After 20 years, Ondi Timoner has rereleased her riveting and colossal documentary study of two psych rock bands, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and their epic dual story of success and failure. There is about 40 minutes of extra material and a present-day coda that reveals, among other things, that each band has a member who now sells real estate. That ending, brutally and suddenly visiting grey-haired middle age on these gorgeous rock’n’roll exquisites, reminded me of the Fellini-esque dream opening to Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories in which two trains, one carrying life’s winners and the other with hapless losers, wind up at the same dusty rubbish heap.
Dig!, which took years to shoot, is alternately narrated by the Warhols’ frontman, Courtney Taylor-Taylor, and the BJM’s relentlessly goofy tambourine player, Joel Gion, and it shows the complex “frenmity” of the two bands. Almost from the outset, it seemed as if the Dandy Warhols were destined for commercial success tainted by feelings of selling out, and their pals the Brian Jonestown Massacre were heading for failure redeemed by a magnificent and self-destructive kind of integrity.
All of them were devoted to the traditional excesses and entitlements of rock’n’roll and enamoured of their 1960s image; the BJM’s guitarist Matt Hollywood even affected John Lennon specs. But it is quite late on in the film that someone makes a very good point: “Sixties bands got into drugs. But they were famous first.” Nowhere in the film does any band-member reflect on the self-fulfilling prophecy of success and failure in their joke-names: Andy Warhol, triumphant and world-famous in the depthless world of celebrity for a lot longer than 15 minutes, and Brian Jones, dying young (or living for ever) after a mysterious accident in his swimming pool.
The undisputed star of the film is surely the BJM’s leader, Anton Newcombe, a snake-hipped and bedraggled Adonis who provides pure on-camera gold with his outrageous behaviour, motormouthed self-pity and disdain for everyone else; the tone is set when he blows the band’s entire tour budget on sitars. The BJM suspect, with good reason, that the Warhols are jealous of their authentic rock’n’roll chaos; they live in the real thing which the prissier Warhols can only fabricate in their photoshoots, one of which takes place without permission in the BJM’s squalid shared apartment. The bands both tour endlessly, an ordeal of hardship and frustration, chasing the breakout success that only happens to the Dandy Warhols because they are the ones with discipline and don’t have full-on fistfights on stage. (Amazingly, gloriously, and also tragically, the ageing and reunited BJM have a public punch-up in 2023.)
But does the rock’n’roll world camouflage the truth about Newcombe’s mental state and drug abuse? Do we confer the ironised title of damaged genius on him by not seeing his pain and unhappiness? He goes in and out of rehab, something the film can’t really show. And, for me, Gion is the other enigma: always smirking, gurning, wise-cracking – always on. Is there a hidden truth he is not showing us? A gripping and desperately sad story.
