Thornton Gets Back to Music

It’s early in Billy Bob Thornton’s afternoon sound check at the El Rey Theatre, and his rendition of two ‘60s British rock tunes is discouragingly generic--the routine bar band fare that gives a bad name to actors who want to be pop stars. Think Bruce Willis. Think Kevin Bacon. Think Keanu Reeves.

But then Thornton, an actor with a remarkable eye for absorbing character roles, switches to his own material and even the busy stage crew in the old movie house pauses to take notice.

“Private Radio,” the title song from Thornton’s debut album on Lost Highway Records, is an expression of despair and desperation that would be at home on the most acclaimed singer-songwriter collections. Think Kris Kristofferson. Think Steve Earle. Think Johnny Cash.

“There are voices in my head, and demons in my soul,” Thornton sings in a voice that may be too ragged for mainstream radio but which carries an actor’s authority and a poet’s vulnerability. “Sometimes they keep me warm, sometimes they leave me cold.”

Not everything on Thornton’s album or in his set list for Friday’s El Rey performance reaches the level of “Private Radio,” which was co-written by Marty Stuart and Mark Collie. Watching him pour his feelings into the vocal, however, makes you understand why he has returned to his first love, music, after a 20-year break for movies.

It also helps explain why the thin, soft-spoken Thornton would open himself up to the humiliation of pop observers who dismiss any actor-singer effort as a vanity project.

Before “Sling Blade,” before “Monster’s Ball” or “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” before actress Angelina Jolie, Thornton dreamed as a boy in small-town Arkansas of being a rock ‘n’ roll star. He sang Dave Clark Five and Wayne Fontana hits in a band by the time he was 10, and he spent much of his teens as a singer and drummer in other bands that played Allman Brothers and Lynyrd Skynyrd tunes.

When bookings became scarce, Thornton kept close to music in his early 20s by working as a roadie. Even when he finally headed to Los Angeles in the early ‘80s, his goal was as much music as movies. But it was the latter that finally brought him fame, thanks to his writing, directing and starring in “Sling Blade,” the marvelously original 1996 look at good and evil.

Now that he is in his mid-40s, Thornton figured that he either had to carve out time in his film career to make an album or say goodbye to ever doing it.

Like most singer-songwriters, Thornton is pretty much telling his own story in “Private Radio” and other key songs on the album, including the haunting “Your Blue Shadow,” a look at his own obsession in the months between falling in love with Jolie and untangling their lives so they could be married.

The album, which features liner notes by Johnny Cash, was slammed by some critics as simply another actor flexing his ego. Rolling Stone, however, praised it as a “pleasing Southern Gothic exploration.” The CD has sold only about 11,000 copies, and Thornton says Lost Highway didn’t adequately promote it. He says he’ll release his next album on another label. A label representative was unavailable over the weekend.

“To me, the title ‘Private Radio’ just means all the things that are going through your head--your dreams, your fears ... mostly fears,” Thornton says later, heading home in an SUV to freshen up before the evening’s concert, the start of a nine-city U.S. tour.

“I was raised in the South, where beauty and pain are mixed together almost equally. I have a lot of fears--not physical fear so much. I’m not afraid of like walking down the alley. I’m afraid for my family, things like that, and afraid of failure, always that. I used to have a fear of death. I’ve been through a lot. But these days I kind of leave that to providence.”

The walled and gated Spanish-style house, formerly owned by Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash, is a worthy estate for a two film-star family. It’s a massive, 11,000-square-foot home, but Thornton isn’t interested in giving a tour.

He heads to a downstairs recording studio where he has been working for weeks on the follow-up album to “Private Radio.” It’s a dark, melancholy concept album--and you get the sense that it is drawn from the same difficult personal journey outlined in the song “Private Radio.”

“You know my favorite song of all time?” he asks later, when talking about the stark mood of his music. “It’s [Kris Kristofferson’s] ‘Sunday Morning Coming Down.’ That song is the way I have felt much of my life ... the sense of absolute loneliness, yet still seeing the beauty of life and believing in it.”

On stage at the El Rey, the British rock numbers don’t sound any less anonymous than they did at the sound check. But he eventually moves to his own material, and the level of intensity builds. “Your Blue Shadow” casts an emotional net over the crowd, much of which was drawn by Thornton’s acting feats. Of a dozen or so fans questioned, none had heard the album.

Thornton seems torn between his lively, good-time rock ‘n’ roll past and his more mature and probing singer-songwriter instincts--and the mix is often distracting. To work out a proper balance, he probably needs to spend lots of nights in clubs playing to live audiences. The question is whether he will reserve enough time in his hectic film career to allow his music to grow.

Earlier in the day, Thornton vowed he would not abandon his music despite the challenge in overcoming the skepticism of actors in pop.

“The only thing that matters is the music,” he said at one point in his Arkansas drawl. “I know plenty of terrible musicians who aren’t actors, and I know plenty of terrible actors who aren’t musicians, so what’s the problem? The gratifying thing is that musicians seem to be able to look past the titles and the job descriptions to simply listen to the work.”

He then recalls with delight bumping into one of his favorite musicians, Elvis Costello, in a Dublin airport.

“When he said he was a big fan of my work, I thought he was talking about the movies, but he had already heard the album,” Thornton says, with the excitement of that little kid back in Arkansas thinking about making music someday. “He even came to my show and joined me on stage when I did [Leon Payne’s] ‘Lost Highway.’”

Things went so well that Thornton and his band will open for Costello on a brief Midwestern swing next month. Not a bad double bill.