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The Brian Jonestown Massacre hit The Depot stage Wednesday night with the seven members looking like a band from central casting. They were led by frontman Anton Newcombe, who came off a little like a cult leader — fitting of the Jonestown mashup in the title — draped in a white flowing shirt and scarf, white pants and puffy white mutton-chop sideburns.
At one point Newcombe joked that his appearance might make him a good fit for Utah. "I look just like Brigham Young!" he said, adding he'd come for your wives. And he was kinda right.
The band lived up to its reputation as a throwback psychedelic-rock band, taking some wandering and weird journeys heavy into the jam-band terrain, and seemed to draw as well from California surf music — Newcombe's almost Dick Dale-ish guitar sound the most obvious influence on songs like "Yeah, Yeah" — and ventured into jazz.
The musical explorations generally worked, because the band is tight and talented with three mashing guitars and a bass churning out waves of sound. Newcombe sounded as if he was singing from a deep hole most of the night, making his lyrics indecipherable and making many of the 30 songs in the three-hour set blur together.
Crowd Favorite • The mostly sedate crowd seemed content to bob along to most of the songs, but there were cheers when the band busted into "Anemone," probably its most recognizable song. Out came the camera phones to capture the moment, and it was a solid rendition, with Newcombe's dirty guitar driving the action.
Highlight • There aren't a lot of bands where the tambourine player can steal the show, but standing center-stage with an aloof nonchalance, banging out his jangly rhythms with a little hip-wiggle and a gaze toward The Depot ceiling, Joel Gion pulled that off. For a little change of pace, he threw in some maracas on a handful of tunes and at one point played maracas AND the tambourine, maintaining a cool that captured the crowd. Gion's tambourines were anything but a throwaway. Of course drummer Constantine Karlis drove the rhythm, and he handled it well,but the jangling tambourine or rattly maracas provided a punctuation mark for each beat.
Lowlight • It seems the technology kept tripping up BJM throughout the night. The mix seemed off, especially early in the night, making it impossible to decipher about 90 percent of Newcombe's lyrics. It was compounded by the always echoey Depot that at times turned the layers of music into a mush of sound. Add to that a microphone mishap and a blown speaker later in the set and a mistuned guitar that left the band milling around onstage trying to make small talk for several minutes near the end, and it felt like there were plenty of potholes along the way.
Banter • About a third of the way in, some in the crowd started shouting out requests, which seemed to make Newcombe bristle. After playing "Jennifer," to be polite, he said, "It actually works out better if you're like, 'What are they going to play next?' Because they're all good." Later, he told a story of holing up in a Paris hotel after a recent show to write new tracks and came out with 45 new songs that will be on an upcoming two-album set, "Third World Pyramid" and "Don't Get Lost." The first, he said, is how other people see the band, "kinda '60s but it's not really '60s, but it's kinda that thing. The other record is how I see us, like you discovered a spaceship and said, start pushing buttons and we'll see what happens."
In the Crowd • When you've been making music as long as Brian Jonestown Massacre without having huge commercial success or mainstream play, it makes sense that followers will span the years and discover the band somewhat by word of mouth. But this group of about 300 was maybe the most eclectic crowd I can remember seeing at a concert. Most seemed to be die-hard fans, ranging from younger mustachioed hipsters to middle-aged former hippies and maybe a Phish fan here and there, everyone bobbing and swaying and some — you know who you two are — who turned it into a free-form modern dance party.
Big Finish • There was no encore, which is really no surprise since the band played for three hours, as it is. Heading into the homestretch, Newcombe announced "This is about to get good," and called out a fan he saw headed for the back exit. "This is just like a bullfight. The minute you go out to take a leak, pffft, the matador is dead." They dove into "Going to Hell," the song that introduced me to the band and one of my favorites, before wrapping up with a 13-minute, mostly acoustic noise jam that built a crushing crescendo before one-by-one the band members wandered offstage.
Twitter: @RobertGehrke