Sundance Rocks the 90s

The only two Sundance movies I was able to watch from my online seat this year, Lolla and DIG XX, delivered a generous helping of delicious Gen X nostalgia. So I can’t really complain (other than all the complaining I just did). The first screening, Lolla, consisted of two-thirds of a series documenting the genesis and trajectory of the Lollapalooza music festival, which premiered in 1991 with nascent alt-rock darlings Jane’s Addiction headlining. Reader, my old ass was there, way back in the field seats, which I’m betting set me back all of $20 a ticket. Good times! I’m gratified to get a closer look, because this was before the age of Jumbotrons and I genuinely can’t remember being able to make out many details beyond the fact that most of Jane’s, who were on their farewell tour at this point, were at least half-naked.

Their frontman, Perry Farrell, was one of the festival’s founders, and shows up as lead talking head here. It’s a relief that his face isn’t quite as frozen as recent tabloid coverage had led me to believe, though it’s still alarmingly Liberace-adjacent. He remains the same grandiose dude he always was, burnishing his credentials as the genius who kick-started a new era of musical festivals. But is he wrong? Would there be, for example, a Coachella without Lollapalooza? Not to hear the festival’s original lineup acts–who included Ice-T & Body Count, Living Colour, Nine Inch Nails, Butthole Surfers, and Rollins Band–tell it.

Revel in the simpler times of a music festival where tickets weren’t thousands of dollars, Ice-T could wander around chatting up patrons outside the Port-a-Johns, and stage-diving, mosh pits and bonfires chaotically cropped up with relatively little pushback from security (they were, apparently, terrified and underpaid). It’s also fun to see Nine Inch Nails’ solidly middle-aged Trent Reznor reminiscing about the show in Phoenix where his tape decks melted and he tantrumed his way offstage. The general vibe was Wild-West, with Farrell and Ice T cheekily performing Sly and the Family Stone’s “Don’t Call Me [N-word], Whitey” at the last show–a spectacle whose shock value seems like it’d hold up today.

The third installment of Lolla will presumably follow the festival into its later years, of which I know relatively little but am assuming the lineups get more diverse. I wanted to hear more from the female bands of the time who the festival didn’t include; the first couple years each featured a single female band on the bill, to the visible frustration of the frontwoman from Babes in Toyland. Siouxsie Sioux, who was on the first year’s tour, was the revered grand dame of the group, as it should be, but still the only woman there. Kickass women in rock were in high supply at that point, so it’s a bummer (if unsurprising) that Lolapalooza overlooked them. A member of L7 does, at least, describe how hard the band had to lobby for inclusion even on a later bill.

Can you DIG it again?

My other watch was DIG XX, an expanded 20^th-anniversary version of what Dave Grohl, in an introductory video, calls the best rock doc ever made. I tend to agree, but admittedly, I’ve always been a big fan of its subjects, the Dandy Warhols and the Brian Jonestown Massacre. If you haven’t seen the original, it’s a wild and sprawling account of how the two psychedelic-rock-throwback groups initially became besties and sometimes collaborators, then split apart as the Dandys found commercial success and the narcissism of the BJM’s tortured but talented founder, Anton Newcombe, increasingly sabotaged the group.

Did we need a 140-minute version of DIG? Depends, I suppose, on your appetite for watching a clash of egos to rival anything on any Housewives show, set during a particular moment when the music industry was distilling into the haves (bands with radio-friendly hits and pretty faces) and have-nots (outfits with innovative but rambling output and unpredictable antics).

Director Ondi Timoner hooked up with the bands early in their careers, capturing incredible and intimate footage of both bands as they began to distill their sound. In the original, Dandys singer Courtney Taylor-Taylor narrates in his sonorous bass; in the remix, Timoner adds the invaluable insight of Joel Gion, arguably the breakout star of “DIG,” and author of a new memoir of his time in the band. He’s BJM’s tambourine player, and while that might seem inconsequential, he adds so much stoned panache to the stage show; he also remains impressively sanguine during Newcombe’s many, many onstage meltdowns.

Gion offers a second narrative to Taylor-Taylor’s original, adding a lot of new context to the footage of the chaos in the studio and onstage (typical dialogue: “You fuckin’ broke my sitar, motherfucker!”) I couldn’t tell you where all of the added stuff is, but I enjoyed all over again watching the relationship between Newcombe and Taylor-Taylor sour in the most creatively pissy ways. After the Dandys get a hit single with “Not if You Were the Last Junkie on Earth,” Newcombe pens a derivative anthem that perfectly mimics the former band’s sound, then hands it out on vinyl at a music festival, clad in roller skates and a fur hat. Perfectly played, no notes!

In a very “Behind the Music” turn, Newcombe’s drug use alienates his inner circle (“Please don’t die, Anton,” one band member pleads to Timoner’s camera). But – spoiler alert- he doesn’t; he’s alive and well and gray-haired, still performing. I can report that BJM may have changed its lineup over the years but remains volatile as ever; when we saw them at a cozy Pittsburgh rock club last year, Newcombe stopped the show repeatedly to berate his stand-in drummer (the original guy had Covid), then used the ten-minute encore time to come out on his own and snottily play a drum solo to show us all (and the poor stand-in, who I’m hoping quit after this) how to do it.

Still, when BJM’s members were on the same page, they were brilliant; I recommend watching a live performance of “Anemone,” their Anthony Bourdain-endorsed best song. I do not anticipate the Dandys show I’ll be seeing this spring having quite the same anarchic spirit, but I also look forward to having more fun there. At this point, both experiences make up some of my favorite live-concert comfort food. I’ll echo Grohl and say “DIG XX” is, more now than ever in its XXtreme form, one of the best music documentaries you’ll ever have the fun of laughing, rocking out and occasionally cringing through.