Brian Jonestown Massacre holds Minneapolis hostage, but no sitars are harmed

May 28, 2010, at the Cabooze

By Dana Raidt
Published: May 31st, 2010 | 5:00pm

Given Brian Jonestown Massacre’s storied reputation, it’s easy to forget about the music. The band, who were notoriously featured in the 2004 documentary DiG!, tend to elicit (and encourage) one of two knee-jerk reactions: to write them off as pretentious rock stars or to regard everything they do as genius. At their recent concert in Minneapolis, BJM seemed determined to prove not only that they have sobered up and set the antics aside, but that they still expect to be taken seriously.

Openers Elephant Stone made pleasant small talk with the crowd while they played their sitar-tinged pop—sounding like BJM-meets-Woods or Here We Go Magic. Everything from the band’s choice of instrumentation to their haircuts made them seem like a younger, more polite (they are from Canada after all) Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Almost immediately after Elephant Stone’s exit, Anton Newcombe—BJM’s founder/singer/guitarist and the member whose exploits have fueled much of the band’s notoriety—unceremoniously took the stage, solo. It was anyone’s guess what Newcombe was actually doing, at times appearing to access the club’s Wi-Fi signal and then playing air drums to the music on the PA, but yet the crowd was abuzz with curiosity (“Is that Anton?” “What is he doing?” “Does he still shoot heroin?”). After about an hour of this, the rest of the band surfaced, including co-founder Matt Hollywood (guitar/vocals) and longtime members Joel Gion (percussion/vocals) and Ricky Maymi (guitar), all of whom had quit in the ‘90s and recently rejoined the band within the past few years.

Older, crowd-pleasing songs were the staple of the band’s three-hour performance, despite the fact that Who Killed Sgt. Pepper? (A Records) was just released in February. With barely a lull between songs and very little stage banter (there was a brief thanks and only one rant by Newcombe, about the amount of money the United States spends on oil in Afghanistan), the band was tireless, professional, and hardly even seemed to break a sweat. Even when Gion’s tambourine broke in half mid-song—which in years past might have derailed the entire concert—disaster did not ensue. After BJM’s second hour of dreamy psych-rock, the audience started losing interest and thinned out, which left only diehard fans, air guitar-playing frat boys, swaying hippies in vest-with-no-shirt ensembles, and a few Stockholm syndrome-stricken others (“I want to leave but they won’t stop playing” was overheard more than once).

Whether the band’s set lasted so long for the audience’s benefit or because they just enjoy hearing themselves play is debatable, although by all accounts the latter seems to be more likely. But it was nice for BJM’s songs, rather than its mythology, to take center stage for once. Their performance was a reminder that behind all the in-fighting, changing lineups, drug addiction, arrogance, and property damage (including the infamous broken sitar scene in DiG!), aresome really good songs and a crew of hardworking, talented people who perhaps have finally figured out how to get along with each other and their audience at the same time.

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Brian Jonestown Massacre official site

Brian Jonestown Massacre MySpace page

Elephant Stone MySpace page