometimes you would see something that would just strike your fancy and you didn’t know why. It was magical.

  Paula also had a small selection of instruments, and I remember I bought my first tambourine in there. She had a couple of guitars, like Teiscos or something like that, not real expensive ones, and there was usually at least one drum set available. Sometimes she would just have a snare drum with a cymbal on it. Sets like that used to be popular back then. They were very simple—a snare drum on a tall stand and a little cymbal stand attached to the snare drum. I can remember guys playing drums that way; I did myself for a little bit.

  Jimmy and I were in there when we saw the first Black Oak Arkansas album. We didn’t know who Black Oak Arkansas was. This would have been in 1970, I guess. The band was just these long-haired guys standing on an old flatbed truck. One of the guys was lean, and he had long blond hair and a walking cane. That was Jim Dandy. We thought, Wow, Black Oak Arkansas, which is a real town in Arkansas, they had named their band after their town. They grew up around there, not too far from Memphis, so they had that sound. When we finally got the money we bought that record, and we were just blown away. If you haven’t heard that first Black Oak Arkansas album, you must. I highly recommend it. Jim Dandy had that gravelly voice, and they were all great musicians. Their songs were unique, unlike anything we’d heard before. Most people know them from “Jim Dandy to the Rescue,” but that first album, with “Uncle Lijiah,” “Hot and Nasty,” and “When Electricity Came to Arkansas,” was just incredible. Years later I was playing in a band called Nothin’ Doin’ with Mike and Nick Shipp, two brothers from Benton, Arkansas (where we later filmed Sling Blade), and we got to know the guys in Black Oak Arkansas very well. We ended up opening for them a couple of times. They were always real good to us.

  About three years ago, the Boxmasters were playing a show in Memphis and Jim Dandy actually came and sat in with us. Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Gilley were there too. It was pretty amazing.r />
  Paula’s Record Shop is also where my brother and I first saw all these records by the Mothers of Invention. Here, we saw these weird ugly fucks on the covers of these records (and by Zappa’s own account they were ugly motherfuckers, so that’s not me saying it). Jimmy Carl Black, Roy Estrada, Frank Zappa, Lowell George were in the band at one point, but those early Mothers records, with Ian Underwood, Billy Mundi, all these guys, we just loved their stuff. I remember the first Mothers album I bought was probably We’re Only in It for the Money. From the time Jimmy and I were little kids, 1966, 1967, we were in love with the Mothers of Invention and everything about Zappa. Frank died before I could meet him, but I became friends with Moon Zappa, Frank’s daughter, and to this day I’m very good friends with the Zappa family, and to me it’s just such a huge deal because it changed my life, hearing the Mothers of Invention. Later on we heard Captain Beefheart, the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, music that people considered at the time avant-garde. That really changed me and Jimmy. We branched out.

  Jimmy started learning to play the guitar and he got very good at it. He played banjo, guitar, piano—just about everything. I learned guitar well enough to write songs on it. When I was in junior high school, I got to go to my first real concert, which was a band called Ides of March. They did that song “Vehicle.” And then my first huge concert right after that was Three Dog Night. I was in a thing in the Methodist Church, the MYF group, the Methodist Youth Fellowship, and they would take us on field trips. They took us to see Three Dog Night at Barton Coliseum in Little Rock. I thought, Geez, maybe one of these days, we’ll get to open for somebody that big. A lot of times my brother and I couldn’t afford tickets, but that was one thing my mom was real good about. She made sure we had enough money to go to concerts. She just wouldn’t tell my dad.

  By the time I was in high school, I was at Barton Coliseum every time someone was there, so I got to see Ten Years After, Emerson Lake and Palmer, the Allman Brothers, and Creedence Clearwater Revival in their heyday. Creedence Clearwater Revival was the best show I think I ever saw in my life. The opening act was Freddie King, a great bluesman from Texas, who did “I’m Going Down.” He was fucking amazing. I got there early. We always tried to get to the coliseum really early so we could be right by the stage and that night, I was right in front. I was wearing these judge’s robes I had taken from the theater department at school and I was a little high. Freddie King just came in there and blew everybody away. There were three acts: Freddie King was the first act and the second act was Tony Joe White, with that song “Polk Salad Annie.” He was fucking amazing. Then Creedence came out. Nobody went onstage and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, Creedence Clearwater Revival!” They didn’t have to. That was the mark of a legendary band already in their own time. The lights went down in the coliseum, everybody went nuts, and you saw the bluish-purple lights on those Kustom amplifiers. It was so dark that I could just barely see the figure of John Fogerty right in front of me. Then the lights went on at the instant he hit the opening chord for “Green River.” I’m just standing right there and there’s fucking John Fogerty wearing a western suit looking down at me. I was just like “Goddammit!” These days, you go to a concert and you see a marble floor and people out there with no fucking amplifiers and no stacks of speakers and shit, it’s just like an empty stage with dancers. That’s no good. That’s not a concert; that’s a fucking television show.

  Our influences were everything from the Mothers of Invention and Captain Beefheart to Alice Cooper, the Allman Brothers, Marshall Tucker, Wet Willie, Grinderswitch, all the Southern rock stuff, to Tom Jones and, of course, the British Invasion. I was never big on Motown because I was a Memphis guy—Malvern is only a couple hours away from Memphis so I was raised around that Memphis sound, like the Boxtops and the Buckinghams. I was a big Isaac Hayes fan. I liked the Temptations pretty well, but I loved Stax Records. That was the heavier shit, and so I was into all that. Blue and the Blue Velvets, the band I wrote about earlier, played some great soul shit, that early seventies soul like “Everybody Plays the Fool” and “Me and Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul. Also during that time there was Al Green, the Isley Brothers, and then you had the horn bands like Con Funk Shun and Brass Construction—it was just a great time in music. When I was in Hot ’Lanta, we did a lot of rock-and-roll versions of soul songs. We’d take a soul song and do a rock-and-roll version, and we’d take a rock-and-roll song and do a soul version so they kind of met in the middle. We sounded like a soul/rock group.

  In 1974, we went to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and we made a record (actually, it wasn’t a record, it was a reel-to-reel tape). For $250 we went to Muscle Shoals and recorded at Widget Sound in Sheffield, Alabama (Muscle Shoals and Sheffield were all there together). Back then, the Muscle Shoals sound was considered the shit, and I got to record in one of those studios where the real shit was recorded back then, where Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, and all those people recorded. I’m friends now with a lot of those guys, like Donnie Fritts, who was one of the original Muscle Shoals Sound guys. He wrote a lot of songs; he was one of those original Muscle Shoals writers. He wrote “We Had It All.” I also know Jimmy Johnson and all the guys in the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. Barry Beckett, who was the original organ player, played on my first two solo records that were on a real label.

  This whole era was incredible. I was playing with Hot ’Lanta and a band called Nothin’ Doin’ (which I had tattooed on my arm). Nothin’ Doin’ was just a full-on rock-and-roll band. It was three guys: me and two brothers from out of Benton, Arkansas, Mike Shipp and Nick Shipp. We played mostly original music, but we would do early ZZ Top stuff. We started getting opportunities—we opened for Hank Williams Jr., Black Oak Arkansas, and Humble Pie. Nothin’ Doin’ was regionally popular and we played all over the place. Eventually a guy saw us in Houston and came backstage. We were playing in a big rock club there called Cardi’s. He was a guy who had worked for the ZZ Top organization. He said, “You guys sound a lot like ZZ Top.” I was the drummer at that point. I had been the singer but we couldn’t keep a drummer so I finally just said “oh, fuck it” and I started playing drums again. This guy kept saying, “You sound so much like ZZ Top.” We would play some of their songs, but we mainly played originals. This guy asked us, “How would you like to do a ZZ Top tribute act?” This was way before tribute acts were a big deal.

  “We don’t know,” we said. “What’s in it for us?”

  “How much do you guys make in a night?”

  “Maybe a couple hundred bucks.”

  “How would you like to make fifteen hundred dollars a night?”

  “Shit yes!”

  His name was Scott Weiss and he had worked for Lone Wolf Productions, which was ZZ Top’s thing, and now he had his own agency called Electric Artists. Scott put us on the road. I’ll never forget this guy. He really was great to us. These days something like that might be considered cheesy, but in those days it wasn’t. We started playing as Tres Hombres and we did this ZZ Top tribute act. We played all over and it was great. We got to open for a lot of big people, and we also did our own shows. It was a fantastic thing.

  Over the years, I kind of came up in the music business. I worked as a roadie for a sound company out of Little Rock. They had an agency, too. I had the opportunity to work on shows with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Pure Prairie League, Lighthouse, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and on and on. All these bands back in the day. I was only into rock and roll early on, and it wasn’t until I was in my late teens that I started appreciating country music. I just thought country music was like this old three-chord stuff that my uncle did. All of a sudden I started realizing the genius of George Jones and Merle Haggard and all those guys. I got into real hard-core country, like Del Reeves, who is a particular favorite of ours. Our band, the Boxmasters, ended up cutting one of his songs, and we’re influenced quite a bit by that sound. The musical influences all thrown together, they form you for later on. You might not necessarily
hear the Mothers of Invention in the Boxmasters music, other than maybe some of the humor, but little bits and pieces creep in there.

  We created the Boxmasters out of our love of sixties music. The name “Boxmasters” sounds kind of like a sixties band, but the direct translation of the word is hard to say on a talk show. Our logo design looks like it’s from the sixties, and we decided to order some suits from Liverpool so when we play on the stage, we wear actual Beatles suits and Beatles boots. On our first record we made up this whole phony history about how the Boxmasters came from Bellflower, California (a town that’s just car lots, basically). The way we really got together happened while I was working on Beautiful Door, my last solo album over at Universal. I met J. D. Andrew. He was working as an assistant to Jim Mitchell, helping me finish up that album. Jim Mitchell is a great friend of ours. He engineered all four of my solo albums and a couple of movie scores.

  Jim got a job that was too good to pass up—working at Fox Sports doing the music that they do for the football games. He wasn’t available much so J.D., as his assistant, was in here a lot, helping me finish Beautiful Door. One night a guy had asked me to do a version of a Hank Williams song for a Canadian television show and so I asked J.D., “You said you play guitar, right?” He said, “Yeah, I play a little bit.” I said, “Can you play well enough to do a Hank Williams song with me?” He and I recorded “Lost Highway” by Hank Williams. The song had this vibe that was like the old sixties country music and the British Invasion all in one. I said, “How much do you know about the British Invasion?” He said, “Not much.”