“Tony was dark as fuck,” declares David Chang more than halfway through the Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner. Chang, a longtime friend of the late chef, author, and TV icon, is ruminating on Bourdain’s more self-destructive tendencies. He pulls out his phone to illustrate that remark by describing Bourdain’s taste in music.
“This was what Tony told me was his favorite song,” the Momofuku magnate says with a sharp edge of disbelief. He hits play. Out pours “Anemone” by the Brian Jonestown Massacre, a hypnotizing, edgy 1996 shoegaze track—all sensual bass lines, plangent guitar riffs, and pattering tambourines. It’s the kind of song that languors best in hazy, windowless rooms, Mara Keagle’s breathy vocals descending like moss on distorted oak. Chang lets it run for a spell, then interrupts. “Great song,” he concedes, “but it’s heroin music.”
The documentary then cuts to archival footage of Bourdain, who died by suicide in 2018. He’s walking around a beach in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where he lived in the early 1970s—talking candidly about his drug addiction at the time, and how eager he was to get into heroin. “The first time I shot up, I looked at myself in the mirror with a big grin,” Bourdain recalls in one scene. “Part of me wanted to be a dope fiend. My whole life was leading up to that point.”
“Anemone” was a central component of Bourdain’s internal soundtrack, a song that encapsulated his dance with drugs. Lyrically, the song is about being scorned by an aloof lover. (“You should be picking me up / Instead you’re dragging me down / Now I’m missing you more (more) / ’cause baby you’re not around.”) As the five-minute-34-second song progresses, the lyrics become more and more jaded, ultimately celebrating the abandonment. It winds up to a cool final statement: “Glad that you’re not around.”
In a 2014 piece for Rolling Stone, Bourdain described his love for the song: “Drenched in opiates and regret, I heard this song once and became besotted by it. It sounds like lost love, past lives, unforgiven mistakes and transgressions.”
It was written by Anton Newcombe, the prolific godhead of rock band the Brian Jonestown Massacre. It was released on the band’s 1996 album Their Satanic Majesties’ Second Request—the first of three full-length BJM records that year—which Newcombe also released on his own label, the Committee to Keep Music Evil.
Newcombe was, in many ways, not unlike Bourdain. He was a charismatic figure within his industry, operating as both a talented insider and too-cool outsider, seemingly ready to torch any and all bridges in favor of building his own. As a young chef, Bourdain torched the food industry by releasing Kitchen Confidential, a no-holds-barred best seller about the dirty secrets of the restaurant business. Newcombe did something similar by rejecting those who praised him as the second coming of Bob Dylan, doing more drugs, frequently kicking members out of his band, and derailing live showcases that could have led to lucrative record deals; one such bomb was indelibly captured in the 2004 documentary Dig!, about the rivalry between BJM and the Dandy Warhols. He was a harsh embodiment of the golden god rock archetype, playing into the band’s cult image with memorable soundbites, like “Wear fuckin’ white and come when I call!”
“Anemone” was penned in that freewheeling spirit. At the time, Keagle was a new recruit to BJM, and Newcombe suggested she and band member Dawn Thomas work on music together. They huddled in Newcombe’s San Francisco apartment and, guided by the rock star, started crafting the song. “[We] wrote the lyrics in the back of a Holy Bible with a green crayon, because that’s all we had,” Keagle said in the BJM biography Keep Music Evil. “And then we recorded it on a little four-track, and that was that song.”
It’s since gone on to become one of the band’s most popular tracks, released on one of their most beloved records. As shown in Dig!, Newcombe spiraled for a while after that album’s release—falling deeper into his heroin habit, permanently fracturing relationships with longtime members of the band, and getting arrested. Things got so bad that, at one point in the doc, bandmate Miranda Lee Richards makes a simple plea to the camera, “Anton, just don’t die. Please. Just don’t.”
Newcombe eventually got clean, quitting drugs around 2000 and kicking alcohol around 2010. “Quitting dope was painful,” he told The Guardian in 2014. By comparison, he said, giving up alcohol was much more bearable: “It’s not hard to quit…. You feel relieved.” Around that time, the rocker moved to Berlin, where he’s been ever since, releasing and producing new projects out of his record studio.
It made perfect sense, then, that when Anthony Bourdain brought his Emmy-winning CNN series Parts Unknown to Berlin, he reached out to Newcombe about being featured in the episode. Bourdain had discovered the musician was secretly a “proud, enthusiastic, and very skilled cook,” he wrote in his field notes accompanying the episode, an exciting revelation. Newcombe agreed, making an enormous feast of garlic-infused lamb, sweet potatoes, and more.
In the rest of the episode, he walks Bourdain around the Mauerpark flea market, goes record shopping, and works on some new music. “Berlin,” a canny portrait of an artistic haven, would become the first Parts Unknown episode to air after Bourdain’s passing in 2018, debuting just two days after his death.
Bourdain is hyperbolic in his narration describing Newcombe, clearly in awe of the band leader. When they sit down for dinner, Bourdain settles into interview mode. “What thrills you?” he asks. In retrospect, it’s difficult footage to watch. Roadrunner paints this period in Bourdain’s personal life as a time of deep philosophical yearning, an era when he was consulting fellow elder statesmen like Iggy Pop in search of the thing that helped them put one foot in front of the other every day.
Newcombe tells Bourdain his love of music is what thrills him—the pursuit of new sounds and birthing the little ideas that flower in his brain. At 50, he wanted his music to brim with energy, and to “remind people that it’s a possibility that they can do what they want to do, if they want to do it.” It’s a surprisingly bright and motivational answer, a world away from the furious, cult-like image Newcombe projected for so many years.
An instant parallel forms. Bourdain, in his own life and career, had influenced so many in the way that Newcombe himself was describing. At that table sat two people who went down similarly anarchic paths in life. It seemed, at that moment, like they’d come out on the other side, bonding over a meal and some hand-spun illumination—brought together by a shared sense of darkness.
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