The Benjamin Report

Someday it will change, it will all change

My reflections on Dig! XX, the re-cut expanded 20th anniversary version of the original cult classic rock n’ roll documentary.

The untold secret behind everything we create that binds the understanding of all art together, especially to its makers, is that there is no finished project. Every piece of writing, filming, drawing, painting, construction, performance, flying machine, death trap, and all that is the result of human making is a never ending doodle. The penciling is never finished. Once the point meets the paper, it never leaves.

This secret is an elusive one to the youngster artists, the hipsters that never believe they’ll get old. But to those elder professionals that build and make, it’s the most frustrating clause in their contracts.

The original Dig! premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2004. It was the first real film from Ondi Timoner, her feature debut that she had embarked on with her brother. As young impressionable artists just angling their way through the rambunctious new indie scene of the early aughts, they sliced apart their film to appeal to the generalized distributors of the time.

Documentaries, especially out of the indie world, were not supposed to surpass the tight 90 of the typical feature film. But Dig! was a story forged over nearly a decade with over 2,500 hours of footage, nevertheless it was picked apart so as to squeeze into the festival lineup. And it was good, good enough to even win the Grand Jury Prize and go on to develop a deeply devoted cult following. But it was never the movie that it could’ve been, perhaps the movie that they wanted it to be back then.

Now, with two decades experience, the brother and sister duo of Ondi and David Timoner returned to their twenty-something archive and rebuilt the project that made their careers. The supposed end result of their twenty year expedition cannot be expressed as anything other than another masterwork.

Once the point meets the paper, it never leaves.

We start on the side of the road in the middle of a pitch black night. A club in its closing hours is turning away its scheduled band, The Brian Jonestown Massacre. They were late and strung out, and totally oblivious to the consequences of their error. As a band, it’s very clear that they’re driven, for better or worse, by the confidence and talent of their frontispiece and leader, Anton Newcombe.

Joking with themselves and spitting cigarettes, they move forward anyway. Later, we’d learn from their representing attorney that they just play wherever they please, throwing all muck and decency into the wind along with a stream of piss and mistakes. The lawyer loves their music, but takes note that every time they perform, they are upended by the police. They’re either called for noise complaints or because of an uproarious battle that too easily gets out of hand. He just handles the paperwork here and there, because after all, Anton always represents himself. He’s too cocky and excitable not to.

He’s just a kid too, whether at 26 or 53, he is and always was a kid rejected by his mom after his 50th arrest and abandoned by his father after he was born. We meet his dad too, who expresses in every physical way the type of heavy regret that destroys so many deficient and ill-adjusted men. Him among them, as it is revealed shortly after his introduction that he ends his own life in the meantime of one of Anton’s twentieth or so birthdays.

It is Anton himself too who introduces us to his friends that he claims will help spread and espouse his vision of musical revolution, The Dandy Warhols. The Dandys are a similar group of misfit youths patching themselves up as an indie band. They are a trying lot of kids, pushing themselves out of moldy corners with music for the losers and laconic tryhard teenagers of late 90’s Portland. Their frontman Courtney Taylor Taylor is a sum of all that mush, a hippie weirdo with nothing new to say but a lot of new ways of saying it. Early on he takes an interest in Anton and makes his envy of him very clear.

Most everyone involved can agree and attest to Anton’s intrinsic genius. A man that can put together multiple great albums in a year while other bands can barely scratch together a respectable line of songs. But to the detriment of this talent and potential is his tilted personality. A child in grown man’s clothes right out of the 70’s and a dense but bursting ego that a local promoter paralleled to that of Charles Manson, Jesus, and Adolf Hitler.

In the proceeding two hours we see how the Dandys inch higher and higher and explode upon a torrent of fame and success. They have their mistakes, but they learn and advance above them to enjoy sold-out tours and festival sets to hundreds of thousands. And we see how The Brian Jonestown Massacre find the nooks in the mountainside that would allow them that fantastic success, and how they still somehow find the seemingly impossible way to muck it all up.

Drinking alone in the shower and hearing with abundant annoyance the scratches and pocked dust marks on your last record, your 19th release, that would distract any passerby from what you thought was a gold mine of ingenuity. But even you can’t focus on the genius through the drivel, because even on the released product your rookie drummer sounds just milliseconds ahead of you. Thousands of times you’ve taught the idiot how to play the track and he still fucks it up, same as the bass player and your second guitarist, and that dullard on the tambourine who was the best man at your first wedding.

Charles Manson, Jesus, and Adolf Hitler.

The last we see of Courtney Taylor Taylor, he’s headlining a major festival in the UK. Jack White is in attendance, same as Anthony Bourdain and Kim Deal. He’ll laugh about paying off a marijuana fine in France with the dollar equivalent to four of his band’s best selling t-shirts, and toke on a gifted joint in the presence of cops. The thing burns brightly with the shine of fresh cannabis, dangling between poster boy teeth and ascending out of the chic smile of a newfound millionaire pop star.

Some bands are lucky, and others are just unlucky. The lucky ones stay lucky by treating the journey like pros, go to the office and put the work in and give back tenfold what’s given to them. The unlucky ones take what’s given to them and spend it all on sitars and spend the week leading up to the show learning how to play them. They never perform as much as they blow up and fight, then laugh at the mold that’s been staring in their face the past decade.

Among all the blow-ups and embarrassments, there was one moment in time when everything that Anton wanted to happen did happen. It was a show he played with his ideal lineup at the Ohio Communist Party Headquarters in Cleveland. Described by his confidante and one true ally Joel Gion as a performance for around ten people that lasted just as many hours, The Brian Jonestown Massacre took the stage at around 8pm and left at around 3am. Among the collected black-and-white footage of the event was a snapshot of Joel smacking the tambourine like a smirking madman while a fresh can of beer spilled its fill over the edge of a live amp. There really isn’t any better summation of the feeling Anton’s music gives you than that.

One member of the audience approached Anton in drunken bliss and told him and the camera, “If the people heard your record, fascism would end in a second.” Anton was smoking while the praise lurched upon him. This was one of the rare moments where we don’t hear him talk, he just smiled and let the guy’s talking hit him. It’s enough for him to just appreciate the moment, because so many times he doesn’t allow himself the fascination, rather he bites and thrashes at his bandmates and fans. The music he wanted to take over the world was never enough to float above his own defiant ego.

Our last meeting with Anton was just a few days after the birth of his first son. While the Dandys are trekking across the planet enjoying the company of stars, he is back in Los Angeles with a formerly retired guitarist cursing drunk patrons. He takes a break during his performance and lets an ex-girlfriend he claims to the crowd is his sister play her stuff. While she’s on stage singing her folk poetry and straddling an acoustic guitar, we’re stuck watching Anton take it all in. He’s nodding his head with the music, but with eyes open and locked onto her. There’s no smile nor pout, but that look empty yet filled of a man who has nowhere to go anymore, but wanting through blunt force to still find another path. He gives her feedback by way of whispers between songs, but he is heckled offstage. As is inevitably true at this point, he gets into a violent altercation and kicks a drunkard from the crowd in the face and is later arrested for it.

There was an interview with a label representative partway through the film that took place in the backseat of a car. He explains that major labels fail on 9 out of 10 artists they sign, but that one artist is successful enough to turn them a profit. “Only industry I can think of with a 90% failure rate that can still claim abundance in success.”

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Dig! XX is currently on the festival circuit. I watched it at the 2024 Milwaukee Film Festival with my friend Jean. We both really enjoyed it. It is not yet available to stream, but hopefully you’ll all soon feel what I felt in the theater watching and admiring it.

I’d like to thank Robyn Ehrlich for gifting me a Festival Pass. I plan on seeing more than 20 films at the festival within these next two weeks. You’ll probably hear more about it here. Thank you for reading.