The Brian Jonestown Massacre are alive and well—relatively speaking. That they’re around at all may come as a surprise to anyone who’s watched the 2004 documentary Dig! It gave us a frontman, Anton Newcombe, at odds with the entire world. He brawled with his bandmates. He brawled with audiences. He brawled with record labels. He brawled with inanimate objects. And he had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol and heroin that made his long-term tenure on planet Earth questionable at best.
Which was sad. The documentary is hilarious in parts (when Newcombe wasn’t saying things like “You broke my sitar, motherfucker!” he was proving he couldn’t roller skate), but his antics distracted from the fact he’s a massively talented musician (plays like 900 instruments or some such) whose retro-futuristic songs make most every other psychedelic revivalist out there look like a piker. And while his legendary proclivity for self-sabotage when it came to scoring record deals bordered on the downright perverse, what it really underscored was Newcombe’s absolute refusal to be bought—he’d sooner go to the devil than shake hands with him.
So it’s nice to know that Newcombe (who has long called Berlin home) has a wife and kids and his own record label and a band that tours regularly and plays to large audiences. The Brian Jonestown Massacre continues to release awe-inspiring albums, and Newcombe has also released a pair of very cool collaborative albums with Canadian singer-songwriter Tess Parks and an excellent album with side project L’Épée, whose other members include French film star Emmanuelle Seigner and The Limiñanas.
And all would be rosy were it not for a (hopefully one-time) setback into bad habits during an ill-fated 2023 tour of Australia, which was a classic case of deja vu all over again. Contentious throughout, the tour ended disastrously with Newcombe verbally abusing the audience before hitting BJM member Ryan Van Kriedt in the head with his guitar, leading to an onstage rugby scrum and the cancellation of the remainder of the tour. Ominous? Yes. Pathetic? Even more so. Watching a guy in his late fifties flee an enraged Van Kriedt is wrong on many fronts. But the band has a 2025 European tour scheduled, so let’s hope Newcombe (whose own comments lead me to think he was drinking again) has cleaned up his act.
Choosing your favorite Brian Jonestown Massacre album is not easy. People who say they all sound the same are dead wrong, because over the years Newcombe has dabbled in shoegaze (e.g., 1995’s Methodrone), country and folk rock (1996’s full-length Thank God for Mental Illness, and the 1999 EP “Bringing It All Back Home–Again”) and the more experimental sounds of 2008’s My Bloody Underground and other LPs. Most psychedelic revivalists mine one vein, and pretend the music died in 1967. Newcombe is well aware of what’s happening now, and he takes it all in and incorporates it into the BJM sound.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre is best known for its drone, but drone or not there’s some mysterious something that gives all of their songs a distinctive and unifying feel. It’s there in the great jangle rockers “Going to Hell” and “Wasting Away” from 1998’s Strung Out in Heaven every bit as much as it is on the urgent and driving drone rocker “It’s About Being Free Really” from 2022’s Fire Doesn’t Grow on Trees. Newcombe does a lot of different things, but there’s never any doubt you’re hearing Newcombe.
That said, if I had to pick ONE, at gunpoint say, I would have to go with the 2000 EP “Zero: Songs from the Album Bravery, Repetition and Noise.” I know what you’re thinking: why not just go with the album? I’ll tell you: that “Zero” was originally meant as a joke, meaning you wouldn’t find any songs from the album on the EP. In the end, three made it onto the EP (along with three others), and they’re three of the LP’s best. What’s more, “Zero” doesn’t include any of the songs from Bravery, Repetition and Noise that leave me cold (most prominently “Leave Nothing for Sancho,” “If I Love You,” “Stolen”). Most importantly, the songs on “Zero” have a unified sound; Bravery, Repetition and Noise is all over the place. It’s a good album. “Zero” is a great EP.
It’s worth noting that the Brian Jonestown Massacre is a big band—six guitarists big on this one, with keyboards and a guy (the legendary Joel Gion) whose only job is to stand on stage shaking a tambourine and/or maracas, looking impossibly cool. They play on a crowded stage, which makes the frayed nerves a bit easier to understand. But it also produces a bigger, fuller sound, and on “Zero” it tells. Neither Gion or guitarist Matt Hollywood, both of whom figure large in Dig!, are credited on “Zero,” although both return periodically. Newcombe may be an asshole, but he’s also a charmer. He must be, because despite the abuse he heaps on band members they can’t seem to stay away. Or maybe they just can’t resist his talent. Or they’re victims of rock ’n’ roll Stockholm syndrome.
“Zero” features only six songs, but all six are winners, and have a unified sound, and it’s that unity of sound that makes the EP so powerful. Opener “Let Me Stand Next to Your Flower” features a big bottom, a full sound, and a very psychedelic vibe—against a lovely melody (set, oddly enough, to a kind of march). Newcombe and another vocalist (the credits are vague) sing, “You’re just like that voice in my head/You’re making me wish I was dead” before getting down to the nitty gritty: “You’re like candy to me/You’re like candy to me/You’re like candy to me/And candy’s no good.” Or sometimes, “candy’s so good.” As is true of everything Newcombe does, duality reigns. Good, bad—they’re the same thing.
“Sailor” is a cover of a song by sixties garage band Cryan’ Shames, who gave us “Sugar and Spice.” Newcombe isn’t a covers guy; offhand, the only other BMJ cover I can think of is of Charles Manson’s “Arkansas.” Here, the BMJ takes a very good original and takes it Lennon/Beatles heights, except “heights” is the wrong word—the sea this sailor is sailing is an inward one. It’s all so dreamy, the melody’s divine, and the arrangement is intricate and perfect—doubly so when you consider how many moving parts are in play. This isn’t psychedelia revisited, it’s psychedelia perfected. Newcombe isn’t a mere mimic, revisiting old ground—at his best he’s a visionary looking to the past and the future at the same time, and I’m fully prepared to say this isn’t just one of the best retro-psychedelic songs ever committed to vinyl—it’s one of the best psychedelic songs out there period. And he did it without George Martin, probably in a couple of days, possibly while on heroin. Think about that.
The slow “Open Heart Surgery” (they’re all slow) features big drums, a lot of reverb on the guitar, and a dreamy organ, and features a lyric that is all love, which is one of the peculiarities of Newcombe’s character—despite the sociopathic behavior, and the “Keep Music Evil” message he’s been pushing since forever, Newcombe frequently sings about love, love, love: he even tells the subject of the song he wrote it to make her smile. To smile! Anton Newcombe! Like John Lennon (or scarier, Charles Manson) he’s a Janus-faced dichotomy, Woodstock and Altamont all at once. He sums this up perfectly in the “long version” of “Straight Up and Down” from 1996’s Take It from the Man!, which closes with a mash-up of “Hey Jude” and “Sympathy for the Devil.” Good and evil meet in Newcombe’s world, and the results are beautiful.
But the cynical part of him—the Altamont part of him—is apparent from the next song, “Whatever Hippie Bitch.” It’s just slightly sprightlier than the other fare, and has a harder kick. That said, there is absolutely nothing in the very basic lyrics to give meaning to that putdown of a title, which seems to have been a joke that just happened to fit the aggression of the song. Tambourine and organ hold the fort until the drums come kicking in, and after that it’s mainly Newcombe’s vocals (with a constant echo from somebody else) that do the heavy lifting.
Which is an illusion, of course. There’s a whole lot going on behind the scenes, and part of Newcombe’s gift is the ability to make the complex sound simple. People are always saying, “The guy can make an album all by himself!” Big whoop. Who can’t these days? What makes Newcombe special is his ability to write a song for lots of players and make you forget they’re there. This is no suite, no big Brian Wilson production number. But take one or two of the players out of the mix, and you’d have a lesser song. He’s writing stealth psychedelic chamber music and it’s (at least in part) the cause of the onstage mayhem—if one of the many musicians isn’t playing the part Newcombe hears in his head he lets them know it, often by giving them a good kick.
“If Love Is the Drug, Then I Want to O.D.” is more than just a clever title—it features a complex lyric about waiting for a lover, and within that lyric there’s a sly take on the old “took LSD and jumped off a roof thinking she could fly” saw. It mingles love, anger and sarcasm, the last best expressed by the chorus “You’re so, high/You’re so, high/You’re so, high/Why can’t you fly?” It’s about a lover falling, presumably into drug addiction, and Newcombe turns the Velvet Underground’s “I’m Waiting for My Man” on its head—she’s the user, but he’s HE’S waiting for HER. Flute and tambourine run throughout it, along with female backing vocals and a guitar echoing with reverb, and it has a vaguely VU feel to it.
The thirteen-minute “New Kind of Sick” is psychedelic futurism at its best. Slow, spacy, synthesized, and orchestrated, it drones its way into your mind while some harmonized vocals sing about robots and madness. This is Newcombe gone contemporary art rock, but it’s still every bit as psychedelic as Syd Barrett—he’s just using a different palette of sounds. Several minutes in a minimalist drone takes over completely, and the only thing you hear is the echo of an echo of a hum. It’s Newcombe meets Eno, except Newcombe didn’t need Eno. Is it frustrating, waiting out the seemingly interminable hum? For a guy like me, yes. This guy is happy when guitar and the tambourine come back in, plaintive, followed by an even more plaintive, lovely organ. I’ve read it described as Newcombe’s magnum opus. It’s not. But it’s proof that trying to put a label on the guy is sheer foolishness.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre seem destined to be remembered for on-stage fisticuffs as much as for their mind-bending music. A pity, but like it or not, the chaos is part of their appeal. And unless you’re a mental health professional, you’re bound to see the humor in it. I guess we’re all sick, but it’s funny. It distracts from the great music, but let’s face it—Dig! is a laugh riot.
How embedded is Dig! in popular culture? On the Thanksgiving 2005 episode of Gilmore Girls, lead Rory’s band Hep Alien reenacts a fight from the film. Anton Newcombe may not have liked it, but it’s hilarious. And just to make sure people got the message, BJM tambourine player Joel Gion, whose high spirits and almost supernatural good humor in the face of chaos made him the one person in Dig! you couldn’t help but love, makes a cameo as a new addition to Hep Alien. He stands back as the members of Hep Alien go at it, blase. He’s seen it all before. He knows how the story ends. Let’s hope he’s wrong.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
