Word: this story was reported and filed previous to Dig! director Ondi Timoner shedding her Altadena dwelling within the Los Angeles fires.
As chronicled in Ondi Timoner’s cult hit 2004 documentary Dig!, as soon as upon a time—and the late Nineties actually does really feel like that way back—there have been two small-bore American rock bands with horrific puns for names.
One was referred to as the Dandy Warhols. The group was and is (type of) primarily based out of Portland, Oregon. and led by an incredibly handsome man named Courtney Taylor-Taylor. The band had a expertise for strong hooks and protecting their collective shit collectively; Mr. Taylor-Taylor had a tremendous chin and a keenness for saying issues like, “I sneeze and hits come out.” (The Dandys hit Gen Z may know finest is “We Used to Be Pals,” a 2003 music that grew to become the theme for Veronica Mars.)
The opposite was referred to as the Brian Jonestown Bloodbath. This group was primarily based out of San Francisco and led by a charismatic but troubled man named Anton Newcombe, who sported a shaggy haircut, appeared like a Manson hanger-on and spoke in essentially the most extreme Newport Seaside accent you’ll ever hear. Newcombe had a expertise for knocking out songs at a wide ranging price, fomenting and interesting chaos in each doable scenario, and declaring of document corporations, “I’m the letter author they usually’re the postmen.”
The bands have been the very best of frenemies. Each had a considerably psychedelic sound—the Dandys’ vibe was just a little extra mainstream alt-rock, whereas the BJM shuttled from acoustic folks buildings to prolonged guitar jams. Each beloved medicine as solely younger rock bands of their 20s can love medicine—the Dandys thrived on coke, whereas the BJM was meth-powered, though it was Newcombe’s heroin dependancy that ruined the band not less than as soon as. (As one-time Brian member Miranda Lee Richards put it, “All these ‘60s bands that bought into medicine, they bought well-known first.”
The Dandys have changed precisely one band member in 30 years; the BJM has had a number of wholesale line-up modifications, with their charismatic but troubled bandleader the only fixed. Each needed to “make it.” Each did and neither did, relying on how one defines such issues. Each admired one another, each wrote bitchy songs about one another, and each bought steadily ignored to various levels whereas the world at giant bought actually into Biggie and Tupac, electronica, ska and nu-metal.
That battle, particularly the limitless grind of get-in-the-van touring that characterised underground rock music within the cheap-gas period, was the main target of Dig!. Timoner says the unique concept was to take a look at 10 bands on the verge of getting signed—ten little households of disparate of us who journey round and play reveals and perhaps there’s fame and fortune someplace alongside the way in which. Candidates included such future bar-trivia-night solutions as Mom Tongue, Lava Diva, the Dashboard Prophets, and The Negro Drawback.
However after seeing the BJM dwell in 1996, Timoner was captivated. “They pulled up in a jalopy with devices hanging out of the automobile, they usually have been late to the gig they usually could not play that evening,” she says, throughout a day stroll in her Altadena neighborhood. “And they also have been like, ‘Let’s have a revolution proper right here on the sidewalk.’”
