As far as I’m concerned, the best part about the Brian Jonestown Massacre is the chaos. Sure they’re a fine band and all—their music is cohesive, well-produced, mildly psychedelic but still approachable—but its not like they’re light years beyond their peers or anything. BJM are a good band and there’s definitely nothing wrong with them, but that’s about as laudatory as I’d get with their music.
From a group-dynamic perspective, though, no one really does it like BJM, at least outside of Ricki Lake Show outtakes on the UPN network. To put it bluntly, these guys are volatile, in a terrifying, amusing, oddly gratifying kind of way. It really seems like they hate each other with the fiercest, most unbridled passion imaginable, and yet here they are, almost 15 years after the release of their first LP and still headlining shows at big venues in major markets.
Although to be fair, this isn’t the same band as the one that released Methodrone all those years ago. Through his own general unpleasantness, singer, lead guitarist and all-around asshole extraordinaire Anton Newcombe has upset, threatened, or actively assaulted 22 former band members into leaving BJM, changing personnel quicker than General Motors.
This is a guy who got arrested for kicking one of his own fans in the head. He once tried to fight his whole band while onstage with them…all of them. In 1991, when a reporter tried to compare him to Eric Clapton, Newcombe wondered, aloud and to a member of the press, “What the fuck has Eric Clapton ever done except throw his baby off a fucking ledge and write a song about it?” This is not a nice man.
Nonetheless, it certainly makes seeing them more exciting. Is Anton Newcombe going to refer to me as “the posterboy for legalized abortion,” which he has said in the past about other musicians, or ruin his career by instigating a drunken punchup in front of the major label A&R’s who want to pay him to make music, which he also has done in the past? I don’t know, but the only reason I went to see his band last week was to find out what uniquely self-destructive antic he and BJM would enact before my very eyes.
I was, to say the least, disappointed that instead of threatening or belittling their fans with the aggression of someone with severe emotional problems, BJM professionally and amicably charged through nearly 25 songs from their good-not-great, totally inoffensive-but-not-that-inspiring catalog.
Songs like “Got My Eye On You,” “Nailing Honey to The Bee,” and “Oh Lord” show off the rockabilly/psychedelic/alt-rock/alt-country sounds that the band have done so unremarkably since the early 1990’s. It’s totally fine—with little variation, BJM make the kind of guitar-driven, risk-free music that white people have been making on a pretty regular basis for a few decades now, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Still, it isn’t worth my T-fare. Hearing outlandishly degrading heckles from a man who, at any moment, could throw a tambourine at me, his drummer, or his grandmother, would have been more than worth my time and money. Nobody antagonizes their associates or supporters quite like BJM, and nobody deserves a public collapse more than Anton Newcombe, and it would have made me very happy to see his train crash, even if it was into me.
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