Cross Your Palm With Silver JewsBy Chris Nelson, from Addicted to Noise, Photos by David Berman.
The Silver Jews' David Berman is "inspired by the proximity to wealthy people" but isn't exactly one of them himself. But that's the price you pay when aesthetics trumps royalties. "I've always for some reason been inspired by the proximity to wealthy people," says David Berman, songwriter and guitarist for the Silver Jews. The county in Virginia that he currently calls home ought to provide plenty of inspiration. Living among Albemarle's denizens is one John Grisham, and Michael Crichton is rumored to be moving in. Sam Shepard and Jessica Lange also lived there until recently. Not that Berman shares a tax bracket with these neighbors. "I just scrape by, really," says Berman. While Silver Jews records have garnered plenty of critical praise, they don't fully pay the bills. Berman covers expenses by occasionally writing articles, or by taking odd jobs here and there. "There's a guy in town who owns an ice cream truck company," he says, "and every once in a while, I'll drive an ice cream truck for him." If wealth was Berman's motivation, he would not have dropped members of Pavement from the Silver Jews to record the band's new album, a quiet, country-ish release called The Natural Bridge. In the early '90s, Pavement's Steve Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich joined Berman to put out the first Silver Jews records, a single and EP on Chicago's Drag City label. Pavement released its highly acclaimed debut Slanted & Enchanted in '92, and then the Silver Jews resumed work to produce their own full-length debut, Starlight Walker. In the years since the release of that disc, Pavement released Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain and Wowee Zowee and in the process became still more popular, not only in indie circles, but also in the popular press. So why did Berman abandon his work with Malkmus and Nastanovich at the point when Pavement's name is carrying its biggest cache ever? Because in Berman's world, aesthetics trumps royalties. After all, we're talking about a guy with no aversion to driving an ice cream truck on odd days if it allows him to pursue his art with purity. In October of 1995, Berman, Malkmus, and Nastanovich went to Memphis to pursue the next Silver Jews record. Berman brought several songs with him for the band to work on, but the session fell apart almost immediately. "I didn't like it after the first day," says Berman. "We were there for eight hours, and after one day, I knew it was wrong, the vibe was wrong, and it sounded wrong. The music was belying the intent of the songs," he explains. "It was coming out almost like heavy metal to me. It was really rocking too hard. I didn't feel like it was anyone's fault. If it was anyone's, it was mine because I couldn't get enough focus together to change and explain what I wanted to be different." Berman's urge to abort the session flew in the face of his lifelong determination to never quit, a goal he attributes to his being a slow learner. "In everything I've ever done, I've always taken longer than everyone else," he says. But what some might consider a drawback, Berman has come to view as a gift in disguise. "I've realized as I've gotten older that in the lag time I was gaining something, like feeling or desire, so that when I could get some skills together, it would help me. It gave a dimension that maybe I would have been too scattered to see if I was adept at everything I picked up." As Berman describes the scrapped session, he "hadn't really lived the songs" that he and the Pavement folks were attempting to record. "They were all pretty sad compared to what I'd written before." It turns out that the abhorrent experience of quitting the session provided the spark for Berman's to finish the creation. "It's always been a question of honor for me not to be a quitter, but I was that day," he says in a typically harsh self-analysis. "Through those dark months that followed, I actually found a hold on the songs and was able to write a couple more to fill the record out." Thus, in a round-about, painful way, Berman generated the lag time that he was accustomed to as a slow learner, and was able to continue working on the album.
 Now that he had the proper material, Berman needed a band to record it. First he enlisted his old friend and Drag City employee Rian Thomas Murphy to play drums. Murphy has also played drums with Royal Trux, Smog, and Palace, and is credited as producer on The Natural Bridge. "I knew that I wanted a kind of producer, someone who would have sound ideas, and Rian's really good at that." Berman knew guitarist Peyton Pinkerton and bass player Matt Hunter from when he lived in Massachusetts. "I knew that I could just send them a demo tape. They would be able to write some parts that weren't intrusive and that were true to the music...it was very easy." (In case you're wondering how Malkmus and Nastanovich felt about the project, Berman says that at first they didn't understand his frustration with the recording. "From the outside in, it just looked like I was freaking out," he admits, "like I was having a nervous breakdown." Berman says that his former bandmates were disappointed, "but we're all friends. They were understanding. They were gentlemanly about it.") "Dallas" is one of the original songs that Berman was able to find a hold on after the aborted session, and is also one of the numbers that was influenced by his proximity to wealth. "Dallas in the '80s, especially in the early '80s, was a real boomtown. There was a lot of ostentatious wealth." At the time when his family lived there, Berman was a teenager. "I was just old enough to start to make sense of what was happening," he says, "but young enough to just soak it all in." The song "Dallas" is Berman's attempt to fathom what was an overwhelming environment for him as young man. "One way you can turn the tables on a city or a place or a person is to write a song, and to render it in the imagination your own, and control it that way." Berman's thoughtfulness about his own work reflects his period of study at the University of Massachusetts, where he was enrolled in the graduate creative writing program. He says that writing poetry is different for him than composing songs. "I can't just put down a pen and pick up a guitar. I have to switch gears, and sometimes that takes days. But the end result sometimes looks the same. Content-wise, there really doesn't seem to be much of a difference." He understands his growth a songwriter within that familiar context of slow learning. "When I was 19 or 20, I bought a used guitar from a guy.... I started a band here in Charlottesville with some friends, but I didn't really start writing songs--that was just a bunch of noise. I didn't really start writing songs until I was, maybe, 22, when I started to think of songs as wholes. And then I didn't even start to think of albums as pieces, and how songs fit together, and continuity until I was 25 or 26." (Berman is now 29.) Details have come to be an important ingredient in his work. Berman considers details to be entryways into his songs. "If a song is a room, then the details are like extra doors. I draw the door, and hopefully whoever's listening to it can walk through it if they want." The songs on The Natural Bridge were wrought using real life places, other people's song titles within songs, and TV show names. "Ballad of a Reverend War Character" is actually about several characters, enough to make the song Berman's own "Desolation Row." Other pieces contain careful, poetic description, such as this lyric from "Black and Brown Blues": "When I go downtown/I always wear a corduroy suit/cause it's made of a hundred gutters/that the rain can run right though." It's probably no surprise that when asked about his inspirations, David Berman is more likely to rattle off a string of authors than a list of bands. He takes special pleasure from writers such British novelist Nicholas Mosely and John Ashbury. Berman notes that he didn't start listening to rock and roll until well into his teens when his cousin introduced him to bands such as X and Black Flag. "That was the first music I could accept, and buying into it [meant] you almost had to sign a contract that said you hated classic rock." These days, Berman is backtracking to learn about groups such as Led Zeppelin and Moby Grape, though he also digs new outfits like Royal Trux and the Dirty Three. In light of his deep affection for books of poetry and fiction, it makes sense that Berman is more interested in creating albums than he is in touring. "Maybe it's because I came to [music] so late in life," he explains, "but music is not in my blood. It is to sit around and play, but it's not to perform in front of people." Berman sees the live recreation of albums as a falsehood for him as a songwriter. Although he's not touring in support of The Natural Bridge, he nonetheless hopes to go on the road eventually. "I haven't found a way to present myself that I can be satisfied with," he says, "a way to do a concert that would be useful and truthful. I can't go onstage and act, I can't play a role--but I have to when I play live. It's not in me to be a rock musician, it's not in me to be onstage and be the center of attention. I wasn't raised that way, it's not in my genes. I'm supposed to be off to the side watching." Berman notes that he has no trouble reading his poetry in front of people, because during a reading he can feel the effect he is having. "I need that, I need to feel the bridge between the audience and the stage." But while he doesn't like to put on concerts, he says that he enjoys being in a concert audience himself very much. "It's not alienating on the other end. I don't expect any contact with the musician when I'm listening to music." Perhaps the lead Silver Jew is simply being harder on himself than he is on others, as he is certainly wont to do. But while he hasn't yet found a way to mount a satisfying tour, don't expect Berman to stop trying anytime soon. Quitting is out of the question. |
