Like virtually every other music aficionado of his generation, Billy Bob Thornton has been obsessed with The Beatles for as long as he can remember, but celebrity comes with certain privileges.
In the exact same fashion as his fellow Academy Award-winning actor and filmmaker, Tom Hanks, it was the group’s seminal appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show that did it, as was the case for millions of viewers who instantly found themselves early adopters of the ‘Beatlemania’ phenomenon.
As far as he’s concerned, they’re the most important act in the history of the music industry, not that he’s the only one who feels the same way. The Fab Four are Thornton’s be-all and end-all, the quartet that redefined popular music forever, and inspired him to become a musician in the first place.
While he’s much better known as an actor, which is exactly the way he likes it when he’d hate for the Boxmasters to be known as ‘Billy Bob Thornton and friends’, his secondary career in the recording studio has given him access to insights about The Beatles he would have never gained otherwise.
For the Boxmasters’ 2019 album, Speck, the Oscar-winning screenwriter experienced a pinch-me moment when he enlisted the services of legendary engineer, Geoff Emerick, who worked with the four lads from Liverpool on some of their most famous work. Naturally, Thornton was completely and utterly in awe.
“This was a guy who worked on Revolver and Sgt Pepper,” he remarked. “It was mind-blowing sitting around, hearing him talk about his experiences with The Beatles when he was 16.” Like any self-respecting superfan, he needed to know if his favourite story about the formative band that shaped his entire existence had really happened, or if it was one of the many apocryphal tales.
“I asked him if it were true that George Harrison got really pissed off that Yoko Ono ate his cookies,” Thornton revealed. As the story went, Harrison called her a “bitch” and went mental when Yoko snaffled one of his biscuits, leading to a screaming match with John Lennon.
“Geoff said it was true,” he added, with obvious glee. “One day, Yoko got out of her hospital bed in the studio and ate George’s cookies, and he got really mad.” Needless to say, Thornton was ecstatic at hearing the urban legend not only confirmed, but verified by someone with first-hand knowledge.
At the end of the day, it’s about Yoko nicking some biscuits, which is hardly the most earth-shattering revelation about The Beatles. And yet, because he’d known about it for so long without knowing if it was 100% true, Thornton was overjoyed to get the confirmation he’d always dreamed of.
