“This Doesn’t Happen To My Band”

The Dandy Warhols “We Used To Be Friends” – After having seen Dig!, it’s hard not to think of this song outside of the context of the bizarre relationship of The Dandy Warhols’ Courtney Taylor and The Brian Jonestown Massacre’s Anton Newcombe. It basically comes down to this – Taylor is the reasonably well adjusted leader of a band who has achieved some modest success, but is in thrall of Newcombe, a charismatic but clearly insane musician who lacks the basic coping skills necessary to function within the music industry. Taylor and Newcombe become friends shortly after the Dandys play their first show in San Francisco, and the film documents the following seven years as Taylor and his band gradually become more successful, and Newcombe and his rotating cast of sidemen continue on a downward spiral into chaos, madness, addiction, and commercial failure. The film is essentially a Goofus And Gallant story – though the Dandys are in many ways just as debauched as the BJM, they are mature and capable careerists, whereas Newcombe seems unable (or unwilling) to make any rational decisions whatsoever. As Taylor moves up in a world which demands compromise, his admiration for Newcombe’s integrity and relentless productivity grows in direct proportion to Newcombe’s resentment and obvious envy of the Dandys’ good fortune.

One of the most peculiar things about Dig! is that Anton Newcombe’s talents are never at any point called into question. Every single person in the film truly believes that he is a visionary genius, largely based on his prolific output and ability to play several instruments. Taylor and an A&R woman from Elektra rhapsodize about Newcombe’s knack for rewriting and recontextualizing the rock music of the 60s, speaking of this fact as though his project was so much unlike the hundreds of other bands from the same period stripmining the same canon. This willful revisionism only serves to enable Newcombe’s toxic, egomaniacal self-narrative in which he is a misunderstood Christ-like figure who is entitled to abuse everyone in his life because he is a Great Artist. Any armchair analyst will recognize the symptoms of Newcombe’s various psychoses – OCD, sociopathic tendencies, megalomania, paranoid schizophrenia. Every relationship in Newcombe’s life ends in disaster, and his situation only gets worse over time, exacerbated by his addiction to heroin.

At the end of the film, Courtney Taylor tells us of the lesson that he’s learned from Newcombe’s antics – “If it’s good, it’s fun, and if it’s bad, it’s funny.” But at some point in the third act, Newcombe’s behavior stops seeming funny and over the top, like a Best Show character made flesh, and just becomes sad and pathetic. His obsession with Taylor results in stalking the Dandy Warhols at CMJ, and then in sending them a package containing shotgun shells with their names on them as a perverse joke, later on insisting that if he wanted to kill them, he would have already done it. Newcombe’s longterm collaborators finally abandon him; his record deal with TVT ends in profound failure; and he is charged with brutally assaulting an audience member in New York City. As the film concludes, Newcombe seems to be as oblivious as ever to the dire reality of his situation, choosing to cling to his destructive self-mythology to the bitter end, absolutely refusing to learn any lessons from his mistakes.

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