Anyone who may have just discovered Billy Bob Thornton through his superb, Golden Globe-winning performance in 2014 as the mysterious, demonic hitman Lorne Malvo on FX’s dark-humored mini-series “Fargo” might be pleasantly surprised to discover that this Oscar-nominated actor, director and Oscar-winning screenwriter is also a bona fide, singer/songwriter and drummer with the white hot rock band, The Boxmasters.
Thornton’s band —- a collective unit that he co-founded in 2007 in Bellflower, Calif., with J.D. Allen, a guitarist, bassist, songwriter and Grammy-winning sound engineer —- is the real deal, not a mindless ego trip or a public relations ploy for the film star.
The Boxmasters is, instead, the embodiment of Thornton’s passionate commitment to rock, pop, country, the Memphis sound and the whole American roots rainbow that he has loved since he was a poor kid growing up in the musically explosive 1960s in his hometown of Hot Springs, Ark.
Celebrating the release of their two CD album, “Somewhere Down the Road,” Thornton and his Boxmasters colleagues are on an intensive road tour of more than 30 one-night gigs throughout the South (including a Grand Ole Opry appearance) and the West, rolling into Connecticut to rock and roll on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 8 p.m. at The Ridgefield Playhouse in Ridgefield.
Although the hard-working band, which has built up a solid cult following, has now made acclaimed CDs, toured throughout the United States and Canada and opened for such superstars as Willie Nelson and ZZ Top, it has run into dismissive commentary that it’s just an ego trip for Thornton or merely another celebrity vanity band based on buzz and no bang.
“We put up with that sort of comment for a long time, but that was said by people who didn’t realize that I actually grew up in music, and movies were kind of an accidental thing that happened to me,” Thornton says by phone while relaxing on his bunk on the band bus in Kent, Ohio.
“To tell you the truth,” he adds, “music for me was the salvation of my youth. I didn’t think about much else other than baseball. I was one of those kids who actually saw The Beatles on ‘The Ed Sullivan Show.’ I laid there on the floor and watched on a little black-and-white screen,” he recalls.
“We watched ‘Hullabaloo,’ ‘Shindig,’ ‘Where the Action Is,’ and all those shows. Even before we had instruments — I was maybe 9 or 10 — we would get brooms and pretend we had guitars and would sing Dave Clark Five and Beatles songs and stuff like that on the porch. Once The Beatles came around, that’s all we ever wanted to do, and I was already pretty high on music simply because of Elvis Presley.”
Thornton’s mother was a huge Elvis fan and gave Billy Bob his very first record album, Elvis’s “King Creole” LP. “The first record I bought with my own paws in the record store,” he adds, “was a 45 of ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand.’ “
“I was such a music geek that I read every liner note. I even knew the names of who did the mastering on the recordings when I was just 12 years old. I would listen to, say, Jim Reeves or Ray Price, or Hank Williams on the same day I was listening to Captain Beefheart or The Mothers of Invention. I had a really diverse musical taste, and that’s all I ever did,” he says.
Through high school, he played drums in bands and later became a roadie with a sound company in his late teens and early 20s.
“I went to LA to get in a band and ended up in an acting class one day. So really the ’80s was the only decade where I didn’t really play any music, with the exception of playing drums in ’82 and ’83 with a ZZ Top tribute band. I was busy starving to death in LA, and was having to pick up little acting jobs here and there just to survive.”
Even before the founding of The Boxmasters, Thornton had managed to sustain his passion for music — his first real love since his hardscrabble days as a kid growing up in Arkansas — by making four recordings under his own name.
And now he’s got an industrial strength touring and recording band as a way to express that love. “Everything I ever loved,” he stresses, “culminated in this band because I’m a child of the ’60s.”
Boxmasters Evolution
Starting out as a mix of British Invasion influences, LA rock and Southern styles, including a taste of hillbilly, The Boxmasters band has evolved over the years into two distinct musical personas, each of which is represented individually on the new two CD set.
One style grooves on jangly, pop sounding, up-tempo rock, accented with tastes of Memphis and other diverse flavors. And the other is rooted in a mood-oriented, introspective sound with the vibe generated by original songs, many co-written by Thornton and Allen.
Not surprisingly, Thornton’s lyrics, are direct and accessible, earthy and emotional, and seem ripped right out of everyone’s everyday life experiences. Or they can also be highly imaginative, dark, enigmatic, funny, ambiguous in seven different ways and outrageous, even sometimes accented with bittersweet philosophical, pop pearls of wisdom.
A prolific songwriter, Thornton can write a lyric, invent a melodic lick or come up with the idea for a song’s hook or structure virtually anywhere from the band bus to the studio, and anytime, even not that far away from downbeat time for the next show.
“People ask me how I come up with this stuff,” he says of his lifetime immunity to writer’s block. “I just say to them, ‘You know what? Just hang out with me for two weeks, and you’ll see.’ “
Friends think of him as a creative force, a man with a mind on fire whether he’s acting, directing, writing screenplays or songs, or snapping evocative photographs that wind up as cover art, images with striking juxtapositions of objects. A typical, cryptic Thornton image graces the cover for “Somewhere Down the Road,” depicting his favorite cowboy boots sitting on a barren floor near a wall socket in what looks like a bleak, lonely motel room. Weirdly appropriate and amusing, it’s a kind of comical, countrified, Salvador Daliesque juxtaposition of disparate objects, suitable for any kind of interpretation you might come up with.
The deep well for Thornton’s creative writing sources, he believes, will never run dry.
“I’ve had a very eclectic life. I’ve been everything from a hobo to a movie star.
“So there’s no shortage of subject matter. There’s still plenty of stuff I haven’t even mined from when I was a kid or a teenager, or when I was on the road traveling, trying to find where I was going to end up.”
Nor is he at all worried that the great comforts of success and security might numb his insatiable urge to write, a motivation initially inspired by the struggle, hard times and scuffling one goes through.
“Of course you can write songs once you’ve actually reached a lot of your goals and the problems that brings about,” he says of his transition from starving artist to acclaimed artist.
“They say you can’t go home again, and that’s true in a lot of ways,” he says of not being able to live your past again except in your imagination.
“When you reach the top of the hill,” he says of the present, “there’s a certain sadness in it because it’s like all your dreams have been realized. And you think without your dreams, you have nothing.”
But that’s not any kind of end point in life at all, he says emphatically.
“That’s when you have to create new dreams. You always have to be hungry too and strive to improve. And that’s pretty much the way it is with our band, always moving forward, always improving.”
What To Expect
To share its constantly growing backlog of newly created original material, the band has just made available for download on its website, theboxmasters.com, a CD called “Providence,” selections from which will be played at the Ridgefield date.
So what else can you expect at the live performance?
Allen, who’s also on board the band bus, describes a typical concert this way: “We come out on stage and blast through a few songs to get everybody fired up. Then we play moodier kinds of songs before bringing the heat back up for the end. Billy, who’s a great storyteller, tells stories about where some of the songs come from, which people love,” he says.
Thornton chimes in, “I like to talk to the people and kind of get to know who we’re playing for.”
As part of the affable, Billy Bob brand of Southern hospitality, the band sits for awhile at the merchandise table autographing CDs and memorabilia while chatting with patrons. After the show, the band, which has a strong, unpretentious, populist streak, goes out into the audience for more meeting and greeting, a nightly ritual that Thornton enjoys as much as anybody in the house.
“We want the audience to know that we don’t like them to be shy. We’re just a little, old band from Bellflower, Calif., and we might even make a few new fans,” Thornton says.
BILLY BOB THORNTON AND THE BOXMASTERS perform on Wednesday, Sept. 9, at 8 p.m. at The Ridgefield Playhouse, 80 East Ridge Road, Ridgefield. Tickets: $60. Information: ridgefieldplayhouse.org and box office, (203) 438-5795.
