Deep at the heart of any band is a self-belief that pushes toward egomania. DiG! is a crucial example of that and charts a hefty seven years of love and hate between The Dandy Warhols and Brian Jonestown Massacre. Neither band arguably hit the highs they expected of themselves, but this documentary piece preserves important energy and necessary loathing of other artists’ success. The so-called “full-scale revolution” never came to fruition and is hard to take seriously. But The Dandy Warhols’ commitment to it and desire to seek it and a takeover of the world is admirably arrogant in the right way. One band fell to liquor and drugs, the other fell to the foils of success. Both became an undoing that is charted with intimacy and reflection throughout DiG!.
Portmanteaus etched in history associate both artists with the past. Andy Warhol and The Rolling Stones never duked it out as these two bands did. Ondi Timoner has unprecedented access to both bands and uses the time to speak to them openly and charts their history as a pair of bands that hope to expose their own image through the lens of those that came before them. At a time of commercial viability in art, DiG! May have initially felt to be a breath of fresh air, but its cast of shadowy artists is more grating than anything else. Their pontificating ways and higher belief in themselves are smug and rarely backed up with quality releases, as their discography reveals.
But capturing that is extremely well done. Timoner keeps the camera in the right spots and cuts through thousands of hours of footage to present the gory bits. No doubt there are elements of DiG! that are reliant on pieces or footage missing for the sake of context and understanding the damage that would do. It makes the unnatural seem reasonable when an explanation is given. Newcombe and company are shown to be late to the hippie craze but as crazed as those freewheeling, lacking attachment individuals were. DiG! more and more moves away from The Dandy Warhols and begins focusing on the depravity at the heart of Brian Jonestown Massacre. It is as David Crosby said. “As the drug using went up, the music writing went down.” Creativity is only as good as the consciousness of the creative. Brian Jonestown Massacre are depravity incarnate and has themselves to blame for their commercial failures.
The Dandy Warhols do too to some degree, those washed-up articulations on their latest album are a crushing other side of this double-edged sword presented by DiG!. Born in the wrong generation mentalities were as present in the late 1990s as they are now. Newcombe comes across as a bitchy representation of The Beatles, surrounded by members of Brian Jonestown Massacre as they explode in a drugs and drink orgy of their own success. Madness replicated as genius; the line is drawn nowhere close between the two but should have been. Cocky and cretinous is the real exposure of the two bands here who brawl, booze and break their way to some form of success.
