How The Brian Jonestown Massacre nearly broke up Oasis 30 years ago
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On September 29, 1994, following a somewhat shambolic crystal meth-fuelled Oasis gig at the legendary Whisky A Go Go club in Los Angeles, Noel Gallagher collected his passport and $700 from the band's tour manager, then pushed a note under her hotel room door to say that he was quitting the tour. For a few days at least, it looked like Oasis' dreams of rock n' roll superstardom were dead in the water, exactly one month on from the release of their debut album Definitely Maybe.
You can blame The Brian Jonestown Massacre for that.
The San Francisco psych-rock band, led by 'mercurial' frontman Anton Newcombe, and perhaps best-known as the subject of the acclaimed 2004 music documentary Dig!, were Oasis' support band on their debut US tour, and in a new [paywalled] interview with The Times, Newcombe admits that the two acts did not get on well at all.
“Noel Gallagher is standing there as we’re doing 15-minute songs, not getting into our psychosexual thing at all,” he recalls, “and then I told him that Oasis sounded like Guns N’ Roses. Joel [Gion, the Massacre’s tambourine player] gave them some crazy speed and they were up for the next three days.”
Newcombe expanded upon this story in a 2018 interview with Clash magaazine.
“They asked him, 'Can you get any sniffs? and Joel’s like, 'I got some.' And he gave him the tiniest little grain on the table and they’re like, [in an English accent] 'Fuck off, mate! Joel’s like, 'You don’t wanna mess with this'... they did a whole gram of, like, pure crystal meth because they thought it was just cheap 5% coke from London.
“It fucked their show and we just came on and tore it up and the next night they tried to recover in Sacramento and we showed up, because we were supposed to be doing that one too and they were just like, 'Fuck you. Get outta here'.”
Happily, as documented in the song Talk Tonight, Noel Gallagher was talked out of quitting the band by Oasis fan Melissa Lim, who he'd first met at his band's gig at San Francisco's Bottom of the Hill venue a few nights earlier.
The Brian Jonestown Massacre will tour the UK in 2025. So too will Oasis, playing in somewhat larger venues.
