DiG! this

This is certainly the year of excellent documentaries and we’re not talking about political tracts. 2004 has seen several superb musical movies that place the viewer in the front row of rock and roll mayhem.
Perhaps chief among them is DiG!, a film that was shot over a period of seven years and observes the rise from obscurity to fame of The Dandy Warhols, and to a lesser extent the rise and fall of The Brian Jonestown Massacre.
DiG! director Ondi Timoner described the film as “a ride I could not get off of,” in an interview conducted last spring during DiG!’s regional premiere at the SXSW Film Festival. The Brian Jonestown Massacre led by Anton Newcombe could never achieve commercial success “because success would destroy him,” noted Timoner.
Timoner started the documentary with 10 bands and eventually narrowed her focus to the two profiled in DiG! She lived with the groups on the road. “I understood their esthetic,” she affirmed.
While both bands, retro-60s sound intact, seem destined for greater awareness, The Dandy Warhols veer towards the light and The Brian Jonestown Massacre steers in darkness. Both Newcombe and Courtney Taylor are charismatic leaders, with good looks and unique insight into their own creativity.
“I sneeze and hits come out,” sneers Taylor in the movie. He continues in a mock aristocratic voice: “And the label exec replied ‘Well if that is true then Capitol will have no problem financing your handkerchiefs.’”
The band members have their own set of rules for intra-band communication. “You’ll burn in hell for pretending to be God and not being able to back it up,” Matt Hollywood an ex-BJM guitarist yells at Newcombe in a moment of clarity early in the film.
Jonestown leader Anton Newcombe has put out over a dozen recordings in less than a decade but at the same time represents the destructive narcissism inherent in rock and roll. Newcombe sabotages his career with heroin and constant egotistical outbursts and on-stage fisticuffs, both with audience and band members. One sequence, shot at the West Coast Knitting Factory, shows Newcombe kicking a rowdy audience member in the head and being arrested after the show by LAPD.
Prime examples of the each band’s karma returns as a theme of the film. The Brian Jonestown Massacre getting arrested for pot in Georgia by a tubby State Trooper and the Dandy Warhols sparking up a bowl after a French cop lets them walk on a cannabis bust are just two scenes that hammer that point like a cool blues riff blasting out of a Marshall amp. The Dandy Warhols talk their way out of the bust situation, even giving the rockstruck gendarme some free t-shirts.
On his website Newcombe (who has disowned the film) notes that cops in Georgia busted the director for pot, and his charge was for not having a valid license. Timoner concurred that that is the way the scene went down.
DiG!, from Palm Pictures and Interloper Films, and the winner of the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for a documentary, rolls out in an exclusive engagement at the River Oaks Theater starting November 5.
Another music documentary that bears mention, Jandek on Corwood, premieres on DVD in late November. This film reveals as much as is known about the reclusive Houston-based artist. The extras include a featurette that examines several Jandek LP and CD covers for greater meaning. Check it out.