‘DIG! XX’: An oral history of rock ‘n’ roll’s greatest documentary
Every age and every stage has its place and its players. DIG! captures West Coast rock ‘n’ roll in the late 1990s, where no two people embodied a strange and stupifying movement unravelling under the warm sun more than Anton Newcombe and Courtney Taylor-Taylor, the foremost leaders of The Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols, respectively. They were the fellows who checked out of the square world and fit right into the round hole of their own weird making.
DIG! feels like a relic from days when “middle and lower class people could participate” in the music industry, a time when the zeitgeist was knowable enough that a “good looking bunch of outlaws” could use “whichever fork on whatever course” of the zeitgeist that they wanted, a time when a cult following of people reconciled the magnitude of what it meant when a man holding a tambourine starts talking about a revolution. It’s a time now long since departed but preserved in the amber of this thing.
It’s a story of two bands, two dreamers, two filmmakers, and a whole host of very friendly people, each locked in a daring battle of art and ego, each destined to collapse along with the wave they were riding. But it also seemed that as long as the camera was rolling, then these heady days would be sustained, as though the scene would survive until someone finally yelled cut.
Perhaps that’s why filming kept rolling for around seven years. Although carnage and calamity always seemed close at hand, the only fear was that those filming didn’t have “enough years left” in their lives to watch and edit the 2500 hours that they had shot. In this regard, the new DIG! XX version doesn’t feel like it’s revisiting what has already been and gone, but rather an attempt to finally conclude something that you suspect will always keep unspooling—blustered forwards in gusts of a psychedelic headwind, first stirred up by a cosmic battle of competition, camaraderie and creativity that started blowing in the weird year of our lord 1996.
I travelled back to the start of this constant disarray and asked a few of the windswept denizens of DIG! to guide me to the present juncture. What I found were folks still dazzled by what they had experienced and still unsure what it all meant. Perhaps there’s a kernel of why we create art, perhaps there’s a cautionary tale, but anyway, this is the oral history of DIG! to DIG! XX… whatever that means.
The origins of DIG!
You couldn’t make DIG! now—the concept of quietly inserting yourself in the ranks of touring bands with a camera would feel too ham-fisted. The expected professionalism of a steady tripod, lights, and HD quality would dissolve the necessary veil of voyeurism. The band would be too boring and human, suffering from humdrum realities like hangovers and fatigue rather than blundering through frivolous days in a wreckless, triumphant and troublesome blur. Perhaps most tragically of all, you’d have to find a billionaire patron to fund eight years on the road, and they’d want weekly results and a definite sanitisation.
No, as you watch DIG! in its new 20-year anniversary incarnation, you are compelled by the certainty that it could not be made now. But you’re equally compelled by the mystery of how it was ever made then. So, how on earth did this strange tape come about?
“Well, my sister and I started making films together in college,” co-creator David Timoner explains. “I joined her in LA after graduating, and we soon found ourselves filming and following a number of unsigned local bands. Our shared love of music led us to begin The Cut, which we conceived as a documentary following ten bands over five years on the verge of getting signed—where art meets industry. In the course of doing that, someone passed us a cassette of the Brian Jonestown Massacre.”
“We immediately loved the music,” he continues, “and went to see them in San Francisco. We met them outside of a gig they’d been kicked off the bill of. It was August 29th, 1996, Anton’s 29th birthday. We already knew we liked their music, but we were instantly taken by their personalities and fearless spirit. The footage from that first meeting was incredible. They were already more interesting by several orders of magnitude than any of the other bands we’d been filming.”
“Two weeks later,” David Timoner concludes, “they came down to play an industry showcase at the Viper Room. That happened… and the next day, as the rest of the band were trying to draw up a contract with Anton to get him to promise not to abuse them, he told us that he wanted us to go meet the Dandy Warhols in Portland and that he was going to take over the documentary. We didn’t argue with him.”
So, the story was afoot, but most things in the world of the Brian Jonestown Massacre fall apart. Even their music joyously oscillates on the brink of psychedelic oblivion, like a ballet on the lip of the Grand Canyon or a Cadilac speeding along the shore kisses of an encroaching sea. It was a good idea to travel to Portland to infiltrate the Dandy Warhols, but there was no promise at all that the host would not reject the new implant. Thankfully, that didn’t happen.
“One day at a Dandy gig, Ondi and David showed up with cameras rolling and talking to everyone, and we all accepted it. Nobody really talked about it; they became our friends and ’embedded’ in our lives, and that’s how they got that intimate footage,” Dandy Warhols’ original drummer Eric Hedford explains. A naturalistic relationship soon blossomed. There was no give, and there was no take.
The whys and wherefores behind this instant bond and the steady stream of footage that unfurled from it, is simply surmised by Hedford as thus: “Ondi’s superpower is that she can walk into a room with a camera and everyone just accepts it and starts talking to her.” And so, the documentary had its stage, its time, and its players. What any of those things were seemed as mysterious then as they are now, but something was underway.
From David Timoner’s perspective, what was underway was something close to capturing the intersection between creativity and a career—at least, that was the case from behind the camera. “We wanted to see if it was possible to be creative and make a living from that creativity and stay true to your muse—to keep your integrity in the face of ‘The Industry’. In Anton and Courtney, we had two characters, each taking different paths, whose lived experience could help us see if it was possible.”
Lord knows what Anton’s motives were – when we recently interviewed him, the project seemed all but a stubbed cigarette in his mind – but for the rest of the musicians now peering down the barrel of the Timoner’s lens, this bizarre project offered a shot at great fortunes. As Brian Jonestown Massacre’s famed tambourine player, Joel Gion, explained, “Back in those days, if someone thought you were worth following around with a camera who wasn’t being paid by a record label to do so, then you were on your way to being the kind of band record labels paid to have cameras follow around.”
Whichever way anyone was looking at it, greatness was most certainly going to be shown, and greatness would most certainly be rewarded, wouldn’t it? “We knew we were the best band in America, with the Dandys being a close second,” Gion continues, “and it was just like Anton says in the film, we were ‘going to show you how to do it’.” They certainly did. And yet, they certainly didn’t in equal measure. To call the result a repository of greatness would belie the truth of what the documentary actually unearths: greatness, ironically, barely features on the figurative word cloud of what makes a band great.
Personality, creative ingenuity, and originality are all abundantly on display, but to labels; neither group looked like reliable engines of income or the type of people you would readily want to ‘work with’. Maybe that’s why the groups were so beloved. So, beyond a ramshackle insight into the best bands ever destined to derail, rerail and plough on towards the sun in a never-ending cycle of hits and mishaps, what does the footage show?
The outcome of DIG!
The result of eight years of torment and triumph on the road with two tumbledown titans, Davids vying to be Goliaths of the industry, is the perfect vignette of what rock ‘n’ roll had become. The counterpoint to Gion’s initial idea of an exposition of brilliance is his reconciliation of DIG!‘s reality, “If you are going to ‘blow it’, blow it so big that it must be celebrated as a type of victory.”
In this sense, when I asked David Timoner what he thought he was capturing, he simply said, “History.” It arrived at a juncture where the claws of capitalism were firmly planted in art. But by the same token, it was also before social media and the internet had boomed. So, with enough spirited willpower, you could willfully ignore this unfortunate fate and plough on as though the bohemian dream of the 1960s had not been bastardised by bigwigs and hired disrupters. It’s just “artists trying to process their experience through music,” David Timoner adds. “The collision of art and commerce.”
That might sound like creative flow caught on camera, but did the filming change the dynamic at all? Were the parties represented as they truly were? While certain members might have refuted this in the subsequent years, you can’t deny what a camera captures over thousands of hours.
“It all happened,” David Timoner posits in earnest defence. “In the words of David LaChapelle, ‘This is how you look!'” But he also maintains that if you place a camera in any room, things change, “It’s impossible for it not to. The awareness of being filmed – especially in those days when everyone didn’t have a camera in their pockets – no doubt changes everything. That said, we filmed so much that I think it became almost normal to them. There was very little to no barrier between us and them. They crashed at our place. We rode in each other’s vehicles. We were ‘in it’ together.”
Hedford largely agrees, “First of all, the movie is unscripted, everyone said those things and they all happened, but Ondi and David were making a film to entertain; the editing does bring out things or exaggerates or puts one band opposite the other for entertainment purposes.”
He adds, “Personally, I thought they made the Dandies look like everything good magically happened to us. Reality is that we worked hard, slept on floors, practised three or four times a week, played every gig we could, took a minivan through a snowstorm to play a house party in San Fran, and went out touring months at a time. I wouldn’t want young viewers to see this film and think that all it takes to become a big band is: do drugs, show your boobs, play a few shows, and out of nowhere you get record deals, videos, large audiences.”
But his worry that it makes things seem “glamorous” is wildly misguided from the prospective of a prudish viewer—cheap thrills, great tunes, and banging sets place peace at a hefty premium. Every success and every failure was very hard-earned.
But as the footage shows, the bands were compelled by something vast and worthy. Their enthusiasm for an unknown utopia was infectious, and they hoped they could create a pandemic of sorts. “I was a true believer in ‘the revolution’ that Anton was pitching. I truly believed that if we could just get the bands’ profiles elevated to a level where the wider world could hear and see them, then they would be huge. As we were filming, we kept shooting these incredible moments that inspired us to keep going,” David Timoner explains.
And maybe the evident faltering and fracturing of this revolution are why the documentary has drawn the ire of some of its most ardent participants. As Gion – the self-professed “lone participant who’s celebrated this thing the whole way” and also the lone participant whose screentime had to be cut because, as Hedford puts it, he was “stealing the movie” (those two factors perhaps related) – explained, “Everyone went into the filming thinking it would be a colourful meditation on how awesome everyone involved was, but then things like ego, ambitions, money and drugs morphed it into something else, and I don’t think everyone agreed that it needed to do that.”
But to use that old adage of journalism, you have to follow where the story goes. The centre of the revolution was struggling to hold. As David Timoner explained, “I was a true believer in the revolution. I was just out of college and pretty naïve, I guess. Then, over the course of it, seeing Anton fall into addiction and seeing all of the opportunities seemingly squandered, it was depressing and sad.”
However, it is testimony to both bands that their legacy still lives on beyond the documentaries. Through fortitude and unfloundering imagination, in the intervening years, touched upon in this expanded edition, they braced through more chaos and continue to be relevant engines of excellent music long past the date that fate and folly seemed to have in store for them.
Reflections on DIG!
Whether it’s Gion’s reflection that it captures blowing it big, David Timoner’s view that it “says something about how art transcends and lives”, or Hedford’s hopeful reprise that “you don’t go through the things we all went through, the struggles, the good times, without feeling like a family or having love for each other,” it certainly captures something profound, stupid and wholly unique.
I ended up watching this re-vamped version of DIG! in 2025, aged 31, not long after I had attended a Brian Eno lecture in which he pondered the purpose of art. In some ways, it seemed to answer his question. When I first watched the original edit as a teenager, it felt like a fun, frenzied future to follow after. Now, it felt like a window into bygone times and bygone possibilities. The life presented in DIG! was done—not just for me, but in all likelihood, for everybody.
I didn’t find myself mournfully lamenting this. I’m quite happy now with my decaf beverages and leisurely trips to the local. Most of the world seems to be. In fact, the prospect of travelling through time to spend a week on the road with either band would likely give me a panic attack. Once again, the same probably applies to a swathe of the population. So, rather than DIG! presenting a lamentable loss of sex, drugs and sleeping on hard floors between the poles of two viewings some 20 years apart, the way it transportively captures lives in motion seemed to impart the meaning of art.
We only get one life, and that’s a heavy reality to hold on your shoulders, but art, at its very best, lifts that weight and allows us to experience other lives and worlds—lives and worlds different from our own but imaginable all the same. Whether DIG! arrives at moments so stressfully chaotic and substance-laden that you conclude you’d die within a day of being in either band, or it bumbles through ruin towards a gilded triumph that leaves your heart pumping second-hand pride through your dreary system, it certainly presents a world beyond your own. For a moment, you can live it, laugh, and gladly sink back into your decaffeinated reality—affirmed by the fact that DIG!, a ludicrous film by any measure, has imparted you with art’s two great virtues: exultation and empathy.
DIG! lifts you from your life and plunges you into another. Come the end, some will be inspired to chase down their own chaos. Others will leave gladdened to return to their own safe reality. Many will be the same person just 20 years apart—most of the participants in the documentary included.
The definitive DIG! XX playlist
We asked the participants of these interviews to conclude with one track that defined the whole venture; here are their selections:
- Joel Gion: ‘Not If You Were the Last Dandy on Earth’ – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
- Eric Hedford: ‘Leave Them All Behind’ – Ride
- David Timoner: ‘Best Friend’ – The Dandy Warhols, ‘Nevertheless’ – The Brian Jonestown Massacre
