The Rejects: Tony O'Neill (Kenickie, Brian Jonestown Massacre)
From Britpop to LA psych rock, and a blackly comic firing.
The American edition of The Rejects is finally (almost) here, and one of its subjects has a new book coming out, too. Getting to know Tony O’Neill was one of the most fun aspects of writing mine. He joined Marc Almond’s band at the age of eighteen, then drunkenly talked his way into Kenickie. After moving to LA, he also endured a stint in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, during the band’s - and his - nadir. In California, Tony sunk into the worst kind of drug addiction, but happily he recovered and survived it.
My favourite stories in The Rejects are the happy ones, in which the fired musician moved on to find their true calling and a second act. Tony is one of those: he’s now a novelist, and has documented his addiction and time in bands in a series of darkly hilarious books.
A new collection of his short stories is coming out in February. It has an excellent title harking back to his junkie days - Forged Prescriptions - and a stunning cover by Jake Chapman, no less.
Since his new book and my (newish) American one are coming out at virtually the same time, I thought I’d mark the occasion by running part of our interview from The Rejects. Tony might just have the best - and almost certainly the funniest - firing in story in the book[1]. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
Tony O’Neill, Brian Jonestown Massacre
Where’s my FUCKING ORANGE JUICE? – Anton Newcombe, Brian Jonestown Massacre
I first came across Tony O’Neill via his debut novel, Digging the Vein. A dark, brutal, funny book about a descent into drug addiction in LA, I devoured it in a couple of sittings. A few years later, I read his breakthrough Sick City after Bret Easton Ellis included it in a ‘currently reading’ tweet, and became a confirmed fan.
Digging the Vein is written in the first person, and O’Neill is frank about its highly autobiographical nature. A young musician in a Britpop band goes on tour to LA and never really comes back. Falling in with a druggie crew of friends, he takes a lot of coke, meth and pills. He gets married on a whim, and it doesn’t go well. Funded by writing music videos, he tries to keep playing music, and is introduced to smoking heroin by a bandmate. And then he brings a sex-worker friend back to his apartment, and she shows him how to shoot up. So begins a nightmare of full-blown heroin and cocaine addiction, played out amid the streets, motels and junkie bands of late nineties LA.
O’Neill was born in Blackburn in 1978. Looking at him today, you’d never suspect he’d spent years living the gruelling life of a heroin and cocaine addict. When we speak, he’s friendly and enthusiastic, laughing a lot and talking rapidly about his work and history. He’s of Irish descent, and has greying black hair, large bushy eyebrows and the elegantly downturned eyes of a silent film star. His forearms are tattooed, and he has the appearance of someone who could still be in one of those smart, stylish 1990s indie bands. As we talk, I wonder if he survived his worst years partly due to his charm and smarts.
In writing novels, he seems to have found his true calling, but I wonder if he ever misses being in bands.
‘I don’t miss it really. I was very aware that you have a window in music. For me, I grew up a working-class kid in Blackburn in the northwest of England watching Top of the Pops every week. And in a weird way I kind of made it as far as my mind could conceive of it. I did Top of the Pops, which was wild, and I spent those years of my life touring and got to see a lot of the world.’
His main plan had been simply to escape Blackburn, and the prospect of a life on the grind.
‘My dad was a bus driver, my mum was a home help. She did shopping for old ladies, and worked in a nursing home until she was almost eighty. She was looking after people younger than her. They worked their whole lives. Nothing like that interested me and all I really wanted was to do something in the arts.
‘I didn’t want to stay in the north of England and work a job I hated and end up with 2.4 kids and a semi-detached. I was so scared of that I ran a little hard in the other direction, and probably right off the edge of a cliff.
‘Thankfully I survived. I did put my family through hell. I joke about the drug stuff but now I’ve got a daughter who’s at the age I was doing all this stuff. She’s very on the straight and narrow, and I’m like “man . . .” – it really hits me now, what I put my parents through. When I was my daughter’s age they didn’t know where I was. The first they heard from me in months was a call from a treatment centre asking for three grand cos I was in detox. And they never disowned me or hated me for it. Thank goodness I didn’t die; there’s a few instances where I came very close. What a horrible thing to do to your parents.’
When he’d recovered, he realised his time in the music industry was up.
‘By the time I got clean I was still only in my mid-twenties. It felt like it was ever-decreasing circles. My first real proper bands were with Marc Almond, then Kenickie. Then with the Jonestown it was good but smaller, then I had this other band that almost made it, we were signed to various big labels, but it never really did anything.’
The loss of that first taste of success is clearly painful to O’Neill’s narrator, as it was to him. He says that, in some ways, it was easier to become an addict than to re-join the real world.
‘In that first flush of fame you get so disconnected from the real world it’s hard to adjust. And I think that’s why when I got to LA I found it so hard that I became a heroin addict. I assumed I was gonna walk into another band situation. And the thought of getting a job . . . I ended up working at the Virgin Megastore on Sunset Boulevard. I can’t tell you how depressing it is to go from the person on the CD cover to the person selling the CD. And it was the Sunset Strip, so musicians would be coming in, you know like Marilyn Manson. And you’re like “No, no, no, I shouldn’t be doing this.”
‘It was much easier to fall into that twilight world of drug addiction, because you’re used to not getting up at nine a.m. or having someone telling you what to do. That made more sense on a kind of muscle-memory level than getting a day job.’
So how did he get clean?
‘For me the biggest thing that happened to me and saved me was probably meeting Vanessa,’ (his wife.) ‘I don’t mean to put all of this on her, like she’s this deus ex machina that came in and saved my life, but in a way she was. Just being in a relationship with someone that wasn’t an addict and wasn’t hardwired that way, that was the biggest thing for me in reprogramming my own mind. If you ask my parents, they think she’s a saint because if we hadn’t got together, I’d probably be dead.’
At the time, O’Neill was into a ‘whole, like, “junkie pride” thing – unapologetic. “Some people like a drink, I like to shoot heroin, that’s just my thing.” Full-blown addict denial.’
But addicts and non-addicts don’t mix.
‘Surprise surprise, we fell for each other really hard. You quickly come up against the fact that it’s unsustainable for one person to be in the throes of opiate addiction and the other not to be. Either the non-addicted person has to become an addict, or the addicted person has to stop, because your lives become completely incompatible.’
One choice was obviously the better one.
‘I’ve been in relationships with two addicts, and they always end up in complete hell. And when Vanessa got pregnant, I knew I couldn’t be an addict and a father. And being an addict is a full-time job.’
Slowly but surely, he recovered, and set about trying to put things right.
‘Since I got clean I’ve tried to live my life in a way to make it worthwhile and make it count. And to make up for the harm I did to my parents. I had a great relationship with my parents, I love my parents, it wasn’t a rejection of them. Always in the rehab places it’s like “there’s something in your childhood, just think”, but in my case it really wasn’t. We weren’t rich, but I had a pretty idyllic childhood. I just liked getting high, I was just hardwired that way. There’s certain drugs I know that I enjoy so much that I can’t do ’em. Because I’m not very good on moderation – to say the least!’
He had a spell with a major publisher, Harper Perennial, but has largely worked with indie presses – the book world’s equivalent of indie record labels.
‘The indie publishing scene is very much like the indie record scene; it’s got the same problems too. As the means of production become completely democratised, you get a glut of material.’
‘There was a period when people who were really serious about writing could start to self-publish and get noticed, but now everybody is publishing anything and it’s really hard to get noticed cos there’s so many self-published things.
‘I’m the sort of writer who probably shouldn’t have ended up on a major press, but I did. It was a quirk of the times and who happened to be running Perennial. They were just taking risks. When I got signed, they also ended up signing Dan Fante, Jerry Stahl. I was basically on a press with all my favourite writers. Sebastian Horsley,[2] who I knew from AA meetings in London. I mean, someone did an article about it, and they called it “Harper Perennial’s club house for losers”. In a nice way, because we were all fuck ups. We were all the sort of people that major presses shouldn’t touch.
‘I’m not a famous writer or a writer that’s sold a lot, but if you like a specific area of writing you’ve probably heard my name. I’m the very definition of cult, in that some people know me but I really don’t have a pot to piss in. To be honest, in the writing game that’s pretty good, because there’s so many voices, it’s so easy to get drowned out.’
O’Neill has some notable fans though. James Frey wrote an intro for one of his books, and Irvine Welsh and Bret Easton Ellis have both championed him. Most of these connections were apparently made through word of mouth, rather than the skilled networking often deployed by writers and musicians alike.
‘Writers who like each other tend to find each other,’ he says. But he ‘doesn’t move in writer’s circles, believe me’. He lives in a small town in New Jersey, twenty minutes’ train ride from Manhattan. His books are the simply the sort that people press on each other.
Ellis read Sick City and reached out to say, ‘“Hey, I like your book.” We struck up an email correspondence. There’s actually a pilot for Sick City written by Bret Easton Ellis out there in the world. He’s great, super supportive, someone who doesn’t mind reaching down and helping pull writers up a couple of rungs.’
Does writing about drugs ever make him want to take them again?
‘In the beginning it was very much a therapy: I realised I was going to start forgetting things and I wanted to write it down.
‘One of the things they say in Twelve Steps is that addicts have a built-in forgetter. And it’s like as soon as you have a bit of distance, all you really remember is the fun and romanticised stuff and that’s what leads you back to it again. I can swap funny stories about scoring all day long; nobody wants to hear the story about the time you were sat in the bathroom for three hours trying to find a working vein and you pricked yourself with a needle four hundred times. So writing it down was a way to set everything in paper so I couldn’t go back and revise the history later.
‘I tried to describe a lot of the boredom and waiting around of addiction as well the highs. The highs are a pretty small part of Digging the Vein. The rest of it’s just mechanics of what life as an addict is like; what do addicts do with their day, where do they get their money, where do they go? That’s all a bit of a hidden culture unless you’re in it. I sometimes think of my books as like travelogues of junk life.
‘So no, it’s not like being on a diet and writing about some fantastic dinner you wish you could have!’
And what of musical rejections – does O’Neill have any favourite stories, other than his own?
‘There’s quite an art to getting kicked out of a band,’ he says. ‘The best reason I’ve ever heard – even though I know it’s an urban myth – is kicking Glen Matlock out of the Pistols because he liked the Beatles. To me, crimes of taste, stuff like that is kind of good. Believe me, when I was in Kenickie, the stick I used to get for liking Morrissey. One of the most painful memories I have . . . We were all super young and the most rock ’n’ roll it got was drinking too much. It was very innocent. It was almost like being in the Monkees, being in Kenickie.
‘I remember we’d all make tapes to play on the bus and everyone would try and one-up each other about how cool their mixtape was. And I finally plucked up the nerve to do a mixtape, and it started off OK, but I put some band on there that everyone hated, and it was a long song too. Four minutes into it I realised that the van had got very quiet, and finally somebody said: “Is this song ever gonna fucking end?” And somebody ejected the tape and threw it out.
‘And I’ve got to admit I still think about that day on the tour bus and cringe a little bit. For eighteen-year-olds Kenickie had really good taste in music. They were all into the Fall and the Stooges and really cool stuff, and me being young and just come down from Blackburn my taste was probably a bit parochial. I got a baptism in cool very quickly when I went down to London. I remember Marc gave me a bunch of albums – Wire, Johnny Thunders, the Cramps. But up until then my musical taste had been dictated by what cassette tapes I could get out of Blackburn Library.’
I remind him that in Digging the Vein, Atom, the character based on Anton Newcombe of Brian Jonestown Massacre, kicks a bandmate out for describing the production on a Zombies album as ‘faggy’.
O’Neill laughs. ‘We’d argue about that stuff all day long. I always remember Anton had this big Arthur C. Clarke book of short stories that he’d hollowed out. And inside he had this big veterinarian syringe and a spoon. And when the Arthur C. Clarke book came out, you knew you were in for a long debate on this or that Byrds B-side.’
It’s time to get on to his time in the Brian Jonestown Massacre, and his own firing.
‘I had the same heroin dealer as Anton. So a lot of time we’d be hanging out at the same house waiting for the guy to show up, and Anton would be there. He was a trip, because he’d be wearing Jesus robes and all this stuff. He was always like that, twenty-four/seven.
‘There was a point where the rest of the BJM were pissed off with Anton because of his drug use. So he fired them all and decided to replace them with people he could trust, which was people he knew used as well. If everybody was on the same drugs, there wouldn’t be so many arguments.
‘He had me, our guitarist Adam, and this guy Billy on drums, who was a speed freak but also a junkie as well. So Billy was a bit up and down – literally. We had a gig booked at the Troubadour – it was meant to be this big “the Jonestown’s back” show of strength. We had six months leading up to it to get a whole new set, but we never practised anything. We learned one new song in six months.
‘We’d get to the studio and all the equipment would be gone because Anton pawned it for junk money. So the first thing we’d have to do is rustle up money to get the musical equipment out of the pawn shop.
‘Anton was one of those people who when they use heroin get really hyper – he had a weird anti-reaction. The rest of us’d be nodding out and he’d be bouncing off the walls. So as soon as we got to the pawn shop, instead of getting the guitar out, he’d want to buy some vintage gun he found. So it was endless – one bit of equipment out, one in, and all the hassle of trying to get drugs delivered. We never learned anything.
‘Eventually, someone would say, “Anton, maybe it’s time you cooled it on the drugs,” so Anton would fire them.
‘At the end, we had two weeks left and the last men standing were Anton, myself on keyboards and Billy the drummer. We were we like, “How are we gonna do it?” And Anton’s like: “I’ll get you a Hammond organ and we’ll do it like the fuckin’ Doors, man. Just play everything on the organ and it’ll be fine.”
‘Anton called for one more rehearsal at his house, but when Billy and I arrived, he was getting heroin delivered, and he didn’t want us to be there because he didn’t want to share. So he sent us out to get orange juice for him, and the car broke down. Billy had this shitty old VW Bug that he was always putting five dollars of gas in, and he ran out of gas. Anton lived way up in the Hollywood Hills, and we had to go and fill a Gatorade bottle up with a couple of bucks of gas to get there. It took us hours to get back.
‘And yeah, Anton had this big thing with the Masons. He was obsessed by the Masons, and he had this ornamental Masonic sword. This is the thing – he was out of his mind at this stage. He thought the FBI was watching the house. He actually believed this sword had mystical, supernatural powers and, if you pissed him off, he’d get it out and point it at you. So we got back hours later, drenched in sweat, baking in the desert heat. We’re dopesick and we had to get this car up the hill with a little bit of gas. We finally get back and Anton’s like “Where were you guys? This is meant to be a rehearsal. We’ve got a gig in two days!”
‘So Billy’s telling the whole story, how the car ran out of gas. And Anton’s like. ‘Oh yeah? . . . Where’s my FUCKING ORANGE JUICE?’ And then he starts swinging the sword and chasing us.
‘Thankfully, from Anton’s house out it’s downhill, and we ended up rolling the car down until we could get the engine to turn, and that’s it.
‘And the show that happened afterward is the one in Dig![3] He stopped Ondi Timoner, the director, coming in to film because there were so many drugs, so there’s a period where he fires the band and then it says: “six months later”, and he’s doing a gig at the Troubadour and people are throwing fruit at him. That was the gig we were meant to be doing, but he’d literally fired everyone. But, oh man, he wanted to take our heads off with that sword . . .’
[1] Tony generously contributed a second firing story to The Rejects. It’s featured in the book as bonus material, and is also blackly hilarious.
[2] Dan Fante was a writer and the son of John Fante, another novelist famed for his LA-set work. Jerry Stahl is a novelist and non-fiction writer perhaps best known for his chronicle of addiction, Permanent Midnight. Sebastian Horsley was a British artist, writer and ‘dandy’ provocateur.
[3] The feature-length Dig! documents the friendship and then fall out between the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. In the film, Anton is seen becoming increasingly erratic and ill looking. Shortly before the six-month gap, he’s filmed attempting to shoot a video on a Hollywood hilltop. He makes everyone wear white and tells the cameraperson to broadcast a message to his fans: ‘Tell them to wear white, and be ready when I call.’ The whole thing has a deranged, cultish vibe.