Kinky Friedman, Billy Bob Thorton and a Cave Full of Ghosts

Billy Bob Thornton is one of Hollywood’s great artists– an  actor, screenwriter, director, musician and author.  You know him best as the talent behind and star of the film “Sling Blade”, which earned him an Academy Award.  Kinky Friedman is  a singer, songwriter, satirist, activist, novelist, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.  Kinky and Billy Bob recently stopped by the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about their new book, “The Billy Bob Tapes: A Cave Full of Ghosts.”

***

Ron Bennington: Just seeing the names of the people who jumped into this [book], that are literally like the best people in their craft. Whether you’re talking about Robert Duvall, Dwight Yoakam, Daniel Lanois, just the names of the people who you work with and interact with is as good as they get.

Billy Bob Thornton: There all great people that have been good friends and mentors and everything over the years. They’re practically family, most of those people.

Ron Bennington: Kinky, how did you come up with putting the book together this way?

Kinky Friedman: Well that was about all I did. I mean I was not, when you sign a contract you don’t know what the guy’s going to do. Whether he’s gonna go away and do a film somewhere in Norway with a masturbating tiny baby chipmunks or what he’s gonna do.

Ron Bennington: Well the thing too is a storyteller I guess is a storyteller, whether you’re writing songs or screenplays or just telling a story to your friends. And some of the book reminds me of a guy that maybe you would sit down and tell some of these stories to Duvall once you get to know people. Once you get to be friends with somebody.

Billy Bob Thornton: It’s not even like I said well I’ll tell the story about this time or that time because that gets into sort of like I’m gonna tell you a joke or something. This was done pretty organically. I just started talking about life and some of it is just some strange and funny stories about growing up where I did. And then there’s a few chapters of me bitching about how I think our culture’s crumbling and all that kind of thing. And it was a good opportunity to talk about some of that, but really like you said when you tell a story and whatever the medium is, it’s kind of the same person doing it, so somebody who would say, like “Sling Blade” or “Bad Santa” or some of those movies that I’ve done would probably like the book because it’s the same kind of guy telling it. For some reason, if you’re an actor and you make a record, you get a lot of shit for that, which is kind of crazy (laughs), but…

Kinky Friedman: But then you make a book..

Billy Bob Thornton: But then you make a book and everybody’s like “Well you can do that. We’ll let you do that!” Because the music business is a closed off, creepy little world. Much more than the movie business is. People want to talk about the movie business being this sort of superficial world, but it’s nothing like…I mean in the movie business, we’re not really jealous of each other. I mean that much. I don’t sit around thinking God, I wish I was Tom Cruise or something like or vice versa. We’re all fine in what we’re doing, but boy don’t try to make a record if you’re an actor. Especially if you grew up playing music because then they’ll really hate you for it because maybe they’ll think you can actually write a song. But the thing is, I guess the point I’m getting to here is goes back to what you said which is I don’t write a screenplay and a book and then go get a lobotomy and then write a song. It’s the same person. And so any story you tell comes from the same brain or heart or whatever you want to call it.

Ron Bennington: Just sitting there telling the story, you can just kind of transcript it and not have to rewrite at all.

Kinky Friedman: Absolutely. I don’t want to be one of these pointy-headed intellectual neurotic Jewish book editor type of people that comments on this, but just to say it is true. As you read some of these chapters, it looks like he’s kind of forgotten the thread, looks like he’s lost it and gone on to something else and by God, he comes right back to it in the last sentence with a little different meaning. And he didn’t have time to, well he had a lifetime to do it, but it’s one take. I mean that’s not edited stuff.

Ron Bennington: There’s stuff about waiting for concerts being every bit as important as when the concert….being there, that made me put the book down and go oh yeah I know that exact feeling. And no one really talks about that anymore. But that somehow that this thing in our culture now, stuff is happening so fast, there’s almost no time to savor any feeling.

Kinky Friedman: Billy Bob may be the greatest living artist from Arkansas. And I was thinking about that with Levon Helm having been bugled to Jesus and Bill Clinton being a political creature, that he is. And I love him, but is there anybody greater? And of course, Arkansas is like a suburb of East Texas. (laughs)

Billy Bob Thornton: But I was happy to be able to say a few things about what’s happening in our society in the book. Besides just telling the strange stories of growing up, it’s nice to be able to say look, we better watch out a little bit because in a lot of ways we’re losing the foreplay of life. You know what I mean? Which is record stores and the movie going experience and all that kind of thing. And technology is really I think, taking us down a bad road. And our history, how far back our history goes in terms of younger people now, it’s shorter and shorter all the time. And I think it’s kind of dangerous for us.

Ron Bennington: Well we don’t even actually sit around and think about sporting events and things that used to be like “Ali – Frazier”, people talked about that for years. Now I bet people can’t go back 4 or 5 Super Bowls before you forget who was there. There becomes less and less time to let anything sink in before you have an opinion. Everybody’s a critic now and you bring that up in your book. Everybody’s a critic of what each other should be doing as well.

Billy Bob Thornton: Well people always blame the system, but the fact of the matter is that at some point, the people have to take responsibility.

Ron Bennington: Exactly.

Billy Bob Thornton: And like record labels and movie studios and governments and whatever they are, those have always been eating machines. And they always will be. So, in other words, you can’t, if you swim across a swamp and an alligator eats you, you can’t say alligators are such horrid creatures because you know damn well if you swim across a swamp maybe an alligator gonna eat you. (laughs) So you have to look at the establishment or whatever, this system as an eating machine and a moneymaking operation. But what happened is finally, I mean where they are, where the evil comes over them is that they finally figured out what people really want and that’s that people all want to be accepted and recognized and noticed. So they start selling them gizmos that are named after them, you know “Youtube”, “Life”, “My Place”, “Me.com”. So you start naming everything after people who make them, to give them the illusion that they’re important and yet the people are really not important to them and in the meantime these people are getting rich off of people selling them these gizmos and by the way, it’s a way of sort of controlling people because what they’ve done is they’ve gotten people so focused in on the technology of life that we’re actually losing the magic in life and it’s a real frightening thing and I’d like to see our kids and grandkids actually sort of revert back to heroes and idols and magic and that kind of thing.

Kinky Friedman: Good fucking luck.

Ron Bennington: Yeah right. I don’t know if we’ve ever turned back from any technology that we’ve ever had like once it’s here, it is here. But these things are like little hits of acid.

Billy Bob Thornton: Oh I know.

Kinky Friedman: Well there’s also about 12 guys pretending to be Billy Bob that are tweeting stuff right now while we’re here.

Billy Bob Thornton: Well that’s the creepy part of it, is that people tell me this, that I twittered something.

Kinky Friedman: Some of them are pretty good actually.

Billy Bob Thornton: And the thing is, I don’t do any of that stuff and don’t know how and don’t have any kind of Facebook or Twitter or anything and then evidently I do. And when I checked into it, I said well you got get that off of here. Nobody can do that. But it’s actually okay supposedly now for other people to just pretend they’re you. And to get it taken off..in other words, nobody had to go and present proof that they were me to get a twitter account.

Kinky Friedman: No, it requires a jihad to get it off, you can’t just…

Billy Bob Thornton: But I have to, in order to take it down, I have to prove it’s me. And it’s just like in making this book, we asked for some pictures from the movie studios to put in the book. A picture of me in this movie and that movie, whatever, like you do . And they wanted, like one of first studios I think that kind of they talked to said “We want a $100 for the picture and we want favored nations so if another studio wants more than $100 we get equal to that” or whatever. And I’m thinking you know what? Every mouth breathing asshole on the internet has all these pictures and they can have them and they can get me to sign them and sell them for 20 bucks or whatever it is they sell them for these days. That’s okay, and all these pictures are on the internet and anybody can get them anytime, but for my own book I’ve got to pay a $100 for them.

Kinky Friedman: Now what did you do? You did not pay?

Billy Bob Thornton: We didn’t use them and we used behind the scenes pictures.

Kinky Friedman: That is called an artistic vision. That’s an attitude toward life. He refuses to pay the hundred bucks where as I would say piss on it. I would say pay it and forget it. To hell with it, I’ll pay $3000 to use all these fucking pictures that are really mine anyway. And that’s a different attitude and I admire his because you could offer him $10 million just to put you in as a character in this movie, he will not do it. He’ll say “No, he doesn’t belong in it. I just met the guy. I’m not going to put him in.” And that’s amazing how, I know very few people that can live a life like that and that’s I think admirable.

Ron Bennington: When you broke through with “Sling Blade”, when that became this huge thing, that was the 90’s where it seemed like every year we were getting some new independent person rolling out. It was a very exciting time for film. Do you think same age, same script, you’d be able to get that presented the same way today?

Billy Bob Thornton: No. No.

Ron Bennington: Things have just changed.
Billy Bob Thornton: I would never get “Sling Blade” made. There’s an entire genre that’s been wiped out by, I’m not sure exactly who, a combination of people in Hollywood, but the adult drama is gone. Or what we used to call “movies”. And it’s incredible how hard it is to get an adult drama financed now. And even an adult comedy frankly. Unless it’s about guys that get caught with a sheep in a hotel room in Mexico or something like that.

Ron Bennington: You’ve got to really broaden it up and make it as silly as possible.

Billy Bob Thornton: Yeah, exactly.

Ron Bennington: 10 gross jokes sprinkled throughout.

Billy Bob Thornton: Well I’ll put it this way. I came up the hard way and not to bitch and moan and talk about walking through the snow to school, but I spent years and years and learned a lot about the movie business and about acting and went through the ropes. And one of the reasons that I wanted to do this book is because of one asshole who wrote into somebody and, I don’t get on the internet and stuff, but friends of mine always think that I want to know anytime somebody says something awful about me, so they call me. It’s like hey thanks. You know what I mean?

Ron Bennington: I have that friend.

Billy Bob Thornton: Yeah, right. They’ll call you up and say “Hey sorry about what they’re saying.” And I’m like what? I didn’t know about this. Unless you called me I wouldn’t even know this. So anyway, a friend of mine shows me this thing that some guy said to me after I had a problem up in Canada, which wasn’t a problem. I was shocked that it was news. And one way or the other, some guy writes in on the internet or whatever, it’s like Bill’s Blog or whatever the hell he was and says that I should appreciate what I have. And it made me think. First of all, how do you know what I have? Because it’s probably not what you think it is. Second of all, you may want to study up on how I got it, whatever I do have. And that’s one of the reasons I really wanted to this book is to just to say look, I kind of came out of nothing and I worked hard all my life and I didn’t roller skate down a banister into a pile of cantaloupes on Youtube and get famous. That’s not how it happened. And God bless people that can do that, but these days it’s easier to become somebody through scandal or doing something stupid. And that’s what people are looking for. We live in a society of cynical people who are looking for the next person who messes up or gets hurt. And people call that entertainment. And see you have reality shows where people who don’t particularly have any talent, but they do something moronic and become famous for it, but if you’re already famous and you do something moronic, you lose your career.

Ron Bennington: You bring up a guy that I just want to mention for a second because people think of him one way, but that was Jim Varney who was such an amazingly funny guy. Everyone just knows him by the one character, but I saw him doing stand up one time in Florida. He walked in off the street and he had been hunting pig somewhere and he was wearing hip boots. And he came in and did stand up. And it was the funniest shit I’ve ever seen in my life.

Billy Bob Thornton: Jim was one of the most talented guys I ever knew. And he and I were both managed by a guy named Phil Walden who was the head of Capricorn Records, the guy that was Otis Redding’s manager and discovered the Allman Brothers and everybody. In the 80’s, he managed me and Varney. And sometimes Varney and I and Phil would be sitting in a hotel room someplace and Varney would start something and we would laugh until we thought we were going to have to call a paramedic. I mean this guy was amazingly funny and a great human being. And it’s a shame to me that he died as young as he did because we were actually, he and I were planning some things that were going to get him out there to the public in a different light. As opposed to just the “Ernest” character.

Ron Bennington: Well I think that in the kind of films that you end up making, if he would have had that chance to add that extra dimension where we see all that stuff as two dimensional. And it was funny as shit, you know we forget it, it was funny as hell, but he could do a million different voices and go off in a million different places.

Billy Bob Thornton: Oh, he was incredible. The first time I ever saw him was when cable was young and he was on…

Ron Bennington: “Fernwood 2 Night” and stuff like that?

Billy Bob Thornton: Well this was even before, there was like a Showtime special of country comedians or something, because Minnie Pearl was even on it. And he did this character named “Elrod” who laid around the house all the time and didn’t do anything.

Ron Bennington: He’d be like “Elrod, get out here and help me water the lawn. These buckets is heavy.”

Billy Bob Thornton: Yeah. These buckets is heavy. Yeah.

Ron Bennington: Funny as shit. I think it’s great to see that you put this together too. And I’m glad that you’re talking about the music in it and I’m glad that you’re talking about some of the social things that are going on. Kinky, it’s always great to see you too man. It’s “The Billy Bob Tapes: A Cave Full of Ghosts”, it’s available out there. Thanks so much for stopping by.

Kinky Friedman: Fuck ’em and feed ’em Fruit Loops, right?

Ron Bennington: Alright. Fuck ’em and feed ’em Fruit Loops. That’s the way we go out on that. Thanks so much guys.

=======================================

You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio.  Not yet a subscriber?  Click here for a free trial subscription.

.

You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews at RonBenningtonInterviews.com.

.

Grab a copy of the new book at amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com or anywhere books are sold.