UNIDA's JOHN GARCIA: "I Don't Want To Lose Our $350,000 Record"

UNIDA frontman John Garcia (ex-KYUSS) has spoken out about the continuing delays in the release of the group's long-awaited full-length effort, which was originally completed in May 2001 while the band was part of the American/Island Def Jam roster. In an interview posted at Stoner Rock, Garcia states that "this is a $350,000 record that I don't want to lose, and I don't want to re-record for $25,000—it just will not turn out the same. The performance and what [producer] George [Drakoulias] did to everybody in the band including myself was a religious experience for me. you know. I want to keep this, I want to have this record come out, so what we're going to do is… what we did is, [we] shopped the record, we released the CDs to just about every single major label in the world that would sign a band like UNIDA, so what happened was none of them came back and said, 'Nope, don't like it, don't want the fucking record.' Doesn't surprise me... Was I surprised? Was I bummed? No. I could give a fat rat's ass. So what we are going to do is that there is one label who wants it, and that's Sony over in Europe. So the immediate plan is that Sony Europe is going to take the record and have it for Europe, and I think the rest of the world, so what we're going to do here in the States is hopefully find a smaller label, an indie, if you will, that has a little bit of money, and that will take it just for North America and we're going to do it that way. But the thing is that we have to... We spent just about, the ballpark of about $350,000 on the record, so American came back to us and said, 'OK, we'll give you the record back for $150,000... What a price. Wow. We spent $350K and they're going to sell it to us for $150K? Fantastic. So what we need to do is that we need to find a way to do this right and management's on the case and the ball is already rolling. Will it happen? Who knows. Will some independent company go, 'Yeah, I'll have it for the states, but I'll fuck off the rest of the world.' And the majority of the people who know UNIDA know that our businessmen know that a majority of our sales happen over in Europe, so it going to be a little... we're still on a rocky road—very, very rocky—but we're going to prevail and things will be OK. It might take a while—it could take a year from now, it could take two years, it could take even three years. Do I want it to take 3 years? No. But as far as new material goes, what we want to do is... The last time I talked to Arthur, the immediate plan was doing a four-song EP to let people know that we're still alive—throwing something out there on a small independent such as Small Stone, Tee Pee, MeteorCity—somewhere in and around that area, a label of that genre that will say. 'Hey, let's release this thing', just to let people know we're alive. We're in the process of booking a west coast tour and we're just going to let people know that we're still alive and we're not dead yet—not unless one of us dies. Then we will continue on the same route that we've been on since day one."