The Brian Jonestown Massacre are undeniably one of the most influential bands in the modern psych scene. However the brilliance and originality of the BJM’s music is often overshadowed by their notoriety, particularly that of Anton Necombe. Everyone I know who has seen the Jonestown live has a story about the show (usually involving Anton going off on an audience heckler or a bandmate). Remotely every piece of press about the band focuses heavily on Anton’s antics or the chaotic history of the band. Ondi Timoner’s 2004 documentary Dig! introduced a massive new audience to the BJM, but forevermore branded Anton as a violent junkie on the edge of his sanity, and the rest of the BJM as goofy burnouts. Like a game of telephone, those who trusted press coverage or Dig! to be an accurate, comprehensive record of the BJM further spread the narrative when they tell their friends about the band. As the Brian Jonestown Massacre heads towards the 30th anniversary of its formation, it’s about time that someone finally helped set the record straight.
Jesse Valencia turned out to be the right man for the job. Valencia was introduced to the BJM in 2008, when while frying on several hits of LSD a friend insisted he hear them. Valencia was deeply impacted by what he heard and immediately became an ardent fan. A year later, after seeing Dig! and attending his first live BJM show, he was struck with the desire to write a book about the band; one which would tell the band’s history and document both the genius and mayhem. It was an ambitious concept- at the time Valencia was just a zealous fan with minimal writer cred and no direct connections to the band. When he reached out to Anton, he was unsurprisingly shut down. But Valencia was determined, and spent nearly a decade doing the research and conducting the interviews which would become Keep Music Evil, out now via Jawbone Press.
I think that Valencia’s decision to write this book came from a real genuine love of the music, and a deep desire to understand Anton both as a musician (Valencia, a musician himself, was greatly influenced by the BJM), and as a person. I think because he truly is a fan, it doesn’t ever feel like Valencia is trying to capitalize on the BJM reputation by writing a tabloid-style tell all. While Keep Music Evil certainly does detail the drug use, violence, financial struggles, and mental instability that have become synonymous with the BJM, there is SO much more to the book than that.
Though, as expected, Anton is the central focus of the book, Keep Music Evil is not a biography, and most of the source material does not come from Anton himself. Instead, the story is pieced together like a massive collage. As Valencia writes, “That’s why this is not an unauthorized biography so much as it is a portrait. If Anton was sitting in a dark room, each voice is a different light on the subject, coming from a different angle. With enough of these lights, once you place them in the room a certain way, the picture becomes clearer and the portrait takes form”.
The author’s complete dedication to giving the full, honest BJM story is evidenced by the amount of sources and citations used. 6 pages of end-note citations include everything from Myspace posts and Youtube comments to The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, spanning about 25 years. In addition to the source material, Valencia drew from the massive roster of BJM members (past and present), collaborators, friends, lovers, supporters, business associates, etc. to provide personal accounts of their time and experiences with the band, conducting 129 personal interview over the past decade. Some individuals may have had only a limited involvement with Anton and the BJM, others may have hazy recollections of actual events, and some may even be completely full of shit. But when all of these individual accounts are compiled and chronicled they are able to create a collective history, and this is the history Valencia has expertly and diligently compiled with Keep Music Evil.
Keep Music Evil is broken into 3 parts- part 1 tells the origin story of Anton and the Brian Jonestown Massacre, details the writing and recording process behind Methodrone and Spacegirl and Other Favorites, Take It From The Man!, and Their Satanic Majesties Second Request, and gives an insight into the early years of the band, from 1990 to 1996.
Part 2 “loosely follows the narrative of Dig!”. Dig! was the incredibly successful 2004 documentary about BJM and The Dandy Warhols- it has been hailed as one of the best music documentaries of the century and credited with propelling both BJM and the Dandys’ careers to new heights, but has also been critiqued by many as creating a false narrative about the supposed feud between the 2 bands, and for exploiting the drug use and volatile relationships within the BJM. In Keep Music Evil Valencia details everything that the documentary failed to “dig” up (or intentionally buried).
Part 3 picks up after Dig! ends,and follows the BJM from 2002 through current day- the impact of Dig!, both good and bad, the establishment of the longest-running BJM lineup, Anton’s early and revolutionary use of social media to share his music, the various new collaborations and experimentations in sound within BJM’s newest releases, the indisputable influence that the BJM had in the rise of a “garage revival” scene, and the living legacy that is Anton Newcombe.
Since it’s release, Keep Music Evil has been included in Vogue Magazine’s list of Best Summer Reads for 2019 . And as strangely amusing as it is to imagine Vogue Editor Anna Wintour groovin along to the BJM, the book’s inclusion on this list says something about the mass appeal of the BJM story and their music in general. The thing is, no one would care about the BJM or Anton if there wasn’t something truly incredible and valuable to the music; they would’ve faded into obscurity after the novelty of their antics wore off. By nearly all accounts, Keep Music Evil shows us that the music is greater than the mess. It’s why band members willingly joined the BJM knowing what they were in for. It’s why venues continued to book the band, despite the liability. It’s why producers often helped Anton record for free, and why so many have eagerly lent their various talents to BJM songs. It’s why all of us continue to pay for BJM tickets, knowing the set might be cut short. And it’s why this book exists- Keep Music Evil is in the end a tale of absolute dedication, of giving yourself 100% to your art and never giving up.
Jesse Valencia is also POW’s feature for this month’s upcoming Discography Biography- he’ll be choosing the 3 Brian Jonestown Massacre albums which have impacted his life the most, and we’ll be discussing each in detail, as well as discussing what’s changed for him since the writing of Keep Music Evil and how the BJM influenced him and his band Gorky.
You can read what all the fuss is about by picking up a copy of Keep Music Evil here
You can follow Jesse Valencia here
Follow Jesse’s band Gorky here
And stay tuned later this week for Jesse’s Discography Biography feature!
