Divided between talent and rage

A lot of people close to Anton Newcombe, including him, say he’s a genius and that it has made his life impossible.

Newcombe’s argument is that genius and commerce don’t mix -- and that genius and plain old politesse probably don’t either. All the evidence you’d ever need that he really believes this is laid out in painful detail in the new documentary “DIG!”

In it, the genius part is readily in evidence, especially during a fascinating extended sequence where we see him cut an entire song by himself, in one manic burst, playing all the instruments (he plays more than 50, he says) and working with a $100,000 assemblage of studio gear he’s cobbled together with his meager paychecks. He works incredibly fast, and the result is yet another great Anton song.

But the film is mostly about how Newcombe and his revolving band, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, appear in a state of constant deconstruction and rebirth. Newcombe’s relationships appear to hang together in a web of violent dysfunction.

On the night of Newcombe’s biggest break, a 1996 industry showcase at the Viper Room with a rumored million-dollar bidding war about to break out, he starts a bloody onstage fistfight with the band members and blows the night without playing a song. In another scene, he kicks the head of a guy who turns out to have been paying him a compliment.

“[The film’s] just like, ‘This guy’s a genius, but, oh, he’ll never go anywhere,’ ” says Newcombe, perched recently at a table outside Ye Rustic Inn in Los Feliz. Strands of his straight hair fall down over thin features and eyes that burn with a kind of feral intellect. His antics are pure press fodder, and his relationships with journalists have been testy. But tonight someone’s buying drinks, and he’s feeling affable.

“I’ve watched film clips [of ‘DIG!’], and the interviewer’s like, ‘Is he violent? Oh, he’s incredibly violent.’ Sure, I’m violent, as violent as I have to be, but that’s not what I am. I mean, we’re having a drink,” he says, flashing a quick smile.

It’s been eight years since the Viper Room meltdown, and there’s still no million-dollar deal. But there are now 10 albums of the Brian Jonestown Massacre (BJM) neo-psychedelic guitar rock, a visceral late-’90s counterpart to the minimal drang of the Velvet Underground or Can, or the Middle Eastern drone-chord experiments of the Beatles or the Byrds.

Coming along as the shoegazing American complement to Britain’s Jesus and Mary Chain and an utter refutation of the Britney and rap-rock that came after grunge, the BJM, like the Sex Pistols, is a band that spawned a thousand groups, mostly through the dissemination of its 50-some ex- and sometimes-members, such as psych-country folkie Miranda Lee Richards or Peter Hayes of the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. Drummer Jason Anchondo and Bobby Hecksher are in the Warlocks. BJM vets James Ambrose and Mark Hagel are now in the Electromagnetic.

The band’s credibility is far more widespread than its sales of only 5,000 to 10,000 for each album. Timothy Leary turned up at an early Troubadour show. Patti Smith was at a 2003 New York show. Robert Pollard of Guided by Voices is a big supporter and tapped BJM for a recent tour. Radiohead members are fans. Courtney Taylor-Taylor and his band, the Dandy Warhols, are used as a foil in the film: After Newcombe’s hyperkinetic commitment to musical “revolution” inspires the young Portland, Ore., band, they go on to relative commercial success with a few radio-friendly pop tunes, and Anton turns against them, bad-mouthing them in the press and writing hate songs.

“The thing is that, ultimately, Anton and his music will last forever,” says Taylor-Taylor, who is still friends with Newcombe. “Because it is genius. Anton will be very successful.” Then he chuckles, “Because of his behavioral glitches, or whatever, it’s just taking longer.”

“I wanted to do this film because I was attracted to the music,” says music video popster and documentary filmmaker Ondi Timoner, who directed “DIG!” “I grew up playing music, and I’d never really met people like this before, living off the grid of society, just no concern for anything but the moment. It was inspirational.”

The glitches, however, show no signs of stopping. When Newcombe and company last played the El Rey in Los Angeles in April, he played about 14 minutes and talked for a half-hour more, cussing out the audience “for coming out to a rock show while our boys are dying in Iraq.”

“I can’t even remember what triggered that, but I was already [mad] about the prisoners in Iraq, the torture,” Newcombe says with a smile. One of the four songs he did play, however, was gorgeous, a full, swelling Britpop tune of epic scope and power.

“He lectured people about how we don’t understand how bad Iraq is and how people are dying,” says Adam Shore, the executive who signed BJM to TVT Records in 1997 for the band’s biggest album, “Strung Out in Heaven.” “But really, we’re not there to see that. We’re there to see him play his songs.”

Newport Beach upbringing

“It’s very clear he doesn’t want to be a rock star, or he could have been one by now,” says Greg Shaw, president of L.A.’s Bomp Records, who has put out most of BJM’s records and now co-owns a label with Newcombe called the Committee to Keep Music Evil. “He sees himself as kind of a Sufi, so let’s go with that. He’s like one of these wandering spiritual characters in the Middle East who show up in your town and start talking about God or whatever while weaving a carpet. And then pass along the stories.”

In actuality, Anton Alfred Newcombe had a rather solidly middle-class upbringing with his two sisters in Newport Beach, though, Anton notes, “not the kind of family where I can pop in and make myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.”

The household was led by his mother, who describes in “DIG!” how she watched teenaged Anton get dragged off to jail and thought it would help him get straightened out, “but it didn’t.” His father makes an appearance, filmed in Shaw’s backyard, where he admits he was an alcoholic and absent for much of his son’s life, and later commits suicide on Anton’s birthday. The one album Anton ever gave him was “Thank God for Mental Illness.”

Newcombe went to high school with a future label mate, Duane Peters from U.S. Bombs. The BJM, named after the late Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones, formed in 1994 in San Francisco. Now Newcombe, 37, has a toddler son who lives in Southern California and, contrary to what is said in the film, sees him regularly.

But a Sufi? In the tradition of the wandering mystic, a spinoff from the core precepts of Islam, a Sufi’s life is given over to the pursuit of a pure connection to God through trance and service to others. Shaw points out the Middle Eastern drone influence that runs throughout BJM’s albums as more evidence of how Newcombe channels this philosophy, including a track that runs for 25 minutes as one repeated note with melodies floating all around it.

In modern L.A., this kind of purist devotion can lead to some obvious clashes with polite company.

“I don’t believe in good and bad,” Newcombe says, sipping a Bloody Mary and veering into the philosophical. “Napoleon was a great man. He wasn’t a bad man. He wasn’t a good man.”

Another person asks about Hitler. “Those guys were great men. They were great men who did naughty things. It just flips off the scale at a certain point, right? What I’m saying is true. Like, God isn’t good or bad. God is great.”

“Fourteen-year-old kids putting together garage bands like to say that kind of stuff,” says Taylor, not buying the whole too-genius-to-be-commercial trip, having toured with the Thin White Duke. “Do you think I’ve ever had that conversation with Bowie? I mean, do you think that’s even an option in his world or my world? No. True genius is not only doing the work but also getting it out there.”

The Brian Jonestown Massacre is out there but has never had any real, measurable radio play. It’s never had a film soundtrack or a car commercial. On the day of the interview, Newcombe evidently had a studio and a place to stay, but no phone. Shaw says there were a couple of years when Newcombe came to his house for pocket money every day.

But “DIG!” leaves the mistaken impression that Newcombe simply imploded and burned out, a victim of heroin addiction and his own anger. Instead, Newcombe says he has been clean now for years and has gone on making his meticulously crafted albums.

In 2003, BJM released “... And This Is Our Music” (Tee Pee Records), another disc of deep ‘60s psychedelic shimmer, part “Meddle”-era Pink Floyd and part Velvet Underground.

Most reviews noted the album’s depressing vibe, many mentioning “Disintegration” by the Cure, but also its irresistible quality.

Tee Pee also plans to release a two-disc retrospective, “Tepid Peppermint Wonderland,” on Nov. 2, and the BJM has a date as the opening band for Guided by Voices on Nov. 12 at the Henry Fonda Theatre. In addition, the BJM’s entire recorded output can be accessed in mp3 form at www.brianjonestownmassacre.com.

“If you separate the music from the artist, this is a musicians’ band,” says Tommy Dietrick, who toured with BJM as a bassist in 2003 and is now with L.A. band Sky Parade. “But as a person, he’s sort of every musician’s nightmare. He drives that train to the heart of utter, ridiculous despair of everyone else who’s involved. Whether you see that side of him or you see the artistic side is up to the viewer.”

Dietrick, like so many before him, had enough of the bad side. In Chicago one night in 2003, Newcombe fell into one of his rages and aimed it at Dietrick. The next day in Minneapolis, without telling anyone, Dietrick skipped the show and flew home to L.A. His exit was easy. No punching involved.

Many times, acting out onstage has occluded the music. At a 2002 show at Brownies in New York attended by Shore, Newcombe played one song, then walked straight through the capacity crowd out the front door and never came back. Amazingly, the band carried on and people came out of the audience to sing his parts.

“His intensity as a human being creates a vortex around him,” Shaw says. “It draws people to him. And he is not spiritually trained in any of these traditions that he talks about. He feels that he is the real thing, so that he doesn’t have to study. He’s not a seeker. He’s it.

“People are not used to somebody being completely real. You say something to him and it sounds like B.S., he’ll turn on you and he’ll deconstruct you and rip you to shreds. He sees himself as answering to a higher source. I want to be a patron to this kind of artist.”

Love songs despite the pain

It’s great stuff for a movie. But the film treats Newcombe the way the record industry does, with great ambivalence. They want to talk about him but not to him. The scene acknowledges him but skirts his involvement.

For all the spiritual pain contained in the songs of the BJM, Newcombe goes right on singing what he always sings about: love. Even on the latest album, the liner notes read: “To all self-serving bands, critics, creeps, A&R; reps, programmers, editors, writers, false fans, troublemakers, narcs, groupies, psychos, liars, drug fiends, egomaniacs, has-beens, would’ve beens, could’ve beens, etc.

“It’s like that book, ‘The Way of the Samurai,’ ” Newcombe says. “All those guys sitting down every day to write poetry and then going out and doing whatever they have to do. It’s nothing personal. I believe the more you can feel, the more you can feel either way.”

“He cultivates the edge he rides,” director Timoner says. “He makes sure that he is flying by the seat of his pants ... that he’s indulging in his excesses and not sleeping in the same place too long. He relies on this, to remain the shark that swims against the current. He would maybe be concerned that he would not be able to create if he got too comfortable.”

One wonders what will happen to Newcombe if one day he is visited by commercial success. Would it be the ultimate vindication or a crushing defeat?

“More people will learn his name and more people will hear Anton’s music [thanks to the film] than have ever heard him -- ever,” says Shore. “He seems to sabotage every opportunity he’s ever had, ever. So this is the biggest opportunity he’s ever had. What’s going to happen?”

Timoner agrees, saying, “Courtney called me recently and it was like, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if Anton just put it all together and just decided to calm down and relax and be nice to people?’ And then we were both real quiet.”