White Rabbit buys memoir of tambourine-playing frontman of The Brian Jonestown Massacre

White Rabbit has acquired In the Jingle Jangle Jungle, a memoir by Joel Gion, the tambourine-playing frontman of The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Lee Brackstone, publisher at White Rabbit, acquired world English language rights from Natalie Galustian at the Greyhound Literary Agency.  It will be published on 29th February 2024 in hardback, trade paperback, audio and e-book.

The publisher describes The Brian Jonestown Massacre as one of the great contemporary cult American rock ’n’ roll bands, stating that “at the peak of their anarchic reign in the San Francisco underground of the mid-1990s, their psychedelic output was almost as prodigious and impressive as their narcotic intake".

Of the book, it states: “Joel Gion’s memoir tells the story of the first 10 years of the band from the Duke Seat. A righteous account of the hazards and pleasures of life on and off the road, In the Jingle Jangle Jungle takes us behind the scenes of the supposed behind-the-scenes film that cemented the band’s legend.

“Funny as hell, shot through with the innocence and wonder of a ’percussionist’ whose true role is that of the band’s ’spirit animal’, In the Jingle Jangle Jungle is destined to take its place alongside cult classics in the pantheon of rock ’n’ roll literature like Playing the Bass with Three Left Hands (Faber & Faber) and 45 by Bill Drummond (Abacus). It will also feature a foreword by Anton Newcombe, fellow member and founder of The Brian Jonestown Massacre.”

Gion said: “This is the band’s story from my own angle, from our early San Francisco nickle-and-DIYn’ days to another entire movie’s worth of equally out-there ’missing scenes’ from the documentary period. I’m not just telling the story, readers will be inside of it with me through scene and voice and, in that sense, I think of it less as a music memoir and more a personal memoir written by someone who happens to be a musician.”

Brackstone said: ‘If ever a fin-de-siecle band were deserving of an intimate insider portrait, psychedelic warts and all, Brian Jonestown Massacre are it.  Clearly all those years of keeping time with the BJM have given Joel a natural sense of rhythm because In the Jingle Jangle Jungle moves with the same effortless, swaggering storytelling verve that will be so familiar to fans of the cosmic counter-culture of west coast America. To imagine, that 20 years ago, when I first saw the band and watched “DIG!” [a documentary about the band] I would be publishing this book is truly mind-blowing."