(The Dandy Warhols)
Featured alongside the Brian Jonestown Massacre in Dig! were The Dandy Warhols, the somewhat less self-destructive side of that messy couple. Band leader Courtney Taylor-Taylor gives a harrowing account of the drug years along with a story about the time he came seconds away from shooting heroin for the first time with the Jonestown.
It was a couple years ago that our guitarist Pete [Holmström] said to me, “I’ve seen you play fucked up before, but never so fucked up that you couldn’t play guitar.” We’re usually all about the music and the feeling when we play live, but I literally couldn’t play. This was in San Francisco, and I was forgetting where I was in the songs, and it was a mess. Some dude started playing tambourine on stage, and I thought it was Joel Gion from The Brian Jonestown Massacre. I’m like, “Hey, Joel!” I was so drunk that I couldn’t see who it was. Turned out it was the bass player for The Warlocks.
It was the first time that I had all my winemaker friends come in from Napa for a show, and I didn’t know you could get that fucked up just off wine. Wine’s always been so good to me, and I’m a wine collector. My palette usually hits the wall at some point, and I have to stop drinking, because I’m not enjoying it. My friends had brought in all these amazing old wines, and there were about fourteen of us at this amazing restaurant, a block away from the venue.
I don’t remember leaving the restaurant or getting on stage. I just remember mistaking the Warlocks dude for Joel, but that’s the only thing I remember about the gig. A few days later in Sacramento, somebody who was at the San Francisco gig, said, “Man, it was awesome! I haven’t seen you play fucked up like that in so long, and it made it super interesting.” Jesus, man. Sometime around 1997, I got drunk in Brussels, and when I went on stage, I remember thinking, “I don’t feel this at all. I don’t feel anything.” I was so drunk that I couldn’t feel the music.
Usually, the feeling of playing and getting it going with the gang is like creating my own wave and surfing it with my best friends. I smoke weed and get stoned before every show, and that wave is an unbelievably powerful, emotionally cleansing experience. I’m literally shaking when I get on stage, but when we start going, that anxiety melts away, and we ride the wave. This time I wasn’t feeling anything, and after the first song, some kid yelled really nasty, “You’re drunk!” That was it, and I hadn’t played drunk since the Independent show in San Francisco. I haven’t played drunk since that one either. I don’t feel music when I’m drunk, except for maybe something like, “Fight for Your Right to Party.”
I remember a bunch of us going to a dance club in Madrid after a show. Great music, and I drank a bunch. The next bar was a small punk club, and I continued to drink. A friend of mine from Amsterdam said that later that night I was on the speaker box singing every line and dancing like a madman to “Fight for Your Right to Party.” He said I didn’t miss a line, and I thought that was so fucking weird. I had surely heard it a billion times, but I had never tried to sing along to it. Through osmosis, we all know that song. I think there’s a ton of songs like that if you get drunk enough, you’ll know every line. I probably know all the words to every campy, Bon Jovi mega-hit. I could probably crush “Dead or Alive” right now if I wanted to.
We used to play with The Brian Jonestown Massacre all the time. That lady [director Ondi Timoner] didn’t really have a story, so she would get the Jonestown really whipped up about how nothing was happening for them while we were touring Europe. That led to them getting really jealous and angry, which ended up shaping the movie. She would trick us into doing shit, like going to the Jonestown house to shoot pictures when we had no idea the band wasn’t going to be there. She convinced us that by shooting in this fucked-up house, it would help the Jonestown’s career.
When she cut it together, it made us look like bad friends and icky people. She was constantly doing shit like that. Any time we were back in LA, which was rare, she would pack us all in a car and drive us out to the desert. On our day off, we had to drive four hours each way to the desert because Anton was out there shooting a video, and we had to be in it. We were constantly doing things that we didn’t understand were made to make us look bad later.
It was really ugly, and we didn’t get to be friends again with Jonestown for years after the documentary. We really couldn’t say, “Dude! We did this because Ondi told us it would help you!” It would have sounded like the fucking lamest thing ever. So, we broke up as friends. Believe the movie if you want…we don’t care anymore. Fuck off. Feelings were hurt on both sides, but we took Joel’s band on tour. Our families hang out with Anton and his family when we’re in Berlin. It’s like we’re finally adults and understand how everything went down. What a history we have—it’s all part of rock legend now.
Ondi has the only footage of the Dandy’s from back in the day, and she won’t even let us see it. That’s her M.O. It’s what she does to people. She did the same thing to Russell Brand in a documentary she made about him. I don’t think she feels confident enough to make something like a Tom Petty documentary, where there’s hope and brightness. I think she felt no one would have watched Dig! if there wasn’t constant ugliness and hatred. She’s a bottom feeder. We lost about half our audience after the doc came out, and Jonestown would get shit thrown at them on stage as the crowd tried to antagonize Anton. People wanted to see a fight, and it made their lives miserable.
“Not If You Were the Last Junkie On Earth” was actually written about my ex-girlfriend, not The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Ondi convinced them it was about Anton. When I got back from the first Dandy’s tour, my girlfriend had shot dope with the singer of my previous band. She showed up at my house looking like a drowned rat in the rain. She had a brown paper bag with her rig, some dope, and a king-size Snickers. She marched into my house and started chewing me out about what an asshole and weak man I was to break up with her. Then she shot up in my bathroom.
On a tour that I went on with the Jonestown, we had pulled over to get crap food at a mini-mart. I was on tour with them because I had been dumped by my girlfriend, and I was super depressed the whole time. There was a ton of drugs, and I was also staying really drunk, which made me more depressed. A bunch of the smack-heads from Jonestown, along with some of the people from the opening band decided to shoot up in the shitty mini-mart, somewhere in the Midwest.
I was so depressed that I went with them. They got out the needle, spoon, rubber tube, and smack. We were all piled into this disgusting bathroom stall, and I told them that I had never shot smack. I had smoked and snorted it but never shot. All it had ever made me do was lay on the sofa and vomit a lot, and I wasn’t a big fan of the drug. At that point, I felt like “fuck it”—I’d do anything because I was so fucking depressed and constantly hungover.
Some dude tied me off, slapped my vein, and drew up the dope in the syringe, when we heard the door to the bathroom slam open. The owner yelled, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re doing in there, but you better get the fuck out right now. I’m calling the cops.” I looked at that needle and my bulging vein. I undid the rubber tube and said, “Nope.” We got out of there, and only later did it occur to me that the owner of that mini-mart could easily have saved my life. He saved my future. That’s a really hard drug to come back from, and once you go down that road, it seems like you can’t stop. You either have to die or become the one out of a thousand junkies that actually get free. I can count the ones I know on one hand.
I’m so fucking glad I didn’t do it. I have enough fucking problems and garbage in my brain as a human being that I don’t need that shit. I’m pretty full of self-loathing already. I don’t need to go darker. I remember thinking that if I ever became successful, I’d come back and buy that mini-mart guy a car. That guy fucking saved my ass from a fate worse than death. Literally worse than death. I just found out that I love pills. I just got a Xanax prescription for my anxiety, but I have to make sure I don’t do more than one a week. When I worry that my world is crashing, that I can’t handle it, or that I’m going to fuck up the Dandy’s and ruin my family, I’ll do a quarter of a Xanax.
It’s called expansion, and it’s when your creative mind doesn’t have any real skills to create its own barriers. It’s what great artists are made of, but it’s what fatalistic, self-abusing idiots are made of too, unfortunately. It’s hard, because getting drunk is fun every single time for me. I’m not a mean or sad drunk. I’m a happy ass drunk. Like right now, I could start with the champagne, then move on to the whites and reds. Next thing you know, I want to invite people over. I’ll call a guy and get a big pile of blow and have the crazy, rock ’n’ roll scene again. I miss it, but then it’s 5:00 a.m., and I’m super suicidally depressed. It would spiral into two or three consecutive days, and it’s fucking gross.
It’s hard to not want to go there, so I just stay busy. Idle hands….