For Billy Bob Thornton, the music came first

Long before 'Sling Blade,' there was Nothin' Doin' ... and a ZZ Top cover band

By Michael Hoinski
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN-STATESMAN
Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Scarlett Johansson is working on an album of Tom Waits covers. Jada Pinkett Smith is the lead screamer in a metal band called Wicked Wisdom. And Dennis Quaid, of Dennis Quaid and the Sharks, is the celebrity frontman of choice for Austin's charity set. It's easy to dog these and other actors-cum-musicians — among them Steven Seagal, Bruce Willis, Juliette Lewis, Keanu Reeves, Russell Crowe and Kevin Bacon — for parlaying their onscreen fame into onstage excess, but Billy Bob Thornton is a different beast.

With the release of "Beautiful Door," his fourth album in six years, Thornton, 52, shows he's anything but a one-note wonder. Still, do people really take his moonlighting gig seriously?

"Yeah..." Thornton says over the phone, not so much in the affirmative as in receipt of the question. It's 9 a.m. L.A. time, and he's burnt from a late-night rehearsal session in preparation for a 26-date tour that includes a stop at Antone's on Sunday.

"You know, I've been doing this since I was, like, 14 years old, so I guess I would answer your question the same way Tom Petty would answer it: If people are taking me seriously, I don't know."

Unlike his best buddy Dwight Yoakam, who co-starred with him in "Sling Blade," Thornton was a musician before he was an actor. But even before that, he possessed an affinity for the written word. As a child growing up in Hot Springs, Ark. — in the same neck of the woods as former president Bill Clinton — he avidly penned short stories in class. Ambition like that would seem to translate into above-average marks, but Thornton says he wasn't very good in school because he was severely dyslexic. (He's since undergone treatment.)

"Back then, they didn't have labels for anything," Thornton says. "And they didn't really have programs for things, so they just thought I was slow or lazy or whatever. In school, I just daydreamed: I was either gonna be in a rock 'n' roll band or a pitcher for the St. Louis Cardinals."

Ultimately, the fastball of Cardinals ace Bob Gibson was no match for the fever-blister sounds of the Sun Records acts on which Thornton was weaned, like Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis. By the time the Beatles, the Kinks and the Stones had hopped the pond, Thornton's fate was sealed, at least temporarily.

"You know how Martin Scorsese is such a passionate guy about movies?" Thornton says. "You hear him interviewed, and from the time he was a little kid, he would try to get a camera and have character actors in every movie and everything ... well, I was that way with music. I read all the liner notes. I knew guys' names. I would know the mastering engineer on something, you know?"

Billy, Dusty and ... Billy Bob?

Thornton has Texas' most hirsute band to thank for kick-starting his musical career. Back in the early '80s, he was living in Houston and playing in a group called Nothin' Doin', with brothers Michael and Nick Shipp. One night, after a show at Cardi's, they were approached by a guy who suggested they trade in their originals for ZZ Top covers. Turns out the guy was Scott Weiss of Lone Wolf Productions, ZZ Top's publisher. This legitimized the idea, and thus was born the first of many incarnations of the ZZ Top tribute band Tres Hombres. Parody proved profitable: The newly named trio opened for Ted Nugent, the Earl Scruggs Revue, Richie Havens — even a then-unknown Stevie Ray Vaughan. "I was just the drummer," Thornton says, "so I didn't have to have a beard or anything."

Flash forward two decades — and roughly three dozen movie roles and an Academy Award later — to 2001, when Thornton, newly married to Angelina Jolie, rekindled his affair with music by releasing "Private Radio." The album was produced by Marty Stuart and it mixed honky-tonk with perverse spoken-word numbers such as "Forever," wherein Thornton confesses to his lover that he's wearing the pink panties she left in his car.

Two years later, Thornton released "The Edge of the World," a Southern-rock record with guest appearances by Daniel Lanois and Warren Zevon. Two years after that, he released "Hobo," a concept album about manifest destiny as told through wayward souls making pilgrimages to California.

Music for the furniture-phobic

That brings us to "Beautiful Door." Thornton and songwriting partner/guitarist Brad Davis of Commerce, in Northeast Texas, put it together over the course of a year and a half, churning out about 30 songs, the last 12 of which made the final cut. The result is a mood setter that balances pacifying enunciation with no-holds-barred imagery. It melds the genres of his previous efforts — roots, country, blues, rock, hillbilly and folk — into accomplished Americana-lite.

The subject matter, however, is anything but. "This record's about life and death, living and dying, and confronting both of 'em," Thornton says. That's no more apparent than on opener "It's Just Me," a metaphysical suicide note sung in a soothing croon that some critics have confused with breathy.

"He's a spirit living inside of somebody," Thornton says of the protagonist, "singing to them, saying, 'Hey, listen, I'm in here. Don't let me bug you and don't worry about it, but this is where I should have been all along ... and I shouldn't have gone away ... and this is my fault. You live your life. I'm just staying here, where it feels good."

Personal songs like this are Thornton's meat and potatoes. "I Gotta Grow Up," which provides insight into the mind of a man married five times, is another such example.

"It's like you go through these different incarnations in your life where for a period of time, whatever person you're with, that's kind of your life," Thornton says. "And after awhile you figure, well, maybe I should get my own life."

Then there's "Always Countin'," an acoustic, toe-tapping prescription for what Thornton calls a "pretty complex" obsessive-compulsive disorder. (He's creeped out by antique furniture; he fears certain types of silverware.) About the condition, Thornton says, "I think it has something to do with growing up in a really tough way. As a kid, you try to latch on to things where you feel like you have some control ... a lot of abused children have OCD."

Of course, every meat-and-potatoes guy can be tempted by sushi. On the title track, Thornton recalls his "Primary Colors" days and tackles politics: "Maybe I'm crazy/ Maybe I'm blind/ 'Cause I can't understand/ The kind of mind/ That kills for God/ Or money or the land/ It just seems odd/ To take that kind of stand."

Hearing, say, James McMurtry spit those lyrics out in his trademark snarl might incite a small revolution, but Thornton's slow-as-molasses delivery makes you yearn for the revolution to be televised.

Thornton says he never did think the drummer/singer dynamic looked cool live (he thinks fellow Arkie Levon Helm of the Band is the only person who can pull it off), so don't expect him to impersonate Don Henley at Antone's; instead, he'll be front and center. Do, however, expect a surprise guest or two.

After all, Thornton owns a place in Austin, and he's spent a lot of time here filming "The Alamo" and "Friday Night Lights." Along the way, he's forged relationships with local roots-rock royalty, including Joe Ely and Stephen Bruton, who writes in an e-mail: "I have a gig on Sundays in Austin, but as soon as it's done, I'll be at Antone's to do whatever I can to support one of my heroes."

That makes at least one person who takes Billy Bob Thornton the musician seriously.