play that well but it turned out it was one of those deals that really worked, you know… and it was just a wonderful time being with Kris. He’s one of the best people in this world, I’ll tell you that right now.
Yeah, he seems like he would be. I haven’t ever met him but he seems like he would be. I like that. I’ve always liked his music too. Music and acting and all that. Speaking of acting, you know, you’re not going to believe this but the first time I actually ever heard of you was not through music but the movie Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. (You both laugh.) So I wanted to ask you how you ended up in that role and also, if you have a memory of that maybe you could share with us? I got plenty of memories. Now one thing you gotta understand, I’ve always been one of the biggest movie freaks in the world. My whole life. So here we were in L.A. and Kris had one movie out and he had just finished another, or was working on another when he got signed to do Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid. So we were playing the Troubadour again out in L.A. and I met Sam Peckinpaw and he asked us, Kris and I, to go down to Mexico with him and some of his people that worked with him, because this was way before they started film- ing Pat Garrett, but they were going to audi- tion a lot of actors down there and they were looking at different locations, one of those kinds of deals. Anyway, we just went along with them. And during that few days we were down there with Sam, he came up to me and said, “You know Donnie, I want you in this movie.” (Laughs) I said, “Sam, I never acted before in my life!” He said, “You know, that doesn’t make any difference. You look like; you know, you look the part.” In other words, he was saying I looked like I belonged in Billy
Donnie and Buffalo in Huntsville, Alabama at Merri- mack Hall, April, 2015. (Colleen Knights Photo)
the Kid’s day…
Yeah. That’s part of it. And so I said, great. I said, man, it’s an honor, you know, and I would have done it for nothing. I would have paid you to do it. But anyway, we got to do Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid and then he called me to do Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia. He got me and Kris to come down to do one little part in that and then we did Convoy with him so, we did three – he only did twelve movies. That was his whole career and we got to do three of ‘em so I thought that was pretty cool.
Wow. That is cool. And also I got to meet one of my great friends - turned out to be one of my greatest friends of all time, a guy that I was already a big fan of, and that was Warren Oates. To me, one of the most underrated actors ever. You know who Warren is?
Yeah. I learned all about it after we after I attended at that George Lindsay Film Festival that you were at. That year y’all were talking about that movie and I learned a lot that day about the
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