This post is showing up late, call it holiday glut. So why
not go with a song from a band where I came late to the party. The Brian
Jonestown Massacre formed its rep in the mid-to-late Nineties, particularly
with an album like Their Satanic Majesties Second Request (1996) which built on
“rip-offs” or “pastiches” of prominent Brit Invasion bands of the mid-Sixties.
The singer and main songwriter, who more or less is The BJM these days, Anton
Newcombe, seems to have fixated early on the sound of early psychedelia and the
morph of white R&B toward drug “scene” music that took place in landmark
albums like Between the Buttons (1967) and the first VU album that same year,
and Donovan’s druggier moments, 1966-67, along with, of course, the
mind-bending Beatles tunes of 1965-66.
And all that stuff is mother’s milk to me. So I was primed
to dig BJM when Jim, a former student, was insistent that I needed to know this
stuff. He gave me a comp of Anton gems up to that point (2003), and together we
saw the man and his crew live—for free—in the back of BAR in New Haven in
spring of 2004. By then Dig!, the film about BJM’s feud with The Dandy Warhols
(perhaps an even cleverer name than the Brian Jonestown Massacre) was out and Newcombe
seemed to be attracting some media buzz. So, yeah, I was a late-comer, but I
really liked And This is Our Music with its use of drone and the kind of
organ-playing accents of glum strumming I thought ended forever c. 1970. And
the show? It was like death by Rickenbacker. I think there were six of them
total. What a way to go.
Newcombe brought it all back home in a big way, not least on
today’s song. “Here It Comes” doesn’t really need much in the way of a hook or
even in the way of a chorus. All it needs to fill me with a kind of melancholic
ecstasy is that little surge when Newcombe’s vocal draws out “oh oh oh, here it
co-omes.” Because what seems to be “coming” at that moment is the entire
history of psychedelic rock and its evolution into something even more
psychosis-ridden in these “loathsome latter years.” Newcombe, to give him all
due credit, is both heartfelt and a little tongue-in-cheek about the music he
is aping so effectively. I say “heartfelt” because I believe he believes that
music should never have stopped sounding this way. The bands who first created
such sounds should’ve stayed there and not evolved into whatever came after.
And I say “tongue-in-cheek” because I have to believe he’s self-conscious
enough to know that this particular aesthetic is well beyond a “rearguard action.”
More than flying a freak flag, the guy is tending a wasted flame. Unless of
course you think he’s beating a dead horse.
I’ll never say so. That horse never became thoroughly
moribund for yours truly, and I got a big kick from Newcombe and company’s
efforts to keep the time when Brian Jones walked the earth contemporary with
the 21st century. It’s a thankless task, mostly, but dammit, someone’s got to
do it.
The lyrics are coy too, giving us just enough to feel the
rebel without a contract sitch in all its dragging glory: “Old mom and dad /
Couldn’t believe / They made me so mad / I just had to leave.” If that doesn’t
give you the main points of the eternal generational battle, then what more do
you need? Or how about “Lying in bed /
Talking to you / The things that you said / Well, none of its true.” There we
have the skewering of the pillow talk heart-to-heart where our hero must beg to
differ. Or what about the middle verse: “Went to the Man / Took my decree / Said
‘please understand / I’ve got be me, sir.’” Might as well be Mick’n’Keith’n’Brian
facing the drug bust blues.
Ah, those were the days. Anton Newcombe—born in 1967—somehow
remembers, even if you don’t.
No comments:
Post a Comment