Conversations with Anton Newcombe and Joel Gion of The Brian Jonestown Massacre from 1998
Years before Dig! turned them into cult heroes, the colourful San Fran psych-rockers had me thinking, "you know, someone should really make a documentary about these guys!"
Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s and 2000s (and crusty mp3 files from the 2010s) to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars and the occasional classic-rock icon.
This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related info).
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THE OPENERS
Last weekend in the Toronto Star, I wrote up my annual survey of summer musical festivals in Southern Ontario located within a two hour drive of Toronto—including opportunities to see Angine de Poitrine, Father John Misty, and Metric without having to deal with big-city traffic or prices.
Speaking of annual traditions: the 40-artist Polaris Music Prize long list was revealed this week and, as usual, Michael Barclay’s That Night in Toronto newsletter is at the ready with your Bill James-level statistical breakdown.
Check out Vish Khanna’s interview with actor, writer, and occasional Girl Against Boys member Gina Gershon if you want to hear the greatest Bob Dylan story ever.
This week at Commotion, I produced our tribute to Giles, with certified Buffyologist Hanna Flint providing the eulogy:
Notes on this week’s new additions to the stübermania 2026 jukebox:
Osees, “OFF COURSE” + Ty Segall, “Black Paint”: In my Pitchfork review of Ty Segall’s 2024 album Three Bells, I suggested he was in the midst of his ‘80s Neil Young phase, using each album as a blank canvas for discrete genre experiments. The same could be said of his old San Fran garage-rock compadre John Dwyer and his ever-evolving Osees, whose recent records have ping-ponged between berserker hardcore and synth freak-outs. But it sounds like both are veering back toward their signature modes: On the title track to his new surprise release, OFF COURSE, Dwyer takes his double-drummer line-up out for an extended psych-funk spin, while the lead single from Segall’s upcoming Chrome fits snugly between “Fanny Dog” and “Break a Guitar” in the roaring grunge-pop corner of his canon.
L’Rain, “soulless cycle”: Taja Cheek’s amorphous art-pop project started dipping more deeply into indie-rock guitar textures on 2023’s I Killed Your Dog, but this teaser from her new album, fata morgana (out Aug. 14), dives face-first into the fuzz. The song tricks you into thinking it’s a mellow dream-pop mantra, before carpet-bombing you with blasts of shoegazey noise that clear the path for an exhilarating, hardcore-powered sprint to the finish line.
Artificial Go, “Jane Ate the Apple Seed”: This Cincinnati band have just dropped a new single, and while the flagship track, “Triple Ones,” sticks to their familiar lane of off-kilter post-punky jangle-pop, this flipside is the real revelation, as they lock into a slow-building hypno-rock pulse that burrows a tunnel from Ohio to Cologne.
Picastro, “Ring Description”: Fun fact—veteran Toronto slocore artist Liz Hysen is now an active amateur boxer, to the point where she based her first collection of original Picastro material in seven years, Double on Time, on the life of Sonny Liston. So that means she can literally knock you on your ass IRL as swiftly as doom-folk hymns like this one.
cute, “coward’s tax”: In which Hamilton’s most reliable suppliers of 20-minute noise-punk mushroom clouds demonstrate that they can level entire cities in less than two. (Note: this song is not yet available on the major streamers, so send all your clicks to Bandcamp.)
Listen to the complete stübermania 2026 playlist here:
THE HEADLINER:
Conversations with Joel Gion and Anton Newcombe of The Brian Jonestown Massacre
Album being promoted: Strung Out in Heaven
The context: I’m pretty sure this is the only instance in my career where I interviewed two different members of the same band on different dates during the same album cycle for two different publications. But that’s how hard I was stanning for The Brian Jonestown Massacre in 1998, when the group was on the cusp of releasing their major-label debut after cranking out six albums over the previous three years. Not only was I fascinated by the sheer volume of music The Brian Jonestown had released in such a short time span, but by the variety of it as well: Each of their albums existed as a self-contained universe that centered around a specific aesthetic, be it shoegaze, garage rock, or psych-folk—a precursor to how equally industrious acts like the aforementioned Ty Segall and Osees would approach their own overflowing discographies.
There wasn’t a lot of information available about The Brian Jonestown Massacre at the time, and the stuff you did hear about veered toward the sensationalistic, if not all-out urban-legend territory. So when the band announced their first Toronto show in the spring of ‘98, I immediately put in a request with my local TVT rep to do an advance phoner with BJM ringleader Anton Newcombe for my campus paper, The Varsity. Instead, I was offered some time with Joel Gion—i.e., the guy who seemed to just stand there onstage and occasionally rattle a tambourine, like a bummed-out Bez. I was initially disappointed that I wouldn’t be speaking to the guy who wrote all the tunes, but once I got on the phone with Joel, I instantly realized—as many would later on—that he was the true rock star of the band, as he freely offered up all sorts of entertaining anecdotes.
Shortly after writing up my article about Joel for The Varsity (reprinted below), Chart magazine contacted me with an offer to interview Anton in-person when The Brian Jonestown Massacre played Club Shanghai (a short-lived restaurant-cum-venue space located on the third and fourth floors of a Chinatown office building, and best remembered today as the place where legendary Toronto booker Dan Burke brought the White Stripes up for their first local show in 1997, when they attracted a meagre crowd that, as Dan likes to say, could’ve all shared the same cab home). The circumstances surrounding my meeting with Anton are detailed in the second article reprinted below. Spoiler alert: the interview did not begin at the scheduled time.
(Side note: I can’t find the original cassette recording of my interview with Anton, but I do have a VHS of it, which I can’t play because I don’t have a VCR anymore. Our conversation was filmed by this guy named Coley who was travelling with the band and documenting their every move. We ended up hanging out for the rest of the night and, after the show, a bunch of us wound up at a boozecan off King West (which also happened to be the place where I first met Brendan Canning, who was DJing there that night). I stayed in touch with Coley over email for a few months after, and he sent me a video copy of my interview with Anton, as well as some BJM sizzle reels he was putting together for a documentary his friends were making. We lost touch after that, but many years later I would see Coley again… in the pages of People magazine.)
THE JOEL GION INTERVIEW
The date: March 28, 1998
Publication: The Varsity
Location: I was at the Varsity office; Joel was calling in from Orlando
Each morning, Discman owners all over the world must make important CD-selection decisions regarding which tunes will be destroying their eardrums later that day. As a future hearing-aid owner myself, I can assure you this process is even more difficult and time-consuming than going through dirty laundry for your least offensive-smelling T-shirt. I have even missed several buses to school as a result.
But like Nutri-Grain bar breakfasts and shower-proof electric razors, the Brian Jonestown Massacre make the morning time-crunch a little easier for you. Spare time is at a definite premium these days, and Anton Newcombe’s cult is your one-stop shopping source for peace, love, sex, drugs, revolution, death, religion, guns, hippie mysticism, pop-culture subversion, black magic and, oh yeah, rock n’ roll. Each of the BJM’s albums play like mixtapes of the greatest artists to ever pick up a six-string: Dylan (circa ‘63), the Yardbirds (circa ‘64), the Rolling Stones (circa ‘65), the Velvet Underground (circa ‘67), the Beatles (circa ‘68), the Stooges (circa ‘69), Syd Barrett (circa ‘70), Bowie (circa ‘71), the Spacemen 3 (circa ‘86) and My Bloody Valentine (circa ‘88). Once you load up on the BJM catalogue, you may never need to go to a record store again.
That such a potent mixture of psychedelic sounds would originate from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district is only natural; just as suburban kids in the ‘60s flocked to the hippie capital to receive their spiritual awakenings, the various members of the Brian Jonestown Massacre were likewise drawn to the mysterious Newcombe, who exhorted them to (as the back cover of 1995’s Take It From the Man puts it) give their bodies, sell their souls, fuck everything else, and rock n’ roll. But the Brian Jonestown Massacre aren’t ones for sticking flowers into the barrels of policemen’s guns; they’d rather swipe the firearms for themselves.
“We’re here to spread the word,” states Joel Gion, the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s tambourine player and, um, Spokesman For The Revolution. “It’s really surprising to me how little people are doing it. What happened to all of the people making speeches and all the people taking the stands? What happened to all the people that wanted to make a change? I don’t see much of that going on these days. People would rather just talk it than walk it.”
Sure, Gion sounds like someone who’s listened to John Sinclair’s opening speech on the MC5’s Kick Out The Jams a few too many times, finishing off his proclamations with frequent shouts of “right on!” and “dig!” But when your hometown’s socially-progressive reputation has been reduced to “Fight the Power!” bumper stickers plastered on BMWs, you need all the idealism you can muster.
“The Brian Jonestown Massacre is not like a regular band,” Gion professes, “where everybody’s got their jobs or they all got their houses and they all got their own thing and then they get together for practice, and practice three times a week and then play a show.
“I’m not really interested in acquiring a big load of money that’s going to buy me a ticket to die in Florida. I mean, we’ve been together as a unit for a long time… we’re all going for the same goal and we all have a lot of the same influences, but we’re all very much our own individuals. We’ve been through a lot together. It’s very real—some of us have lived on the street for this…”
Or have resorted to somewhat dubious lines of work. Three years ago, Gion took a sudden leave of absence from The Brian Jonestown Massacre; Newcombe claimed the tambourine man was kidnapped by his parents. Hey—whatever it takes to get the FBI off your case…
“At the time, I lived in this warehouse and my roommates were into drug manufacturing,” Gion explains. “I used to pay my rent by laying down books of LSD—you know, I’d lay down two books and I’d pay my rent—and I’d make runs for them and whatnot. I used to and I’d pay my rent-and I’d make In have this fake leather Hotel Riviera Las Vegas travel bag and I’d get like 500 E’s can muster. “The Brian Jonestown Massacre is E’s thrown into it, and an address with cab fare, and I’d go there and come back with bricks of dough.
“But I started noticing street cleaners outside the warehouse that were there every day and they weren’t sweeping nothing. And I’m seeing the same bums everyday and they’ve got their standard-issue bum clothes or whatever but they’re all, like, new. And I say to my roommates, ‘Do you guys see what I see?’ And they’re like, ‘What are you talking about, you’re paranoid.” So it got to the point where I just said ‘fuck it’ and split. And three days later, sure enough, the Feds busted down the door.”
Gion may have avoided the heat that time around, but he and his mates are still up to no good. The Brian Jonestown Massacre have a strange way of “spreading the word.” Most of the media hype surrounding the BJM has focused not on the uprising the band is stirring in record stores (six double albums in three years makes for a potential shelf-space crisis), nor has it centred around the band’s upcoming major-label debut for TVT Records, Strung Out in Heaven (due in stores May 12). Nope, when people talk about The Brian Jonestown Massacre, they speak of fabled riot-storting gigs, band members fighting onstage, or of the band’s increasingly bizarre feud with fellow West Coast psych-rockers and MTV Buzz Bin residents the Dandy Warhols.
According to Gion, the Dandys and the BJM have been friends ever since he and Newcombe stumbled upon the band playing a house party five years ago. A mutual admiration society quickly formed—Dandys leader Courtney Taylor has credited Newcombe with directly inspiring the Dandys’ musical direction—with the BJM inviting their Portland peers to take part in their bimonthly gigs at San Francisco’s Trocadero Transfer club. However, after the Dandy Warhols signed to Capitol Records for their 1997 release The Dandy Warhols Come Down, the inter-band love-ins came to a screeching halt.
“I can’t speak for everybody,” Gion says, “but this is what did it for me: They’re touring with Love and Rockets and we got the third billing. So we play our set and I go upstairs to go grab me a beer—you know, I just played a gig and I’m going to go hang with the people. And I go up there and there’s a sign on the door that says ‘Dandy Warhols only.’ And I’m like, ‘Obviously, that don’t apply to me.’ So l go in there and I grab a beer and I’m kicking back and suddenly I’m getting some sort of razzmatazz routine from them about how I’m drinking their beer and I’m in their space and stuff. And I was just like, ‘Fuck you.’ That’s what killed it for me, right there—just getting the whole rock star bullshit from them. That’s the vibe that I find probably the ugliest of all, when people are total charlatans with what they are and it’s really only about themselves.”
In retaliation, The Brian Jonestown Massacre responded to the Dandys ubiquitous “Not if You Were Last Junkie On Earth” single with their own instant anthem, a glammed-out suckerpunch entitled “Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth” (featured on 1997’s Give It Back!). Never ones for subtle gestures, the BJM then took their Beatles-vs-Stones rivalry with the Dandys to whole ‘nother level when Newcombe sent off four gift-wrapped empty shotgun shells to the Dandys, with a member’s name written on each—a move that cost the BJM a high-profile gig with the Dandys at New York’s CMJ festival last September.
“We had a headlining gig for CMJ,” Gion recounts, “and we asked that we get The Dandy Warhols to play with us. I mean, we’re old friends. But they took [the shotgun shells] as some sort of death threat bit and Capitol had us thrown off our own show. Like we’re going to go in there with machine guns and start bringing them down or some shit!”
But then, how could we expect any less from a band that takes their name from a dead Rolling Stone and one of the most horrifying mass slaughters in recent history?
“People talk about all the stories and riots at this gig, or bullets to this, and all that,” Gion concludes. “I think that’s just an example of the way people interpret things in today’s society. But if you listen to the music, there’s a very solid catalogue of material being made here, and that’s what it’s all about. And whatever you do as a person shouldn’t really overshadow the music, because that’s the whole thing—that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”
THE ANTON NEWCOMBE INTERVIEW
The date: April 18, 1998
Publication: Chart
Location: The backstage dressing room at Club Shanghai
Right up there on the list of least-desirable jobs, second only to CBGB’s bathroom janitor, has to be managing Anton Newcombe and his psycho-delic cult, The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
The guy who currently holds the position, Mike Dutcher, is well aware of the dangers that come with the territory; his predecessor was allegedly dismissed whilst staring down the barrel of Newcombe’s shotgun, and band members have been known to engage in random acts of violence, both with audience members and amongst each other. Dutcher’s justification: “Everybody gets into fights at work with co-workers; The Brian Jonestown Massacre just happen to ‘work’ in front of hundreds of people each night.”
But in the hours before the BJM’s Canadian debut at Toronto’s Club Shanghai, even Dutcher’s feeling a little tense. Just yesterday, drummer A.J. Morris suddenly quit the band to go home to his girlfriend in L.A., forcing a last-minute cancellation of that evening’s show in Boston. Luckily, tourmates Swoon 23 have offered the services of their own time-keeper, Marty Smith, for the remainder of the tour.
But instead of using the valuable pre-show time at the Shanghai to rehearse with Smith, Newcombe and his bandmates are stuck at the border. Apparently, an old weapons charge on guitarist Jeff Davies’ rap sheet has come back to haunt him; the FBI have supposedly been called in. The Toronto show is in jeopardy, not to mention a scheduled 7:30pm meet-and-greet dinner in Chinatown with various A&M staffers to celebrate the band’s recent signing to affiliate label TVT.
In other words, it’s business as usual.
Finally, at 9:30pm, a cheerful Brian Jonestown Massacre (Davies included) burst into the restaurant armed only with smiles and handshakes. Despite the advance billing, Newcombe’s vibe is much more Woodstock than Altamont.
“I’m way more focused than those Woodstock freaks!,” he tells me later in the Shanghai dressing room. “You think of, like, ‘Whoa, the ‘60s! Wow, everybody is freaking!’ But no—there were some people doing stuff, and there was just a sea of people going, ‘Yeah, it’s groovy baby’ and they had nothing to say… My parents were hippies and they sold out, so fuck them. I’m not buying into any of that shit.”
Many have pointed out the Massacre’s obvious musical ties to late Rolling Stones co-founder Brian Jones. But it’s the second half of the band equation—which refers to People’s Church leader Jim Jones and the 1978 mass-suicide at this Guyana compound—that seems to have had a greater spiritual impact on Newcombe.
“I’m anti-religion,” Newcombe clarifies, ”which is totally different than being agnostic or atheist. I’m really into spirituality. Religion seems to be the rules to the game—I don’t want to play games.
“I just know that I’m a free individual… and a lot of people are kind of put off by that. It’s like taking acid or something. You can have all these revelations… and be able to articulate them, but the place you’re going mentally is so far away from where the average person dwells that you’re not going to be able to relate to them. And that’s going to scare them.”
It’s said that we only use one-tenth of our brain’s capacity, but Newcombe has found a way to tap into that 90 percent reserve. His expansive theories can’t be reduced to soundbites, and to say he’s “prolific” is seriously selling the man short. Since 1995, the BJM have released six albums’ worth of mad, droning psych-mod genius; the band’s fine new TVT debut, Strung Out in Heaven, takes a spin on the Lennon/Velvets axis. But despite more than a hundred should-be classics already to his name, Newcombe is still better known for inspiring beer-bottle riots than mass singalongs.
“That’s weird,” Newcombe confesses, though he’s not too concerned about his image. “It just means I have more work to do. It’s silly, all the cliches [about me], because it’s really about the music. But a lot of people like to hear the dirt.
“I can’t really do anything about what’s already happened, but I can do things about the future. I don’t want people to be hurtful towards me because they don’t understand me. I don’t have any desire to be smacked around just for principle; I try to conserve my energy a little bit more than that. But one of these days, I’m going to get hit in the face [by a projectile] and get cut up and then I’ll be really mad. I just don’t dig that. Sometimes, people are like full-on provocateurs… People are weird.”
“I’m really into being a kid forever. I refuse to evolve too much, you know? I’ve seen the big people’s world—they can have it.”
ENCORES: BONUS ANTON INTERVIEW EDITION!
The Brian Jonestown Massacre returned to town in August 1998 to play an infamous show at the El Mocambo, where, after arguing with one of his guitar players (or was it the drummer?), a visibly angry Anton stormed offstage at the end and reportedly hopped straight into a cab to the airport, leaving the rest of the group stranded in Toronto for a few days. That effectively spelled the end of the “classic” BJM line-up—i.e., the one immortalized in Dig!—and it would take the normally prolific Anton three years to release another album, after which new BJM music came at a slower and steadier pace, even as the Dig! hype machine kicked into full gear.
I got the chance to speak to Anton again—or at least email him some questions—shortly after Dig! was released on DVD. And even though his answers came in text form, I could tell he was in a less-sunnier mood than at our first meet-up in ‘98. Here’s the news item I wrote about our exchange for the July 21, 2005 edition of Eye Weekly:
Anton Newcombe likes to talk, just not to journalists. But the Brian Jonestown Massacre mastermind is happy to email us his thoughts—even if he’s not the sort of guy to punctuate his prose with smiley-face emoticons.“It is my impression that most writers have no idea about my work or contributions to popular culture,” Newcombe writes from his L.A. home, explaining why he prefers email interviews these days. “I’m not fucking around here anymore. It’s just not worth my time.”
It’s understandable that Newcombe is feeling a little guarded. While his long-running, long-suffering psych-rock ensemble is receiving unprecedented attention these days, it’s not necessarily for the right reasons. The band’s current tour will promote their upcoming Tee Pee Records release, We Are the Radio (due in August), but it also coincides with the recent DVD release of Dig!, Ondi and David Timoner‘s Sundance-winning documentary chronicling the divergent career trajectories of Newcombe’s notoriously dysfunctional band and their MTV-embraced friends-turned-rivals The Dandy Warhols.
Newcombe has publicly attacked the film for essentially portraying him as a violent, paranoid megalomaniac, but, in this case, the defamation of character has produced tangible benefits—the BJM’s July 27 Toronto gig has been upgraded from Lee’s Palace to the 1,000-plus capacity Phoenix.
However, Newcombe is noticeably absent from the Dig! DVD’s “Where Are They Now?” bonus film, featuring recent interviews with all of the film’s principals—except him. Did the Timoners give Newcombe the chance to set the record straight?
“I wouldn’t piss on [them] if they were on fire. I have been wronged and the courts will prove the merit of my case. We’ll just leave it at that,” he says.For now, Newcombe’s main priority is showing his post-Dig! fan base that there’s more to him than onstage fisticuffs. We Are the Radio is the ninth addition to a sprawling discography that assumes every shade on the psychedelic spectrum, but where the BJM released six albums (three of them doubles) during their initial 1995-98 outburst, Newcombe has slowed his output considerably since—though not out of lack of inspiration.
“I don’t feel the need to release so many albums now when the work I have already shared has yet to be digested and placed in a healthy context in regards to the popular lexicon,” he says. (Translation: “I was doing this garage-rock thing back when The Strokes were wetting their private-school beds.”)Newcombe newcomers can go to the BJM website and download the band’s entire nine album back catalogue—for free. Though, of course, even free transactions come with a price.
“We’ve had over 15,000,000 downloads,” Newcombe says. “Think about what I’m saying here. We have all of the ISP/email info of each person that downloads.”
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