EXODUS Bassist JACK GIBSON: 'I'm A T-Shirt Salesman. I'm Not A Musician.'

In a new interview with Danielle Bloom, EXODUS bassist Jack Gibson was asked what advice he would give to musicians who are just starting out, as well as to those musicians who maybe are a little jaded at this point in their career. He responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "I don't know what to tell young musicians today because I am jaded. And it isn't that I'm just jaded, it's that there's no music business anymore.

"When I was young, there was a path, there were steps to take," he explained. "You got your band together, you put your music together, you started looking for shows, and if you could draw people to your shows, then the next step was that label people would be interested. Then you had to get your promotional pack together to give to the labels that were interested. And then you tried to get signed and then you tried to make records and sell records And those steps don't exist at all anymore. Now the step is make a band — or not even make a band. Let's just go viral. I don't know to do that. Don't ask me how to fucking do that. I'm in my fifties. I don't know how to do that shit. It's totally a mystery to me. I don't know how things get popular now, other than just total luck. So I don't know.

"Here in Nashville [where I live now], young musicians, they ask me that all the time," he continued. "And I kind of feel like a dick when I'm answering, because I'm, like, 'Guys, I don't know.' I don't know what makes things tick. The bands that are real popular, I don't know why those bands are popular. And I'm not saying that they're not good; I just don't know why those ones are the ones that stand out from the other ones right now. It all kind of sounds the same to me. I guess it's probably because I'm just old. But I don't know what direction to give anybody."

When Bloom noted out that "we are living in different times" right now, Gibson concurred. "There's no business," he said. "Once they started giving the music away, there's no business. We don't sell shit for records. If we don't go out and sell t-shirts, we don't make money. I'm a t-shirt salesman. I'm not a musician. I'm literally a traveling tchotchke seller. That's what we do. We play music to try to get people to the store and sell them our fuckin' stuff with stuff printed on it. That's the business. If you can't fill up a room, 50,000 units moved on the Internet, then they don't wanna talk to you. And any day now, we're all gonna lose our jobs to these fuckin' robots. Once the A.I. figures out how to actually make music that people enjoy, they're not gonna pay us to do shit."

After Bloom expressed her belief that people will always be interested in seeing live music being performed by humans, Jack said: "Well, that's true. But at this point in time, most of the music business isn't that; most of it is licensing and commercial jingles and music editing and music recording. All that's gonna just disappear. There's gonna be 50 people out there who make music that people are interested in that can't be reproduced. And then the rest of it… Like, who's gonna pay somebody to write music for a movie? Or pay an orchestra, pay 60 people to come in and perform it when one guy can just go [punch a few commands into a computer] and it comes out. And we're not gonna know the fucking difference. Things are changing so fast that I don't really know what to say."

EXODUS will embark on "The Battle Of '24" North American tour in the fall. The trek marks the band's first headlining run in many years and will feature support from thrash metallers HAVOK, metallic hardcore outfit CANDY and crossover thrashers DEAD HEAT. The tour kicks off on November 2 in Tampa, Florida and will thrash across North America, ultimately concluding on December 7 in Los Angeles, California.

EXODUS released its latest album, "Persona Non Grata", in November 2021 via Nuclear Blast Records. The LP was recorded at a studio in Lake Almanor, California and was engineered by Steve Lagudi and EXODUS. It was produced by EXODUS and was mixed by Andy Sneap.

"Persona Non Grata" was the follow-up to 2014's "Blood In Blood Out", which was the San Francisco Bay Area thrashers' first release since the departure of EXODUS's singer of nine years, Rob Dukes, and the return of Steve "Zetro" Souza, who previously fronted EXODUS from 1986 to 1993 and from 2002 to 2004.