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TV/Film The Last Rock and Roll Band

Jan. 20, 2025
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“In every spiritual tradition, you burn in hell for pretending to be God and not being able to back it up.”

 - Matt Hollywood on Anton Newcombe


“You fucking broke my sitar motherfucker.” 

Anton Newcombe on Matt Hollywood


The year, though we can never really be sure, is 1996. The Brian Jonestown Massacre gathers in a pixelated San Francisco backyard. The list of members has its own Wikipedia page but consists at its core of three principal characters: John Lennon (Matt Hollywood on bass), Austin Powers (Joel Gion on tambourine), and Charles Manson (Anton Newcombe on mad genius). The daily drama almost always concerns money, typically lost to grass, wine, or smack. Today, however, Anton has blown it all on sitars.


Anton Newcombe is the singer-songwriter-guitarist-producer-founder of the BJM, volatile yet prolific. He sports long greasy hair, a poncho, and sideburns whose length will become our main marker of time’s passage. Though Newcombe has led his band in producing three albums this year already, he can’t seem to stop sabotaging their shot at signing to a label. Matt Hollywood, nagging in small round glasses and an overgrown Mod cut, posits that Newcombe is no better than the record companies he hopes to scam, and can’t deal with other people. Newcombe responds that he doesn’t do anything wrong and that’s why he never says he’s sorry, and storms away.


This altercation appears in a short scene at the beginning of Ondi Timoner’s DIG! (2004), giving birth to two of the film’s most iconic quotes. Twenty years later, Timoner gives us access to the full session, and reveals it was the direct catalyst for a particularly storied night in 90s rock history: the BJM’s all-out brawl onstage at L.A.’s Viper Room. It’s one of many ways DIG! reinvents itself in 2024. DIG! XX (2024) is not only a remaster, but an entirely new film.


The original documentary, premiering at Sundance 2004, chronicles the rise and rivalry of two bands from the 90s West Coast rock scene: The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. Filmmakers and siblings Ondi and David Timoner forge an intimate relationship with the two bands, following them for seven years in hopes of answering a vague but burning question about the conflict between art, genius, and commerce. Despite focusing most of its attention on the BJM, who at the time were lesser-known, the film is narrated by Courtney Taylor, leader of the Dandy Warhols. Taylor’s comments give some structure to the film but weave in and out of the story so much you might forget he’s there. Otherwise, the piece is a raw pastiche of tour life and fist fights, with a less-than-happy ending forced to salvage itself with a montage of audio bytes about revolution and legacy. For its twentieth anniversary last year, the film returned to Sundance as DIG! XX with the addition of Joel Gion (BJM)’s narration and thirty-five new minutes of footage, edited this time around by David instead of Ondi. On January 14, 2025, I attended its New York City premiere at the IFC Center, followed by a Q&A with Ondi Timoner and Adam Shore, a former A&R man who worked with both bands and who appears throughout the film.


Make no mistake: this film is not nostalgia bait. If DIG! (2004) defined Gen X, DIG! XX (2024) refreshes itself for the ironic and sexless Gen Z. In their revision, the Timoners strip DIG! of all its earnesty using the commentary of Joel Gion. His hindsight drips with sardonic self-deprecation: your Gen X parents looking back on the teased hair and mullets of their high school yearbook photos. (Gion even references his own use of hairspray in the doc.) The result is narrative and goofy, more Spinal Tap than Don’t Look Back. Despite the lack of actual clarification between the two narrators, it’s not hard to keep up. Juxtaposed against Gion, and about twenty years behind him in wisdom, Courtney Taylor comes across as naive and charmingly egotistical.


Gion’s perspective, which commands the tone of XX, is coldly amused. Editor and producer David Timoner compares his writing to Hunter S. Thompson, or Lester Bangs (Rolling Stone, Creem). On the other hand, Taylor’s perspective on his supposed frenemy Newcombe is warm, as if they’re a pair of star-crossed lovers, or warring kings with a begrudging respect. In reality it seems they were just a pair of friends, one of whom happened to be pretty troubled. Members of the Dandy Warhols have claimed there wasn’t even a rivalry between the bands, that Newcombe tried to play up a Blur-Oasis thing for press, and that the documentary itself further exaggerated it for narrative sake. New and reordered scenes in XX support these claims. The filmmakers, however, don’t shy away from accusations that they twisted the story. Speaking about the scene selection process, Ondi tells the IFC audience, “Japan doesn’t happen where it actually truly happened because Anton becomes a heroin addict as soon as he gets the advance from TVT records and I wanted the audience to have a moment. I wanted you guys to have ten, five minutes of ‘yay!’ so we flipped it around so that Anton becomes a heroin addict after Japan, but the actual reality is he’s totally strung out in Japan. But that’s just not a part of the story we told. You have to think about the mood of the audience and what is the audience going through, and that’s really who you’re making the film for.” She admits many scenes are out of chronological order, rearranged since the original cut to give the audience a better emotional journey and, most importantly, end on a high note.


The fact that documentary isn’t “real” already feels like a given to me. I think most of us below a certain age at this point have come to expect manipulation from any form of media, far beyond simple bias, and further towards fiction. We just choose to immerse ourselves in these fictions rather than engage critically with their sources. It’s not a lack of media literacy; it’s a deliberate suspension of disbelief. What feels revelatory to me about DIG’s modern retooling is the parallels it reveals between the form it takes (film) and the form it depicts (music).


The original film is a pure document of a scene from the inside. It’s assembled by a version of Ondi Timoner that has Courtney Taylor crashing in her bed, and the “deadline she couldn’t push”, her son Joaquim, growing in her belly. It feels definitively incomplete, like a window into a world that actually exists. The remaster is strategically fuller, a “sculpture” as Ondi describes it, yes, but a sculpture with a hat on. It’s brilliant and catchy.


While the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre may not have had their own actual rivalry, I feel they represent the turn of the century’s final musical conflict. The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s stage is covered in blood, tripwire, and way too many guitarists. The Dandy Warhols are a solid foursome who describe themselves as the most high-functioning rock-and-roll band in America; the BJM describes them as a pop band.


Ultimately, the Dandies achieved commercial success. They’re professionals with more concise songs. Courtney Taylor says he “sneezes and hits come out” and he’s obnoxious but not wrong; you might not know the Dandy Warhols by name, but you may have heard their music in the theme song for “Veronica Mars” or in a mobile network commercial. They’re even proud posers, going as far as to use the BJM’s real living quarters for their own band’s photoshoot. Anton Newcombe and the Brian Jonestown Massacre hardly have distinct songs, but produce record after record for the sake of art and “revolution”, each one coming from and contributing to a singular musical world. They represent the scene’s last real attempt at reviving rock and roll without selling out, and DIG! XX wants to convince us that they didn’t fail.


I felt convinced of the opposite. If contemporary culture could really still tolerate a rock-and-roll band, couldn’t it also tolerate a rock-and-roll movie? XX must shroud the ego and debauchery of its characters in thick layers of irony to make it digestible to current audiences. With that much distance from the real world we’re seeing, we can laugh at it or try to romanticize it, but we can hardly take the art within the piece seriously. It is victim not to woke culture, but cringe culture. My takeaway: rock-and-roll stands no chance against a status quo of irony.


As a retrospective, XX completes the original DIG! in ways that only a retrospective could. It seems that even in 2004, Ondi and David saw something in this story: something that they couldn’t really express through the original film. Take the Viper Room incident. Adam Shore explains in the screening Q&A that it was infamous only to West Coast scene insiders, the Los Angeles A&R “clique” that he was just entering. DIG! itself broke the story to mainstream audiences. Twenty years later, it’s iconic, having inspired a spoof on “Gilmore Girls” that actually makes the new cut. In this cut we get context for the fight– both the building resentment that led up to it and the cultural impact years later– and it becomes the inciting event of the film. In 2004, Ondi Timoner didn’t know what would become of rock-and-roll, how soon after its resurrection it would die for the second time, or how the passive masses of the internet age would yearn for the hedonistic, bohemian heaven of a strung-out tour van. But she did know to keep rolling.

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