The Point Radio: Billy Bob Thornton Rock God

Actor Billy Bob Thornton has give us some incredible movie roles, but did you know his passion is shared standing on stage with his band, The Box Masters? Billy talks about how music has influenced his life and about which of his movie characters were his favorites. Plus it has been a decade since Hurricane Katrina laid waste to the Gulf Coast. Experts from ANGRY PLANET (Pivot TV) and The Weather Channel weigh in on the way the forecasting has changed since that storm and the possibility of it happening all over again.

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Transcript

The Point Radio. Hey, it's Mike Rod. You know Billy Bob Thornton for some incredible movie roles, but did you know he's also a damn good musician? We'll talk to Billy and his band coming up.

Plus, it's been a decade since Hurricane Katrina slammed into the US. Experts from the Weather Channel and Angry Planet weigh in on what happened then and what could be happening now. Let's get to The Point.

This is The Point. The Point Radio. Get The Point Radio. Actor Billy Bob Thornton has given us some great moments in film and television,

but did you know that one of his greatest passions happens off the screen? The rich has got all types. Billy's part of an American rock and roll band called The Boxmasters.

And I talked to him about how early in life music became an influence. Well, probably in the crib. You know, I think most people's mother sings to them, you know, in the crib.

So probably about them. I don't think my dad sang too many lullabies, so he had a different vibe. Yeah, but I mean, I saw the, I was one of these people who saw The Beatles actually live on the Ed Sullivan show

in 1964, so. And I was already as a little bitty kid when I was three or something. You know, I already loved Elvis Presley, so. You know, I was fortunate enough to be around

when those kind of things happened, you know? And I think, you know, I don't think you ever lose that. And, you know, we had the bar set very high for us. I mean, when you're a kid and all you dream of is just being in a band.

And the examples that you have are Elvis Presley and The Beatles is like, the bar set high enough to where you know you're never going to reach your goal. So it keeps you dreaming and it keeps you hungry for the rest of your life.

They say that the music you buy shapes the music you love. So what was the first 45 you bought? The first 45 that I walked in and bought with them my own mitts was I want to hold your hand by The Beatles.

Wow, amazing. The first record I owned was, my mom gave me a copy of the King Creole record by, so those were the first records I had. Among those performing along with Billy is JD Andrew.

And I talked to him about how the band first got together. Well, initially, you know, I was hired as a recording engineer to work on Billy's sport, solo record titled Beautiful Bill Work.

And that's kind of been my trade for, you know, my career. And so we were working on some stuff. And one day Billy came down and asked me to play guitar on a cover of a Hank Williams song for a Canadian TV show.

And I was the, you know, there's none of the other musicians around because they all lived in different places. And so just, you know, play guitar on this. I did, and it had a thing

that we really thought was cool. And it had a, you know, enough something there that it sparked us to start trying, more trying to record more songs. And then the next first song that we recorded

was a cover of Yesterday's Gone by Chad and Jeremy. And Billy started giving me a history lesson in some of the more obscure British invasion bands. And we started marrying those with, you know, late 50s, early 60s, Hiddl-Boolie music.

And started down that path of kind of experimental, you know, kind of cross-pollination of, you know, genres of music. And, you know, we don't sound like that anymore. We've kind of gone to a much more natural sound

in, you know, kind of late 60s, kind of pop rock kind of band, at least most of the time. And, you know, it's probably a more accessible sound than some of our more experimental stuff

that we did earlier on. The musical style of the band has been called Mod Billy. And I talked to JD about exactly what that is. Well, you know, yeah, that was the term we coined for the more early stuff that we were doing,

you know, which was the combination of the Hiddl-Boolie music with the British invasion. And kind of everything that we were doing at the beginning was kind of a Mod Billy thing. You know, Billy sang in more of a character,

he kind of gave it Alan Co. voice. And, you know, we still kind of use that term to describe our stuff, but, you know, these days we sound more, you know, in the vein of the birds and Buffalo Springfield mixed with, you know,

some more English, you know, off influences, you know, and kind of all, you know, when you boil it down to its core, you know, there's a band called Big Star out of Memphis, the literally 70s that was, you know, a band called Big Star.

And we, you know, they were kind of influenced by the same things, you know, we were, you know, they're, you know, a lot earlier, but, you know, it's basically Southern guys listening to British Rock and, you know, making that their own.

And that's pretty much what we do too. Billy told me that the band right now is in the middle of a huge US tour. Well, our tours are always about like this. And we just got off a tour of like three months ago

or something. So generally, I think the different thing this time is that we went back out sooner than we normally do. Like we just been home a couple of months and then we're right back out again

because we really want the pump to show I could be very proud of it. And, you know, we've actually kind of come up in the world a little bit, you know, I mean, my first solo record was in 2000

and this is 15 years later. And slowly but surely we've shipped away at people and we've got a really nice call following that. And so we want to go out a couple of times a year. I'd say the difference in this tour

and we're out of this kind of, it's quite an undertaking, but I think the main reason it's an undertaking first we're concerned is because it's 31 shows in 36 days. And that doesn't leave you much time off. And I think unfortunately, I think we've already used up

three or four of the days off. So I mean, from here to the end, it's pretty brutal. So, you know, we like to work a day, you know? I mean, if we're not doing a show that day, we're just sitting on the bus kind of, you know,

watching sports, you know. Back on the acting front, of course, Billy's giving us some great movie roles. I asked him if there was any of those characters that he loved to have a chance to play again one more time.

There were a couple of movies that I've done, but I wish never ended. I wish I could keep playing the characters from now on and just live in that world and keep, you know, one was called The Man Who Wasn't There.

Maybe I did with the Coenbelly, Black, White maybe. And the other one was a simple plan that I did with the series. The final issue will be by the same creative team

of Jonathan Hickman with an Alex Ross cover as well. It'll hit comic stores in December, mainly due to the fact that over the summer, certain delays caused some problems in the Secret Wars saga.

However, Marvel has assured everyone that this will not affect the launch of their all new, all different titles that have been discussed heavily on the internet for the past few weeks. Those will all be in comic stores as originally planned.

The second season of the dark comedy East Siders is finally coming back online. Originally the show appeared on YouTube and Logo TV. Now it's moving to Vimeo on demand, partly due to a Kickstarter campaign

that brought in more than $25,000. The show will become available with new episodes on Vimeo on September 15th. Meanwhile, over on YouTube, it looks like gamers are getting a plus.

YouTube Gaming has debuted, featuring live streamed and archived gaming videos. It's of course designed to compete with Amazon's Twitch and the separate pages on the outlet contain more than 25,000 games.

It's what fans of Sons of Anarchy had hoped for. Kurt Sutter is now developing a spinoff of the popular drama series. There are very few details about this, other than a possibility it may focus

on the Mayans Motorcycle Club characters and another Northern California Motorcycle Club that may be involved. Again, very few details, but Kurt Sutter has confirmed that he is doing the spinoff

and is working on it now with folks at FX. ABC Family is coming to New York Comic Con in a big way, including with cast members from Stitcher's, the new series Shadow Hunters, and cast members also from Pretty Little Liars

that will appear at various events at New York Comic Con, which takes place in New York City beginning on October the 9th. The point, the point. It's been a decade since the devastating attack

on America's Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina. I talked to world-renowned storm chaser and star of the pivot TV show, Angry Planet, George Coronas, about his particular experience with the storm. It's hard to believe that it's been 10 years

since Hurricane Katrina made its landfall. It blows me away. As the storm was in the Gulf of Mexico, I actually was able to drive from my home in Toronto all the way to Gulfport, Mississippi,

where I knew the strong side of the storm was gonna hit. And I met up with some colleagues and we rode out the storm and the closest thing to a bunker that we could find was a steel-reinforced multi-level concrete parking garage.

And it was the best place because we could hide from all the flying debris that was flying around, like pieces of metal, like swinging like helicopter blades and just every piece of roofing gravel

hitting you like a bullet. And the storm surge level, the water came up, the sea level came up almost 30 feet. So if you were in anything smaller than a three-story building, you would have been completely underwater.

And it was just an incredible experience. And even with all that, New Orleans got all depressed and they had a ton of flooding there, obviously. It was a disaster there, but it could have been a lot worse

had the storm taken a little bit of a jog to the West. If the park that hit me had hit New Orleans, it would have been so much worse. So what were the weather conditions that created Katrina? Well, it was just a mixture

of very, very warm sea surface temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. So that warm ocean water is the fuel for these hurricanes. And very low amounts of wind shear and that sort of wind blowing in different directions

at different levels of the atmosphere. Hurricanes hate that. They get ripped to shreds in wind shear. And you had this very warm water, low shear environment, and that creates really strong hurricanes.

And that's exactly what happened with Katrina. About 12 hours before making landfall with a category five, luckily, it actually weakened down to a category three before making landfall. But all that momentum that was behind it

still had a category five equivalent storm surge. So there was that flooding that really did all the damage and caused all the fatalities, unfortunately. I also talked to weather channel meteorologist, Mike Lowry, and asked him if the way we forecast weather these days

has changed because of Katrina. Well, Mike, we've gotten much better at forecasting hurricanes. We can tell you with greater accuracy where a storm is going to go.

I think one of the biggest changes, though, from 2005 is that we're able to give you a visual of what the water impacts are going to be from a hurricane. Katrina showed us how devastating a major storm surge can be for a coastline.

And come this hurricane season, in fact, the National Hurricane Center has some new products that will allow you to see whether or not you're at risk for some sort of ocean storm surge flooding. Michael's a resident of the Gulf Coast,

and I ask him how folks are doing these days, 10 years after that devastating weekend. Well, it's amazing to see the recovery here along the Gulf Coast. I love the Gulf Coast.

There is no place like the Gulf Coast. It's beautiful here in Gulfport, all the way over to New Orleans. Having driven this stretch of coastline in the weeks and months after Katrina,

there was nothing left, everything. I mean, the only thing you saw were maybe some steps leading up the buildings, but everything was gone here. And to see these beautiful homes and communities now flourishing 10 years later

is really, really encouraging. And I think though that the residents here have learned a lot from Katrina and what happened over the past 10 years, and they have built higher in many places, and they're more resilient, and that's the key.

So is it true that weather overall has changed over the past decade? I ask Andrew to weigh in on that. Well, yes. In a short word, yes.

I've been a storm chaser for 18 years. I literally travel all over the world. I just came back from Siberia and Bangladesh and Laos, and I document weather and climate change in every corner of the Earth.

And yes, we're seeing a lot of changes at the extreme ends of the spectrum. As our temperatures are warming up, we're seeing more of those extreme events, floods, drought, things like that.

So yeah, it's getting worse. And the thing that I worry about when it comes to storms like Katrina is the warming heat surface temperature. It's the dark ocean surface that absorbs so much

of that incoming sunlight, and it's warming a lot faster, and that's exactly gonna provide more fuel for these hurricanes. Michael told me that this year, the Weather Channel's doing something a little different,

forecasting what could happen with a Katrina-like situation a few decades in the future. Yeah, it's just what we're doing is what the Weather Channel does best, rather than looking back, which we will do,

for this special we're looking for. We give you a forecast every day, and that's what we're doing here with Katrina 2065, is looking ahead 50 years into the future, if there was a Katrina magnitude storm

that hit the Gulf Coast, what sort of changes would we see simply because of climate change, because of a warming atmosphere, because of rising seas? And I think you'd be surprised

on how different some things could look, regardless of what happens to the storms. For example, if the waters here, you can see the harbor behind me, just because of the rise in water,

we can see worse storm surges, we can see storm surges and ocean water that goes farther inland because of the rising seas. Meanwhile, Andrew told me that the folks on Pivot are taking a little different approach.

Well, it's a whole week of programming airing this week on Pivot. We call it Project Katrina, a decade of resilience in New Orleans, and what we're doing is basically showcasing

what happened during the storm, how the people and the culture of New Orleans are rebounding and looking ahead to the future in terms of the protections for the city of New Orleans and how climate changes in the future

could affect the United States in terms of hurricane hits and that. So we're looking at the past, the present, and the future. So on our minds is the big question, could this happen again?

Andrew says- Oh, there's no question, it will happen again. It's not a question of it. It will happen. Will it happen this year?

Who knows? Will it happen next year? I can't say. The El Nino in the Pacific is really affecting the hurricane production

in the Atlantic right now. So I'm not really expecting a particularly devastating hurricane season this year, but all it takes is one storm. Hit the right place at the right time.

There's already a tropical storm brewing in the Caribbean right now that has had a real close eye on it. Project Katrina, a decade of resilience, is a special that runs this month on Pivot.

Check that as well. As Katrina 2065, another special on the Weather Channel. Get more information on that at WeatherChannel.com. That's it for right now, but we're never too far away. Stay in touch on Twitter with our new account at PC Upload.

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