The Brian Jonestown Massacre once seemed destined to become footnotes in rock history. Sure, the West Coast psych-rock troupe were beloved by vinyl lovers and bowl-cut enthusiasts in the 1990s, but their attempts to break into the mainstream had been repeatedly thwarted – usually through self-sabotage by their frontman Anton Newcombe – leaving their stoner anthems languishing in obscurity by the dawn of the new millennium.

Then came Dig!. The cult documentary catapulted the band to notoriety all over the world in 2004. This carnival of spurned opportunities, heroin habits and on-stage fist-fights – otherwise depicting the band’s rivalry with major label frenemies The Dandy Warhols across the late 1990s – won them legions of new fans fascinated by now-infamous Newcombe. Depicted as a larger-than-life figure with a prolific, unrefined songwriting talent, determined to subvert the booming music industry and “destroy this fucked-up system”, Newcombe had ambitions that were repeatedly undermined by his own tendency towards self-destruction. There were arrests, disbandments, and broken sitars, leaving viewers to wonder what happened to the flawed genius after the credits rolled.

Today, 20 years since Dig! was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance Film Festival, the band’s music has successfully pilfered all corners of pop culture. Amid vinyl re-issues, new album releases, and countless international tours, “Straight Up and Down” was chosen as the title theme to HBO smash hit Boardwalk Empire in 2010 – while opiated calling card “Anemone” became perhaps their biggest hit with 70 million streams on Spotify.

Until last year, everything seemed to finally be going well. A newly restored and extended Dig! XX – featuring new narration from band member Joel Gion – was set to premiere at Sundance, and The BJM were embarking on an international tour. Then things came crashing down again. In November 2023, partway through a show in Melbourne, Newcombe grabbed guitarist Ryan Van Kriedt’s instrument and hit him over the head with it. They ended up on the floor, punching each other, before security pulled them apart. The brawl made international headlines. Remaining tour dates were abruptly cancelled.

It wasn’t always like this, insists Gion, the band’s tambourine-playing talisman, whose long-awaited memoir In the Jingle Jangle Jungle arrives off the back of all this noise. In the early days, “I was so completely enamoured with Anton,” he tells me. Gion joined the band in the mid-1990s after failing his audition to be a guitarist, and quickly became a calming influence within The BJM’s ever-swirling tornado. After his fun-loving antics in Dig! earned him a central spot on the movie release poster, he became a kind of psych-rock pin-up.

Back then, Gion continues, Newcombe was less the “super outspoken” man of today’s reputation, and more simply a funny and interesting human being. “He was just this rock of Gibraltar who inspired so much curiosity,” he says. “The ‘crazy guy’ version didn’t surface on my radar until the Viper Room show.”

Gion is referring to the 1996 LA industry showcase that would later become the viral calling card for Dig!; “the embarrassing party video that for all involved will never go away”, as he calls it in Dig! XX. The band were hoping to land a record deal that night as A&Rs assembled en masse. Instead, the show descended into chaos as a ruckus broke out between Newcombe and his bandmates, resulting in instruments being smashed and the group being evicted from the venue. “A few hours before, we’d been in the backyard singing ‘I Am Love’,” Gion rues. “And then suddenly I just had no idea what was going on. Like, why is my hero behaving this way?”

Still, Gion stuck by Newcombe, and remains the second-longest serving member after the bandleader himself. In 2019, he was struck by a “creative lightning bolt”, which led to him committing 2,500 words a week via Patreon in order to share tales previously regaled towards a revolving door of band recruits. “There was no better buzz,” he tells me – a bold statement, given the extensive references to LSD, ecstasy and heroin in the ensuing hardback. “If I wrote some scene that I was really happy with, I was set for the day. I was high.”

In the Jingle Jangle Jungle largely spans the early 1990s to the early 2000s, providing fresh perspective to the fabled events witnessed in Dig! plus a panoply of debauched tales from Gion’s personal life. From living under surveillance by the US Drug Enforcement Administration while housed in an acid-tab-printing factory to almost breaking up a young Oasis on their first US tour, to encounters with Joey Ramone, Harmony Korine and Robert Downey Jr, Gion is a fount of vibrant storytelling built on groovy colloquialisms and rampant fourth-wall-breaking.

References to UK shoegazers like Ride and The Verve, house parties soundtracked by Blur and Pulp, and the sneaking of contraband to The Jesus and Mary Chain and Primal Scream, meanwhile, provide welcome trail posts for Brits with a lesser grasp of that decade’s thriving West Coast music scenes.

But it’s Gion’s passion and excitement for his own band – and for the man he describes on the page as his “most tolerant and patient friend” – that provides the most endearing moments of his book. And yet, there is a conspicuous absence of a promised “foreword by Anton Newcombe” in my review copy.

“I was worried about going back in time and dredging all the bad behaviour back into the public eye,” Gion says. “But then Melbourne happened.”

The culmination of a too-long stint of touring in 2023, Melbourne was the latest bizarre incident to add to the band’s long list of mishaps – with a chorus of boos and the unceremonious lowering of curtains directly mirroring the events at the Viper Room in 1996. Sans the Benny Hill routine and wrestling match, this was the prevalent vibe throughout the entire tour and the rehearsals, says Gion: “It was almost four months in this bizarre state.

“We’d be hanging out all day, and the vibes would be good,” he says, re-living the long haul across the US and Australia. “But then the minute we got on stage, the curtain goes up and the vibes go down. By the fourth song, people are screaming their heads off. I could steal moments – we would do ‘That Girl Suicide’ and I could just fall into that swimming pool of positive energy. But in the end, I left the stage in a pissed-off huff on all but two or three shows of the entire tour.”

He wasn’t the only one. Reddit forums were rife with reports of Newcombe chastising new drummer Dan Lyons (formerly of UK reprobates Fat White Family) through the mic, leading one fan to refer to the tour as a “psychedelic Jerry Springer show”.

For Gion, percussion-breaking point came on 4 October in Seattle – on a night that resulted in a venue ban for the band. He laughs, remembering the mud slung at him that night: “Joel wrote a book. I’m not gonna read it,” Newcombe had told the audience. “It’s really commendable ’cause they could have just had AI do it.”

In response, Gion “broke a maraca, slammed it on the ground in front of his feet… and just walked,” he recalls now.

He would be coaxed back, only to abandon ship for good mid-November due to a personal matter at home. Three shows later, Melbourne cemented the tour’s fate. “Everything’s kind of weird now,” Gion admits – he hasn’t spoken to Newcombe since. “I know he’s annoyed that Dig!’s coming out again. He’s annoyed that I’m narrating it. And he’s going to be annoyed when he reads this. But I have to tell the truth. You can’t be a memoir writer and not tell your life in a truthful way.”

Chaos has always been the form and function of The BJM — but incidents like this will never stop Newcombe. “It’s Anton. If you put the fire under him and give him something to fight against, that’s when his A-game comes out hard,” Gion says. “He’s probably going to put out the best record of his career now.”

As for his own involvement: “If he came up to me in four months and said, ‘Man, I’ve just had this super guru experience and… do you wanna go on tour and play music with me?’ I would be out the door that instant. But it’s gonna take some huge revelation on his part… And if this is when it’s supposed to end, then I’m not going to cling to it. Nothing lasts for ever.”

In the Jingle Jangle Jungle is published by White Rabbit Books on 29 February, £22