The Brian Jonestown Massacre's Anton Newcombe: "The Worst Thing Is You Don't Exist Anymore"

By Chris Ziegler Fri., May 11 2012 at 10:09 AM

Anton Newcombe is ready to do his interview, but he's not truly ready to do his interview until he reaches back to grab his red aviator sunglasses. Once he's suited up, then we're set, and this Newport Beach native who can trace his family's local history back to the days before farms turned into parking lots and shopping malls--and who shouts out Burger Records--is ready to talk. It's the day before Brian Jonestown Massacre leaves on a tour to promote their latest Aufheben (out now on Newcombe's A Records), with a stop scheduled for the Wiltern this weekend, and singer/songwriter/multiinstrumentalist Newcombe--subject of a fascinating 2006 cover story in the Weekly, and subject of the ... less-than-salutary documentary Dig!--is in what you might call a very good place.

"The Brian Jonestown Massacre is out there but has never had any real, measurable radio play. It's never had a film soundtrack or a car commercial," said the L.A. Times in 2004. "On the day of the interview, Newcombe evidently had a studio and a place to stay, but no phone."
But here we are in 2012 and Brian Jonestown's "Straight Up And Down" is the theme song for the much-acclaimed Boardwalk Empire, a deal Newcombe describes as worth "two or three or four or five '90s record deals, or for indie bands ... that's like twenty Ariel Pink deals at once." And back in his various European home bases, Newcombe runs his own Ustream channel called Dead TV, where he cooks and chats and takes calls all through his Skype connection.
In the long aftermath of Dig!, Jonestown and Newcombe have soldiered on as they always have, releasing some of their best albums and filing the documentary experience away alongside all the unorthodox other methods they've used to put their music into the minds of ... well, not quite the masses, but a lot more people than just the usual rock 'n' roll mutants. Like back when the Internet was something you had to access by getting to the campus lab and having a servermancer chant solemnly over a zip disk with your files on it--that's when Newcombe was already seeding Brian Jonestown MP3s to
the world via a server at CalTech. It's all just a method of connection.
"I realized there would never be this record store that carried Bomp! records or this English label I'm on or my own label or even TVT in some little town in Norway," he says. "My stuff was gonna be unavailable except by mailorder. So I'm just allowing 5,000 people in Oslo to check out my stuff.
"I instigated the Dig! thing," he continues. "I brought the Dandys in and eliminated the other groups. It was like eleven L.A. bands hashing it out and they brought me in because it wasn't that interesting. You know how guys at Guitar Center are--these
guys just wanted to be famous. It'd be like if you were doing a documentary on kids standing in line for American Idol. You know what they're all about. Rebecca Black can break down what that motivation is! They don't have anything to offer the world, but they just want a shot. And I had this whole other thing."

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It's definitely a whole other thing. But in the happily plasticized world of 2012, it's a welcome thing, too. And after decades of not just playing music--all the way back to a Costa Mesa
garage--but releasing records, booking shows and general total immersion, Newcombe is as savvy as they get, with a pirate's sense of music-industry protocol (Want to know how and why to turn a business deal into an opportunity for a homicide? Or at least where all the previous bodies are buried?) and a sense for how spectacle intersects business, identity and society that Andy Warhol and Malcolm McLaren would recognize instantly. There are lots of layers here--you get the sense that the entire convoluted Brian Jonestown experience has all been part of Newcombe's plan, and that there has never been a plan at all, and of course that the plan has been to make it seem like there was never a plan in the first place. That confuses people even now: "I read a review of the new album today," says Newcombe, "and they're like, 'There's nothing new here.' Writing songs in French and Finnish isn't anything different to you? Why even take the time to expose the fact you don't know what you're talking about?"
See, once there was another band whose music was the sound of confusion, and it was good. And Jonestown's newest Aufheben is only confusing if that means its overwhelming--we start somewhere between the 1966 Velvet Underground acetate and
Rolling Stones songs like "Citadel" or "The Lantern," but there's so much more.

3
You'll hear terminal Neu!-style repetition, is-that-synth-or-wind? melodies that seem lifted from the soundtrack of the original Wicker Man, electrified drums and futuristic touches that point more toward techno and electronica than vintage underground psychedelia--and the multi-lingual wordplay Newcombe mentions extends even to the album's title, a particularly German word (a la schadenfreude) that means something like ... to destroy something in order to rebuild it. This is their 2012 album, he explains, with everything that's meant to imply: "I love esotericism and eschatology--the study of the end of the world," he says. "Kali or the Bible or the Aztecs--any of it. And the worst thing that can happen is you have a decent record to listen to!"
Really--that's the worst thing?
"Well," says Newcombe. "The WORST thing is you don't exist anymore!"
The Brian Jonestown Massacre play the Wiltern on Saturday.

Les premières fois d'Anton Newcombe, de The Brian Jonestown Massacre

Rock | Son premier disque ? Isaac Hayes… Interview express d'Anton Newcombe, de The Brian Jonestown Massacre, pour la sortie d'“Aufheben”. Leur meilleur album à ce jour.

Le 07/05/2012 à 11h51 - Mis à jour le 07/05/2012 à 17h17
Propos recueillis par Olivier Granouix

Ame damnée à la tête du Brian Jonestown Massacre, Anton Newcombe occupe une place à part sur la carte de la musique du diable. Révélé par le documentaire Dig ! en 2004, où il apparaissait en perdant magnifique, exalté mais intègre face aux victorieux Dandy Wharols, l'Américain a toujours su imposer le respect. Que ce soit par sa longévité miraculeuse – compte tenu des excès de substances en tout genre dont il fut longtemps coutumier, par son goût de la promo autodestructrice – ses interviews kamikazes, ses bastons avec le public ou les membres de son groupe, etc., mais aussi par sa longue discographie hallucinée et hallucinante, livrée avec une régularité de métronome. Treizième disque en treize ans, sa dernière œuvre, Aufheben, vient de sortir. Un album qui boucle la boucle, poursuivant les mantras mystiques des derniers disques, mais renouant aussi avec le folk psyché des débuts. Un album parfait pour s’arrêter là et qui serait à en croire Newcombe, leur « dernier disque terrestre puisque les Aztèques ont prévu la fin du monde pour décembre 2012. » L’occasion donc de se souvenir du bon vieux temps, avant l’Apocalypse…

Panic in Babylon, clip réalisé par Anton Newcombe

Premier disque acheté ?
Ma mère adore la musique. Quand j’étais petit, elle me donnait un peu d’argent et me disait : « Va t’acheter un disque, celui que tu veux. » La première fois, je suis revenu avec Shaft d’Isaac Hayes. Je l’avais choisi pour la pochette : une affiche de film, avec ce Black immense et intimidant. Je crois que ma passion pour la musique très visuelle remonte à ce moment-là.

Premier déclic pour devenir musicien ?
La première fois que j’ai réalisé que je pouvais être actif dans la musique, c’était à l’adolescence, pendant un mauvais concert d’un groupe punk de mon quartier. Les mecs étaient visiblement très limités techniquement, ils n'allaient sûrement jamais devenir de grandes stars, et pourtant ils se donnaient à fond. J’ai réalisé que j’avais le pouvoir de faire comme eux.

Première guitare ?
Ado, je me faisais un peu d’argent de poche en testant sur mon corps des produits pharmaceutiques pas encore brevetés. A part quelques plaques rouges de temps en temps, c’était un bon filon. Avec ce que j'ai gagné, je me suis acheté une guitare Airline, un instrument au look dément, sixties à mort. Jack White l’a remise au goût du jour. Je n’ai jamais lésiné sur la qualité, niveau guitare. J’ai besoin de ce qui se fait de mieux.

Première chose que tu fais le matin ?
Me promettre de rester libre. Aujourd’hui, je suis indépendant : j’ai ma propre maison de disques, je fais moi-même mes clips sur mon ordinateur et ça m’amuse beaucoup. J’ai mon studio à Berlin et j’y vais quand je veux pour enregistrer. Je suis aussi libre au niveau du style, et c’est très important pour moi. Mon ami Kevin Shields, de My Bloody Valentine, a créé un son, une œuvre unique, une sorte de Mona Lisa instrumentale. En quelque sorte, il a marqué l’Histoire en découvrant une nouvelle règle d’or dans la géométrie musicale. Sauf que depuis, il est coincé. Moi, je me laisse le droit de ne jamais me bloquer, je suis dans le mouvement permanent… Je survole la compétition !

The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Aufheben, 1 CD (Differ-Ant)

a really bad review from salt lake city

Concert Review: The Brian Jonestown Massacre at The Urban Lounge

by Austen Diamond

Posted // 2012-05-10 - Maybe my hopes were a little too high. One friend described his past experience of The Brian Jonestown Massacre in concert as “mercurial.” I’d say meditative and boring. Part of the rock-concert experience is to be touched by the artist as they unfold their canon, as they create music that is unique in time and place, as they offer the unexpected. On the other side of the spectrum, when a band or musician is off the handle, it can ruin a show. But that’s long been the lure of the Anton Newcombe-led California psych-rock troupe. Newcombe’s oddities were portrayed keenly in the documentary Dig!, and he has been well-documented to go berserk in concert -- once telling a concertgoer that he will “fucking kill them.”
There were no such onstage antics at The Urban Lounge tonight. It was more like this.
I don’t profess to be a devout BJM fan, but I do love their albums (probably even more than the band’s exciting drama of years past), from Take it from the Man! to their latest 2012 release Aufheben. So, I can’t exactly say which songs did and didn’t work (in truth, they were all a bit muddied anyway), other than that 75 percent of the show didn’t work.

There were a couple things at play here: For one, even with a large number of onstage musicians (my favorite was the guy who’s sole job was to play the tambourine -- see above on the left; the guy wearing sunglasses), they couldn’t recreate the diverse sonic landscape of records past. Next, the boys were just phoning in the show; there was no magic, no engaging with the crowd. Finally, many of the songs have a similar drone, thus creating a trance-like meditative vibe unbecoming of the midnight hour (or my lack of really putting on a heavy buzz).
I can’t speak for everyone. The sold-out attendees slightly nodded in time, although it seemed like the music turned everyone into the upright dead. I left early, which is extremely rare for me. I hear that I missed an encore with a “Sympathy for the Devil” medley. Although that would have been swell, it wouldn’t have been nearly enough to save the show for me.
photos by Dom Darling
Join Austen Diamond on Twitter: @AustenDiamond

(ricky doing his ironing backstage @ the world famous fillmore ballroom,you know the place that jimi hendrix,the doors,janice jopplin and gerry garcia all did their laundry at...)

photos by @griffinshot - Tim Griffin
Anton Newcombe of BJM @ Emo's East - 4/29/2012
Brian Jonestown Massacre @ Emo's East - 4/29/2012

Brian Jonestown Massacre, who played a secret, acoustic set at one of the pre-parties at Red 7 earlier in the week, closed out Austin Psych Fest 2012 at Emo's on 4/29. More pictures from Anton Newcombe and the gang's set, below...

Continue reading "Brian Jonestown Massacre closed Psych Fest 2012 @ Emo's (pics)"