Talking with Joe Bob Briggs

John Bloom - aka Joe Bob Briggs - is a writer, actor, and host of the The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs on Shudder. I was fortunate enough to spend a few hours on the phone with him talking about writing, his career, movies, and more.

You started writing for the Arkansas Democrat at age 13. How did you come about with that? I take it you were interested in writing before you got to that point?

Not really. It just sounded like a cool job. Boy, I'm trying to remember who told me to go down there and apply for it. It was actually called Apprentice Copy Boy, but it was such a two-bit paper that anybody who worked there had to write, and you had to write a lot. They called it copy boy, but I was expected to write 10 articles a day. And when I say articles, I mean some of them were two paragraphs long, but you still had to turn out the copy. And I didn't even know how to type when I first started. So the first day I was there, I was writing stuff out on a notepad, you know? And this old alcoholic assistant sports editor says to me, ‘What the fuc are you doing?’ And I said ... I mean he's talking to a 13-year-old kid. And I said, ‘Well, he told me to do the baseball scores. I'm writing out to ...’ He says, ‘Come over here.’ He takes, and he says, ‘Sit right there.’ And he shows me this old upright Underwood, if you know what that is?

Oh, yeah.

And he puts in this piece of paper that's attached to a roll of paper. It's like a toilet paper, roll of paper. It's like paper that's eight and a half inches across, and it's kind of like really bad quality paper, but it's on a roll. It just goes on forever. And he says, ‘You type directly on here.’ And I said, ‘What? I was going to type it after I wrote it.’ And he says, ‘No, we don't have time for that shit. You type, you think and you type. Think, type, think, type.’ And so I go, ‘Okay.’ And so that was my first day on the job. The guy was brutal.

Did he give you a glass of whiskey and some cigarettes right after that?

Well, yeah. Actually, that was later. But yeah, the whole sports department of the Arkansas Democrat was hard drinkers, smokers. They introduced me to coffee. They're like massive amounts of coffee all the time in the morning, I think because ... I mean I worked in the morning. It was afternoon paper so I worked in the morning before school, and then I went back at night to cover sports events. And I figured out later the coffee was because they were hung over in the morning.

This was the kind of place where they would hire a guy to say, ‘Okay, you're going to cover some high school football for us wherever you worked before. You go out to Jacksonville tonight and cover this game,’ and Jacksonville is just right across the river. And so the guy would leave and never be seen again. It was like, there was a lot more than one story like that. And one time there was a guy named Fred Morrow, who later became sports editor of the Rocky Mountain News in Denver. I said to Fred one time, I said, ‘Why'd you hire that guy?’ And he says, ‘He looked like he was my same shirt size.’

So anyway, they had, yeah, it was one of those Front Page type atmospheres, if you know that movie. Back in the days when the presses are in the building with the writers. And so there's a constant roar. You have to yell all the time because there's this constant roar. And I actually got so used to it that in later years when I would work in a quiet place, I couldn't stand it. It was actually annoying to me. But in the days of linotype operators and all that stuff and the hot type and all that, it was a big, noisy, smoky, profane place. They taught me all the cheating tricks in journalism immediately - to a13 year old kid.

Such as?

Well, such as, oh man, we didn't have anybody at the minor league baseball game in Shreveport last night. So here, take the Gazette, which is the opposing paper, take all the information in that, rewrite it in such a way that you can't tell where you got the information or if it was Saturday night, so you couldn't cheat that way. If it was Saturday night and both papers come out Sunday morning, go and listen to the game on the radio and then put a dateline on it.

Pretend you were in El Paso at the game. And so they said, ‘No, you got to get more creative with it. You can't just say he hit a homerun. You got to say where he hit the homerun, you know, how?’

And so I would use all his stuff from the radio broadcast. And then I found out later the radio guy wasn't there either. He was taking it off the teletype. So just stuff like that and just crazy.

That is…

And I also did, then they would borrow me to do news reporting. It's like there'd be something that nobody wanted to go to, like a Ku Klux Klan rally.

Which at the time was, there was like, they would be there once a month. Nobody would go to it. There'd be eight guys who seven teeth between them who were from some place in the hills who would come down, and have the Klan rally. And say, "Okay, go cover the Klan rally." And I'd go cover. "Does anything happen?" "Yeah, they said the usual stuff that they always." And they say "Okay, spike that. We don't care."

They would send me to do stuff like that. And then the big assignments were anything involving the Arkansas Razorbacks. That's the big sport. That's the biggest thing in Arkansas is the University of Arkansas football especially. So they send me to cover this.

While working at the Arkansas Democrat, you were locker room interviewer for Razorback football.

That's right. The visiting team though, not the Razorback locker room, the visiting team.

And the Razorbacks were a powerhouse, so they were always losing teams. They would send me to any of these losing coaches. They just hated me. So, it was not a nice job.

Obviously, writing stuck with you because you went to Vanderbilt on the Fred Russell-Grantland Rice sporting writing scholar. Was that because of a particular column or an entire body of work?

No, that's an annual competition that they have. At the time, it was just the Grantland Rice scholarship. Fred Russell was still alive, but Grantland Rice was the most famous sports writer of his day. He had a syndicated column that was all over the country. He was Vanderbilt University class of double aught. And when he died in the 50s, he was a big horse racing enthusiast. And so the Thoroughbred Racing Association set up a scholarship at his alma mater Vanderbilt. And every year they have, if you're a high school senior, you can enter the competition for the sports writing scholarship to Vanderbilt. And they announced the winner at the Kentucky Derby first weekend in May, and then you start college that fall.

So I won that. And I don't know, are you a big sports fan?

Kind of, yeah.

I won that in 1971. The guy who had won it one year before me is a guy named Skip Bayless, who ... he was on ESPN for years. Well, Skip was ... anyway, it's hard to describe Skip. He was a newspaper columnist for years. He was a newspaper reporter, sports reporter, always sports reporter, sports fanatic. And then he started doing TV. He became sort of the most hated guy in sports reporting on TV, that's what he was known for.

…And the scholarship was you would spend your summers working at the horse breeding farms in Kentucky and then at the racetracks in New York, and they give you a stipend.

It was a full scholarship. It was just like an athletic scholarship only it was for sports writing. So that's how I ended up at Vanderbilt. I couldn't afford Vanderbilt. That's the only way I ever could have got into Vanderbilt so.

And I take it, you've donated to that fund ever since?

Well, you don't have to because they fully, the Thoroughbred Racing Association, they funded it in perpetuity and-

Oh, okay, so you're off the hook, okay.

Yeah. So, it's fine. It's a full ride for somebody every year.

That's great. Well, since that time. And how do you think journalism has changed in your lifetime? And let's go ahead and just say since you were 13.

Since I was 13. Oh my God.

And what do you make of the sad decline of prints? I mean, mainly newspapers.

I mean, newspapers don't really matter much anymore. So that's the major change. But they did it to themselves. It's like they started to be irrelevant long before the internet came along. And so, I don't cry for newspapers. I'm like ... I'll put it this way, why doesn't Sears become Amazon? Why doesn't, or Spiegel or some company like that, why don't they become Amazon? Why does Sears go out of business and get replaced by Amazon? Isn't the CEO supposed to know what's going to happen and make the changes necessary to keep things going?

Now, some of these companies, some of these journalism companies have survived, like the New York Times and the Washington Post and everything, they have not survived in any kind of form that I would recognize from the days I was at the paper. We were fast and loose with some stuff, but you couldn't buy us, you couldn't pay us off for an article.

I mean, even those old cigar smoking, alcoholics with eighth grade education, you couldn't bribe them. And a lot of these media companies today are, I mean, why didn't the Washington Post just spike an endorsement article for Kamala Harris? I mean, you see things like that happen all the time now, indicating that these media organizations are very, don't have a lot of backbone and so.

Yeah, I would agree with that.

And so, I mean, there've been four or five firings at the New York Times where it was over some kind of, somebody had some kind of politically incorrect opinion or something like that.

Right.

That would never have happened when I was 13. Even though we were working at what you might consider piss ant one-horse newspapers. But on that point, on basic honesty and independent reporting, they were pure, they were pretty pure on that stuff. You couldn't pay them off.

Every once in a while you would find an entertainment reporter or somebody who would get money for a good review, but they would be fired once they were caught, you know.

You wrote Evidence of Love about Candy Montgomery who killed Betty Gore by striking her 41 times with an axe. How did that book come about? Were you just interested in…

That was a situation where I was working at Texas Monthly. The lawyer who won that case was looking for somebody to write the book, and he went and tried to get Tommy Thompson to write it, and he didn't want to write it. He tried to get Gary Cartwright to write it, and he didn't want to write it. And as a last resort, he called me. And he says, "I'm trying to get somebody to write this book on this case." And I said, "Well, I know the case, but I'm not sure it's a book." And he said, "Well, will you come out and talk to me?" And so, I went out and talked to him. Don Crowther was his name. He was like a redneck lawyer from Dallas.

And I said, "I want to meet your client." And they took me to meet Candy Montgomery. And she was so, what can I say? She was such a typical American housewife, a woman who had killed the other woman with 41 blows of an axe. She was so typical. She was just so like right there in the middle of the road typical. I told him, I said, "I'll do it. I'll do it." I said, "I want to write it." And she said she would talk to me. And so, I got my friend Jim Atkinson, who is, and he is one of those guys who loves police reporting. And he had done a lot of cop reporting, and he was so crazy about cops that he took the captain's exam for the Dallas Police Department just for fun and passed. So that's Jim Atkinson.

So, he took the prosecution, I took the defense, and I interviewed everybody on the defense side. He interviewed everybody on the prosecution side. We put our notes together and wrote that book together. Unfortunately, it was long before the true crime craze had happened, and so nobody wanted to publish it. It was like, "Nobody wants to read that s***." Nobody wants to read about an axe murder in Texas. And so-

Now wait a minute, because Gary Cartwright, I'm looking that up right now. Blood Will Tell. He'd written that back in '79. And that was a big hit, wasn't it?

Minor hit. Minor hit. It wasn't a bestseller. Blood and Money, which Tommy Thompson had written was a big hit. I mean, the two that people talked about in those days were In Cold Blood, the Truman Capote book and Blood and Money. Those were the two true crime books. But if you talk to an agent or a publisher at that time, they would say, "True crime is dead in the water. We don't do true crime" and so.

And yet that story has long legs. I mean, it's been adapted three times for television. What does that tell you about the story?

Yeah, well, I think it tells you ... I mean, I'm trying to think of her name now. There was a woman in Seattle who became sort of the true crime paperback of the month woman. And she said she was inspired by Evidence of Love to do that, but I can't ... I'm trying to remember her name. Anyway, she's famous paperback writer. And I asked her, "How do you write one of these books every month?" I mean it took us maybe 18 months to do the book. And it's because all the standards of reporting declined so far. And people started asking for money to tell their story. And so the fact that we wrote that book before everything got gnarly in the true crime world probably made it better because we had to go deeper into the facts of the story, and we didn't pay anybody. There was no corruption involved in the telling of the story. And so that's how I look at it. But I don't know. I mean there have been other good true crime books, but really once it ... I mean, I love these stories.

I watch the true crime networks and they do a good job with it, but they're not really deep. They're not really deep dives into the culture surrounding the crime. There have been a few series that are better than others, but I think it was just, we reported it as a ... we wrote it like a novel.

Like I said, it's been adapted for TV three times. And we've got Barbara Hershey, Jessica Biel, and Elizabeth Olsen all played Candy. And I'm going to say Jessica Biel doesn't look anything like her, but she's the most attractive. I don't have a question. I just thought I'd throw that out there for you.

Yeah, yeah but…yeah. But the Elizabeth Olsen one is better adaptation. As far as being close to the book, staying close to the book, that third one, it was the one. Anyway, nobody asked me.

Let's jump from, and I do not demean this in any way when I say, let's jump from serious to not as serious, take me from writing full length features and film reviews as John Bloom to, Joe Bob Briggs. How did all that come about?

I was going to go with the name Bubba Rodriguez, and my editor, Ron Smith said, "No, we're going to get too much flak for using a Mexican name." And I said, "Okay. Then I'll make it the whitest name I can think of." And so that's how it became Joe Bob Briggs. And I'm glad I made that decision actually. You know, I think it was Lenny Bruce said, "If the Pope had a southern accent, no one would listen to anything he ever said." And that's true. That's true. And it allows you to, by being Joe Bob Briggs, first of all, everybody can relate to it and be superior to it.

Therefore, you can talk about anything you want to talk about ... I'm not saying this very clearly, if you get criticized, you get criticized for the wrong reasons. And if you get support, you probably get support for the wrong reasons too but you know? But it's perfect for satirical writing because satirical writing is telling the truth in a fictitious way. And I always compare it to professional wrestling. Professional wrestling is real. You get hurt. You can't fake getting hit on the back with a metal chair. It's like, it hurts. Is it fake? Is it real? The answer is yes, it's fake and it's real. The mixture of the fake and the real is what, is their art form. That's what makes it work. That's what makes it work on several different levels.

And so, I was kind of doing the same thing with this where is it real? Yes, it's real, but it's very exaggerated. It's very exaggerated. And so that's why I started out thinking Bubba Rodriguez because I wanted it to be multicultural at the drive-in, the drive-in as a place where everybody gathers. And in Texas at the time, and I'm sure today, drive-ins were very popular with Hispanics, Blacks, and Rednecks. You had this great mixture of all cultures. I wanted to name that sort of suggested all cultures but immediately somebody said, "No, that's racist." I said, "Okay, okay, I'll be white." I said, "Okay, sorry about my attempt to be diverse. I'll be white."

You were just ahead of the time. That's all. So when did the persona make the transfer from writing to in person and on television?

Well, when I got fired. There was a big, I wrote a parody.

We are the World.

Yeah, I wrote a parody of We are the World called We are the Weird. And actually Joe Bob got fired. They didn't fire me. In fact, the editor wanted me to stay, and I said, "No, I think I have to quit in solidarity with Joe Bob." And so it's accurate to say that Joe Bob was fired and John Bloom quit. Because I had a regular city column and was doing other kinds of reporting at the paper, and they were very willing for me to continue to do that. And I said, "Nope, you can't do this. You can't do this."

I got speaking invitations after that. They would invite me to go to the Kiwanis Club or something, or the Lions Club or whatever and speak, but they wanted Joe Bob, they wanted Joe Bob Briggs. And so I said, "Okay, I'll do it." And so I would go and do a version of the column for free at various places like that. And after a while, I just stopped saying, John Bloom appearing as Joe Bob. I just became Joe Bob. And there was a guy in Cleveland at Cleveland State University who wanted to promote a concert with Joe Bob Briggs or personal appearance Joe Bob Briggs in Berea, Ohio, which is next to the airport there in Cleveland.

And I thought, "Well, okay, I'll go there." And he called it the Berea Convention Center. It was actually the high school auditorium in Berea, Ohio. I said, "I don't know a single soul in Cleveland. I can try to do a show there and if it bombs, I'll just leave town and it'll be like, it never happened." Well, I go to Cleveland and it's on the front entertainment page of USA Today.

There you go.

Joe Bob Briggs is going to appear in this show. So the very first time I ever got up on stage, and I was terrible. It was horrendous. And the crowd knew though that it was the first time I was ever up on stage. And so they forgave me sort of. I had this country western band backing me up where I had written these country western parody songs.

And so every time I forgot what was in the show, every time I forgot the script, I would just go to one of these country western parody songs. And I actually finished the show in the lobby because I walked out of the theater in the wrong direction, and I went into the lobby and the people surrounded me in the lobby, and I continued to finish the show in the lobby. And so after it was over, I was like, "I'm never doing that again. I'm never performing again." That was it. And then I kept getting these invitations. I thought, well, you know what? I'm going to get some professional advice and actually prepare a show. And so that's how it started. And then they invited me to come be the guest host of a show on the Movie Channel. There's, host for movies on the Movie Channel, because they saw an article I wrote for Rolling Stone on Texas Chainsaw Massacre II. I went to the set of it, interviewed Dennis Hopper.

They had seen this article and they said, "Oh, let's have this guy host our crap we bought in Europe. Our exploitation films.

It eventually became Drive-In Theater. It became a show. But they just had me host movies on Friday night for one month. And the whole set was just a lazy boy recliner with steer horns on the back. That was it. And I sat there and talked straight to camera, and they invited me back the next month and then the next month, and then the next month, and I was there 11 years. I don't think we ever had a contract. We just like once a year, you want to come back? Yeah, I want to come back.

And the set got bigger and bigger. The show, we added elements to the show. And really that show just grew organically and is the same show that I do. I've done the same show three times on three different places. That's how it started and that's how it continues. It's like we add something and if people like it, we leave it in. And if they don't like it, we take it out.

How much thought have you given to that progression? Have you given to the character? How much thought have you given to Joe Bob's background? How deep have you gone?

Yeah. What happened is over the years, the John Bloom and Joe Bob Briggs kind of merge into a mutant character of its own. And there's no rhyme or reason to it other than the common denominator throughout the years is defense of the underdog and being on the opposite side of political correctness, wherever that is at any given time.

And sometimes that's on the left, and sometimes that's on the right. I have been vilified by both parties

What I originally liked about the flexibility of being Joe Bob Riggs turned in later years into a thing that attracted hate, because I started it in an era that was fairly, even though I would get picketed and I would get attacked, it was a fairly tolerant era as far as satirical writing, stand-up comedy, anything that was like attacking the culture. And then starting, I don't know when it started, I think probably around the time of Obama administration, suddenly, either on one side or the other. And if you don't say the right thing, it's not just that they disagree with you, they viciously-

Want you gone.

Viciously, attack you. And it peaked in the first term of Trump. Because it's like as a comedian or as a satirist or whatever, one thing we always have to do in America is make fun of the president. So here comes this guy. He's the easiest one to make fun of in years. And suddenly, boy, the backlash you get if you make jokes about him, and it was a little bit like that with a Obama too. He would get massive backlash for Obama jokes, and you got massive backlash for Trump jokes to the point where they canceled the fucking White House Correspondents dinner. They don't even do it anymore, where they used to roast the president and all that stuff.

Right.

And so after making fun of every president from the '70s to the teens, suddenly there's this cultural change where there must be something wrong with you if you're writing this shit. And I always say, back in the 80s, I'm writing this stuff where they're always saying, "Joe Bob, you're offending the older people. You can't say that. You're offending the older people." And then now it's like, "Joe Bob, you're offending the younger people." And I'm like, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. What the fuck? What the fuck?" It's like, yeah, okay.

And so anyway, everything I did to make Joe Bob this flexible satirist of everything ends up being effective, but gets me in trouble all the time to this day. I mean, get script censor.

Do you think that's people can't differentiate between the fact that you or you, and then there's a character you do, or?

They can and they can't. I mean, even if they think it's a character, they think, oh, you shouldn't say that. You shouldn't cross that line. If I heard many ... every time somebody says, "Well, yeah, but you crossed the line." I don't know, where's the line? I don't know where the line is. Really, when they invite me to speak somewhere, I always have to ask, do you want me to speak because you like me or you want me to speak because it's some kind of controversial panel that you want me to be on them, and I'm the goat?

There you go.

I got an invitation to speak about I Spit on Your Grave at the University of Miami. And I said, "Oh, this could be really bad." And then I was disappointed when they canceled me. They thought I'd be too controversial, so.

Well, that leads me to my next question. People obviously have kind of this idea or their idea of what you are or your character is. And I was thinking they probably did the same about Robert De Niro, you kind of think he's going to be this way.

Did you two have any issue when you made Casino with him? Did he think he was going to get some redneck and you kind of thought, well, I'm going to get Travis from Taxi Driver or…

Well, no, as an actor, I mean, he was very generous with me as an actor.

I didn't really know anything about him. He doesn't talk a lot. He does not talk a lot because we have these scenes where I would be seated with him. They had to keep a security cordon around him. And we were at the Riviera Hotel in Las Vegas, and so they would keep people 20 feet away from us while we're waiting for the lighting to be set up. So we're sitting on a couple of stools, and I would try to make conversation and I would get, “yes, no”, not a big conversationalist.

And went on for a couple of days like that. And then I think on the third day, I said something like, "You know these cocktail waitress girls today are a whole lot better looking than those yesterday." And he goes, "Did you notice that too?" And I thought, "Oh, okay. I have found my topic." And so from then on, we got along great. We had something to talk about.

You got to know where you stand.

One of the things I like about Joe Bob is his use of language. And I'm mainly talking about the writing. You use the word fu on the end of everything, and it's used as a noun, a verb, an adjective, whatever.

But my favorite, and I hope it's okay that I use it in my personal life, is aardvarking as a euphemism for sex, I've got to ask where did you pull that one out of?

Well, a lot of these phrases were out of necessity because of words that you can't use in the newspaper. And so since you can't say certain things in a family newspaper, I would make up a nonsense word that wasn't on any kind of list. And also on television. It's on nobody's list as being a forbidden word.

One of mine that I started using to mean a slow-witted person was a slopehead. I started using slopehead. And when I was at TNT, they started telling me, you can't say slopehead. "We're going to censor that out. You can't say slopehead." I said, "Why?" They said, "Well, because that's an Asian slur." And I said, "No, no, it's not. I think you're thinking of slant eye. Slant eye is an Asian slur. Slopehead is just somebody that has an oddly shaped head.

And he said, "Well." And I said, "I think you have elevated something that I invented several years ago into an ethnic slur." I said, "This is the reverse of how language is supposed to work." It's like the thing that was invented to avoid being a slur then becomes a slur. So anyway, a word that I actually invented ended up on the can't-say-it-on-TV list.

But anyway, most of those things were invented, just so you could say that instead of something that was offensive.

Well, I still, I need you on record giving me permission to use aardvarking.

Oh, use it all you want. Yeah, absolutely.

Okay. I don't owe you a nickel every time I say it or anything.

Oh no. People came up to me with that all the time about people like people saying aardvarking instead of the other cruder synonyms for it.

I believe I read one time a list that you put out, and I liked bashing Chipmunks was another one I really liked.

Yeah. Yeah.

I know you're pressed for time, or you probably are. So let's get to the money shot here. Joe Bob Goes to the DriveIin as being re-released, or I guess it's updated by Dark Horse.

Yes.

And we should all go buy it, and.

Yeah, I went back and put in the columns that were omitted from it when it was published back in the 80s, so that it's sort of the complete. I had to write an introduction explaining why it was controversial because I thought, people are going to look at this, and they're going to say, "Well, this is not controversial." Today, it seems kind of lame." And so I had to explain that in a previous era. Exploitation movies were considered beneath contempt and beneath the dignity of a daily newspaper. And so they were ignored. They were just considered disposable trash.

And so the very fact that I was reviewing them at all was an outrage to certain people. And then the fact that I was celebrating them sent some people over the top. There's a part of the book where I get directly attacked by a conservative columnist for the Dallas Morning News named William Murchison, who just said, the fact that I was celebrating these movies that had this kind of violence in them. And actually without naming me, Janet Maslin of the New York Times did the same thing. And actually, Roger Ebert was not very supportive either. He was kind of a prude about this stuff. And so-

Wait a minute, he wrote Return to the Valley of the Dolls…

I know. I know. But he would argue that that was not a sex movie.

Anyway, so it's hard to imagine today people being on their high horse about sex and violence. I always said the way you tell the difference, if you hate something, you call it's full of sex violence. But if you like it, you say it's full of romance and adventure. So it was that sort of thing where they didn't approve of what we would call pop culture.

And in fact, the word, the phrase popular culture was not invented until the 70s. And so a lot of people didn't really make a distinction between pop culture and culture. And so there was good things and bad things and I was definitely celebrating bad things. But anyway, yeah, Dark Horse got these really top rank illustrators to illustrate the whole book, and it's totally different from the original.

Yeah, it looks like it's more of a coffee table book almost.

It is. It is. It's like, which I don't get really, but yeah, it's a coffee table book.

I hope one of my favorites is reviewed in there, and that is Humanoids of the Deep. I give that one a viewing, sit down with a 12 pack a Miller Lite and watch that at least once a year. It still holds up.

Did you see our show on Humanoids from the Deep? We had it on the show.

I probably did.

I'm trying to think of her name. Linda Shayne. Linda Shayne plays, what is it? She's the beauty queen in Humanoids from the Deep, it's some funny name. Anyway, and she was also the writer and one of the stars in a movie called Screwballs, which was a high school comedy. And as Bootsie Goodhead, that was her character name in Screwballs. And she became kind of a friend or somebody that I knew at the time that I was first writing the column. And then she called me years later and said, "Do you think you could take that Bootsie Goodhead thing off of the internet?" And I said, "Well, I don't know, Linda. I think it's probably really hard to just sort of take it out of the lineup." And I said, "Why?" And she says, "Well, I'm making children's ... I'm producing children's movies in Salt Lake City, and when people Google me."

And I was like, "All right, I tell you what, I'm going to massively misspell your name, Linda, and let's see if that'll work." She never called me back and so I guess maybe we got around it, but that's the kind of thing that I always feel bad about is somebody gets mailed later in life for being in the exploitation world or something.

Well, I don't know if you know anything about me, but I interviewed Vladimir Putin back when he was in the shirt-off phase, and it was a huge get.

Oh my God.

Yeah. It was a huge get, and I was one of only three people he talked to in four years. I interviewed him for Outdoor Life magazine, mainly just because they said they couldn't do it.

You interviewed him in the Kremlin?

No, just back and forth email and phone and all that.

Oh, okay.

But anyway, my mother just passed away about last year, but I remember when he invaded Ukraine, she just called in a panic and said, "You've got to erase everything about that from the internet." And I was like, "You can't erase things from the internet, mom. That's not how it works." And she was like, "People are going to think you support that." And I was like, "I talked to him about tigers and taking his shirt off in the jungle and all that. I mean, come on. Certainly people are smart enough to see the difference between the two." And she was like, "Don't, don't you bet on it." I'm like, "Okay, well, you got me there."

Well, have you gotten any flckg because of that? That's not... I mean, that's a get for anybody. That's a get for...

Well, for a while it was pretty cool because it was, you know, "Hey, I interviewed him." And they was like, "Oh, yeah, okay, great." Now it's like, "I interviewed him, but it was before he went nuts." And they're like-

Well, yeah. What year did you interview him?

Interviewed him 2011 for ... mainly, I wrote about him kind of, and what I told Austin was, I teach, but I write for the outdoor magazines when there used to be some, and I write for the paper. And people just kind of assume I'm this big game hunting character person. So it was just kind of interesting that people thought that was the kind of thing I was doing, just going out there and interviewing Vladimir Putin and hanging out with him and so.

But I got the interview because I started writing for Outdoor Life about how, hey, I got a real bro crush on Putin, because he's the last real man we've got out there. And he's the second coming to Teddy Roosevelt, and apparently he got all those and thought it was funny. And his secretary was a big Matthew McConaughey fan and thought I kind of sounded like him because I'm from Texas so I use that to my advantage, and then I.

Wow. That's amazing though.

Thanks. Ok, I can read one thing by John Bloom and one by Joe Bob Briggs. What do I do?

John Bloom would be Evidence of Love. And the Joe Bob thing would probably be an article I wrote for the Wittenburg Door, and…

Now you know, you're supposed to say my new book, which comes out from Bob-

Oh, sorry. Oh, okay. No, I was thinking of this article that I wrote where I went and I partied with the atheists at the Atheist Convention in Arlington, Virginia. That's one of my favorite articles. I don't know if anybody else would care about, but all the celebrity atheists were there. Goddamn, I'm going to forget their names now. William, William Dennett and the big four, the big four celebrity atheists were all at this one place in Arlington, Virginia. And I went there and spent the weekend with them. That's one of my favorite sort of, it's sort of a Tom Wolfe style article from, I want to say 2008, somewhere around there.

My daughter is completing her master's in art history at the University of Houston, and she works at the MD Anderson Special Collections. And yesterday, I'm on my spring break, I got to go over there and I got to spend four hours looking at Larry McMurtry's papers, all this stuff he has from-

Wow.

Yeah. All the stuff he started when he was at Rice, like the original Last Picture Show and some other things, and Hud, and then everything that had to do with Houston is there.

So that was fantastic for me as a writer. Where's your stuff going?

Oh man, I don't know if anybody going to want-

It's time for you to start thinking about it.

... anybody going to want my stuff.

Look, look. You know what was next to Larry McMurtry's stuff waiting to get put into the circulation? All the stuff from Houston rapper DJ Screw. So yes, somebody's going to want it.

I'm a big Larry McMurtry fan, but if I read a McMurtry novel, they're so fucking sad. His novels are so fucking sad that I have-

I went to the... Yeah, Last Picture Show is the book that changed my life. But you read it and you're like, "That's everything I am. I hate this."

Yeah, exactly. Everything I am and everything that sort of wrong with life, you know? And at the end of it, you go, "Wow, that was too fucking true." And it's like, and it's like, and then I can't read anything by Larry McMurtry for at least a year, and then I can go back to it. It's like-

Let me tell you that when I first read Last Picture Show, I was in high school, and my mother said, "You know that his parents bought my grandparents' house in Archer City." And I said, "Really?" And she said, "Yeah." And so years later, when I started writing for magazines and things, I reached out to him, I wrote him, and I said, to get some feedback. And I said, "Look, the way I heard it, your parents bought my great-grandparents house in Archer City, and I'm using that as an in with you."

And he wrote back within two days and said, "Yes, we bought that house. The roof fell in a storm the next week. Thanks for bringing up that memory." And then he was really nice and said, "Yeah, I'll read whatever you sent me." And he gave me honest feedback. Yeah, he gave me honest feedback. He said, "You've got good dialogue but-"

I tell you a McMurtry book that nobody much talks about anymore, but just slays me is Leaving Cheyenne.

And when you get to the end of the book and he does the tombstones, what it says on the grave of these three people, it's like, I don't know. It's just like, oh fuck. Fuck. It's like too much fucking pain.

And when I was a little kid, we lived in one of those towns, and I'm like, "Yeah, God damn, if you live and die in one of those towns, it's like you never existed. You know, it's like, I'm just like, I don't know. There's something about that book, and it's like, it just kills me. It just kills me.

I think you sort of have to be from Texas to feel that deeply about it, but I do, man, I can't. It's like, man, you're a genius, Larry, but fucking leave me alone.

Okay, well, that is all true. But where ... you need to start thinking, where are you going to put your stuff?

Oh man. I don't know.

Vanderbilt.

I don't know. I mean, I was an outlier at Vanderbilt. It is not like I go back to the homecoming game. Although-

You knew your boy De Niro has all his stuff at University of Texas, so.

Oh, really?

You might want to consider that.

John Bloom:

Well, that's because that Harry Ransom Center. They also have the Texas Chainsaw Massacre files at the Harry Ransom Center. So maybe you're right.

Well, get it some thought.

Did you know Don Graham? Did you ever meet him?

No.

He was the Dobie chair at University of Texas English Department.

But I think he was the last guy at the University of Texas, the last full professor at the University of Texas who still went to work in cowboy boots every day.

There you go. I went down the street. I got my degree from St. Edward's University, and it was like you'd literally park there on Congress and go, "Oh, there's a prostitute." And then you'd go in and Brother Egan would tell you something and you'd be like, "Oh, okay."

Where is St. Edwards? I know it's in Austin, but where is it?

It's down on South Congress. It's changed a lot since I went there, but yeah.

Okay.

All right. Two more quick questions and I'll let you get it.

Okay.

What advice, if any, do you have for young writers out there? I don't know if there are any but-

I always tell ... I mean whenever they ask me, I always say, "There's only three ways to learn what you're doing. And that's write every day. Write every day, and write every day." And I've had the same policy with people that want me to read. They want me to read their stuff, or they want me to tell them what to do to get to where they're going. And I say, "Write me 1000 words every day for 30 days and bring it to me." And if they can do that, then they can be a writer because it means they can deal with the boredom of it and the tediousness of it, you know?

And the other question I get is, "Where do you go to write?" They give me that. "Do you write in Starbucks? Do you write in? Where do you write?" And my answer is always, "Whatever is the most boring place I can find with a blank wall."

There you go.

So that I'm forced to confront the blank page. Not a popular answer, but it's sort of the most truthful answer I can come up with.

This piece first appeared in the Fredericksburg Standard.

Like what you see? Want to keep the adventure going? Fire a PayPal or Venmo in my direction & you may get a shout out! Hot Tip: Include blog idea in the description…