WASHINGTON — When the nation’s top journalists attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday, there’s a good chance their ears will still be ringing from an Oscar winner jamming out with his band the night before.
Billy Bob Thornton‘s band The Boxmasters will headline a private show at The Hamilton on Friday night, an annual pre-dinner event organized by the Rolling Stones’ musical director Chuck Leavell.
“He’s asked us to do it a few years in a row, but we were always unavailable,” Thornton told WTOP. “They have various people from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal who have bands, they get to kick their heels up the night before the Correspondents’ Dinner, then they try to have a national touring act to headline the show, so that’s us this year. We’re playing for the news folks.”
The rest of us can check out The Boxmasters live at Rams Head in Annapolis on Thursday night.
“We’ve played there a lot,” Thornton said. “It’s one of our favorite places. They’re pretty familiar with us there, more than the [news] folks at The Hamilton. They’re too busy telling stories on TV anyway.”
The band formed in 2007, releasing a self-titled debut with such original songs as “The Poor House” and eclectic covers of the Beatles, Mel Tillis, Mott The Hoople and The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band. Seven albums later, the band is touring its new effort “Tea Surfing,” featuring such songs as “Easy Summer.”
“We’ve always sounded like a band that was influenced by the British music of the ’60s combined with Americana,” Thornton said. “The ‘Tea Surfing’ record, the new one we have out, we wrote it with the idea that: ‘Let’s write original songs in tribute to the British mod music and the Southern California music of the ’60s, but let’s write it as if we were in 1966 when we wrote these songs.”
The current lineup features Thornton on vocals, J.D. Andrew on rhythm guitar, Teddy Andreadis on keyboard, Dave Fowler on bass guitar, Kirk McKim on lead guitar and Erik Rhodes on drums. As Andrew playfully roasts his fellow bandmates, the camaraderie between the boys is undeniable.
“Teddy has horrendous ADD and he’s mostly going deaf from all the years of playing in rock bands, so he often doesn’t hear what you say, and if he does hear it, he forgets almost immediately,” Andrew joked. “In Amarillo, they have a place called the Big Texan where you can try to eat a 72-ounce steak. Billy goaded Erik into trying to eat the 72-ounce steak … We’ve called him ‘Meat Sweats’ ever since.”
Andrew and Thornton are true road warriors, dialing WTOP from a tour bus in the remote Midwest.
“We’re in the middle of Wisconsin in a place called Bowler,” Andrew said. “I looked on the map and I don’t think there’s anything around it. We were on two-lane roads driving through the woods, and we weren’t sure where our bus driver was taking us, because things are pretty remote out here.”
Thornton has made a career playing complex characters in remote locations. His first of six Golden Globe nods came in Sam Raimi’s “A Simple Plan” (1998), a snowy morality play set in rural Minnesota. Thornton played the mentally-challenged brother of the late Bill Paxton, who died earlier this year.
“Bill was one of my dearest friends,” Thornton said. “He and I used to run around together before either of us had much of a name back in the ’80s. We ended up doing three movies together. … I had just seen Bill a couple months before he passed on. It was quite a shock. … He was a very talented guy [and] one of the coolest guys you’d ever run into. He was an unselfish actor and an unselfish person.”
Likewise, he stalked snowy North Dakota in F/X’s “Fargo” (2014), based on the Coen Brothers’ flick that arrived the same year Thornton won an Oscar for writing “Sling Blade (1996). Thornton won a Globe as hit man Lorne Malvo, who terrified victims and inspired others to stand up for themselves.
Did Malvo’s predatory mindset and “shades of green” monologues change Thornton’s outlook on life?
“I kinda looked at it that way to start with,” Thornton joked. “I guess that’s why I fit the part. But that was so well-written. Noah Hawley did an amazing job on that. It was great to get up to go to work.”
Most recently, he won his second Golden Globe in Amazon’s “Goliath” (2016), playing disgraced lawyer Billy McBride, who’s become an ambulance chaser seeking redemption for past mistakes.
“I played a lawyer in ‘The Judge,’ but that’s the only time I’d ever done it,” Thornton told WTOP in 2015. “It was just a few scenes with Robert Downey Jr. and [Robert] Duvall there, so the opportunity to be able to play one for a while is really appealing to me. At the end of the day, lawyers are actors.”
Be it actors, lawyers, hit men, or musicians — even a Bad Santa — Billy Bob Thornton can do it all.
For the leader of a band called The Boxmasters, you ironically can’t put this guy in a box.
Listen to the full conversation with Billy Bob Thornton and J.D. Andrew below:
