The Billy Bob Tapes

… Paula’s record shop, with rows of records waitin’

For dreamers to flip through them one by one

Hey, there’s one we just saw, on Bandstand they were ratin’

Just look at all those labels, like Roulette and Sun.

Saturday afternoon a half a century on

Bewildered ghosts line all that’s left of Main Street

The magic left with the digital dawn

The remnants pass as whispers in retreat.

Yeah, I’m gonna have the nerve to say

That those were the days

And I’ll say it right in your face

Yeah, I’m gonna have the nerve to tell

A story that’s hard to sell

To the Bank of Wireless Wizards and their fools

That bought this place

—“Saturday Afternoon a Half a Century On”

(Thornton/Andrew)

THE TIME I REMEMBER THE MOST IN MALVERN WAS MY LIFE IN MUSIC, because that’s all I wanted to do. I grew up hearing my uncle sing songs by Jim Reeves, Hank Williams, Webb Pierce, Jimmie Rodgers. That kind of country music was really my first music; we didn’t know anything about the blues.

When we finally got electricity at my grandmother’s house, we got a radio, and that’s how I heard Elvis Presley. Elvis really did something to me. I heard his songs on the radio, and I thought, Wow, that’s amazing. These days it’s real easy to think that Elvis Presley was just this fluffy kind of deal, but when he came along, he changed things. Elvis didn’t write songs, so he wasn’t a songwriter. He was just this big star and he was sexy. A lot of people don’t really know who Elvis’s real influence was, but I do because I’m close to a lot of people who were close to him because I grew up near Memphis. They tell me that who he really wanted to be like was Dean Martin. People always say that Elvis’s big influence were the black gospel singers, and he did love that stuff. But if you listen to Elvis sing, and then you listen to Dean Martin sing, you’ll notice that. Listen to “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime.” You’ll get it.

My uncle gave me a little Roy Rogers guitar that had a picture of Roy Rogers and a little rope on it. I would bang around on that. One Christmas somebody gave me one of those little washtub things made out of tin that looked like one of those pedestals in the circus, that the elephant puts his foot up on. In fact, it did have some kind of circus shit on it; it was pink and blue with a picture of elephants on it. It was one of those things you could stand on and pretend you’re in the circus. The first song I ever wrote was called “Cat Shit on a Rat Box.” That was the only line, and I even remember the melody, it kind of sounds like a Chuck Berry song. I would stand on that elephant stand and bang that song out on my little Roy Rogers guitar, over and over and over.

In 1964 the shit hit the fan in music. My brother Jimmy and I were instantly rock-and-roll junkies, and when we saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, that’s what changed my life; you try to tell a kid nowadays what it was like to see, with your own eyes, history being made—most of them don’t get it. My son Willie gets it, which is great. I can tell him about it and he’ll listen to it. By the time he and his brother, Harry, were seven and eight, I turned them on to Mothers of Invention, Captain Beefheart, and the Bonzo Dog Band and all these people. I think that’s why they “get it.”

Anyway, I remember when Jimmy and I first saw the Beatles on our old black-and-white Zenith TV. We were literally lying on our stomachs on the hardwood floor, looking like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting, watching the fucking Beatles when they first came to America. I’ll never forget that shit as long as I live. They did “She Loves You,” “I Wanna Hold Your Hand”—they were such heroes. When I saw them that day, I knew that was what I wanted to do. When the Beatles came along, their sound actually changed the world. I mean, even though they were playing their pop songs at that time, it changed the world. Their sound was completely different—they were influenced by skiffle music they had in England, along with listening to Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins, which is ironic because here, nobody gave a shit about Little Richard or whoever until the Beatles. The British Invasion was good for this reason. English bands who grew up listening to American music on the radio would listen to all this wild shit and they would take a Chuck Berry song, or a Little Richard or Carl Perkins song, or whoever it was, and they’d play it in a way that was palatable and acceptable to the people in America on the radio. But the way they played, it didn’t sound like Chuck Berry. It sounded like them doing that. So the way that sounded was just this perfect mixture of things that created what we know as sort of pop-rock music. It was an amazing deal.

So then, of course, every night Ed Sullivan was on, my brother and I were in front of the TV. We saw the Animals, the Kinks, the Stones, Freddy and the Dreamers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, Peter and Gordon, Chad and Jeremy, all of them, and that became my obsession. We started our first band with no instruments. We used cardboard boxes for drums and we sang with a pretend microphone, a mop or whatever it was. We took rubber bands and stretched them over cigar boxes. The Dave Clark Five was one of our personal favorites, so the first songs we probably ever played as a band were on cardboard boxes doing “Glad All Over” and “Catch Us If You Can.”

I got my first drum kit when I was nine. It was from a Sears or Montgomery Ward catalog. It was this little kid set with cardboard heads that I broke real quick. Later, when I finally got a real set, it had Mylar heads. I thought Mylar sounded pretty fancy, like something Dave Clark played on. Of course I broke those in half pretty soon too.

When I was thirteen or fourteen, there was a kid named Don who had a red sparkle Ludwig drum set—“kit” didn’t come along till later, they called it a drum “set” when I was growing up. Don and I played against each other in Little League—we were both pitchers—and I used to go hang out by his house to watch him play left-handed drums with his band, and I would be eyeing that red sparkle Ludwig drum set.

I begged my parents, and I had to work it off, but they paid $150 for this used Ludwig red sparkle drum set without a high hat—just one cymbal and four drums. I’ve got a picture of that somewhere.

MY FIRST REAL BAND WAS CALLED THE MCCOVEYS BECAUSE IT SOUNDED like the McCoys. The McCoys were a band from Union City, Indiana. They did “Hang on Sloopy,” which hit number one on the Billboard charts in 1965. Their guitar player was Rick Derringer, who later on became a big guy with Johnny Winter. In those days we had one amplifier and you plugged two guitars into it, each in a different channel. We had no bass player. I played drums. We played instrumentals because we didn’t have any microphones. We loved the Ventures so we would do “Walk, Don’t Run,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and “Hanky Panky” by Tommy James and the Shondells. We did an instrumental version of “Ballad of the Green Beret” by Sgt. Barry Sadler. The whole point of the song is the guy doesn’t sing, he talks. And it’s a story about this guy talking about “fighting soldiers from the sky, fearless men who jump and die” … See what I mean? So it’s kind of pointless to do the song without the words. It’s like “let’s do an instrumental version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.”

The big band in my town was called the Yardleys. The British Invasion was in full swing at the time, and they named themselves the Yardleys because it sounded British, like Yardley of London that made all the perfume and scented soap. The Yardleys were Steve Walker, Larry Byrd, Bo Jones, Bucky Griggs, and Butch Allen. They had a Farfisa organ, bass, guitar, drums, and Bo Jones played the trumpet. They played original songs and actually made a couple of 45s that were played regionally, but they may as well have been the fucking Rolling Stones or the Beatles as far as I was concerned.

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?”

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.

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.

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.”

The first song I played for J.D. was “Yesterday’s Gone” by Chad and Jeremy. I said, “Let’s record this and see what happens” and we did. I said, “I like this. All the guys I play with in my solo band, they all live everywhere, all around the country. Do you know anybody locally?” He knew this guy Mike Butler, who’s a terrific guitar player. He came over and we formed the Boxmasters. Brad Davis, a great bluegrass player who played in my solo band, he plays with us now. Brad and I have been playing together for thirteen or fourteen years. The Boxmasters are me, J.D., and Brad. We make the records, the three of us. When we tour, there’s six of us in the band.

The Boxmasters started out as a thing that was a combination of hillbilly music and the British Invasion. I’m not talking about country music like they have now, but actual hillbilly music and country music of the fifties and sixties. Webb Pierce, Del Reeves, guys like that who we really loved. J. D. Andrew and I put this band together to mix that music with the music of the Animals, the Beatles, and the Kinks, with the Rolling Stones thrown in for good measure. The sound has kind of grown to where we want it to be, which is more just like a sixties rock-and-roll band, without so much hillbilly in it. We first signed with Vanguard, which is an old-school label, and because it was an old-school label, they let us use their original label on our records. For our first two albums, we put a bonus CD in there of covers that all the Boxmasters fans love to hear us do live. We ended up doing three albums for Vanguard and we had a great time there. Except for the bonus covers, we did all original music. I’ve probably written close to a thousand songs. The Boxmasters now have about eight or nine records in the can. Our next one comes out this year (2012).

Geoff Emerick, who was an engineer for the Beatles, said one of the things he loves about our band is that we have a backbeat you can hear. That was a great compliment. We have a great fan base. There’s not many of them, but our fans really love us, and we sell enough to keep afloat. If we had come along in 1967, we would have done pretty well I think. Some people are really going to take exception to me saying that, but I don’t give a shit because I believe that 100 percent. If we had come along in the mid- to late sixties, we would have been a big band. But it doesn’t work that way anymore. We write a lot of good songs, and frankly, we’re a pretty damn good band.

A couple of years ago, for old times’ sake, I called Larry Byrd, one of the Yardleys, and I flew him out to play organ on the Boxmasters’ record Holy Toledo with J.D., Danny Baker, and myself. Generally, the guys in the Yardleys wouldn’t talk to me when I was growing up, but they were my heroes, and Larry was always kind of nice to me.

CHAPTER TEN

“Saturday Afternoon a Half a Century On”