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I'm with the band By Susan Gerhard MUSIC CAN BE owned, but aura can't. Aura can't even be borrowed, really. But it can be capitalized on. Sometimes the process involves transcendental moments in crowded, sweat-soaked rooms that smell faintly of urine, beer, last decade's cigarettes, and tomorrow's orgasm. Other times it involves a public relations echo chamber bouncing gossip and sound back and forth until they translate into cold, hard cash. Anton Newcombe, a musician and one of the primary subjects of the documentary Dig!, who wants to sell without selling out, understands the aura thing one way. And Ondi Timoner – the person who captured him on film as a unique piece of art in Cossack hat or hippie tunic, on a pair of wacky roller skates or with George Harrison sitar and sideburns, looking like Peace but raising holy hell – documents it another. Maybe everything you need to know about Newcombe's band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, can be found in their name, which gives a nod to, maybe nods off to, so many eras past that it twists and exacerbates them into something sick and fresh, a new, brighter flavor of suicidal Kool-Aid. Timoner encountered the aura more than seven years ago, when she was filming them for a different project, one that involved 10 bands. Newcombe introduced her to the Dandy Warhols, the other neo-psychedelic West Coast band who would eventually be the subject of the film, and informed the filmmaker that they were going to take over her movie. She was apparently charmed enough by his megalomania, recreational habits, and visionary talent that she spent much of the next decade, for better and worse, following both bands as they wrangled with the road, record labels, and each other, in an odyssey that stretched over three continents and could rightly be called Homeric in scope if it weren't so Dickensian in squalorous detail. While the Dandys move from humble digs in Portland, Ore., to a deal with Capitol Records, an over-the-top video shoot with David LaChapelle, and a conquering tour of Europe, the Brian Jonestown Massacre spiral from infighting in a backyard on Waller Street in San Francisco to a vicious night at the Viper Room through a tour that has them playing marathon hours to a handful of believers at an Ohio communist hall and drops Newcombe into the hands of police in Georgia. To add insult to injury, the film is mordantly narrated by the Dandys' lead, and Newcombe's rival-friend-fan-nemesis, Courtney Taylor. Is it any wonder Newcombe states on his Web site that he doesn't support the film in its edited version? Yet the downbound-train take on the Brian Jonestown Massacre isn't the whole story. Newcombe is still making music, releasing it for free to appreciative fans. The Georgia arrest is part of the controversy surrounding this film – the edits imply that Newcombe was jailed for drugs. What he was actually arrested for was driving without a license. It was the filmmaker who got arrested for possession in that case, albeit for only half a joint. To read the film as some kind of parable built from zero-sum parts – the more the Dandys succeed, the more life they suck from the Brian Jonestown Massacre; therefore, covet not thy neighbor's success – would be wrong. This is a movie; therefore, what is goodness and light bores, and what is dank and dastardly is ... intriguing. You could say the Dandys are the straight men here, in spite of their comic-book cruelty. (In one scene, the Dandys visit the site of the wrecked BJM house for an unannounced photo shoot, leaving one BJM band member wondering if his band could be accused of copying the Dandys if they ever did a shoot in their own home.) It may be a parallel universe the Brian Jonestown Massacre live in, but that universe – including the likes of Joel Gion, ex-tambourine man with bushes for sideburns, Rhoda's oversized shades, and '40s character-actor asides – draws you in like a vacuum. One of the posse, sometime collaborator Miranda Lee Richards, en route to a photo shoot with team Jonestown, all dressed in white, is asked by a stranger whether it's a band or a cult. She answers that she's not quite sure. You may not be, either, by the end of the film. It's a credit to Timoner's candid camera that for all she sees them through, she leaves the not necessarily widely experienced auras of both bands – whose moments have come and gone and arrived again – brilliantly bruised and strangely intact. 'Dig!' opens Fri/8, Lumiere Theatre, 1572 California, S.F. (415) 267-4893; and Act 1 and 2, 2128 Center, Berk. (510) 464-5980. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times. |
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