Black Robot: Former members of Buckcherry reboot for hard rock revival

When he pulls up to Jake's on Friday night, he's not going hear the hiss of air brakes. When he hops out, he'll have to unload his own gear. For the first time in 12 years, Jonathan "J.B." Brightman will be transporting his rock 'n' roll not in a bus but in a van.

And you kind of get the feeling he wouldn't have it any other way.

"Last time I toured in a van it was 1998," laughs Brightman, bassist for AC/DC-inspired hard-rock revivalists Black Robot. "For me, to start all over, it's going to be pretty rough for a while, but it feels good."

Brightman left Los Angeles-based sleaze-rockers Buckcherry in 2002, just as the band was closing in on the mainstream success, for reasons, as Brightman describes them, straight out of Behind The Music.

"I wanted to continue what I'd started, but unfortunately for me, when I played with Buckcherry, I just couldn't tolerate what was going on with the interband politics," he says. "It wasn't good for me. In a nutshell, I didn't have any place to live and was living out of a storage unit, living on a tour bus while a couple of guys were buying homes in the Hollywood hills."

Being broke and out of a job was one thing; but being remembered mostly via the former-member footnotes of lawsuit-era Buckcherry's Wikipedia page - in 2006, a 16-year-old girl alleged that she was coerced into appearing topless in one of the band's videos - was something else.

"(Buckcherry) kind of took what was part of my legacy and kind of redefined what that was all about and I think started making lower-quality music," Brightman says. "There were three of us that left the band and then they (the two founding members) went and formed a new version of Buckcherry and had this massive hit."

The first time he heard Buckcherry's Billboard-charting, Paris-Hilton-sex-tape-inspired song? The one with an unprintable title?

"I was like, 'This is a piece of junk,'" he says. "It just sounded like some throw away track we used to do, but people really locked in on it ...Somebody's got to make music for all the people who don't really think a lot."

Brightman's just determined it's not going to be him.

Which is why, in 2008, he and other Buckcherry expatriates (who have since moved on) flipped the switch on Black Robot, a band that after just one album (their 2009 self-titled debut) had famed heavy metal journalist Lonn Friend gushing that they knew "what it truly means to rock as if our very survival as a race depended on it."

But though he's only eight years out of the game, Brightman knows that the rules have changed and that the days of being offered major label deals before ever releasing an album- DreamWorks Records signed Buckcherry solely on the strength of their performances - are over.

"The way it used to be is that you had to demonstrate your music in a live show and basically a bigger company would sign you and invest all this money in you from day one," Brightman says. "Now in order to get a bigger company involved with you, you literally have to do everything yourself and once you start [gaining attention], that's when they come into play, when there's a little blood in the water."

But to the new order, he says, there is an upshot.

"The great thing is that you can reach all these people without the help of a record label," he says. "You can get to these people with Facebook and MySpace. The record companies thought they were holding the golden keys with that, part of playing with them is giving up your creative control and that's a horrible thing to do, to give a person license to your art."

Brightman is speaking from first-hand experience that informs his drive for the Big Time to this day.

"Buckcherry started out as Sparrow, that was our band's name, and we played all over Hollywood with that name. So then we got a record deal and the first thing the record company wanted us to was change our name."

Ostensibly, the reason revolved around a cease-and-desist letter from a major Christian record label of the same name.

"But there was no real conflict there," says Brightman, who came up with the name Buckcherry - a spoonerism of Chuck Berry - after reading an old Rolling Stone interview with the legendary rock 'n' roller about record companies trying to exert creative control over their artists. "What I realize now is that they were trying to exercise creative control over our project and process by forcing us to change the name of our band."

He says the name (and rock 'n' roll) of Black Robot is here to stay.

"Now everything we do is what we agree on as a band," he says. "They're no knuckleheads in suits telling us we can't do this or that and it's an amazing feeling. It took a little while to get that passion back. It'll be just as hard this time and probably even harder but [after] getting out on the road with this thing, it just really feels great to make music again."