LAST OF THE BIG-FUCKUPS

LAST OF THE BIG-FUCKUPS

Brian Jonestown Massacre’s percussionist in charge unlocks his diary

Joel Gion

My pocket buzzes mid-pull of my vodka disguised in a coconut water carton. I pull the phone out and thumb-press the notification from British Airways, which then opens a portal into warning-world anxiety and the big reveal I’d been on watch for: Another Brian Jonestown Massacre tour is starting out in true Brian Jonestown Massacre fashion. For me at least, and in the name of saving a few tour budget bucks, I’ve booked a connecting flight in London en route to Berlin, which now will suddenly have me landing into Storm Éowyn, some type of new global-warming phenomenon they are calling a “bomb cyclone.” The airline would like to suggest that I change my plans if I can, I assume for the unspoken but most obvious reason that first springs to mind, but also the great possibility that I will join the thousands of stranded from the hundreds of flight cancellations at Heathrow.

I’m already “on the bus,” as it were, in the form of a large, tour-size airport shuttle heading to San Francisco International Airport, the place that until recently I’d called my city for a collective 30 years. And so, with the die already cast, I look to the window wall and switch perception to reflective mode along the last of Sonoma County’s rolling green before it turns into the Marin section of all things the same.

I had already been expecting some trouble when I landed in Berlin due to the return of the Sundance Film Festival’s “Grand Jury Prize” award-winning documentary Dig!— which, unlike myself, my band leader Anton famously hates—now in the form of a newly expanded 20th-anniversary version replete with my freshly added narration. What is probably the most trouble-garnishing of all this is my blow-by-blow commentary of last tour’s Melbourne onstage band fight and implosion, an event I’d missed (my onstage side gig is drama diffuser) due to leaving the tour a week early in order to send my cat of 17 years into the ninth life encore stratosphere, hopefully to wherever David Bowie is hanging these days.

For those of you who still get all of your music news exclusively from the pages of this magazine, I passionately salute you, but most folks here who are also online probably saw footage of the BJM 2023 tour abruptly ending in the exact same pretzel’d body pile formation as our infamous ’96 Viper Room brawl and main takeaway scene from the documentary. Bands don’t get into onstage fistfights anymore, unless we include copycats Jane’s Addiction’s watered-down version almost a year later, or maybe if it’s in some small punk rock dive bar. And so to put it into full Spartacus-in-Cinerama perspective, the Forum is 2,000 capacity and the biggest venue in all of Melbourne. This makes for a very wide range of YouTube camera video perspectives, and something that, with the help of a new 20th-anniversary version of the film, now Dig! XX, is an event nailed onto the narrative.

This departure of mine just days before adds to the reunion anxiety mix, along with the possible crashing-and-burning-on-the-tarmac thing, and I already hate flying to begin with. Not the actual flying-through-the-air part, or even prolonged hours of watching all the oldest-to-be-found movies on wine and hopefully valium, but the cattle-call nature of it all. The claustrophobic confusion while navigating people flexing their most inconsiderate sides, the TSA’s never-the-same-game-twice of what they need to do to you to ensure world safety (there’s also just something about the “take this off—leave that on—take that out—put that back in" that’s reminiscent of my parents telling me to "go wash that eyeliner off"), and in go your cap and corduroy into one of the never-washed gray tubs where some dude-bro’s straightfrom-the-men’s-room-urinal-puddle shoe soles probably just were. All the while you are by default a person of possible nefarious intent with a forced temp job of sweeping up their floor with your socks. Did the days when scrubbing your hands for a timed two minutes every time you touched something from the outside world ever really happen?

It’s especially funny when I think back to the first time I’d ever flown, back in ’98, showing my hot-off-the-laminate-machine fake ID of me as Anton in order for our then Mafia-movie boss look-and-act-alike band manager to save the couple hundred bucks on the ticket change. Neither the pre-9/11 airline counter person nor security batted an eye at that thing, despite the typo declaring that I was “licensed and boned" (the latter part being a true business premonition), the misspelled signature, and the crooked-cut Polaroid head shot being 10 times as thick as the actual printer-paper “card.” These days such an attempted charade would be considered a deplorable crime and would surely render a newsworthy trip to the Big House.

As you can tell by how much more there is left to read here, I survive landing in London and arrive alive in Berlin to Anton’s studio. I am also relieved to find that the vibe vitals seem normal in our band relational interior world, seemingly, but not so much on the exterior’s world relations when, on the last day of rehearsals, the police show up to Anton’s studio to appease an angry neighbor’s noise complaint. This soundproofing criticism is something that has never happened in the 20 years of coming here for what are typically days-on-end tour rehearsals, perhaps another sign of the times in these days of dwindling music appreciation, with empathetic patience and even perhaps impressedness replaced with annoyed indifference.

A few hours later we file onto a doubledecker tour bus and get the hell out of das Dodge under cover of the night. It’s a quick 1-2-3 gig count-out through Germany and the Netherlands and then over the English Channel into the U.K., where we will be ping-pong-balling for the next three weeks.

Upon arrival, the wind is crying Mary as the sad news hits that the rock music princess who’d self-spiritually intermarried bohemia and high art, Marianne Faithfull, has died. When I first joined BJM back in ’94, then disturbingly the same great distance from the '60s as now is from the ’90s, I would wake up every morning to a picture of her tacked to the wall next to my bed. The ripped-out magazine picture page was of her around '66, having morning tea in that gorgeous, somewhat disheveled, freshly awoke way, looking like it’s after a long night of swinging, which was usually the state I myself was in in those heady "head"-on days of Britpop, ’60s garage rock, and all-night illegal outdoor raves.

THERE IS NO WAY THE BJM ME FROM THE ’90S WOULD BE ALLOWED INSIDE TO SEE THE NOW ME PLAY THIS VENUE TONIGHT.

I awake inside my coffin on the doubledecker luxury hangover mausoleum on wheels and open my sideways sunroof to reveal the Brixton Academy’s dank and gray-bricked rear end. The venue has just reopened after being closed down a few years ago when two concertgoers were crushed to death in a crowd surge. The now re-vibed venue is on a hyper-safe-place alert with overt security practices, even making all band and crew entering the back entrance go through three backstage-laminate-requiring checkpoints, each and every time, regardless of the fact that they recognize me from my various comings and goings, starting with the first round. This taking-zero-chances policy also means that later when some new friends of mine show up to the gig on mushrooms looking a little too much like they are on mushrooms, they are denied entry, which is crazy when you remember this is a Brian Jonestown Massacre gig, and there is no way the BJM me from the '90s would be allowed inside to see the now me play this venue tonight.

After soundcheck a photo shoot has been set up for right on the stage because the lineup is never exactly the same from year to year. Anton’s whole new personal management and industry team is here, under the guidance of big-time legendary Creation Records founder and Oasis discoverer Alan McGee. Everyone is really friendly to me so that’s nice despite the theme to Rosemary’s Baby suddenly being stuck in my head for some reason.

We hit the stage once occupied by the likes of Bob Dylan, the Smiths, the Clash, and Madonn—uh, the Ramones, who had songs that were shorter than some of our between-song times, and yet those occasional long tuning periods have gotten a lot shorter for how long they still can be. And despite my romance with all things from the past, as I shake my tambourine in front of tonight’s sea of 2,000 heads bobbing together in different shades of hairy waves, I have to admit that in many ways this is one of the best band periods there has ever been, of which there have been quite a bounty to rank by now.

The echo from the ’60s bands to the ’90s bands to today’s newer school of neopsych bands is still reverberating despite how long and since. And in the oddest of all turnarounds, it’s these more “together” modern psych acts that came to be from seeing Dig! that help to accentuate our shade of odd-ones-out even further. Still and despite it all, we have retained our ragtag status and, for better or worse, for real reasons.

The next song is over, and it’s time to tune those vintage '60s Vox guitars again, so righteous-sounding but fickle things that they are, like the players themselves, seemingly the last of the big-time fuckups.

And having ended on that note, I’m going to be in trouble again when I go back to Berlin for the next tour in May. Maybe.