A Cult-Classic Doc About Indie Rock's Greatest Feud Returns—as a Meditation on a Revolution That Never Happened

Note: this story was reported and filed prior to Dig! director Ondi Timoner losing her Altadena home in the Los Angeles fires.

As chronicled in Ondi Timoner’s cult hit 2004 documentary Dig!, once upon a time—and the late 1990s really does feel like that long ago—there were two small-bore American rock bands with horrific puns for names.

One was called the Dandy Warhols. The group was and is (sort of) based out of Portland, Oregon. and led by a shockingly good-looking man named Courtney Taylor-Taylor. The band had a talent for solid hooks and keeping their collective shit together; Mr. Taylor-Taylor had an amazing chin and a fondness for saying things like, “I sneeze and hits come out.” (The Dandys hit Gen Z might know best is “We Used to Be Friends,” a 2003 song that became the theme for Veronica Mars.)

The other was called the Brian Jonestown Massacre. This group was based out of San Francisco and led by a charismatic yet troubled man named Anton Newcombe, who sported a shaggy haircut, looked like a Manson hanger-on and spoke in the most severe Newport Beach accent you will ever hear. Newcombe had a talent for knocking out songs at a breathtaking rate, fomenting and engaging chaos in every possible situation, and declaring of record companies, “I’m the letter writer and they’re the postmen.”

The bands were the best of frenemies. Both had a somewhat psychedelic sound—the Dandys’ vibe was a little more mainstream alt-rock, while the BJM shuttled from acoustic folk structures to extended guitar jams. Both loved drugs as only young rock bands in their 20s can love drugs—the Dandys thrived on coke, while the BJM was meth-powered, although it was Newcombe’s heroin addiction that ruined the band at least once. (As one-time Brian member Miranda Lee Richards put it, “All those ‘60s bands that got into drugs, they got famous first.”

The Dandys have replaced exactly one band member in 30 years; the BJM has had several wholesale line-up changes, with their charismatic yet troubled bandleader the sole constant. Both wanted to “make it.” Both did and neither did, depending on how one defines such things. Both admired each other, both wrote bitchy songs about each other, and both got steadily ignored to varying degrees while the world at large got really into Biggie and Tupac, electronica, ska and nu-metal.

That struggle, especially the endless grind of get-in-the-van touring that characterized underground rock music in the cheap-gas era, was the focus of Dig!. Timoner says the original idea was to look at 10 bands on the verge of getting signed—ten little families of disparate folks who travel around and play shows and maybe there’s fame and fortune somewhere along the way. Candidates included such future bar-trivia-night answers as Mother Tongue, Lava Diva, the Dashboard Prophets, and The Negro Problem.

But after seeing the BJM live in 1996, Timoner was captivated. “They pulled up in a jalopy with instruments hanging out of the car, and they were late to the gig and they couldn’t play that night,” she says, during an afternoon walk in her Altadena neighborhood. “And so they were like, ‘Let’s have a revolution right here on the sidewalk.’”