Of the two subjects profiled in Ondi Timoner's infamous 2004 documentary, Dig!, the Dandy Warhols came out looking worse than their more self-destructive friends-turned-rivals the Brian Jonestown Massacre. Sure, BJM main-man Anton Newcombe is the one seen starting onstage fistfights, getting arrested, and strung out in various stages of junkiedom-- but then everyone loves a good tortured-artist narrative. The Dandys, on the other hand, exemplified less valorous ideals: a combination of calculated careerism and-- when their 1995 signing to Capitol initially lead to creative clashes with the label-- naïveté about how the music industry really works.
However, as American Anglophiles emerging in the echo of the post-grunge alt-rock boom, the Dandys were always more spiritually in tune with the star-making machinations of major-label/mass-media culture than the Pacific Northwest indie scene that birthed them. Not only were they musically indebted to UK rock icons ranging from the Rolling Stones to Spiritualized, the Dandys also strove to emulate the sort of pop-star mythology cultivated in British music weeklies. With their haughtily named frontman (Courtney Taylor-Taylor), nose-ringed guitarist (Peter Holström), and frequently topless keyboardist (Zia McCabe), the Dandys projected an air of glamor, decadence, and aloofness that was anathema in a 1990s American indie culture that favored an everyman ideology.
And, despite some embarrassing missteps along the way, the Dandy Warhols performed about as well as one could hope for a kaleidoscope-eyed American rock outfit operating in an era of nu-metal mooks and Creedleback grunters. That the Dandys and Capitol eventually parted ways (2008's Earth to the Dandy Warhols was issued independently) could be seen as less a sign of the band's flagging commercial fortunes and more an indicator of a mission accomplished-- they arguably whetted the Stateside appetite for the gritty-but-stylized likes of the Strokes and the Hives, and their dalliances with David LaChapelle prefigured the symbiotic relationship between hipster rock bands and fashion media that's so prevalent today.
As a chronological overview of the band's major-label tenure, Capitol Years is naturally frontloaded with tracks from their two strongest albums, 1997's ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down and 2000's 13 Tales From Urban Bohemia. Removed from its heroin-chic context, Come Down's brow-raising single "Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth" now sounds passé; the glam-slammed "Boys Better" and "Every Day Should Be a Holiday" stand as superior showcases of the Dandys' hedonistic allure. Alternately, where the band's 2000 Vodafone-assisted breakthrough "Bohemian Like You" plays right into the hands of detractors who claim the Dandys overvalue style over substance, the galloping "Get Off" reveals the less glamourous flipside to the up-all-night revelry-- when Taylor-Taylor sings, "All I want to do is get off," it sounds less like an invite to intoxication than a sobering admission of addiction.
The Dandys' later years are marked by ideas that were either woefully misguided (the irritating-as-ever falsetto-funk stomp "We Used to Be Friends"), recycled ("Holding Me Up", from 2005, follows Bohemia's "Godless" strum for strum) or just plain empty (the hook-less, strobe-lit rave-up "This Is the Tide", the lone previously unreleased track here). But the Dandys' most maligned album (2003's Nick Rhodes-produced Welcome to the Monkeyhouse) also yielded their most genuinely moving song: the Evan Dando collaboration "The Last High", a rewrite of the Stones' "Under My Thumb" whose synth-pop austerity effectively renders the loveless, lonely life of the world-touring, hotel-bound rocker. And, sometimes, you can't help being fascinated by their galling smarminess-- only a band as self-aware as the Dandys would attempt a self-satisfied celebration of cashing in like "All the Money or the Simple Life Honey". In that sense, The Capitol Years is less interesting as a compilation of one sporadically successful band's stint on a major label than a road map through an evolving underground rock culture, one in which the label of "sell out" has transformed from scarlet letter to badge of honor.
