The Dandy Warhols – Not If You Were the Last Junkie on Earth
1997 · Directed by David LaChapelle
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Best comments
1.“In the Dig! documentary, the lead singer didn't like how he looked in this video, and the director was like, 'I'm sorry, but that's how you look.'”
More comments
- 2.“Maybe I'm an asshole, but as an ex-junkie, this cracks me right the hell up.”
- 3.“I'll be clean 16 years this December. Love this song.”
The story
Courtney Taylor-Taylor wrote this one about a girlfriend of four years who got hooked on heroin within about a week while he was away on the band's first tour. Instead of a sad song, he wrote a bouncy rock song that rolls its eyes at her, and at the whole heroin chic moment of the '90s, when fashion sold strung-out skinny as glamour. It came out in June 1997 as the first single from ...The Dandy Warhols Come Down and reached number 13 in the UK the next spring. It's also dedicated to their friends and rivals the Brian Jonestown Massacre, who fired back with Not If You Were the Last Dandy on Earth. That whole feud plays out in the documentary Dig!
The video was David LaChapelle's first. The celebrity photographer got the job because Taylor-Taylor was a fan of his candy-colored, surreal pictures. He built a demented game show: the band plays while a chorus line of human-sized syringes dances around them, and the prizes are the real rewards of the habit – a hearse, tombstones, twirling stretchers. Overdose victims round out the cast. LaChapelle told MTV News he wanted to make the point with a sense of humor. Mojo called it "an arch, playful, taboo-shredding hoot."
Guitarist Peter Holmstrom later said people misread it as an anti-drug song. In his telling it's anti-addiction and anti-stupidity, which is a different animal. He also said it was his least favorite song on the album. Bands. Never satisfied.
