fawny.org

Single-sided, journalistically reprehensible transcription of nothing but Billy Bob Thornton’s utterances on Q

[Mumbled greeting]

— That’s the ones that have been released. We’ve recorded about five.

— I don’t know what you’re talking about.

— Uh, I don’t know what you mean by that. [Clears throat]

— I’m not sure what that means.

— Hmpf.

— Uh. Never met him.

— I don’t really know him.

— Well, I said hello to him once. He’s a nice guy.

— No.

— Um. I don’t—

— No.

— Shit, I don’t know.

— I just liked baseball when I was a kid.

— Uh, I don’t know. Maybe.

— Uhh. I – I subscribed to a magazine called, um, Famous Monsters of Filmland, which was – the publisher was a guy named Forrest J. Ackerman, who passed away recently.

— They had a contest where you could build your own model, and it could be like a King Kong or it could be, it could be anything from something that you created yourself to like one of the monsters that was actually in – well, you know, in some of the magazines. It could be Frankenstein all the way to Phantom of the Opera. They made these plastic models in those days that you could buy and put together. But this was like a thing – if you create your own world of it, you know, build telephone poles, make the railroad tracks and everything. And I actually did enter it once. I didn’t win anything. But I gave it a shot. And, uh – but it was a big deal for us kids in those days.

— Ehh? Music? No, it was a monster magazine.

— Would you say that to Tom Petty?

— Yeah.

— Really?

— Would you explain why it’s not a hobby?

— Yeah, I am, I am, since you were instructed not to talk about shit like that, yeah, I am reacting to that, yeah.

— Well, the producer was instructed, so somewhere along the way—

— First of all, that wasn’t supposed to be mentioned either. You know. But, uh—

— Uh, not really.

— No.

— Yeah. That’s correct. That’s correct.

— Yeah.

— Well, I think it’s odd that you have to smoke inside of a white stripe outside. [Chuckle]

— Yeah.

— Well, there’s plenty of “context” without all that. Yeah. So.

— [Clears throat] We’re not really new.

— Well, I made eight albums.

— I don’t know.

— Well, what I’m explaining is we said do not talk about shit like that, and we also said that we didn’t want to hear anything about how this was my “first love.” You wouldn’t say that to Tom Petty, would you? “I understand music is your first love.” Well, my first love was a chick named Lisa Cohn, you know what I mean?

— Uhm, that’d be great.

— Yeah, it’s a mixture of the British Invasion with hillbilly music – something that I know more about than, say, a band who’s 20 years old that you wouldn’t say that to, yeah. I grew up as pretty much a music historian, so. Yeah, cosmic cowboy music.

— Not lately. Not in the last 30 years, no.

— Well, the good news is that Willie’s audience is pretty eclectic. He has everything from bikers to, you know, old people to young people, and so somewhere in there you find an audience. Or at least we do in Europe and the United States. Canadian audiences seem to be very reserved.

— Yeah.

— Uh, you know, we tend to play places where people throw things at each other, and, uh, here they just sort of sit there, you know? And it doesn’t matter what you say to ’em.

— Some are theatres. Some are like stadiums or whatever you want to call it. But, um, uh, it’s very, yeah, very, um – well, it’s mashed potatoes and no gravy, you know what I’m saying?

— Yeah. Yeah, you do, actually, on a lot of things.

— Yeah, absolutely. I’ve seen that in several of the shops.

— Um, the guys are gonna do an instrumental version of a song called “Turn It Over,” which is on this record that we have now.

— Um, I’m a drummer.

— No. We don’t cart those around at 6:00 in the morning.

[Clears throat twice]

— Absolutely.

— We’ll give it a shot.