Red Mosquito

Lament wrote:I really don't. He was pretty tame in that era. Their popularity was at a nadir after they got kicked off of TVT Records in 1998, and Anton was actually clean for the most part. Dig! hadn't come out yet, so the public was totally indifferent to them for the most part. A lot of the shows I saw had maybe 50 or so people in attendance. I'll tell you though, when they were clean-ish...holy shit were they were they fucking great. I remember watching them tear up the Velvet Lounge in DC one night in like 2002/2003. They played for over three hours. When the drummer (who was new at the time) shouted out to Anton after like 30+ songs that there were no other BJM songs he knew how to play, Anton picked up a bass and led them through a 20 minute long space rock jam that to this day remains of the greatest things I've ever witnessed.

After Dig! came out, Anton seemed to make a very concerted effort to try to "become" the Anton he was portrayed as in the film. He got back into drugs pretty quickly and looked like he was self-destructing on stage every night to give the newfound "fans" what they wanted. The last time I saw them was in 2005 at DC9. It was a legitimately sad sight. They were plodding through their set with zero interest, Anton was clearly strung out again and couldn't focus on anything. He would go into a daze in the middle of songs, zone out, and then snap back with incomprehensible, angry remarks before grinding each song to a halt. It was beyond terrible.

It's really too bad. They were a fucking unbelievable band in the early 00s, and Anton was a genuinely awesome guy. He was always very kind and welcoming to me, which to some awe-struck kid is kind of the greatest thing in the world. We had a few conversations on the phone here and there, and at one point a band I was in was going to open for them on a run through DC (we had a song about him we used to play called "The Ballad of the Greatest American Hero" that a mutual friend of ours had passed on to him and he got a huge kick out of). He also arranged for a bandmate of mine to get a tryout to play bass for the Warlocks in like 2002, which was very cool of him (Bobby Hecksher of the Warlocks was a former member of BJM).

He used to tease me about being a BRMC fan (Peter Hayes was a former BJM member as well). I had befriended them around 2000 and seen them probably 25-30 times before the release of the second album (I got off board there, but that's another story). Anton thought they were the biggest phonies in the world (which, yeah, they kinda were, but I didn't care). It's weird though, even with Anton's band experiencing their first period of total indifference from the music scene (which oddly coincided with bands blowing up left and right doing the exact same things he'd been doing for ten years already), a lot of the guys were still totally intimidated by him. He had a feud with Jimmy Fallon around 2001-2002 that probably attributed to my hatred of Fallon (I mean, I already hated Fallon, but him and Anton being enemies made me hate Fallon even more).

I'm glad he finally seems to have a sustainable level of success. It's just a shame about how it came to be. I haven't paid more than passing interesting to anything they've released since "And This is Our Music," but those old albums bring back some amazing memories of some pretty awesome times.

Heathen wrote: