The violence was too much for guitarist Taylor. "[Newcombe] started hitting people. I was thinking about blowing [the tour] off," he says. "Yeah, the booking was really fucked up, we were backtracking to clubs -- it was all wearing way too thin. Clubs were not paying guarantees or not paying if we were late. But that was the last straw." He decided to fly home with Artley.
Newcombe says he understood some of the musicians were at wit's end. "People start bitching and moaning, I start whipping out plane tickets," he says. "They're my friends, not professional musicians."
Taylor tells it different. "Half of his shit or more is lies," he says. Taylor and Artley paid their own way home.
Regarding the BJM (and not the flight home), Gion says, "Pieces of the plane were falling off as it was going down." The remaining three members -- including Hayes, the guitar-playing punching bag -- got on the road the following day. The band was headed to Florida for a couple of shows. Nary 60 miles out of Atlanta, the new van threw a rod, and the band coasted into a gas station in Butts County, Ga. For the next two days they camped out behind a dumpster, trying to figure out what to do with the wrecked van.
Newcombe settled on selling the heap for scrap and used the cash to rent a U-Haul truck. Apparently Newcombe thought the rest of the band could ride in the windowless payload, but the summer heat and Southern humidity made that idea impossible. All four crowded into the front seat. Now the other members were penniless and Newcombe controlled the purse strings.
For the entire tour, the band had been sleeping in a van -- not exactly palatial, but a step above a tin box sans ventilation. Gion says at one point there was a storm outside. "I'm sleeping in a metal box in a lightning storm, and I'm about ready to pop out like a piece of toast," he says.
Moreover, Newcombe was leaving the band to watch the U-Haul at tour stops (without food) while he went off drinking with unknown funds. Finally, after a July 9 show in New Orleans, when Newcombe left the group in front of the Howlin' Wolf Club in search of women and booze, the remaining three members were fed up.
In a stroke of coincidence, Deresinski, the former manager, was in New Orleans to visit some friends who ran a studio. He says he was on his way back to California when the three musicians spotted him driving past their club at 1 in the morning. The trio flagged him down, and Deresinski offered them a ride to the Golden State. He said he'd feed them, since Newcombe had all of the money. In short time, all three musicians quietly loaded their equipment into the ex-manager's van while Newcombe snored in the cab of the U-Haul.
Newcombe woke up the next morning alone. He played several subsequent shows through the Southwest solo, with his guitar.
Back in California, Newcombe somehow convinced Gion to rejoin the band. They played "a Simon and Garfunkel acoustic thing" at the Casbah in San Diego. The next night, Newcombe had most of the band -- minus Taylor and Hayes -- back in the lineup for a show in Anaheim. Sure, there was a fight between Newcombe and the Dandy Warhols' stage manager, but by then, everything had calmed back down. Only Gion and Hayes made it to the Starry Plough last Friday and a show the following night at the Bottom of the Hill; two other members are staying in Los Angeles and one is here in S.F. Deresinski says he's finished with the band and will now focus on managing the Portland group Swoon 23. No matter, says Gion, things will work themselves out. "We don't need therapy," he says. "It's all about the music and turning people on.
