Brian Jonestown Massacre @ La Tulipe

I’m assuming 2010 has been a great year for the Brian Jonestown Massacre. If you’ve seen Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary Dig!, you are more likely to understand why BJM’s June 3^rd performance at La Tulipe was so impressive. In addition to this, you’ll understand how happy I was to hear that their last Montreal show sold out completely, while the Dandy Warhols (supposedly) couldn’t draw much of a crowd when they played Club Soda last September. It is the dawning of a new day for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and this is most likely because Anton Newcombe quit drinking, limiting his regular intoxicant consumption to Ecstasy, mushrooms and amphetamines. Now that’s what I call will power.  

If you haven’t seen Dig! or know about the group’s history, I’ll give you a quick and essential run through as I’m sure you’re a tad confused already. You’re probably thinking, “What do the Dandy Warhols have to do with this whole thing? They seem so clever, what a great band name, you know? Weren’t they on the O.C. soundtrack? I hear Mischa Barton is sooo fucked right now! Did you see her on Law and Order SVU? Apparently she was awful to work with and it totally makes sense. She’s such a slut.” These are completely legitimate questions and concerns, and you’re right, I too hear she was hard to work with on the SVU set. As for the O.C. soundtrack thing, I’m not really sure but it seems plausible. But I digress.  

The Dandy Warhols happen to be the Brian Jonestown Massacre’s closest ‘frenemies’ (in Lindsay Lohan terms). Since their formations, the two groups have been constantly competing with one another, sometimes playing shows together, other times sabotaging each other’s posses in hopes of destroying their chances of ever becoming successful musicians. While the Brian Jonestown Massacre have clearly always been the better group (this is partly true and mostly subjective), the Dandy Warhols managed to enter the public consciousness first, selling albums and touring successfully worldwide. BJM couldn’t keep up for many reasons, but their failings came mostly as a result of leader Anton Newcombe’s virtual inability to do almost anything other than write and produce incredible music; Newcombe is infamous for laughably extreme drug abuse and temper problems during rehearsals and performances (one scene in Dig! shows him kicking a fan in the head while on stage). While friends and fans never stopped rooting for the Brian Jonestown Massacre, it seemed as though Dandys’ level success and recognition was not an option. The Dandys’ success is also infuriating because lead singer Courtney Taylor Taylor (yes, two Taylors) is a huge dick. Now, you all know that I don’t like to insult any musician that works hard (not true), but anyone who’s as big of a jerk as Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor does not deserve good fortune.  

Honestly, I expected Newcombe to freak out on that fateful eve of June 3^rd, and I looked forward to it. Apparently I’m an asshole and didn’t believe the Brian Jonestown Massacre could pull of a decent public performance, let alone make it through a full-length set without nodding off half way through, courtesy of Montreal’s excellent heroin (or so I’ve “heard”). I am hoping by now that you’ve caught on to the fact that having referred to these thoughts as “assholeish” implies the fact I was way wrong. While I don’t have much of an affinity for their opening band Elephant Stone (a group basically comprised of Jian Ghomeshi, Neil Diamond, my old co worker’s boyfriend and a torturedsoulpoetsingersongwriteralcoholicfriendofafriend of mine by the looks of it), Brian Jonestown Massacre had their shit together and played an incredibly solid, jangly, loud set, mostly sticking to songs from their ‘Matt Hollywood era’ (Hollywood only recently rejoined the band after quitting in 1998), arguably the finest albums they’ve produced.  

Everything about BJM’s performance was basically perfect, from the great live adaptation of their psychedelic garage meets shoegaze sound (read: louder and distorted) to their awesomely indifferent onstage personas, refusing to kill time with obnoxious, attempting at humour type of stage banter and quite literally looking like they just didn’t give a shit. Amazing. They aggressively ripped through tracks off Take it From the Man, Their Satanic Majesty’s Second Request, Thank God for Mental Illness and Take it Back, making up for the lack of band on fan violence I had expected. Of course, a particular favourite song amongst the audience was “Not If You Were The Last Dandy On Earth”; seeing that many people come together in common hopes of crushing Courtney Taylor Taylor’s soul restored my faith in humanity completely. A core group of the audience danced furiously by the front of the stage, fuelled by the band’s extended psychedelic jams and (potentially) ecstasy. My notes are barely legible from being pushed around so much. I found their live performance to be much more indicative of the band’s influences than their recorded material, giving nods to pre fab 60s pop groups like the Monkees (their performance of “This is Why You Love Me”), as well as the more melancholy sounds of the Smiths (literally borrowing lines from “That Joke isn’t Funny Anymore” in their live rendition of “Wisdom”, which I would have been so pissed off to miss). The band played an unusually long set (I believe about an hour and a half), but I just wanted them to keep playing. This doesn’t happen to me at a show that I find less than incredible, as I tend to want to go home and watch Saturday Night Live half way through most concerts (and I’m talkin’ RECENT SNL, which apparently doesn’t blow half as much as 80% of the band’s I’ve seen live since 2002).  

Basically, the Brian Jonestown Massacre rule. If they instructed me to steal or kill, I would, even with the knowledge that Anton Newcombe is a bit of a psychopath (or at the very least “out of sorts”). I will never join ‘Team Dandy Warhols’, not even if I were the last junkie on earth and they had mountains made of the good stuff. If you ever pass up the chance to see the Brian Jonestown Massacre live you are an IDIOT and should be sentenced to hear Courtney Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor Taylor talk about his “rich, successful and awesome band The Dandy’s” incessantly until the day you die.

Also, just so you know, every time I want to type a word with the letter “z” in it, I have to Google search “striped horses” as if I don’t know what the fuck a zebra is. Shortly thereafter, Google looks at me like some sort of moron cretin hybrid and explains to me that those silly striped horses aren’t actually horses at all. I then copy the first letter of this perplexing new creature’s name I’ve just learned about and past it into my Word file. I then proceed to call all my closest pals to see if they’ve heard of this strange new species of tiger horse called the zebra. It’s been about 2 weeks now and I haven’t heard back from any of them…