On a very warm October, indie psychedelic rock band Brian Jonestown Massacre made a stop in Portland, Oregon in support of their 21st studio album called The Future Is Your Past to the Aladdin Theater. JC got a chance to sit down with lead singer and founding member, Anton Newcombe where they got a chance to talk about the band’s journey, being in control of their own destiny, and how labels need to be more transparent when it comes to their overhead costs.

JC/theFIVE10: “Welcome, sir.”

Anton: “Thanks for having me!”

JC/theFIVE10: “So, you guys are on this big tour supporting the album that came out in February. The Future is Your Past. How is it going so far?”

Anton: “Well, it’s going good, but you have any specific questions? I mean, ’cause that’s a real vague question.”

JC/theFIVE10: “It is. But I start with that because for you guys, you guys have been on the road perpetually for a long time. Are you noticing anything different about this tour that is unique from tour’s past?”

Anton: “Well, I think post-Covid, for people that they’re really into bands, I think people are really, um, there’s a certain amount of skepticism that you see in music, you know, and people are always like, oh, I know songs that you don’t know. And you don’t know anything and your favorite band stinks and all this different stuff. Right. But there’s always a portion of the audience where people are just, they’re trying to figure out what it is if they’re new to it, instead of just accepting and going. You know, if it sounds vaguely familiar in some context because of whatever, you know, they’re gonna be skeptical.
Like, oh, this sounds like the sixties or something. Right. I’m not seeing any of that. So I’m really appreciative because it just seems like people are there for it. You know, maybe one person’s a little bit outta line or something. That doesn’t get it. Like maybe their girlfriend dragged him or something, you know? But really, and we have a really diverse, uh, demographic. You know, you couldn’t put your finger on it.”

JC/theFIVE10: “And you guys have a really loyal fan base.”

Anton: “What changes is it’s all ages. I mean, there are kids, like, literally kids, like, I don’t know how they get into these shows, you know what I mean? In the front and original hippies. It’s like, that’s the range, you know? Um, so, and it’s a little bit different. Also, we, you know, we just went through parts of the Midwest. I went to these places and we’d been playing to Indiana in these theaters, and everybody was like 47 years old, and that isn’t our demographic. And I realized it was because of money. Like, people just didn’t have the money to go out to shows. It’s like, what the, I’ve never had a concert in my life where it’s just this one demographic of people, you know, filling up a room. I’m like, this is very, very odd, you know? And I put two and two together. These people are, you know, hurting for money, coming out of like, all this stuff, you know?”

JC/theFIVE10: “I just came back and we covered Sting who was in town recently, and I think his, if you wanted seats up in the nosebleeds, it was like $80 per ticket.”

Anton: “Nick Cave was doing Australia, and he tried to get us to go down and play, you know, and will you guys come down and, and headline one of the days? And it was like, sure, you know, I love you. No problem. Okay, we’ll give you 25 grand. I’m like, what are you even talking about? You know? It’s like we, we played 2,500 Cedars and bigger, and even if it was 10, it’s like he, I was like, what are you even talking about? There’s no, no, we can’t, we can’t do it. We can’t, we can’t actually all get down there for $60K or something. He’s like, damn, you guys are expensive. The dude charges $250K up to play in concerts, you know what I mean? Yeah. We charged $25 to see us or something. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I can’t set, I can’t set the ticket prices anymore because, you know, what happened is basically everybody sold their venue to Live Nation or whoever. Right? So there was a reason they had antitrust and monopoly laws in America. And for some reason, everybody thinks like they live vicariously through some fake billionaire or something. Is, is like a reason to throw the baby out with about water. And it’s like easy money, you know, a culture where people want that opportunity to screw everybody. They’re not really getting it. You know, they’re not really getting that. Um, CEOs with 25 million and a golden para parachute is like, they’re making 3,500 times the salary of a worker in the same company. And meanwhile, it’s like so many jobs and so many urban, desirable places to live. It’s physically impossible under 20, 25 an hour to even get in on a place To have kids to do anything, you know? It’s like you get a place like San Francisco, where the hell is the Starbucks people coming from?

JC/theFIVE10: “You bring up a good point. The writers just finished up their strike. The actors are still on their strike, but what is the answer for musicians?”

Anton: “The main thing is, you know, we set out to use cameras and expose all this shit. Because I knew exactly what was up. So if you look at all my peers and everybody, Matt Penfield was raving about and all this crap internationally, even we couldn’t get the time of day because there’s all this stuff that, you know, it’s like, oh, you gotta listen to Google Dolls 500 times a day or any of this other stuff. The weird thing about it is, is, uh, everybody’s signed essentially the same deal, more or less or worse, right? Right. And what happens is you go, this is getting serious.

People are asking questions, here’s my manager, and here’s, we got a lawyer, we can’t afford to pay the lawyers. The lawyer’s gonna do it on spec. So the manager gets 15% and the lawyer gets a couple points. So he’s getting basically 10%. Right. So they look at the contract, says, we’re gonna give you 125 grand for the first record. And the manager goes, oh, cool. I get 15 percent, I get 15, 20% of that. 20, 28,000 bucks looks like a good deal. Sign it. And the lawyer goes, it’s 18 grand. This is a good deal. Standard everything. Sign it. Everybody signed the same contract and everybody had the same thing happen to ’em. They’re all flushed down the toilet after three records. No big secret. Um, the record company owns the name. They come back after that. That, uh, it’s almost like statute limitations. They’re free to operate again. Yeah. It’s come back like, oh, here’s your favorite band. 20 years later after the landmark record.

But, and, and nobody’s playing music. These people, these bands, everybody fighting each other, tearing the flyers off the walls of each other, talking shit about things. And none of them were playing music, which is the exact opposite of what I ever wanted to do, but you know what I mean? Yeah. I wanted to play music.”

JC/theFIVE10: “You guys have have your own record label. You kind of control your, you control your own destiny. Yeah?”

Anton: “Well, I never sold my rights. Right.”

JC/theFIVE10: “Do you think that’s something that new bands can do today?”

Anton: “Well, people do that. You know, like, the thing is, is that after what I was doing, the hip hop people started to do the same thing. Except their trick is, uh, very much akin to this way that the UK’s establishment is run, or Roman people thing, which is a form of like institutionalized buggery against their children saying it’s to break them. And then guess what? You get to be top dog if you follow the rules, right? This isn’t even a sexual thing. And so these rap guys go, I’m featuring this guy.
I own all your shit. And then all of a sudden that person starts their label and does the same thing as featuring these artists. And it’s got a piece of their thing, and they’re going right down the line. But the problem with indie music and all these different things is all these people come up to you and they say like, they’ve got distributions.

It’s still connected to the same thing. It’s, everything’s still connected to the same plugs except, you know, there’s like subcontracted laborers, right? So this big daddy, white dick comes to you and he says, I wanna give you a 50-50 deal. And you’re like, oh, he’s my bro, you know, and I love this label ’cause such and such, and they do this, but you don’t know what their deal is with their distribution overhead.

So they might be getting 15%. So if he gives you 50-50 deal, you’re getting 7.5% and you’ve just entered into a congratulations. There’s another horrible record contract. And by me, what I give is 70 cents on the dollar to an artist. So every dollar made Yeah. Of every copy. 70 percent doesn’t matter. 70 yin on the hundred. It’s a 70-30 split and people can’t comprehend it ’cause they don’t understand the actual mass. And I’m not gonna tell you how much I don’t pay for distribution globally, but Yeah. It’s like I have the best deal in history because I asked, I mean, I don’t know, I want to get this information, but I asked the people, uh, I had something to bring to the table to start with.

That’s business. Right. The other thing that’s tough for a guy like me though is, you know, like in business, everybody’s trying to get the best deal for their team, for their side. That’s business. As a friend, you know, you try and fucking make me sign a contract where you got 50% of my money for everything, for all life. Because what you sucker me into recording a demo tape at your studio, you want some 360 degree, you’re stealing from my babies. Right. Fuck you. Yeah. You know what I mean? I’ll tell you what, I’m gonna throw you down the stairs, you know? So that’s sometimes why it’s important to have a business person to keep it. If you don’t possess the ability to see even when they’re straight-up fucker, straight-up mafia, straight-up user shark, whatever you want to call him Right. Wolf from Wall Street, whatever it is. If you don’t have that possessive kind of temperament you can deal with that. You’re taking it personally, like the My Pillow guy or something. You shouldn’t be in that position.”

JC/theFIVE10: “We had Uncle Imani from The Pharcyde and he said something that I’ll never forget and it stuck with me forever, which is, ‘when people talk about money, God leaves the room.’ And he wasn’t talking about like, you know, whatever God you believe in. He was just saying that when we start talking about money, the morals and the values that we have as people kind of go by the wayside.”

Anton: “But you know what, it’s so complex because, you know, you can’t draw a line because everybody’s already said, well, I need to compromise to this ’cause I’m just trying to live. You know, if you eliminate society or civic-minded collective understandings that are very important to have to make things function, people are already making those compromises and working at jobs they hate, they’re being treated like shit, uh, their relationship, but staying in a relationship is unhealthy and all this different stuff. Anyway, so on the most micro level, it starts with you, I think. What served me well was that I knew exactly what I was doing from square one. Had nothing to do with getting access to blow jobs, cocaine parties, famous people, fucking anything. I don’t give a shit about all that stuff.”

JC/theFIVE10: “This is your 21st studio album, The Future Is Your Past. It’s the one you’re currently touring on. Talk about how your music has adapted and how the music industry has moved around. And if you could talk about your process and how it’s changed and adapted over time.”

Anton: “The thing was, is like when I, when I started out in bands with teenagers as a teenager, you know, uh, we would scrape, scrape and save, go and record. And this guy had like a jingle studio. His claim of fame was, there was a band called Alama and he hooked him up as a radio hit in Southern California. This band from New Jersey moved out. And so he’d done something, but from the earliest times I ever recorded, I felt that there wasn’t anybody that actually understood what it was I was trying to communicate. Like, I’m gonna make this sound better or I’m gonna make it like this. And they don’t really understand it. At its root, what I’m playing is jazz music. It’s like basically a kind of documentation that is no different than if you’re recording, uh, Robert Johnson or something. It’s like, it is what it is. That’s the point.

The point isn’t perfection. It isn’t anything like, no, that’s the sound at the guitar. I’m looking for the sound of the drums. Nothing more, you know, it’s not about trying to turn the drums into 808. Not trying to do anything. This is the thing that it is. And so I knew that immediately that I had to be in the driver’s seat, even if I didn’t know how. So it was about technical, just looking at photographs of Glenn Johns recording Beatles or whatever mic setups just from Stones and stuff, do nothing.
I’m not gonna touch anything. I’m gonna use the right gear. Just plug in and play. Not pedals, not nothing, and a lot of people don’t understand that.”

JC/theFIVE10: “Anton, thank you so much for your time! Appreciate you.”

Anton: “No problem!”

You can catch Brian Jonestown Massacre on tour and pick up their latest album wheever