In The Jingle Jangle Jungle
★★★
Joel Gion
WHITE RABBIT. £22
Brian Jonestown Massacre tambourinist’s gonzo memoir.
The comic star of 2004’s BJM rockumentary Dig!, Gion capers straight into the narcotically skewed San Francisco alt-rock sub-culture which triggered the band. After flunking an audition as guitarist, he’s soon enlisted on maracas (“harder to play than they looked”), eventually settling on tambourine (wood-framed only). Bez-like, he moonlights as a speed dealer, struggling to be “professional” with his all-female clientele, but soon providing “snorts” to the UK shoegaze royalty whom BJM open shows for. Ongoingly impecunious, Gion scavenges from Burger King bins, earns bonus coin painting LSD onto blotter, and cops countless injuries amid dust-ups on and off-stage. Of BJM frontman Anton Newcombe he says, “His power […] held everyone in its grip”, yet that magnetism, and the musical genius averred in Dig!, remain unexplained. And why the incessant fighting, even as fiftysomethings (a pre-Xmas Antipodean tour ended prematurely)? Our narrator, though entertaining, often misses an entire line-up’s departure, and lacks those deeper insights.