“This is hell out here,” Brian Jonestown Massacre frontman Anton Newcombe says over the phone from Nashville. “It’s just so fuckin’ humid. It completely negated my shower.”
Despite the sweaty circumstances, Newcombe is otherwise in high spirits a few days into the band’s current U.S. tour. “It’s an opportunity to say hi to old friends, but it’s also an opportunity to meet new people.” Newcombe, who grew up in Orange County, California, has lived in Berlin for the last 19 years, and doesn’t miss America’s humidity or increasingly grim political climate. But coming back stateside to tour or visit family is generally a happy occasion. “I’m 58, that’s really old. But, y’know, I feel blessed that we can travel around the world and do this and it pays for itself.”
The Brian Jonestown Massacre has released 20 albums since 1995, but the band’s surprisingly not on the road to promote anything in particular right now. The most recent full-length was 2023’s The Future Is Your Past, and the band released just a couple new songs, “Makes Me Great” and “Out of Body,” as a non-album single in April. That frees the band up to play whatever they want, even if they can only scratch the surface of their massive back catalog. “We do a three-hour set, and there wasn’t even enough time to play a song from every record,” Newcombe says. “So the only thing you could do is throw some stuff together that you like that sounds good.”
Newcombe expects to get started on a new Brian Jonestown Massacre album in early 2026 in between tours, after a couple of years of focusing on outside projects. In February, he released the debut album by All Seeing Dolls, a long distance collaboration with Scottish singer-songwriter Dot Allison that began during the COVID-19 lockdowns. “We did it before I’d even met her,” he says. “She just was playing acoustic guitar on her couch and singing and I built everything around it, sort of freeform.” Next, he’s producing a record for the French band L’Epee.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s sound, heavily indebted to ’60s psychedelia and British Invasion bands, has always resonated a little more in the U.K. than in the U.S. In July the band played the storied Glastonbury Festival, but Newcombe doesn’t relish trimming down the setlist for festival stages. “For me, there’s a whole spectrum of human emotion or what the band represents or something like that, it takes the listener on some kind of ride, dynamic-wise, right?” he says. “And it’s harder for me to accomplish that in a shorter time frame of like 55 minutes.”
Lately, Newcombe has been reaching back to the very beginning of Brian Jonestown Massacre, which formed in San Francisco in 1990. “The song that we’re opening up with was written at our first practice,” he says. “It was like six songs that came out over a couple of the first early records that all were from the first practice.” That song, “Whoever You Are,” was released on 1997’s Give It Back!
The Brian Jonestown Massacre has gone through many lineup changes over the years, but Newcombe and longtime bandmates Ricky Maymi and Joel Gion are still going at it, along with newer additions like Hákon Aðalsteinsson and Hallberg Daði Hallbergsson, both from Iceland. “I stick with people as long as I can, like the Icelandic guys keep coming with me. So that’s good, I like them,” Newcombe says. Like Spinal Tap, though, they have more turnover behind the drums. “We cycle though drummers.”
Some of the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s most popular songs like 1996’s “Anenome” are regularly performed, but “Straight Up and Down,” best known as the theme song to HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” hasn’t been in the set for years. “Well, we could,” Newcombe says, sounding like he probably won’t. “I could play anything, we play just about everything you’ve ever heard.”
More than any one song, though, the 2004 documentary Dig! is what the Brian Jonestown Massacre is most widely known for. Director Ondi Timoner’s acclaimed film, which won the grand jury prize at Sundance, chronicled the friendship and rivalry between BJM and Portland’s the Dandy Warhols through the late ’90s and early 2000s. Newcombe is famously depicted in the doc as a volatile genius who sabotages his band’s potential for mainstream stardom while the Dandys climb the major label ladder. Understandably, he has mixed emotions about the experience, and shrugs “Who cares, right?” when the subject comes up.
Gion, best known as Newcombe’s goofy tambourine-playing sidekick in the movie, has more readily embraced his association with Dig! Last year, Gion published the memoir In the Jingle Jangle Jungle: Keeping Time with The Brian Jonestown Massacre and provided voiceover for new footage added to a 20th anniversary extended edition of Dig! Newcombe is disinterested in seeing the new cut, but diplomatic about his bandmate’s involvement. “I can see why he did it because he had a book out, so it all worked out in, y’know, cross-marketing.”
Today, Newcombe owns the label that releases Brian Jonestown Massacre’s albums, A Records, as well as the instruments and studio gear that the band tours and records with. That he’s still prolific and self-sufficient decades later puts the Dig! narrative in a different light.
“In the film footage, you’ve got a bunch of people yelling at me because I won’t sign this record deal,” Newcombe says. “Everyone in the movie is kinda saying, ‘Oh, look at him wreck his career.’ And now we’ve seen those record companies don’t exist. And the reason why I have a tour bus and all this shit is because I own the publishing. And the reason why my friends don’t play is because they don’t own their music. It just doesn’t seem so crazy now.”
