Love is the Drug Hoodie

PRINTED ON LAA HF09 BLACK HEAVY FLEEE HOODIES.

This item ships immediately. You will always receive your item unless otherwise contacted. All items are final sale. We are not responsible for lost, stolen, or misplaced packages. 

Over more than 30 years, The Brian Jonestown Massacre have garnered a reputation like that of few other bands. The San Francisco group, led by Anton Newcombe, are known for their fecund creativity, violent volatility, chaos and magic – all of which are woven together to create music spanning psychedelia, shoegaze, country and garage rock. I have joined them for part of their UK tour. “Stop putting off a genius, you cocksucking dickhead!” yells Newcombe to a heckler during one of many guitar-tuning breaks in Brighton. “Go fuck yourself!” he spits to another.

Much of their reputation was cemented in the 2004 documentary Dig!, in which Newcombe delivered lines such as: “You fucking broke my sitar, motherfucker,” after an onstage brawl with his own band. The film is a maelstrom of drama, addiction, blown opportunities and a friendship turned rivalry with the Dandy Warhols.

BJM’s entire career has been a retro-futurist tribute to rock‘n’roll’s weird and wonderful history. While their music sprawls over all kinds of musical sub-categories, everything they’ve done has been pursued under Newcombe’s consistently singular vision, accompanied by a constantly shifting cast of trusted lieutenants and guest musicians. And, while their evolution has been at a pretty glacial pace – it would take an expert ear to determine whether any given BJM track was recorded last year or as far back as the mid-Nineties – there is nonetheless three distinct ‘stages’ to their career.

Formed in San Francisco in the early Nineties, BJM’s name came from a portmanteau referencing the deceased Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones – a key figure in introducing Eastern influences into Western rock in the late Sixties – and the 1978 incident at cult leader Jim Jones’ self-dubbed ‘Jonestown’ settlement in Guayana where over 900 of his followers committed ‘revolutionary suicide’ through cyanide consumption. Their first recordings were produced by a revolving door membership of around 40 different members in their first few years, centered around the brain trust of Anton Newcombe, before settling on something resembling a stable line-up for their self-released 1995 debut album Methodrone. BJM then churned out a further four LPs over the following 18 months, covering everything from drone rock, Velvet Underground-influenced rock and Stones-referencing psychedelia – including the cheekily titled Their Satantic Majesties’ Second Request – to country and blues on Thank God For Mental Illness.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre face the challenge of being an underground rock band of the better part of three decades’ standing who want to keep moving forward. Newcombe says he never wants to be like the Stone Roses, “where people can’t get over the fact that it’s not 1989 for ever”. He adds: “Everything about my life has been an uphill struggle. We play three hours every night, like Taylor Swift, but she has an army of people to help her and she’s aerobically fit while I have my health concerns to think about. I’m currently working on two albums at once. Each day I go into battle with my insecurity and self-doubt.”

Commanding and unpredictable, but also tinged with more sensitivity and nervousness than you might expect, Newcombe is driven by keeping his band going, no matter what. “Well, what are you going to have on your epitaph — ‘He paid his taxes on time’?” he asks before popping out for a post-double heart bypass cigarette. “I’ve been incredibly selfish, like all true artists are, but the songs pop out of me and I live or die by them.”