How the Brian Jonestown Massacre Changed My Life, Part 1.

Seventeen people, one show, and the night everything changed

From “The Jailhouse Rock Cafe Show Posters 1988-2001 Montreal” (Chimney Sweep Productions, 2020)

After coming back from India, my musical taste started evolving. I’d always loved the Kinks, but working in Future Shop’s music department, I started looking backwards more deliberately. That’s when I discovered the Jam through their cover of “David Watts.” Something about that song cracked me open. I got deep into the Jam, which reignited my love for the Who, and from there I started discovering the Small Faces. I was becoming fascinated by mod subculture, the clothes, the attitude, the music. It felt like another world I wanted to be part of.

That's when I found it. In the new releases section sat a CD I didn't recognize. The artwork stopped me: a black and white photo of a guy holding a gun. Nice packaging. I picked it up. It was “Strung Out in Heaven” by the Brian Jonestown Massacre. I flipped it over and looked at the liner notes. It said: “Anton Alfred Newcombe. 1967 - 1997.” I remember thinking, wait, the main guy in this band is dead and they’re still going? I was fascinated. I put it on and I was immediately drawn in.

As it turned out, the Brian Jonestown Massacre were playing Montreal. October 7th, 1998. The Jailhouse Rock Cafe, $7 at the door.

My band, the Datsons, got on the bill that night, first of three. We were pretty new, still finding our legs. We'd put out our debut in January '98, a fairly straight up mid-nineties indie pop record, but we were already shifting. The sixties influence was creeping in, the Motown records were piling up, and we'd started wearing (ill-fitting) suits. We were a three piece pseudo-mod band still trying to figure out who we were. But something was starting to take shape.

There were seventeen people at that show. We played our set, another band played, and then the Brian Jonestown Massacre took the stage. I had never seen anything like it. There was a guy centre stage with huge mutton chops playing tambourine. Two other people wearing sunglasses. And the singer (Anton, I learned, was not dead) had his back to the crowd, facing the back wall of the venue, while the spotlight was on the tambourine player. I remember standing there thinking, this is the weirdest and the most rock and roll thing I have ever seen in my life.

After the show, one of the guys, who I later found out was Dean, came up and asked where he could score some cocaine. I was a twenty year old Indian kid from the suburbs. I had absolutely no idea. So that conversation ended pretty quickly. I remember feeling pretty intimidated by the whole thing.

But something special happened that night that had nothing to do with the band itself. There were three people in that room of seventeen who would end up changing the course of my life. Flipped Out Phil, Sophie Francoise Faithfull, and Mimi le Twisteuse. They were plugged into the mod/freakbeat/garage scene in Montreal. Flipped Out Phil and Mimi had their own radio shows. They were excited to discover these young kids who were into mod, and because of that chance encounter, everything shifted.

From that night forward, I went deep. Over the next three or four years, I became a full on mod. DJ nights, mod soul nights, northern soul. Phil and crew would make us mixtapes and bring us out to loft parties that were straight out of Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow Up. We threw multiple Mod all nighters in Montreal (or MODtreal). I even bought a 1976 Lambretta/Servetta Li150. I never really got it running, but that wasn’t really the point. It was a totemic move, a declaration of intent.

The Mod bible.

Kirsty, to put it mildly, was thrown. I was never really one to peacock or strut around, and suddenly here I was in suits and badges and a series of increasingly questionable haircuts. She still references my Spock haircut to this day. I can’t say she was wrong.

I started feeling, for the first time, like I genuinely belonged somewhere. After years of floating between worlds, never quite Indian enough, never quite Canadian enough, here was a tribe that claimed me. Though if I’m being honest, even then I never fully felt like one of them. Chronic imposter syndrome. Some things never change.

I couldn’t have known it then, standing in that room of seventeen people, slightly intimidated and unable to score cocaine for anyone, but that night set everything in motion. The next time I would cross paths with the Brian Jonestown Massacre would be five years later at the Wilderbeat Weekender in August, 2003. By then, my band had become the High Dials and the situation would be very, very different.