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Words: Everett True
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Photography: Cat Stevens
Sometimes you stare at beauty so long it becomes
unrecognisable. Each time I visit London, it becomes
more like New York to me – a foreign city full of
shady corners, film set locations and trampled
dreams. I drink coffee and curse the day I needed to
watch my caffeine intake. I listen to people talk, and
wonder whether this is commonplace, the idea of
interaction and laughter. Where are the galleries?
Tthey were all torn down years ago. We talk as fans
hum overhead and…the time I was happiest, you
say? Off school, on the way back from the dentist’s,
I tried to crack ice with my foot in the paddling pool
in Admiral’s Park, Chelmsford. I stood there for
hours, oblivious. Now I seek the same oblivion
through electronic card games and iTunes, but it’s
not the same. The wind doesn’t chap my lips.
trains across the sea
A tall, bearded, charismatic man is holding court,
upstairs at Costa in Soho Square.
“When that guy wrote the Pavement book,
I lost so much respect for him…he sent me and
Bob a copy of what he’d written…Scott was the
only one he interviewed, it was all told from Scott’s
perspective.” He sighs. We’ve met before – this
strange intense figure and I. Walking through Soho,
past an open-air Christian rock festival, he tells me
of a trip he made through London in 1992 all the
way up to a Tower of Babel on the South Bank to
personally hand over his band’s first single, ‘Dime
Map Of The Reef’ EP (the same copy that Frank
Black had previously hurled to the ground) to one
of the Gods enclosed within. The God remarked,
“Drag City, cool” – and David, delirious through
lack of sleep and composure, knew he was on solid
ground. Only Gods could have known of such
obscure Chicago labels at that time.
Ten years later, almost to the day, we
encountered each other again, in West London:
the God made flesh, humbled in a flurry of wings
and bad breath, brought low by a lack of believers.
By this point, it was established that Mr Berman
had a band, a muse and one hell of a knack for
manipulating words. “And I wanna be like water
if I can/Cause water doesn’t give a damn,” he
crooned on ‘Horseleg Swastikas’ from that year’s
album, his fourth, Bright Flight. Mr Berman talked
about having a knife held to his throat in a biker
bar in Nashville, seizures and marriage, being
unable to travel in an ambulance because he
had no insurance, and feeling resentful – having
figured me out, erroneously, as a fellow hellraiser.
Reputations often have little to do with reality.
Interview’s end, he promised to spill the beans
on Pavement next time we met. (Steve Malkmus
and Bob Nastanovich played on Mr Berman’s
debut album, 1994’s excellent and meandering
Starlite Walker. Both ex-Pavement musicians have
continued their association with Silver Jews over
the years – this, coupled with Mr Berman’s previous,
almost psychotic, aversion to playing live, has led
some people to wrongly assume Silver Jews were
somehow a side project. This assumption has
bugged Mr Berman, as you may imagine.
Four years later, and it’s like he’s continuing
the conversation from the exact point it left off…
“…and I told him factually a few things that
were wrong, and said you’ve got to put in there that
the band was Steve, all the recordings were Steve
– that’s not Mark Ibold on the bass, that’s not Scott Kannberg playing the second guitar on his own
songs, and that was always something that Steve
always liked to hide because he liked to pretend
he wasn’t in charge. Ultimately, those records are
marred by the fact his attitude let him put Scott’s
songs on there, which certainly give a whole new,
almost holiness, to the fast-forward button.”
the right to remain silent
Silver Jews never play live.
Or, at least, they didn’t until this year when –
convinced by his wife Cassie (formerly of Louisville’s
austere post-Slint outfit Aerial M) that it would be a
positive experience – David Berman took a band out
on the road, an honest-to-goodness live band that
includes two members of Lambchop, and played
dates across America and Europe, even two in Israel
a few days before the latest war started. Imagine
that: your first ever live shows and you have a whole
body of work to draw from – last year’s Tanglewood
Numbers is the Silver Jews’ fifth album – and an
instant audience. (Just add beer.) None of those
shit supports playing to a bunch of disinterested
Death Cab fans – but an eager, anticipatory body
of fans, built up through diligence and the odd
message board. That’s 15 years without a live
show: weird, for such a natural performer, but
David’s demons have precluded an appearance up
until now. He’d done a couple of poetry readings,
sure – but, hell. It’s not exactly rock’n’roll, is it?
The evening we meet up in London is show
number 35 and – look, would you mind if I skipped
this bit? Mr Berman’s ad-libs were muffled, the
sound at the Mean Fiddler way too compressed, no
instruments, least of all the voice, picked out – and
whereas I love the sense of spontaneity within Mr
Berman’s recorded work, the unpredictable way
songs can trail off and suddenly start up again, none
of that was happening for me. Everyone else was
having a good time, sure – and that’s lovely. But I
like my music sparse, tense, in isolation: this was too
adult. It’s not a criticism. Cassie was indeed a delight
to look upon, as I’d been informed by the slavering
fan-boys already. It was cool to see Mr Berman up
there, not shaking too much, finally receiving some
of the recognition he feels he’s missed over the
years. Tanglewood Numbers is an excellent record,
full of deprecatory anthems, allusions to past
troubles and chirpy violins. I could hum you several
tunes from it right now…but I just wasn’t in the
mood that evening, OK?
Give me another 15 years. I may be ready then.
the frontier index
Mr Berman writes songs like tiny stories, sometimes
stumbling over himself, made delirious by his own
power with words. I used to be of the opinion that
the line, “There is a house like New Orleans, not the
one you’ve heard about, I’m talking about another
house…” (from the first album’s ‘New Orleans’)
was the single funniest and smartest non sequitur
in the canon of American underground rock this
side of Malkmus’ “Out on tour with the Smashing
Pumpkins/Nature kids,I/They don’t have no
Function”, but then along came “In 1984 I was
hospitalised for approaching perfection” (from third
album, American Water’s ‘Random Rules’) and a
plethora of others, and now I have no hard and fast
rules. (For humanity, check out Mr Berman’s 1999
collection of poetry, Actual Air on Open City.)
“I photographed him in Putney once,” recalls
former Melody Maker photographer Stephen
Sweet. “He was like a holy man and a bit like Howe
Gelb. He said he taught English literature and gave
me a list of novels to read, like Jesus’ Son [by Denis
Johnson > and something by Cormac McCarthy.
Dude, those novels sucked. Lawrence of Domino
said he needed the photos for press. He still owes
me £100. “Life should mean a lot less than this”…
that’s a great quote from the Silver Jews’ ‘How To
Rent A Room’ [from the second album, 1996’s The
Natural Bridge >. He was just satisfied that Malkmus
was producing his record. Pleased, but no massive
deal – more a friendly gesture from an old friend.”
“One of the greatest moments of my life was in
Cardiff last night,” David informs me. “Several guys
in their sixties came up to me. One of them was
this old, old man and he was like, ‘I own the oldest
record store in England, and I only stocked your
last record this week, but now I am going to stock
them all.’ There was a couple; Gerald and Jean – he
looked like a steel worker and she had a beehive
hairdo, a Lilly Tomlin getup, and they were like,
‘Please come back…’
“Before this European tour, if I’d stopped to
consider the fact that I’d be playing for people who
weren’t familiar with the music…” David pauses,
worried. “The first 19 shows [the first part of the
tour, between March 10 and April 28 > were all sold
out – 15-year-wait love-fests with people flying in
from here, there and Croatia to try and have this
moment. Then people realised it wasn’t just going
to be one week, and relaxed. So now we’re doing
these festival shows. The first one in Italy [June 23,
Umbertide > was a small town and it was, like, put
on by the town. Maybe 20 people knew who the
Silver Jews were. I was like, ‘Show number 20 is
presenting me with a whole new problem’…”
David stops, distracted by a looming tangent.
“I have a certain amount of memory loss,” he
explains. “I read a review of a show where the guy
said, ‘The only thing that was depressing was that
the audience knew the words better than he did’.
It’s true. I realised that if you’re really excited about
a show, you want to believe that it is [the artist’s > life
and soul. You want to feel these are the words he
breathes the whole time he walks the earth, it’s not
just some shtick he pulled 10 years ago. You want
Yeats to remember what he wrote. And if you don’t
remember it, it is not yours any more.”
Or maybe it just belongs to a certain time? By the
very act of documentation, you absolve yourself
from the responsibility of having to remember it.
“Right,” David agrees. “When people ask
‘Why did you just record?’, that was a reason. When
I write, I don’t want to read it. I want to make the
record and put it away. At my house in Tennessee,
there aren’t any CDs. We have vinyl, but I am too
lazy to put it on. CDs are all out in the pot cave.”
The pot cave…?
“Yeah, the pot cave,” he repeats. “Where pot
smoking goes on, I guess. It’s an outdoor structure,
and they are all in there on shelves. Trying to record
The Natural Bridge was such a searing experience
that I couldn’t listen to music. The only thing I could
listen to was Urge Overkill’s Exit The Dragon, and
only because I felt it wasn’t music but entertainment
like Charlie’s Angels or something. When I make
the records, I give the songs away. Playing live
would undercut the original version. I have so many different variations of answering that one question.
I had a 10,000-reasons list against playing shows.”
Were you prepared for the interaction?
“No. I wasn’t prepared for the affection, because
other than maybe being at a dining room table with
10 family members, three of whom may not even
like me, or being with five friends at four in the
morning, I have never been in a room full of people
who liked me. And I certainly haven’t been in such
a room with hundreds and hundreds of people.
I can see how different I would be if it had happened
to me at the age of 21. I can see how it would have
foreshortened my career immediately, and my
options, because the affirmation makes you look
at your own music in a whole different way. It
becomes poignantly clear what [the fans > like
and what they don’t like.
“For 15 years,” he continues, speaking loudly,
“I made records, and except for running into
someone in a bar who recognised me occasionally ,
it allowed me to set up my life without the Silver
Jews intruding. And then Cassie came along…”
honk if you’re lonely
“I thought Silver Jews would be quite serious during
the photo shoot, but they so weren’t like that,” Plan
B photographer Cat Stevens tells Cassie later, while
Mr Berman is upstairs in his hotel room recuperating.
“Why?” asks Cassie. “What is the Silver Jews’
persona?”
“I feel bad saying it…” Cat replies. “When I said
I was photographing Silver Jews, people were like, ‘I
wouldn’t want to do that. They’re really depressing.’
I haven’t read too much about you, except Sean
Michaels’ live review in the last Plan B. It was lovely,
and in it he mentioned two stories about the band
– that David tried to overdose and you saved him,
and that you and David are completely smitten.”
“I’ve been hearing stories about the Silver Jews,”
Sean wrote. “The first concerns Berman’s attempted
suicide, three years ago. That he left a scrap of
a goodbye note, put on his wedding suit, then
medicated and medicated and medicated as he took
a shower and made his bed. That his wife chased
him to his dealer’s, to an upscale hotel, and then
finally brought him to hospital.”
“Oh, they are both nice stories,” Cassie smiles.
“It’s interesting. I never thought David’s behaviour
was strange because so many people I know are
depressive, or don’t relate to people so well outside
their group of friends or outside music. David took
a confessional perspective about it on Tanglewood
Numbers, and laid it all out on the table, saying
what he had been doing for the last few years.”
I’d say the barnstorming ‘There Is A Place’ that
finishes the album, with its lines, “There is a place
past the blues I never want to see again” and “I saw
God's shadow on this world” is probably the clearest
indication of that: Malkmus’ guitar waxing lyrical in
the middle eight over ‘Police Conversation 1783’.
“I think it is really cool and important because
one person may hear it,” David’s wife continues,
“and they may have depression to deal with. It’s
hard to get a temperature reading of your band
from the internet. A lot of people are like, ‘What
a pathetic guy for trying to kill yourself’, and that
is not very compassionate. There is the undercurrent
of darkness to David’s music, but he is
so not serious, and the band too.”
punks in the beerlight
Back to David…
“…Cassie was a Silver Jews fan and I met her at
a party in Louisville,” he says. “I heard somebody
say, ‘There’s the prettiest girl in Louisville, Cassie
Marrett’ and I said ‘Where?’ and they pointed her
out. I was really depressed and had nothing to lose
at that time. I was so ugly.”
When was that?
“Right after we recorded American Water in the
fall of ‘98. It was Thanksgiving and I was visiting Bob
[Nastanovich > in Louisville.”
So you walked over…
“Yeah, and I said, ‘Hi Cassie’. She looked at me
and she goes, ‘We’ve never been introduced’. Then
I said something trying to be funny and keep the
conversation going, and she said, ‘I was just about
to go get some more beer for the party’ and I said,
‘Do you mind if I walk with you?’ This was during
a two-year period in my life when I was really going
for broke. I had different techniques: I used to wear
a hearing aid and go up to women in a bar that
I found attractive and say, ‘Hi, I’m David’. They’d say
something back to me and I’d say, ‘Excuse me?’ and
let them see the hearing aid. I instinctively felt that
something about it made me seem less threatening
– but it’s a handicap that is not disfiguring so it
doesn’t eliminate you,” he laughs.
“Anyway, this was the last time I did it,” he
admits. “We walked off to get the beer and it
caused a lot of pain in Louisville. There was a lot
of anger towards me, and it went back and forth.
It was relentless. I had never been in a war with
a scene. It was like the title track of that Jack White
and Loretta Lynn album Van Lear Rose [2004 >. In the
song, a guy comes and takes away
the girl, and the men of the town are angry. Cassie
is the Van Lear Rose and I am the stranger. The day
she finished college six months later, we moved
to Nashville, three hours straight south…
“Louisville has improved now, but there was
somewhat a dark star over the city during the late
Nineties. There weren’t any talented bands in the
scene but people were still snooty because a few
years before a few local bands had done some
pretty good records. They were very depressed.
You’d always hear of some pretty girl committing
suicide every month or so. So we’ve lived in Nashville
since 1999. We bought a house two years ago.
Having my own place solved numberless problems
I had no idea existed.”
pan-american blues
“The first shows we played,” says Cassie, “were
interesting. It was almost like the audience were
looking at David the way a parent looks at their child
when they’re learning to ride a bicycle. The audience
were like, ‘It’s OK, man’. Afterwards, they were
saying, ‘Thank you, you did it’.”
So you helped take the training wheels off
David’s bicycle.
“Yeah,” she laughs. “And the audience was the
safety net, with this exchange of love, concern and
care. In Athens [Georgia, March 10, Silver Jews’ first
ever live show >, I kept looking at David and couldn’t
believe he’d been such a reluctant performer over
the years. He has the microphone finally, and 800
people are there, and he wouldn’t stop talking.
Another favourite moment was at Roskilde
[Denmark, July 1 >. There were about 5,000 people
there and instead of throwing a beach ball around
during our set, they were jumping up and down
with someone’s suitcase over the top of their head”
Why did you want Silver Jews to perform live?
“Mostly, I am a big fan of the songs. Some were
written 15, 10 years ago. They needed to get out in
the world and live a bit. They required him. Nobody
else could do it. I was a fan of Silver Jews before
I met David, so that was the first reason. The second
reason was I wanted him to experience the stitch
between an audience and a performer. It is unique
to that occasion. Playing live invites an exchange
between the listener and the creator.”
we are real
“There are two rocks,” says Mr Berman. “Rock all
the way up through the mid Nineties where it was
supposed to end, and the rock that has come since.
All of the latter is abstracted to another level, been
put in quotes, and shaded in.
“I don’t think many people expected this second
part of rock,” he continues, quite seriously. “I
remember when Spin was talking how rock was
dead. I was angry they were saying that, because
it felt they were not saying what they were seeing
out on the street, but what they wanted to happen.
It was the critics who wanted music to become
global techno and more instrumental. That’s not
what happened. I couldn't argue for rock's continued
existence, but I still knew it was a phoney push.
“I feel those phoney pushes, most famously
done by NME or Melody Maker. Now I feel the
Village Voice does a lot of push/pulling. It is almost
like a decision is made. If you look at a Village Voice
poll – how does that happen? Ten thousand records,
but everyone likes the same kind of record. It is just
not possible.
“I always felt the Silver Jews were hidden in
plain sight,” David explains. “With a difficult band
name, and the problem of a band that doesn’t tour,
don’t sell more records, the presumption of being
a Pavement side project, the fact that I am not a
classic singer – all these things combined to allow
us to hide in plain sight.”
This article first appeared in Plan B issue 13 |
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