Latest news with #Dig!
The Herald Scotland
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Why rock fans can't get enough of classic music documentaries
Recent other documentaries have focused on subjects as wildly diverse as Led Zeppelin, Cyndi Lauper, The Beach Boys, De La Soul, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan's mid-70s Rolling Thunder Revue, and the 'Yacht Rock' genre. Netflix alone has films about Wham!, James Blunt, Elvis Presley, Quincy Jones and the making of the 1985 celebrity recording of the single 'We Are the World', while Apple TV's roster currently includes documentaries on Sparks, Eric Clapton, Sheryl Crow and The Stooges. Coastal, filmed by Neil Young's long-term partner, Daryl Hannah, will be of considerable interest to Young's fans as well as acting as a curtain-raiser to his gigs at Glastonbury in June and at London's Hyde Park in July. Shot in arty black-and-white, it has footage of Young on stage and amiably chatting with his bus driver as he makes his way from gig to gig. In a new interview on Young's website, the point is made to Hannah that, given that Young is a 'storied, mythologised figure' while also 'quite inscrutable', the off-the-cuff moments in the documentary are valuable. 'I think you're right', she responds. 'People do find him this mysterious, inscrutable figure. That's why I decide ultimately to include those moments, so people get to see what a sweet and open person he can be. You see more of his humanity and less of the myth'. Writing in the Guardian, Peter Bradshaw notes that the film 'tests the fanbase loyalty to the limits by being pointlessly and uninterestingly shot in arthouse black-and-white (though it exasperatingly bleeds out into colour over the closing credits) and by including an awful lot of material on the tour bus which is – how to put this? – not very interesting'. 'Part concert film, part home-video-on-wheels - Neil and bus driver JD, perfectly happy nattering about nothing in particular like two old blokes on a road trip - it has the same warmth and chattiness as the gigs', said the reviewer in Mojo magazine. 'Hard to think of another live Neil Young movie where he seems both a little unsure of himself and so contented'. Over the years, magazines and critics have devised lists of the greatest-ever music documentaries. It's not exactly an easy task, given the vast number of films that have been made about a dizzying range of subjects. As the film critic Mark Kermode once explained when embarking on his own list, 'What I have tried to do is to chart an admittedly erratic course from early milestones such as Jazz on a Summer's Day to more modern offerings such as Dig! and Moonage Daydream to give some sense of the vast and unwieldy scope of the genre and its subjects – from low-budget obscurities to Imax-friendly blockbusters; from cool blues to frantic post-punk via unearthed Afro-Cuban history'. Here are 13 great music documentaries worth tracking down (if you haven't already seen them). * Gimme Shelter (1970), by cinema verite trailblazers Albert and David Masyles and Charlotte Zwerin, is a riveting look at the Rolling Stones' US tour of 1969 - the tour that ended in the infamous outdoor concert at Altamont Speedway, at which the band hired local Hells Angels to provide security. It didn't end well. Mick Jagger at one point asks the crowd: 'Who's fighting, and what for? We don't want to fight'. One man, Meredith Hunter, who drew a revolver, was stabbed to death by a Hells Angel. It was the end of the Sixties, in more ways than one. * Moonage Daydream (2022), by Brett Morgen, was an immersive and mesmerising documentary about David Bowie. As A.O. Scott remarked in the New York Times, 'it's less a biography than a séance. Instead of plodding through the chronology of Bowie's life and career, Morgen conjures the singer's presence through an artful collage of concert footage and other archival material, including feature films and music videos'. Morgen's previous documentaries included Crossfire Hurricane, about the Stones. * Woodstock (1970), Michael Wadleigh's Oscar-winning documentary of the August 1969 Woodstock festival, a counterculture landmark, features music by such acts as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Santana, Janis Joplin, Ten Years After, Jimi Hendrix and The Who, as a vast crowd descended on Max Yasgur's farm at Bethel, New York. Mick Richards's 2019 features documentary, Creating Woodstock, fleshes out the story. A two-disc 'Ultimate Collector's Edition' Blu-Ray set - Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace and Music: The Director's Cut' - includes many never-seen-before performances from Joan Baez, Grateful Dead and others. * The Beatles: Get Back (2022) is Peter Jackson's three-part documentary series, based on footage and audio recorded in January 1969. Variety magazine sums it up thus: "What's startling about 'Get Back' is that as you watch it, drinking in the moment-to-moment reality of what it was like for the Beatles as they toiled away on their second-to-last studio album, the film's accumulation of quirks and delights and boredom and exhilaration becomes more than fascinating; it becomes addictive". Also featured: the Fabs' rooftop concert in London's Savile Row. * Laurel Canyon (2020), by Alison Ellwood, is an excellent two-part documentary series about the musicians who inhabited Laurel Canyon, 'a rustic canyon in the heart of LA' and made it a hotbed of musical creativity. Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Linda Ronstadt and Don Henley are among those interviewed. * It Might Get Loud (Davis Guggenheim, 2009), showcases three guitar virtuosos - Jimmy Page, The Edge, and Jack White - to scintillating effect as we trace the development of careers and their signature sounds. Uncut magazine: "It Might Get Loud is about the way the electric guitar and the amplifier combine to create a kind of superpower, transforming the player into a sonic god". * Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999), is a brilliant retelling of how the American musician Ry Cooder assembled a diverse, mostly elderly, group of veteran Cuban musicians and steered them to global popularity. "Filmed in Amsterdam and New York, the concert scenes find the stage awash in such intense joy, camaraderie and nationalist pride that you become convinced that making music is a key to longevity and spiritual well-being", as the New York Times described it. * Oil City Confidential (Julien Temple, 2010) is a celebration of R&B specialists Dr Feelgood - Wilko Johnson, Lee Brilleaux, John B. Sparks, John Martin - and the distinctive Canvey Island environment from which they sprang. * Muscle Shoals: The Greatest Recording Studio in the World (Greg Camalier, 2013) tells how a small city in Alabama became home to the Fame recording studios and the Muscle Shoals Sound Studios, which were established by Fame's former house band. Among those featured are Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge and Keith Richards. * 20 Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville, 2013), deservedly won an Oscar for its sympathetic look at the careers of notable backing singers such as Merry Clayton, who duetted with Jagger on the Stones song, Gimme Shelter. Archive footage and new interviews combine to thrilling effect. Simple Minds: Everything is Possible (Joss Crowley, 2023) is a comprehensive look at the rise of Simple Minds, the Glasgow band who rose from art-rock beginnings to become the most successful Scottish group ever. Among the talking heads are band members as well as Bob Geldof, Bobby Gillespie and James Dean Bradfield. Since Yesterday: The Untold Story of Scotland's Girl Bands (Blair Young, Carla J Easton, 2024) cleverly unfolds a story of Scottish pop music from the 1960s onwards through the recollections of those far-sighted women who helped make it; among them are Strawberry Switchblade, Sunset Gun, His Latest Flame and the Hedrons. Big Gold Dream (Grant McPhee, 2015) is a fascinating, award-winning account of two hugely influential Scottish indie record labels - Edinburgh's FAST Product and Glasgow's Postcard Records. Bands featured include Fire Engines, Scars, the Rezillos and Aztec Camera. Two years later, Grant took up the story again in Teenage Superstars, featuring The Vaselines, BMX Bandits, The Pastels, The Soup Dragons, The Jesus and Mary Chain, amongst others. Recommended.
The Independent
25-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
‘I get PTSD when I watch it': The inside story of Dig!, the most outrageous music documentary of all time
The year is 1996, and a psychedelic rock band with revolution in their ears and methamphetamine in their veins are in full flow at the Viper Room in Los Angeles. The Brian Jonestown Massacre, led by their mercurial, messianic frontman Anton Newcombe, believe they are on the verge of breaking big. A gaggle of music industry power players have been invited to bless their ascension, yet instead what they witness is a chaotic onstage brawl that culminates in smashed instruments and tattered dreams. Newcombe, ejected into the night by security, seethes: 'You f***ing broke my sitar, motherf***er!' This scene plays out early in Dig!, perhaps the most rock'n'roll documentary ever made. Ondi Timoner's 2004 film revolves around the contrasting fortunes of the Jonestown and their more industry-savvy friends and later rivals the Dandy Warhols. The camera travels from grimy bedsits to lavish video shoots and sold-out festival appearances, capturing the grit, the debauched determination and the righteous fervour required to believe your music really might change the world. The actor Jonah Hill has declared it to be a landmark work comparable to Goodfellas. Dave Grohl called it 'the most honest, warts-and-all description of what it's like when you and your friends join a band, jump in a van and try to start a revolution'. Twenty years on from its release, a new extended cut of the film, dubbed Dig! XX, is back in cinemas and set for digital release. The additional footage adds depth and context, including the backstory to Newcombe's oft-quoted sitar line. More than that, thanks to the additional perspective offered by the last two decades, the film now plays as a fascinating snapshot of music industry excess just before the business was kneecapped by streaming. In 2025 it can't help but pose questions about whether joining a band, jumping in a van and trying to start a revolution is even a dream anyone entertains anymore. For Timoner, Dig! was always supposed to be about larger themes than just the warring bands at the centre of the narrative. An idealistic student at Yale in the early 1990s, she had hit on the idea while trying to release her debut feature, 1994's The Nature of the Beast, about an incarcerated woman in Connecticut. The compromises and sacrifices she had to make in order to get the film out into the world left her questioning her pursuit of the artist's life. 'Is my heart just going to be broken?' she remembers thinking when we speak. 'Am I going to destroy everything just by trying to reach an audience? Is it possible to maintain your integrity and accomplish that? I thought looking at bands would be the best way to answer that question.' At the time, America's alternative music scene was still dominated by the grunge emanating from Seattle, but a host of younger groups on the West Coast wanted to return to a janglier, more melodic sound. Timoner and her brother David started filming 10 struggling bands trying to make it, but it was only after they got turned onto the retro, Sixties-indebted sound of the Jonestown that their film took flight. 'Everyone else we were filming was cowering in the shadows of the industry and waiting for their free lunch,' Timoner says. 'By contrast, Anton was like: 'I'm the letter writer, they're the postman.'' The night of the Viper Room show, Newcombe told Timoner: 'We're starting a revolution. Go meet the Dandy Warhols. We're taking over your documentary.' The Dandy Warhols, led by the high-cheekboned rock god-in-waiting Courtney Taylor-Taylor, are a Portland-based psych rock group who had played with the Jonestown and bonded with them over their shared love of shoegaze guitars and recreational narcotics. Both bands were early in their careers, and Timoner found in Newcombe and Taylor-Taylor the perfect foils with which to explore her art vs commerce thesis. Where Newcombe was endlessly creative but also tortured and often self-sabotaging, Taylor-Taylor was able to play by the industry's rules enough to land his band a major label record deal, shoot a music video with celebrity photographer David LaChapelle and eventually hit it big in the UK after letting their 2000 single 'Bohemian Like You' be used in an advert for a mobile phone company. The film is just the tip of the iceberg. That kind of intensity was every day. It was exhausting, but we were young, so you have more energy for chaos Billy Pleasant, Jonestown drummer In one telling scene in Dig!, Newcombe hosts a sordid party at his squat-like LA base, only for the Dandys to turn up the next morning and stage a photo shoot there. 'That photo shoot is so poignant, and so emblematic of their relationship dynamic because [the Dandys are] like: we'll visit, but we don't want to stay in this squalor,' says Timoner. 'Anton cultivates a certain edge and creates from that place, [whereas] Courtney is like a tourist.' Zia McCabe, the Dandys' keyboardist, witnessed both the obvious affection and later tension between the two frontmen up close. 'For Anton, music is life or death,' she explains over video from Portland, pointing out that music poured out of Newcombe whether he liked it or not. 'Courtney has to wait for those precious moments and then capitalise on them. I think he's always been a bit jealous that Anton can't shut it off, but really, if you step back and look at the big picture, quality of life often suffers, right?' The Timoners (Ondi and her brother David) followed the two bands for seven years between 1996 and 2003, eventually piecing together Dig! from over 2,500 hours of footage. That gave them a front-row seat for Newcombe's descent into heroin addiction and his band's often disastrous low-budget tours, marred by frequent breakups and occasional drug arrests. 'The film is just the tip of the iceberg,' remembers erstwhile Jonestown drummer Billy Pleasant. 'There just happened to be a camera rolling on the bits that everybody sees but, my gosh, that kind of intensity was every day. It was exhausting, but we were young, so you have more energy for chaos.' At the opposite end of the spectrum, the filmmakers also prolonged the production in order to capture the Dandys' rise through the upper echelons of pop culture. 'They did keep wanting to wrap it up, and then s*** just kept happening [to the Dandys] that they couldn't not put in the film,' remembers McCabe, who was 19 when she joined the band. 'I was young and I had given up questioning anything, so everything was just my reality. 'Oh, now we do major labels. Now we fly to other countries. Now we have tour buses. Oh, a film crew comes and films every single thing you do.'' When the film debuted at Sundance in 2004, it was an instant hit, winning the Grand Jury Prize in the documentary category. 'I've had a lot of films at Sundance, but nothing that caused that kind of kinetic reaction,' recalls Timoner, pointing out that the film spoke to the wider artistic experience. 'People say: 'What is Dig! about? Well, it's about these two bands, you know, it's about art versus commerce, but it's also about friendship and rivalry and madness and mental health.' The film reached an even wider audience when it became a featured inflight movie on Virgin Atlantic and entered the zeitgeist enough that the Jonestown's onstage brawl was spoofed on the US TV comedy-drama Gilmore Girls. The band's impish tambourine player, Joel Gion, makes an appearance in the episode. '[The writers] were just fans of the movie,' Gion explains when I call him to ask how that unlikely cameo came about. 'It was weird, but I get more steady checks from [that programme] than I do from being in the band.' Gion is one of the stars of the original movie – it was his face, complete with bug-eyed sunglasses, that adorned the posters. He often plays the role of comic relief, keeping things light as his band implodes around him. 'For me, the minute the camera got put in my face I immediately envisioned a movie audience out there,' he remembers. 'I just went straight into 'Beatles movie' zone. You know, the Maysles Brothers' film about the Beatles' first US visit when they're on the train? That's what I grew up on. That's what made me want to be in a band. I'm not talking to Ondi behind the camera or to myself about how fabulous what I'm doing is. I'm talking to some imaginary audience. That was a pretty far-flung stretch of the imagination when you're living on a mattress in a punk rock band factory, but I'm not mad at how it turned out.' In Dig! XX, Gion provides additional narration, counterbalancing the original voiceover by Taylor-Taylor and adding background for many of the Jonestown sequences. The end of the new version brings the story up to date and shows that however precarious their existence appeared in 2004, both bands have defied the odds and are still together, touring and making music. 'Cutting the new ending was emotional, because it's a happy ending. They're all still here,' says David Timoner, who edited the second film. 'When we had the idea for this new version of the film I said I'd love to end it with both bands onstage embracing. It turned out they were playing in Austin, so we got someone to film it and it happened! We had that kumbaya ending, and then [another onstage Jonestown fight in] Melbourne happened, which was kind of perfect too. It's still the Brian Jonestown Massacre. It's still Dig! It's uncanny, the footage of the fight is like a mirror image of the original.' For those who featured in the film, such as the original Dandys drummer Eric Hedford, watching the new version is an emotional experience. 'It brings up a lot of feelings of that time,' he says. 'It's like a wild movie yearbook of my twenties. I get a bit of post-traumatic stress when I watch it, but I'm old enough now to have nostalgia for those days.' For younger viewers discovering Dig! for the first time, the film may appear to depict an alien species. The reason the bands are so willing to squeeze themselves in tiny vans and traverse the country is largely because there was no better way of getting their music out to eager listeners. Today it's possible to send a song around the world at the tap of a touchscreen, but the financial realities have squeezed already thin margins sharply. To be a touring band hoping to find a pot of gold at the end of a run of shows may now be an antiquated concept. Dig! is a time capsule of a more optimistic, hedonistic time for the music industry. 'One major issue that's different now than it was for us is access to income,' points out McCabe. 'I worked two days a week as a dishwasher, lived with five roommates, had food stamps and state health insurance, and we could afford our rock'n'roll lifestyle. We had time to be artists. Now, if you have time to be an artist that means either your parents are backing you or you have a successful OnlyFans. That curtails access to being able to make music and art, because everybody's got to work 40 to 60 hours. That is horses***.' Gion agrees. 'If people don't know who you are, because you can't afford to record, because you have to work, because there's no money in recorded music, then none of this works,' he says. His dream, he adds, is that some of the people who watch Dig! XX get inspired to start doing things their own way. 'We've silenced an entire group of people that have to bump and scrape and fight to live, who maybe have more to say,' he argues. 'It's been a long time since we had a punk rock or psychedelic revolution. People have got to get f***ed-with enough by these breadhead fat cats to [a point where] some new explosion happens, and the landgrabbers in charge of music are told that this won't fly.'
The Guardian
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘We had even more fights than they show in the film': how we made Dig! with the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols
I wanted to make a documentary about 10 bands on the verge of getting signed by record companies, to see what would happen to them. When I first heard the Brian Jonestown Massacre, I thought they were some lost band from the 1960s. But a friend told me they were alive and well – and that every label wanted to sign them. I filmed them soundchecking for an industry showcase gig at the Viper Room in Los Angeles, then they came over to my house, which is the backyard scene in Dig! They were on the verge of getting signed, but had spent all their money on sitars and were taking the record companies off the guest list because they didn't want to 'give away' tickets. The gig itself ended up with fights on stage. It was the most incredible thing I'd ever filmed, but I ended up crying on Sunset Boulevard because the bouncer took the tapes, which took me years to get back. Outside the club, singer Anton Newcombe told me he was covered in 'blood from people's faces'. The next day he told me: 'Forget those other bands. Go meet the Dandy Warhols. Together we're going to change the record business for ever and you can film us.' Within 10 minutes of meeting Dandy Warhols singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor, he told me: 'I sneeze and hits come out.' Dig! looks at art versus commerce, friendship, collaboration and madness through the eyes of two lead singers who each possess what the other has not. Anton can live on the edge and make records for the price of a six-pack of beer. Courtney needs stability. I filmed the Jonestowns in Super 8 and the Dandys in 16mm and 35mm because they made it commercially. It made for a contrast: I wanted the footage to reflect the diverging fortunes of what Courtney calls the 'most well-adjusted band in America' – the Dandys – and the least well-adjusted. When I started filming I was 23 and had no idea if it would see the light of day. Between 1996 and 2003, I shot 2,500 hours of footage. My child's birth prompted me to finish editing, so when I won the Sundance grand jury prize in 2004, I thanked him for the deadline. Dig! is Romeo and Juliet, or the real-life Spinal Tap. The new cut – Dig! XX – brings the story up to date. Them becoming friends again and playing together is the last thing you'd imagine happening at the end of the original film. I recently lost my house in the California fires, but the raw footage was at my office and so survived. I found my Sundance award in the rubble. If Ondi and Anton had discussed filming, the rest of us weren't privy to it. Suddenly we were outside the club, pissed off, with cameras in our faces. The gig had blown up but being in a film was a consolation prize. I thought: 'We'll blow all those other bands in the documentary away.' At first I was hamming it up for the camera, but later, when everything started sinking, the camera became a coping mechanism, or confessional friend. Dig! was intended to be a celebration of scrappy artists socking it to the man, but turned into a film about the Dandys becoming a pop band and living the MTV life while everything fucked up around the Brian Jonestown Massacre. We had even more fights than are shown in the film but they were still relatively rare and they weren't all started by Anton. In the early days Anton had been a super-driven songwriter, but we were all a bunch of fuck-ups by then, at the end of the filming. I'd wink at the camera as if to say: 'Don't worry folks, everybody's fine, even though there's chaos reigning.' But I'd hate to be typecast as the party guy or court jester. I lucked out at the end of the movie when I quit before things went full-metal blotto [he rejoined the band in 2006]. But when I see the original film now, I have no regrets. We had so much belief in ourselves, which wasn't blind illusion. Twenty years on, we're much mellower – most of the time. There haven't been any fights on the current tour, and we've got the place in pop culture we always imagined. In a way, it took everything we went through in Dig! to get to where we are. The 20th anniversary expanded documentary Dig! XX is in UK and Irish cinemas for one night only on 25 March
