Last Friday, Billy Bob Thornton and his band the Boxmasters called an early end to their tour of Canada, where they've been opening for Willie Nelson. Last week, Thornton did his part for better relations between our two countries by getting pissy during a radio interview with CBC host Jian Ghomeshi, first playing mum because he felt that, by mentioning the fact that Thornton has a movie career, he had suggested that his music career is merely a "hobby", then opening up enough to say that Canadian audiences are too "reserved" and unresponsive to suit his rowdy ways. "We tend to play places where people throw things at each other and here they just sort of sit there," he told Ghomeshi, adding, "It's mashed potatoes with no gravy." Thursday night, the Boxmasters were greeted with the responsive audience of Thornton's dreams; the group was, reportedly, loudly booed, with a few shouts of "Here comes the gravy!"

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This week's international incident comes to us courtesy of Jian Ghomeshi, the apparently unflappable host of the daily arts program Q on CBC Radio One in Canada; the Boxcutters, a music group currently touring with Willie Nelson and Ray Price; and the Boxcutters' lead singer, drummer, and songwriter, Billy Bob Thornton, who gets sulky if you make passing mention of his side career in movies when he's there to talk about his goddamn music! The band stopped by the station for a live interview Wednesday morning; in the ensuing fracas, which started spreading across the Internet like kudzu yesterday, the talkier members of the band, who may possibly be unconvinced that their proceeds from their latest album, Modbilly, will leave them set for life, talked about the inspiration they have taken from such diverse sources as Buck Owens, Michael Nesmith, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and Chad and Jeremy. However, Billy Bob, peeved that Ghomeshi had referred to his movie career in his introduction, chose to express his displeasure by claiming not to be too clear on how long he and the boys had been playing together, how they came to be touring with Willie Nelson, and whether or not he had ever almost pursued a professional baseball career. Thornton also seemed less than thrilled with Ghomeshi's description of his band's music as a combination of hillbilly with British invasion, which seems reasonable, and expressed a preference for the term "cosmic cowboy", which might actually be worse. For his part, Ghomeshi earned some kind of grace under pressure award just by not reaching over and yanking the soul patch off his guest's face.

Once Billy Bob did start talking, he managed to piss off the Canadian listening audience by referring to the audiences of the Great White North as "mashed potatoes with no gravy," which seemed to be his poetic way of saying that he was disappointed to play for people who didn't throw beer bottles at him for his trouble. Since Bily Bob was there to talk about his music, he might he annoyed with us for reporting on his travails at what's supposed to be a movie blog, so before you proceed to the clip, let's have a shared understanding that we're posting it here so that everyone can bask in the hardy tunesmith's passionate and heartfelt tribute to the recently deceased Famous Monsters of Filmland editor, Forrest J. Ackerman. Booga booga!

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