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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
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Dig! XX review – amazing film of battling 90s psych rockers revisited two decades on
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! XX, 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. Dig! XX is in UK cinemas on 25 March for one night, then on limited release in cinemas from 28 March.
