The ghost of Brian Jones visited Anton Newcombe and asked him to make ‘Take it from the Man!’
Led by the formidable Anton Newcombe, the Brian Jonestown Massacre are one of the greatest and most iconic bands of the past 30 years or so. Newcombe’s approach to writing songs has been tireless, and he has consistently delivered solid record after solid record.
One of the band’s best albums is undoubtedly 1996’s Take It from the Man!, which saw a significant departure from the shoegaze influence of their first two records Methodrone and Spacegirl & Other Favourites. For their third album, BJM invested in a sound derived from the British psychedelic, garage and blues rock bands of the 1960s.
The approach to the sound of Take It from the Man! has often been compared to the psychedelic era of the Rolling Stones. The band itself took its name, of course, from a portmanteau of Brian Jones and the Jonestown Massacre – Jonestown was a small settlement in Guyana where nearly 1,000 people committed suicide in a cultish ritual led by the American leader Jim Jones in 1978.
In the liner notes to the album, we find the admission from Anton Newcombe: “I, Anton A. Newcombe, do solemnly swear that the ghost of Brian Jones came to me in the studio and asked me to make this record. P.S. He also asked that I kick the shit out of old Mick and Keith for ripping off his band, girl and money, having him murdered, being glad he’s dead, and for not being very nice people.”
There’s a strange mixture of seriousness and irony in Newcombe’s liner notes. He was evidently a big fan of Brian Jones, hence the naming of his band, and had been critical of the way Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had made Jones feel estranged, which arguably led to his early death in 1969.
On the other hand, Newcombe is undoubtedly indebted to the very sound of the Rolling Stones and their influence on Take it from the Man!, one of his greatest works. The showiness of the Stones is evident in Newcombe’s later comments, as he stated: “I might have written those songs getting drunk up in Portland at Zia’s [of the Dandy Warhols] house with everybody after a show. I used to really love writing songs in front of people with acoustic guitars or whatever just to show off with my mates; it used to make me really happy to be clever.”
Still, it humorous to imagine Jones’ ghost coming to Newcombe to personally request that he make the record, especially knowing Newcombe’s ego was about as big as possible in the early days of BJM. This is brilliantly shown in the music documentary Dig!, charting the early rise of his band alongside The Dandy Warhols.
