Retsoor asks: can people change?
Anton Newcombe: A person can change, however, it can be difficult for a person to change people.
RS: Is the belief in God a choice?
AN: Who am I to ponder the mind of god?
RS: Is everything singular or plural?
AN: It can be either, but it’s definitely singular.
RS: What percentage of the world is evil?
AN: 33.356397%
RS: Why do you get out of bed in the morning?
AN: To pee.
RS: What % of your personality can you choose?
AN: The answer is maths.
RS: How has mental health affected your creative life?
AN: Half crazy in a totally insane world is stronger than a pint of Guinness.
RS: Which parent do you sound like when you’re angry?
AN: My parents are both dead, so neither, but if I had to guess, I would say it’s my mother.
RS: What % of your unhappiness do you have control over?
AN: Who attempts to reduce emotions to mathematical equations? Oh, evidently you do.
RS: What % of utility have we lost or gained from the internet?
AN: I think if monopoly taught us anything, it’s that deregulation of public utilities is a huge mistake.
RS: Do you do what you do so you don’t get sad or because you are?
AN: I do what I do and I do it well, I do it for you sugar baby honey can’t you tell.
RS: Does answering questions in a public forum worry you or inspire you?
AN: I find it helpful to imagine that everyone is naked, for instance, you right now sitting there naked, reading this… it’s like magic, and instantly I am in your mind, as you imagine yourself naked…
RS: Which list is longer: a list of everything that is wrong, or a list of everything that isn’t?
AN: Lists are stupid, I prefer to leave post it notes everywhere, i tilt to the aggressive end of the passive aggressive spectrum.
RS: Would you choose to live again, without knowing you were given a choice, if you had the choice?
AN: I focus on the carnate as in incarnate, from the latin carne or in flesh, the now, be here now. Why waste energy on answering hypothetical questions only to forget them.
RS: Bonus question: Drugs?
AN: Yes.
RS: Bonus Jeopardy: one small regret I have is: (no big regrets allowed, please).
AN: Not kissing you enough.
My memories of meeting Anton are a handful of scenes from my very first tour out west, probably in my late teens or early twenties, when The Brian Jonestown Massacre played with Mercury Rev at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill, circa 199—? In a pattern I’ve recognized since, he was preceded by emissaries, most memorably Jeffrey Davies in a house frock, beehive hairdo, and ascetically long finger nails, with which he played guitar as deftly as he picked through a constellation of tiny, multicolored balloons to make sure I got “the second fattest one.” It was my first encounter with the “dark side of the 60s” and the underbelly of Summer of Love idealism that the band cultivated and it changed my idea of what our generation could do with the failed art form we’d inherited from our parents. I credit them with starting the initially ironic trend of poaching motifs from our Boomer forebears, before it became a requirement when bands like the Strokes, the White Stripes and Interpol took it to its commercial extremes. All of which set the stage for the layered irony of online discourse and memes, a.k.a. our species’ gradual transition to communicating with already existing bits of culture.
Our friendship gathered anecdotes without any real effort, we rarely met under “normal” circumstances. I manned the floppy camera hat Ondi Timoner used to capture the more salacious moments of DIG!, for example, a documentary widely cited as the “Disney version” of the band’s story, on a week long Japanese tour during which the filmmaker crashed on our hotel room floor. We played an historically-flooded-out Truck Festival in England with Garth & Maude Hudson that included Oxford music luminaries like Mark Gardener and Andy Bell—both of whom Anton sat onstage in enormous stuffed arm chairs from the lobby so they could watch his set. He routinely cooked me dinner during a particularly impoverished NYC period, gifting me vinyl to sell on eBay for groceries, and on and on. Generation X enjoyed the last moments of rock & roll being a career option for working and middle class musicians, before Napster rendered it a plaything of the privileged class, and Anton and I continue to look out for one another as the internet kicks the roll of “artist” around at the mercy of commerce. Thank God for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, thank God for mental illness, thank God that “danger” still has a representative in an art form originally designed to include it and us. – Retsoor
