Dig! XX: Not If You Were The Last Rock'n'Roll Band On Earth

Ondi Timoner's classic chronicle of the rivalry between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols gets an overstuffed 20th anniversary expansion.

Dig!, Ondi Timoner's chronicle of the intertwined fates of the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, differs from other classic music documentaries in this simple way: its subjects are footnotes to rock history.

Of course, neither the Dandy Warhols nor the Brian Jonestown Massacre were aware of their ultimate fate when Timoner followed them around with a camera crew between 1995 and 2003. They were in the thick of it, convinced they were destined for fame or maybe better still, notoriety—to be "the Velvet Underground of the '90s," as Dandy keyboardist Zia McCabe calls the Brian Jonestown Massacre in Dig!

Watching Dig! XX, Timoner's freshly expanded Anniversary edition of the original film from 2004, viewers are all too aware that the Brian Jonestown Massacre did not become the '90s equivalent of the Velvets. They did not inspire legions of noteworthy new bands, they found space on the fringe, a status possibly aided by the word-of-mouth popularity of Dig!, but perhaps not. It's a question Dig! XX doesn't explore, preferring to nod at the film's enduring cult through an intro by Dave Grohl (his very presence suggests you're about to witness a Very Important Rock Movie) and such added asides as a clip of a Gilmore Girls episode that parodied an altercation between BJM band members.

That Gilmore Girls episode first ran in 2005, not long after the initial 2004 release of Dig! It aired in the era when the Dandy Warhols regularly popped up on network television thanks to Veronica Mars plucking "We Used to Be Friends"—their best song and one that could conceivably be about the band's relationship with BJM—for its theme song. The Brian Jonestown Massacre also wound up getting a boost from TV when "Straight Up and Down"—a cut from 1996's Take It from the Man!—became the title music for Boardwalk Empire, Terence Winter's Prohibition gangster saga for HBO. Even in the province of television, far from the grimy dives they played at the outset of their careers, the bands appeared to be in dialogue: BJM countered the bubblegum snap of the Dandys by submerging themselves in the dark arts of psychedelia.

Dig! XX certainly posits that the bands are polar opposites but its concluding epilogue suggests their divergent paths led them to the same destination—namely, a shared stage at Austin's Levitation, playing for a crowd of psych-garage fanatics in late 2023. All the drama depicted in the doc, all the grinding in the ensuing years, all fades away, revealing two groups doing their best to keep the fire of 1995 alive by conjuring the spirit of 1967.

To an extent, preservationists are all either band has ever been. Adam Shore, an A&R man from TVT Records, posits that Anton Newcombe—the head honcho of the Brian Jonestown Massacre—is "the best '60s revivalist since the '60s," a phrase that implies that he's somehow tapped into the essence of rock'n'roll in a way all the flannel-clad American rockers of the '90s did not. Again, the framing of the praise is entirely dependent on history: Newcombe is called great because he's in thrall to the ghosts of rock'n'roll past.

By naming his freaked-out collective the Brian Jonestown Massacre, nodding to both the evil genius in the Rolling Stones and the notorious cult leader Jim Jones, Newcombe invited those comparisons and he did so in a curiously Gen-X fashion: he camouflaged his nostalgia in snark. The sarcasm gave Newcombe cover to indulge in transparently retrograde fantasias, creating records that sounded contemporary because they were done on the cheap: all the surface noise and compressed effects gave Brian Jonestown Massacre an indie patina. The Dandy Warhols didn't have that problem because they swiftly made the leap to the majors, making their best run at the radio by making records as bright and shiny as the BJM were foreboding. Capitol poured money into the Dandys, helping to get "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" onto MTV buzz bins circa 1997. The group had better luck overseas, playing to Britpop-weaned audiences primed to hear referential rock delivered with a slight smirk.

The final act of Dig! XX essentially ends when the Dandys are ascendent, when "Bohemian Like You" cracks the UK Top Ten. Suddenly, the quartet is playing to large, adoring festival crowds and receiving backstage praise from Jack White, Mercury Rev, and Kim Deal. Recently, the band—who have maintained a stable lineup since 1998—featured Black Francis on Rockmaker, their perfectly pleasant twelfth studio record which also has cameos from Slash and Blondie's Debbie Harry. Despite the company they now keep, the Dandy Warhols aren't quite in the same league as their famous guests. They've drifted back to the pop periphery, skilled and lucky enough to maintain a cult large enough to keep the group viable as they release carefully considered records every few years.

Newcombe too carved out his niche, albeit in a haphazard fashion. With his trusty lieutenant Joel Gion and guitarist Ricky Maymi by his side, he cycled through bandmates—the particulars never mattered much—slightly faster than he churned out albums, adhering to a dense drone that could stand some melodic or sonic definition. He's stayed true to the vision he cobbled together during the days documented by Dig!, when his fevered fervor convinced a small cult that he was a mad genius of sorts.

Dig! never seems to subscribe to this point of view, even if its central conceit is that the Brian Jonestown Massacre are the visionaries and the Dandy Warhols are the disciples, cannily softening and sweetening the formula for the masses. Whenever a figure in the doc rhapsodizes about Newcombe—which lead Dandy Courtney Taylor-Taylor does often—there's a sense of directorial remove, as if Timoner isn't endorsing this point of view. Of course, that praise is also undercut by the fact that the Dandy Warhols have sharper, snappier hooks than their idols; their songs stick, while BJM's sound dissipates. Still, on film, Newcombe overwhelms all comers, a vortex of ominous charisma countered by the buffoonery of Gion: they're chaos agents, careening between darkness and the light.

The willful madness of the Brian Jonestown Massacre finds the ideal foil in Taylor-Taylor, a man who looks like a born rock star but lacks magnetism on the scale of Newcombe. He's a marketable persona; Newcombe can't even be contained within the world of '90s indie-rock, he's simply too much trouble. It remains fascinating to watch the tension between the two bands ratchet up as Dig! turns into a real-life This is Spinal Tap performed by musicians who believe they're in on the joke. Dig! XX attempts to enhance the entertainment value of the original by offering a ton of new footage, enough to push the film well over the two-hour mark. It's fan service that dilutes the overall impact of the film, slowing the pace enough to make it feel as if the audience is trapped in a stale, sweaty party house with Gion, Newcombe, and the rest. In a sense, that's instructive. More time spent with the Brian Jonestown Massacre makes it clear why they couldn't even navigate the demands of TVT Records; in comparison, the professionalism of the Dandys comes as a relief.

In the twenty years since the original release of Dig!, these distinctions have become outdated due to the infrastructure of the music business collapsing. And, as Joe Gross points out in his GQ article on Dig! XX, the contours of everyday life itself have also changed radically in the decades since Timoner documented the rock'n'roll drama of the Dandys and BJM. The passing of time makes even the overstuffed new edit of Dig! a valuable cultural artifact, preserving an era when subcultures were allowed to exist in a complete vacuum, rising and falling according to the whims of outsized personalities who could only thrive in their tiny kingdoms.