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10. What's the Deal with David Berman?
91 Plays1 year ago
After much procrastinating and shoegazing we peel ourselves away from the punch bowl to ask if you’d like to hear us talk about a man named David Berman.
Also mentioned: U2, Guns n Roses, Tori Amos, Father John Misty, Lana Del Rey, Doseone, The Microphones, Dan Bejar
David Berman recorded on Drag City Records.
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Transcript
Baseball Frustration & Transition to Candy Jail Podcast
00:00:00
Speaker
I don't know, I was just watching the baseball game and it was frustrating me and I have to get out of baseball headspace. Like your team that you want to be winning is not winning frustration? Yes, that's the perfect question from someone who doesn't really follow sports but is aware of the fact that it consists usually of a team playing another team.
00:00:28
Speaker
true love doesn't come around anymore. So hey everybody, welcome to Candy Jail, the podcast that was once hospitalized for not approaching David Berman. So we're doing something a little bit different. This is episode number 10 for us and we thought we would go off script and just kind of wing this one and finally work our way around to the namesake of this podcast, David Berman.
Inspiration from Helen Miller & Silver Jews Superfandom
00:00:56
Speaker
And I want to give credit to Helen Miller, who is our special guest on the episode we will be releasing two weeks after this episode comes out, who
00:01:07
Speaker
had a wonderful conversation with us about Roland Bart and his book, Camera Lucida, and we recorded for almost three hours. And after we got off mic, she sent us a message and said, one thing I forgot to ask, what's the deal with David Berman? And so this is our first, what's the deal with David Berman episode and Helen, I guess, in a sense, this is for you.
00:01:33
Speaker
So we're not sure where this is going to go or how this is going to go. But if this made it so far out there that you are listening to it, presumably that means we went somewhere interesting with this. So Robert, you are wearing a silver juice shirt that I have not seen before. I got lots and lots of silver juice shirts you haven't seen before.
00:01:58
Speaker
That is actually not even a joke. That reveals, tips my hand immediately as to how much of a superfan I am. Although, I guess we're both superfans enough to name our podcast after his song that can be found in his final album under the Silver Jews moniker, Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.
00:02:21
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, in some ways, I like that we are attempting our first casual, unscripted, or at least like unroadmapped episode.
Artistic Significance: Challenges & Internal Pressure
00:02:34
Speaker
And that we're trying this with David Berman and of course, his body of work, sort of at the center of what, however,
00:02:45
Speaker
will wind up riffing today in different directions. And the reason why I think I like it is because
00:02:53
Speaker
I don't know how you feel, man. I know that his work means a lot to you at this point. I know Stephen King's does. I know, even with all the baggage or whatever, having to explain it, although I don't think you should, you're a love of you too, or at least some of those albums. It can be very fucking hard to talk about things extremely close to you, works of art, in part because I think it's just hard to talk about art in general.
00:03:22
Speaker
But I also think it's especially hard when you have a personal stake in it. It almost makes it impossible. And so, again, I like that we are doing this casually, at least on my end, in theory, I like it because it takes some pressure off. It takes the pressure off of like feeling like because I've let me just let me just say a few things. I know I'm rambling, but I'm a rambling man, you know. Were you born that way?
00:03:52
Speaker
I was, well, my papa was a rolling stone. I just got stoned. Just kidding. Never got stoned. I didn't inhale, just like Willie. Nelson, that is.
00:04:10
Speaker
I think I've had a desire, man, to write about my relationship to this music, write about my relationship to David Berman's poetry. On some deep level, as weird as it sounds, write about my relationship to David Berman as a human being.
Preparing for Public Discussion on David Berman
00:04:26
Speaker
David Berman as a Jew. David Berman as someone who struggled profoundly, but was also obviously intensely gifted.
00:04:36
Speaker
I've not written really anything of substance, I think because of a perfectionism. Instead of trying to approach perfection, I've been so internally dead set on not undercutting how fantastic he is that it has sort of straitjacketed me. So this is really my first attempt with you.
00:05:01
Speaker
do something semi-substantive with it if by substantive I mean just kind of go on the record in a more public way. So yeah I think it's easier for me to talk about Berman than for you and I at this point I don't think that's because you love him more than I do. I think it's just because I came to him later and I've noticed that and we've talked about this before like the stuff that you fall in love with during your formative years you know your teens and your 20s
00:05:31
Speaker
that stuff becomes personal in a way that it doesn't, for me at least, the stuff that I fell in love with when I was older, I don't have that same instinctive relationship to ancient mariner like grab passers-by and grab their wrist and fix them with my glittering eye so I can tell them about how awesome this thing that I love is.
00:05:57
Speaker
But with some of the stuff that I fell in love with when I was younger, I still have that. It's so personal to me that it can be difficult for me to talk about it. It can be difficult for me to write about it. I am a U2 superfan. The reason I have podcasting equipment was because I spent about a year
00:06:22
Speaker
prepping a podcast that I wanted to do where I was going to go through U2's discography album by album. That might not happen at this point. I think just the writing the episodes got something out of me that needed to come out, but that kind of
00:06:42
Speaker
that feeling of my feelings about this thing are too big for me to put them out in the world in the wrong way. That is a feeling we are more likely to have, I think, about the things that we fall in love with when we're between the ages of like 13 and 24 or something. I think connected to that too is
00:07:05
Speaker
maybe a desire not to turn the things we love into an academic exercise.
Overthinking in Literature & Emotional Art Connections
00:07:10
Speaker
Like I think for, for people who think too much, and I'm putting that as a separate category from smart, I don't think you have to be smart to think too much, but I certainly have fallen victim to overthinking. I think maybe you do sometimes from time to time, but you know, the way that an English class, right, or a, um,
00:07:32
Speaker
college-level literature class will parse a text and look for symbolism and look for metaphor and try to discuss like meta meanings of narratives. And it's like, here's an actual anecdote from a friend of mine who, you know, he's complicated, but I think he is definitely an artist and I respect him as a writer, primarily. He's also a painter.
00:07:58
Speaker
But lifetime reader, intense reader. And he read the Brothers Karamazov or Karamazov.
00:08:06
Speaker
when he was probably in his teens, actually, he was one of those, like you actually, like precocious in that regard, but returned to it multiple times. I mean, he's read Proust a couple times and not for a career. It's just like, he's one of those readers. He encountered a young woman, because he wound up working in bookstores, who picked up the Brothers Karamazov in front of him and bought it and then came back maybe like two weeks later.
00:08:33
Speaker
And he asked if she, how she liked it. And she was like, I finished it. I love that. And she was like, I love that fucking book. It was a great book. And that was it, like no further discussion. He then said, like four years later, she shows up and he asks her what she's been up to at the same bookstore. And she had enrolled in a graduate program and had written her dissertation on the brothers Karamazov. And she gave it to him, apparently.
00:09:00
Speaker
And his response to this, which I think was not to be dismissive of her, but to speak to something I think very true, was he was like, you know, I really preferred the young woman who just said she fucking loved that book. And I know that that can be reductive because I think we should be able to talk about these things and make sense of why they're so meaningful.
00:09:23
Speaker
But at a certain point or in a certain register, I actually think it can do injury to it. And so I understood it because it is an emotional connection and you don't want to engage in analysis to such a degree that you surrender that emotional connection that I think is ultimately the most vital part, I think, I think.
00:09:46
Speaker
Did I ever tell you how my first experience reading Nabokov? I was actually in the middle of reading the Brothers Karamazov and I was probably about a third of the way into it and I was
00:10:00
Speaker
How do I explain it? I was enjoying parts of it, but I was also sort of forcing myself to enjoy it at the same time. And I was staying with a friend of mine who had a copy, an unopened copy of Lolita, Nice Everyman's or Modern Library Hardcover.
00:10:21
Speaker
It was a rainy day. We were stuck inside and I was so tired of reading Dostoevsky. I just was not into it that day. And I went over to my friend's bookshelf and I asked him if he'd ever read Lolita and he said, no, somebody gave that to me. I've been meaning to read it, but I've never read it. I said, do you mind if I, you know, he said, knock yourself out. And that was it. I mean, I opened, you know, within.
00:10:42
Speaker
two minutes of cracking the book. I was completely hooked and I finished it within a day or two. That's impressive because that's a dense, long, it's fairly long and it's, yeah, you did it in two days. So you just put everything aside and read that thing. Basically, yeah, I was staying with my friend and his mom. I'm sure I was horribly antisocial for a couple of days while I did that. But then when it came time to write my senior thesis to graduate from undergrad,
00:11:10
Speaker
I wanted to write on Pale Fire, the Nabokov novel. I can just guess that this is going to be a fight. We don't have to say where we went, but I know that they'd probably be a pain in the ass with a request like that. Yeah, so they okayed it at first and I got my advisor and I was at least halfway through the writing process when they changed their mind and decided they weren't going to allow it.
00:11:34
Speaker
In retrospect, I'm glad that that happened because what I was writing about Pill Fire was gibberish. Man, it was just fucking gibberish. I don't remember what it was, but I know it was gibberish. And that was a case of, again, the same thing, me at 21, 22, trying to write about this thing that meant way too much to me and not being nearly mature enough to do it.
Introducing Berman's Work & Musical Journey
00:12:00
Speaker
I'm not even going to tell you the sorts of grandiose projects I had in mind for getting at writing about David Berman's work, but there's more than one. And I've certainly mind-written them hundreds of times, and especially so after his death in 2019.
00:12:20
Speaker
So let's, I actually have an idea for how to get a little deeper into this. Um, and I'm not fishing for compliment on my end. I'll just, it's not even really a disclaimer. It's just a reality that I'm the one that introduced you to Berman. So I'm not asking you to like thank me live or something, but let's talk about like how we both came to him. Cause that it's not the whole story, just that I introduced you to him. I think it's interesting how.
00:12:47
Speaker
I introduced his work to you from different vantage points and it took a few tries before it really stuck. And once it stuck, it sounded like then the storyline fever got its hooks in you. And if you don't mind, then I'd like to speak to how I came to it because I have some pretty, I have a unique story with that as well, I suppose. Yeah, you had a bit of an uphill battle and
00:13:13
Speaker
So Berman was, he was a poet and a singer-songwriter. He went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville and became friends with Stephen Malkmus and some of the other guys who would go on to form Pavement, the extremely influential early alt-rock, indie rock band. And Malkmus and Berman formed another group that was
00:13:39
Speaker
really just started out with them jamming, I think, and eventually turned into a group that put out an album with Berman as its frontman. And between, what was it, 1994 and 2008, this band, Silver Juice, put out six albums, always a rotating lineup. Berman as songwriter and frontman was the one constant, sometimes Malcomus was there, sometimes he wasn't.
00:14:06
Speaker
Berman's wife Cassie later became a member of the band. Bob Nastanovich, the drummer, might be the most consistent recurring player. He's not on all of them, but he's on most of them.
00:14:19
Speaker
Right. And this was a band that never toured until their very last album. So it's one thing to develop a cult following as a touring act. That's how a lot of musicians pay their rent. But to develop a cult following and then not tour at all is an extremely unusual move. And so when you first tried to get me into Silver Jews, it was the music. And I can tell you exactly why I was resistant.
00:14:49
Speaker
I grew up, my formative years listening to rock music, I was listening to mostly these really big singers like Eddie Vedder, Robert Plant, Bono, people like that. I was listening to Leonard Cohen too, but Leonard Cohen pulled me in because of the words. But when it came to singers, there was a certain kind of
00:15:13
Speaker
intense emotion that I was looking for. And then in the 2000s, right when my tastes were sort of solidifying as a listener, there was this other wave of singers that came along that seemed to be eschewing serious emotion at all costs. I always think of the band Cake, whom I despise. I don't remember that guy's name, but he sings every song like it's the most deeply ironic thing ever to be singing a song.
00:15:42
Speaker
And I found it extremely like, not just off-putting, but almost like anti-musical. And when I first heard Berman's singing voice, that was what I thought of. I didn't hear any emotion in it. I heard a lot of kind of monotonous irony in it, in just like the timbre of his voice. And then the style, not all of the albums, but some of them, the musical style is sort of like this jangly, lo-fi aesthetic.
00:16:13
Speaker
that has never really appealed to me much because it strikes me as artificial. And so those were the sort of obstacles that-
00:16:27
Speaker
those arrangements, because I also think like it's hard to really say like those arrangements in a homogenous sense. So I'm not trying to jump down your throat, but just say like each album does have its own sound going on. And I would argue some are more musically accomplished, like in sort of like a Juilliard sense than others. But it's interesting, like I do think they're all kind of they've got that country inflection, although I'm certainly no expert in country music.
00:16:57
Speaker
But yeah, can you speak a little more to like the artificial, yeah, label that you've surfaced? I can, although it wasn't entirely fair of me because I think I was lumping them in with a sort of, like there's a lo-fi aesthetic that stretches from
00:17:18
Speaker
You know, maybe it had its origins like in the college rock scene of the early eighties and then it, it, it kind of is adjacent to punk and then it eventually morphs into these sub genres, like a mumble core and stuff like that. But the idea is kind of, I, that it's a, it's a backlash to like the glossiness of a lot of really big, successful rock and roll acts and.
Musical Aesthetics & Home Recording Revolution
00:17:44
Speaker
If you think about, and maybe this is too inside baseball, but if you think about what the music scene was like in say 1986, 1987, there were a lot of hair metal bands, right, that had this big polished
00:17:57
Speaker
but ultimately kind of lightweight sound like think of like Slayer or Poison or even Bon Jovi, right? And then Guns N' Roses comes along and Guns N' Roses just yeah they've got Slash but they've also got their rhythm guitarist Izzy Stradlin who just played this incredibly loud crunchy
00:18:19
Speaker
gut ripping rhythm guitar that just blew all the slayers and the poisons out of the water like it was You know, it was like a buzzsaw cutting every other rock band off at the knees but it was still a highly produced sound expertly produced and there was a backlash against just the whole idea of expert production and
00:18:47
Speaker
And also just the fact that there was home recording equipment that sounded halfway decent. And even if it didn't, the fact that you could just press record on one of those things in your room or your bathroom clearly opened the door for a lot of amateur musicians that wound up actually being able to have careers, right?
00:19:08
Speaker
Exactly. And I think what started as a good thing, which is, hey, look, we don't have any money. We don't have a recording space. Let's just do this ourselves. Let's just grab the cheap home recording equipment and set up in the garage and record our album. That's awesome.
00:19:23
Speaker
That's a great thing to do. But then when the aesthetic becomes, we have to sound like we don't know what we're doing. We have to sound like we can't afford better equipment. We have to avoid anything that sounds too much like a pop hook, or anything that sounds too much like a guitar solo that Slash would play, or a guitar solo that the Edge would play.
00:19:43
Speaker
then that now you're just deliberately crippling yourself and and then going out and pretending that you're you can't work and you need to panhandle like it's it's like improving a kind of like cool person credentials or something yeah it's it's fundamentally artificial and dishonest and it doesn't appeal to me at all and for whatever reason i was lumping the jews i think into that category i wish i could remember what the first couple songs that you played for me were but i don't
00:20:13
Speaker
I mean, I'd definitely say that like Starlight Walker is probably, I mean, aside from like even the earlier, earlier stuff, there's one called, I think the early record, the Arizona record. These are them literally like playing with broken instruments in some cases. I think Berman actually had a guitar that was literally fucking broken or at least like was missing a string and he certainly couldn't play very well at the time. So I would agree with especially
00:20:41
Speaker
pre-Starlight Walker and even Starlight Walker, even though that was their first studio recording as being, you know, the, um, what do you want to call it? I don't want to say sophomore, cause there's still, I think some of my favorite songs in Starlight Walker. And of course you have Malcomis playing with them. So.
00:20:57
Speaker
I don't know how he would match up against, you know, guitar players in major bands like U2 or Pearl Jam, but I would imagine he's up there. He's fucking good. And everyone recognized that. But I guess I just say like, I guess even like, what's the other one? Natural Bridge, which is arguably my favorite.
00:21:19
Speaker
might be a little rough around the edges, but once you get past Natural Bridge, I'd say he winds up with pretty much consistently adept, if not really professional musicians around him. So that's, we're talking Bright Flight, Tanglewood Numbers, and Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.
00:21:43
Speaker
And I actually think American Water certainly sounds professional, too, in that regard, like whatever the hell that means. But just that it's these are these are truly talented musicians gathered around him. So I can see I see your point and I give you that for maybe the first album. But I don't know about the rest.
00:22:04
Speaker
Yeah, no, like I said, it wasn't entirely fair of me. You had an uphill battle because I had constructed a bias against this band or this particular artist in my head.
Berman's Poetry & Musical Evolution
00:22:15
Speaker
I think and then two things happened.
00:22:18
Speaker
So while he was front man for the non-touring cult act, Silver Jews, Berman also published a book of poetry called Actual Air, which was Open City Books 1997, I want to say.
00:22:35
Speaker
and you bought me a copy of that and by the way i bought you an original open city copy which now not that this matters but it's a valuable book um they're hard to get your hands on because they've and i think for absolutely i'm thrilled they've put out this hardcover edition in an uh in addition to an e-book
00:22:55
Speaker
So you could spend nine bucks and get it. But yeah, the one that I actually found was in a used bookstore and it's from the original sort of first run print. So that's a cool copy. And in a sense, you had an even bigger hill to climb here because I have an allergy to people who write rock lyrics who think they're poets, right? Anytime I hear Jim Morrison described as a poet, I want to jump out of a tall building and
00:23:23
Speaker
Even Bob Dylan, as good as he is sometimes as a lyricist, he's a songwriter, he's not a poet. And the only person that I've ever seen do both very well was Leonard Cohen, and he started out as a poet and then decided maybe he could be a musician as well. And so giving me, you know that indie rocker that I love that you don't, here's his book of poetry, that wouldn't have worked except that this is one of the best books of poetry I've ever read.
00:23:51
Speaker
And around the time that I was reading it was when Purple Mountains, Berman's new band, new album came out in 2019 after a, what was it, an 11 year hiatus, I believe? The last Silver Jews record was Look Out Mountain, Look Out Sea. It was unfairly savaged.
00:24:14
Speaker
by the gatekeeping tastemakers at Pitchfork and Berman just kind of hung up his gun belt and retired from the whole thing until 2019 and I was intrigued enough at that point that I'd gone back on the strength of
00:24:32
Speaker
how good his poetry was. I'd gone back and started listening to more of the Silver Jews and I was starting to get into it and then Purple Mountains came out and that was it. One listened to the first song that came off of that record and I was a fan and at that point I had to go back of course and listen to all of the Silver Jews records and one of the first things that floored me was how good the band is. Even on
00:25:02
Speaker
The early stuff that sounds, that does have this lo-fi, we don't know what we're doing vibe, a lot of what's actually happening musically is pretty sophisticated. If anything,
00:25:15
Speaker
Far from being archly ironic, the music is incredibly earnest, almost to a fault at times. There are maybe moments where they would be better served by having a little bit more sense of humor, although many of the songs are very funny anyway. And in fact, some of the funniest songs he ever wrote are some of his later songs, and I wonder if there was
00:25:43
Speaker
Whatever snob that pitchfork it was that wrote the dismissive review of lookout mountain. I wonder if he was Butthurt because his favorite serious person was cracking a little bit too many jokes. I don't know but I don't know. I actually I kind of want to read that review now. I'm sure he
00:26:04
Speaker
I'm not sure Silver Jews will ever be a big band, although we'll see. I found that photo, who shared that with me? A friend of mine happened to have come across a Lana Del Rey photo that was taken maybe four months ago. Lana took it up herself. It was a selfie in her car.
00:26:28
Speaker
What would you call it, skillfully? Put a little hint in it or a little plug for Berman. And you can just see at the bottom of the frame, she's probably on a freeway in LA, the music playing is How to Rent a Room, the opening song to Silver Jew's Natural Bridge.
00:26:49
Speaker
And I'm hoping enough Lana fans saw that and said, who is this guy? What is that song? And started listening. And I'm sure that did happen to some degree. But I think he deserves to be up there with the greats. But because of his personality on some level, and I mean that as a compliment, just being not a limelight hungry person,
00:27:19
Speaker
although it's always complicated, right? I think there was that and there wasn't, but it was definitely a real antagonism for him. But also, as you pointed out, from your first exposure to the music, his voice is tough for most people. I'm curious, actually, if we can just stay with that for a second, because now that you've gotten at
00:27:42
Speaker
what ultimately did turn you towards his work and make you really want to engage with it was the poetry. And then you went to Purple Mountains and that's music again. And then that was the open door finally to Silver Jews again. What were you able to accommodate internally with his voice that allows you to connect with it? Because clearly I don't think you can connect with any music unless you can become sold on
00:28:11
Speaker
If it's a singer, if it's a band with a singer, a lead singer, you have to on some level feel kindly towards the voice. So what shifted for you? What allowed you to connect with it then in ways that you clearly couldn't previously?
00:28:29
Speaker
it was just realizing that it wasn't artifice in other words he wasn't singing the way that he was singing because he was trying to sound arch or unemotional that's just his voice and i was i was gonna say this in relation to the poetry but
00:28:47
Speaker
Berman as a poet and often as a songwriter during the silver jews era is very elliptical he very rarely writes a poem that
00:29:01
Speaker
has a continuous idea or theme that you can track from the first line to the last. He writes the most beautifully constructed sentences and puts them together, but those beautifully constructed sentences may not fit together in any way that is immediately thematically obvious or even thematically obvious after prolonged reflection.
00:29:28
Speaker
but they sound right together. Almost like perfect haiku non sequiturs stitched together across a song. Exactly, exactly. And my original pitch for the name of this podcast was In the Wild Hotels of the Sea, which is the last line of his poem, Community College in the Rain, which might be my favorite Berman poem, but if you ask me what it was about, I couldn't tell you I would just read it to you.
00:29:58
Speaker
When he was older and he was writing the songs for Purple Mountains, he made a point of not wanting to be elliptical anymore. He wanted to come to the point and he wanted to be direct. And up until the Purple Mountains album, he had flirted with directness, I think, but he had always leavened it with this measure of
00:30:26
Speaker
Cryptic like you said almost like haiku like her in some cases even colon like utterances that would sort of break up the otherwise earnest direct flow of his of his images and his thoughts There's a couple exceptions with like straightforward actual like almost narrative storytelling, but they're very few I think I could probably count them on one hand if not two fingers, but yeah, exactly Yeah, yeah
00:30:54
Speaker
And so when he sat down to write for Purple Mountains and he put his hand to being direct and being unambiguous, it turned out he was about as good at it as anyone who'd ever lived.
00:31:08
Speaker
And that was, I think, the entry point for me because it reinforced for me, oh, this guy knows exactly what he's doing. He has absolute and utter command of his art. And when he's being elliptical, it's not because he doesn't. It's basically it's not because he. How do I say this? There's a certain kind of writing that you see it in poetry and you see it in song lyrics that I have a particular allergy to.
00:31:37
Speaker
The person who always comes to mind for me is Tori Amos. Have you ever spent any time with any of Tori Amos' music? I think I've probably wound up with a couple songs on repeat at different points in my life, but I can't even tell you which ones.
00:31:51
Speaker
Okay, so incredible musician and has some amazing songs out there. And from time to time writes amazing lyrics. I mean, the lyrics to, you know, like the song Crucify, for instance, are pretty damn good. But she, especially as she started, I guess maturing as an artist a little bit, would write these like stream of consciousness nonsense lyrics that I think meant something to her.
00:32:17
Speaker
But it really just sounds like, you know, she would like ratatouille, strychnine, sometimes he's a friend of mine. Like just stuff that doesn't mean anything at all. But I guess she just liked the way it sounded or something. And I hate it. I hate it so much. There's these songs that have the most beautiful melodies and harmonies and sophisticated chord changes. And it's just like sonically, it is the most beautiful thing you've ever heard.
00:32:43
Speaker
And then she's singing this just nonsense silliness that almost breaks the spell of everything else and most people who write kind of disjointed.
00:32:54
Speaker
uh, cryptic poetry. That's really what they're doing. They're writing that way because they don't know how to write any other way. And they, they think that these like subconscious associations that sound cool to them also sound cool to other people and have artistic value, but they really don't. I would even add another fold to that, which is, I mean, some of that stuff is just plain
Artistic Vulnerability & Communication
00:33:12
Speaker
bad. And even if they, I mean, I don't want to sound like an asshole, but I think even if some of those folks worked at it hard to be more meaningful and direct, they would not be
00:33:24
Speaker
very successful. But I think there's also the poets who start that way. I might argue most poets start that way is my guess, and have the potential to really produce meaningful poems, meaningful art. And the reason that they start that way and might even stay that way forever. And that's a
00:33:49
Speaker
that does injury to where they could have gone with their talents is because it's fucking scary to actually bear yourself. And I think a lot of that stuff, a lot of that acrobatics, and I'll even include myself in this because I think I'm still semi stuck in that myself. Not that I've been writing a lot of poetry recently, but I have in the past. And I did fall into that kind of a mode. And I think
00:34:14
Speaker
if I'm going to psychoanalyze myself and then unfairly project that onto all poets of all, you know, forever and ever, I think a big chunk of it is like, we, we, it's scary to be vulnerable. And to be direct is to be vulnerable on some level. And to do that,
00:34:35
Speaker
irrespective of it being good or not good, as in like an actual artistic achievement, I'm saying that completely untethered from an institutional definition of artistic, like genuine, just like it's connecting with millions of people, thousands of folks. Fuck. That's hard. It's so scary. No one wants to be mocked or made fun of or shot down, or you're just like pulling off your goddamn shirt with a, with a gash.
00:35:05
Speaker
and you're allowing not only the gash to be seen, it's not like you're throwing salt in the gash, but you are...
00:35:11
Speaker
You're speaking directly to it, to use an image that is probably overused, but I'm just trying to hit this as close as I can. It takes guts. And I think some people work up the guts to do it and some don't. And I think he did, in spite of what developed subsequently. Well, it's always much less frightening if you can be misunderstood.
00:35:38
Speaker
and hide behind the hijinks and the acrobatics. Yeah, exactly. I was just thinking about how it's like, if you're in a relationship with someone or you wouldn't be in a relationship with someone, to actually sit down in front of them and say, listen, I'm really attracted to you, or I love you, or whatever it is, that is obviously very frightening because you can be rejected.
00:36:01
Speaker
Whereas if you put hints out there, like a lot of people seem to do, especially when they're younger, you know, if the person is then not into you, you can just hide behind the, oh, no, I didn't mean it that way. You're just misunderstanding me. Writers do that same kind of thing. Like, what did you think of my poem? Well, I don't know. I didn't really get it. Well, you just misunderstood it. Right. It's not that you're not smart enough to get it. Exactly. Exactly.
00:36:31
Speaker
Yeah, I would like at some point to spend time with Berman's poetry to try to describe it a little bit. I would certainly never want to sit down and write a graduate level dissertation on it. That holds no appeal to me whatsoever.
Humor & Sincerity in Berman's Songs
00:36:46
Speaker
I wanted to say one other thing and then you can tell me about your introduction to Berman, but I can actually tell you the song that made me a Silver Juice fan. It was San Francisco, BC, which interestingly is not a representative Silver Juice song at all. It's a narrative track off of their last record.
00:37:10
Speaker
It contains the funniest line I've ever heard in a song, which is, what about the things that we quote, believe? And it was that humor, even though, like I said, that's not really a representative song for them. But it was that humor that was what brought me in.
00:37:30
Speaker
And once I got in through the humor, then I was able to appreciate the seriousness, if that makes sense. But for whatever reason, because of the way that I'd kind of unfairly stereotyped Berman as a sort of irony-obsessed Gen X, you know, mopey sort of savant, I guess it was
00:37:58
Speaker
It was his incredible sense of humor that was the thing that was needed to make me take him seriously, I guess. Which is a nice little paradox. Indeed, indeed. So your love of Berman goes back much, much farther in your life than mine does. So talk a little bit about that.
00:38:20
Speaker
Yeah, before I do that, I just want to throw in my, the only other narrative song that comes to mind immediately, Under Silver Jews, which is, I Remember Me from, which one is that, Bright Flight. And it is,
00:38:40
Speaker
Actually, I don't even think on some level it is a deeply sad song. And it was actually one of my least favorites for years. I think in part because it's a narrative. And for some reason I was resisting that. Also in part, your point about at times he can skirt the line of almost like too much earnestness.
00:39:05
Speaker
Although if I had to choose between too much and not enough or not enough, like being too fucking cool, which I feel like I hate to put it this way, but father John Misty strikes me as the opposite end of like he's.
00:39:18
Speaker
really trying to be cool and I find it extremely off-putting. I might not be giving him a fair shake. I have heard his music so he's clearly talented but even and I know this is like outside of the the purview of actual his actual music making but his interviews just make him seem like such a jerk
00:39:38
Speaker
And that was another thing I so loved with Berman. I did get the chance to meet him once. But every interaction he seems to have, not only with the public, so he had difficult relationships with his friends, complicated, but there's an unbelievable genuineness and earnestness that courses through all facets of his life. And so it wasn't just performative. And I
00:40:06
Speaker
I really love that about the music and about him as a human being, even if I didn't know him personally. I kind of fell off of listening to Father John Misty after the album that had, I forget what it's called, the album that has like holy shit and a strange encounter on it. A lot of those songs are very funny, but there is arguably, arguably
00:40:30
Speaker
something mean-spirited about some of them. And he has a song called, Only Son of the Ladies Man. Great, great song. And it has, it contains the line, I'm a steady hand, I'm a Dodgers fan. And then I saw him perform that one time and he changed the line, I'm a Dodgers fan too, I'm a sports ball fan. And sports ball is this term that was invented by people who think they're cool because they're not fans of any sports.
00:40:58
Speaker
And what, football, baseball, basketball, it's all the same. It's sports ball, ha, ha, ha. We're so cool because we don't follow sports like you idiots. And it's always, the term sports ball has always irked me. And the fact that Josh Tillman would put it in one of his songs and he would swap it out for a lyric that actually meant something about being a fan of a team in a specific location, which was relevant to the song, just really rubbed me the wrong way.
00:41:22
Speaker
That is neither here nor there. I didn't mean to go down too much of a Father John Misty side road. I just wanted to get that out there since you brought him up. Yeah, I mean, just to end the side road, I remember reading an interview with him like kicking back one tequila after another at like a hip bar, giving really sort of dismissive and rude answers to the interviewer, which I thought it's never a good sign.
00:41:47
Speaker
Even Dylan, whose work I'm not deeply intimate with, although I have high respect for, has been infamously rough on some huge superfan interviewers, which I think is not cool. And Berman was never that way with really anyone. I've not heard this with any fan that he treated that way.
00:42:09
Speaker
But I remember me, I didn't like because it actually did strike me as not only, I don't think Ernest was the word, it was like the only song in the entire corpus which felt almost saccharine. But I've since warmed to it because back to the lyricism, just the mastery of what he's done there. I mean, he
00:42:32
Speaker
is ingenious with pivoting from first to second to third person. He's genius in pivoting from past to present to future tense, and he's genius with some of the images. I'll end with this one comment, but I wanted to use this as sort of a tie-in to your San Francisco, BC, like the only narrative songs.
00:42:53
Speaker
uh in the middle of the song sort of the the uh what would you call it the major turning point is two characters are in love they're picking flowers by uh the side of a road and the man turns to the woman and asks if she'd marry him and right before she gets to respond he gets hit by a truck
00:43:12
Speaker
And the next line are, or I can't remember if it's exactly the next time, but he has two lines to encapsulate what it must be like to get hit by a truck and fall immediately into a coma. Do you remember what the two lines are? I don't. All right. You failed the, you failed the super fan quiz. That's okay.
00:43:32
Speaker
The lines are everybody. Candy jail has been canceled. There will be no more episodes until Robert finds another co-host. There will be blood until Brendan knows these lines like it's a tattoo on his soul. So the two lines that I'm like, holy fucking shit were.
00:43:50
Speaker
a black hawk nailed to the sky and tape hiss from the trees. I mean, that is fucking insane because that's exactly how I'd imagine the final images, sounds, associations one might hear right after falling into a full, becoming fully blacked out from a major accident. And like, those are those flourishes where you're like,
00:44:14
Speaker
There's only so many folks that can do this shit, and he's one of them. There are others, but he's definitely one of them. Many, many writers, including many poets who have successful published careers, will never write anything as good as tape hiss from the trees in their entire life. Or even just the Black Hawk Nails of the Sky as like this
00:44:35
Speaker
Hawk that is obviously in motion, but you've just been hit by a car. So it's just pasted onto that sky in the wallpaper of that character's mind, you know, as it's fading to black. And I'm like, fuck that is, uh,
00:44:51
Speaker
I don't know what he had to do to get that line. I mean, and there's some truth with this too, right? Like not to romanticize suffering or to say you have to be depressed in order to make good art, although I can see arguments for it on some level, but I think that knowing his story, so without turning it into a, you have to have a dark night of the soul in order to produce good music,
00:45:16
Speaker
Um, he did go through hell, like multiple, multiple hells. And so, but look what came out, you know? And so on the one hand, it's like, I'm, I, it makes me sick and sad to imagine what he went through. Um, but he was able to turn what he went through into gold and that is an incredible feat.
00:45:39
Speaker
It was, and he was able to do that until he wasn't, right? I mean, we don't want to shy away from the fact that David Berman did take his own life in 2019, and that's certainly not something that I will ever judge him for. But it is, I think, something not to lose sight of, that sometimes even when you have the talent that allows you to
00:46:03
Speaker
perhaps take something that you stumbled upon in your dark night of the soul and turn it into something beautiful that may be life affirming for other people, that sometimes also that's not enough for you.
00:46:15
Speaker
And in his case, ultimately it wasn't. And I think that adds another layer of complication and sadness to the story. And it doesn't, I don't mean that it has to be the whole story by any means, but I think it's something that's important to not lose sight of. I agree. Anyway, there's like so many side roads I could go down with that comment and we shall or we could at some point in a respectful and I hope productive way.
College Musical Discoveries & Personal Growth
00:46:43
Speaker
But in terms of
00:46:45
Speaker
the answer to your question like how did I expose to him. So I had a very still have a very dear friend from college who was a serious music lover. And we had connected actually over music initially because I was into some very obscure white guy rap that he was from my high school days because in
00:47:05
Speaker
New Mexico, we actually have a pretty healthy rap scene and certainly an independent or indie rap scene. So we like our rap adjacent non-star stars. So like Atmosphere, Brother Ali, a lot of rhymesayers. But even like, what is it, cunning linguists, folks from Southern rap scenes, really all over. But I was steeped in that from where I grew up.
00:47:33
Speaker
And so one of the bands or the labels that became the sort of indie darling band, at least for a time, was Anti-Con, which in its full spelling outedness is anti-conformity. And it's famously represented with the symbol of an ant. So their big names were Dos One, who's done a number of projects. His voice is
00:48:00
Speaker
genuinely bizarre, very nasally, almost sounds like he's got a deviated septum, and Yoni Wolf, who winds up collaborating with him on a rap experimental group called Cloud Dead, and then he formed his own band, Why, with a question mark, which is arguably the most famous thing to come out of the Anakin label, but he essentially
00:48:24
Speaker
Met dose one while he was in college they collaborated formed anaconda label i might be getting a couple details wrong but they're essentially founders along with what's the dude's name that form soul i played you a couple soul songs before his big one was selling live water which is still actually pretty interesting album anyway.
00:48:46
Speaker
When I realized that my friend or when he realized that I was listening to that music, we immediately connected and we wound up forming a friendship. And it was a fairly lonely period in my life as I think it is for many college, you know, first semester college students where
00:49:03
Speaker
I mean, there's certainly some people that are 18, 19, 20 that actually are literally like our mature adults, but most of us, certainly the, the young men have heads. My head was far up my ass and I was in a bad space. So to make a friend in those moments is crucial, you know, for so many things, including success in college, but yeah, just general wellbeing.
00:49:29
Speaker
to find even one or two people that you can connect with like that. So we connected through music. He wound up introducing me to what would become my best friends in college for my whole college career. And we wound up moving in together. So I wound up getting just exposed to an enormous amount of music. And his close friend was from San Francisco and had grown up in San Francisco. And this guy was even more nuts with music and knew folks like
00:49:55
Speaker
i mean was going to bands that are now big names i guess at least amongst the pitchfork folks i don't mean that dismissively but he's not the name i'm about to drop is not as big as pearl jam but the microphones
00:50:10
Speaker
what's his name, Elverum, Phil Elverum of the Microphones was this other friend's favorite musician. So I started getting exposed to like all of these bands that constellate around people like Phil Elverum. And really understanding like, yeah, these aren't top 40 hit makers, but amongst certain groups and certainly the artsy folks, they were like gods.
00:50:37
Speaker
So I got introduced to a lot of bands adjacent to folks like Elverum. And all of a sudden, I'm confronted by my friend Joey. That sounds aggressive. I am introduced by my friend Joey to Silver Jews. I remember exactly where we were. So we wound up in LA because we were in college in Southern California, not in LA, but about an hour away.
00:51:03
Speaker
And there's a wonderful music store there that anyone who's from LA surely knows, and certainly music nuts know, which is amoeba music. They have movies too, but they're, I think, primarily known for their enormous music selection, vinyl, CD tapes, everything out of print, you know, recently released vinyl, everything.
00:51:25
Speaker
So we're on our way back from an Amoeba trip and he throws on Starlight Walker. He's like, check this out, man. First song comes on was just sort of the Hello My Friends intro, famous, wonderful intro. And I'm like, I don't know, this isn't even a song. And then comes the opening jingles to Trains Across the Sea.
00:51:49
Speaker
And I was completely hooked from the beginning to the end of that song. And I do think the lyrics were hitting me in ways that I'd never been hit before by lyrics, but it was actually, I think his final like, the way he hums that at the end, which is so, if you really focus on that, that's like his version of the lead singer of Counting Crows doing his weird like, yeah, you know, those weird fucking things he does. And you're like,
00:52:18
Speaker
You either love it, or you can tolerate it, or you can't. But that's what will lose a million fans right there, because some people are going to find that annoying. I was immediately endeared to those idiosyncrasies of Berman's. I was like, it's not musical even, really, but it's so personal. It's like what you would do in your closet in front of the mirror when no one's around, and he's doing it recording. And it's clearly coming from such a personal place.
00:52:46
Speaker
So that song, and then when New Orleans came on, he might've jumped straight to New Orleans, knowing on some level that that was a good one to get someone hooked. And when he did the alpha, delta, gamma, I actually predicted gamma, so I must've been not too stoned in my science class in high school, because I remember Joey turned to me, he's like, how'd you know that? I was like, I took biology class, and I guess I remembered that one fucking thing.
00:53:14
Speaker
But those two songs, I was immediately like, this is my person. This is my band. And I just went full like mainline Silver Jews. And I probably had...
00:53:31
Speaker
I wound up having American Water playing on repeat the rest of the summer. That must have been a spring semester. So when I went home for the summer, I just had American Water playing literally on loop the whole summer. So that was my introduction to Silver Jews, was my friend Joey in a car, Starlight Walker.
00:53:52
Speaker
specifically Trains Across the Sea and New Orleans is what made me a, what I would, what I've now discovered to be a permanent super fan. So. It's interesting that it's those two songs because those are the two songs on that album that are, that grabbed me the most as well. I think New Orleans especially, I think contains this, it's classic Berman.
00:54:21
Speaker
in that the music is incredibly, you know, it's a very minor chord driven. The lyrics contain references to the gray half light of the hallway at night and these very somber, lonely images. And then in the middle of it, just as the music is sort of reaching a crescendo and we're preparing to go towards what we think might be the climactic verse he sings,
00:54:49
Speaker
there is a house in New Orleans, not the one you've heard of, I'm talking about another house. And it's this completely corny joke that somehow lands perfectly within the context of the song and then it immediately gets very serious again after that. That is sort of classic Berman in terms of
00:55:08
Speaker
providing the comic relief in the middle of the most serious moment and thereby both the comedy and the seriousness being heightened by that juxtaposition.
00:55:20
Speaker
And the imagery, right? I mean, I was going to say, if there's any word or any image that recurs throughout his albums and his poetry, if you put a gun in my head and like, which one is the most frequent?
Berman's Imagery & Literary Influences
00:55:34
Speaker
Like I mentioned, petulant is a Stephen King favorite, right? And actually, it does show up in Hearts in Atlantis. I highlighted a few. We're reading listeners. We're getting ready to discuss another Stephen King book. But anyway.
00:55:49
Speaker
Hallways. It's all over the place. All over the place. And so are hangers like coat hangers. He mentions a cold white maple hanger or husbands on the run in Trains Across the Sea. You encounter a maple hanger of actually just a hanger of a different color
00:56:07
Speaker
in one of his poems in actual air. So for the real nutcases like myself, although you seem to be there with me, you can do some heavy David Berman Kabbalah, which I think would not be academic analysis and just go, wow, look at how many images and associations connect across his entire body of work, not just the musical albums, but the poetry. Some of them are so
00:56:36
Speaker
clearly close to him for reasons that I would be maybe interested in exploring, but, you know, just that those are his images. Hallways are one of them. I mean, the hallway is a central recurring thing for him. Yeah. I'm looking right now at a poem called If There Was a Book About This Hallway, which is a fantastic poem, of course. But yeah, it's one of those things that he comes back to again and again. And
00:57:05
Speaker
There are definitely thematic echoes or even deliberate references between some of the song lyrics and some of the poems. Is that that poem where he says something along the lines of like, if Jesus had died instead of on a cross in a hallway, would people wear little hallways around their necks? Yes. I love that. The exact line is, if Christ had died in a hallway, we might pray in hallways or wear little golden hallways around our necks. So fucking good. Yeah.
00:57:35
Speaker
Um, yeah, yeah. There's a, I never heard him talk about, and in generally, generally speaking, I hate this kind of thing where like somebody, an artist is being interviewed and they're like, who are your influences? And, you know, then they, the artist in question lists off these people who are influential to them. And like, the only thing I've ever taken away from that is like, if I like someone and they like someone else, maybe I should go check out that thing that they like. Right. But trying to trace like.
00:58:03
Speaker
you know this person got this from pavement but they got this from this other you know I don't I don't care and it's half the time people don't even know so I don't know if Berman ever talked about what his quote-unquote influences were and I don't really care
00:58:18
Speaker
There's a bit of Billy Collins in there. I don't know that you can imagine Berman writing the way he did in a world that didn't have Billy Collins in it. But I suppose that's probably true of a lot of people who were writing poetry, you know, late 20th century, early 21st century. But it's that kind of humor, except Billy Collins is usually working up to a sort of a punchline at the end of the poem, which is also sort of the emotional
00:58:47
Speaker
release or payoff. Yeah, the emotional release at the end of the poem is often kind of a punchline in a Billy Collins poem and Berman will
00:58:56
Speaker
put punchlines much earlier in the poem, and he wields humor in a fundamentally different way. And I've just never, I mean, just reading, let me just read titles of poems from actual air. Classic Water, Governors on Samanex, the Coahoma County Wind Cults, Tableau through Shattered Monocle, Community College in the Rain,
00:59:26
Speaker
The Night Nurse Essays from Cantos for James Missioner Part 2. I think if I just picked up the book at some point randomly and started looking at the titles, I'd be like, okay, I have to read this. Because even the way that he's wielding words in his titles betrays this mastery and this complete originality.
00:59:48
Speaker
Yeah, like one biographical statement and then one personal anecdote as recounted by Bob Nastanovich and then recounted by me. So I hope this isn't a game of telephone or misrepresenting how
01:00:01
Speaker
Nastanovich remembered it because he and Malcomus, as you brought up, all wound up, I think, at University of Virginia at the same time. And it's important to note, because Nastanovich brought this up, he was like, and he says this, he's like, listen, I was a normal, I'm, you know, I'm an artist, but I'm kind of a normal guy. And
01:00:23
Speaker
I realized very quickly that David Berman and Malkmus were not normal guys, and maybe on some levels, especially Berman, because he would encounter these major talents in the English department that were well-respected poets in their own right and had published many books, one of which being James Tate.
01:00:46
Speaker
And then Tate Berman would I think gladly say was a major mentor of his, but apparently according to Nastanovich, they literally treated Berman who was 20.
01:00:56
Speaker
as a colleague, as an equal. And I remember him saying like, it was just fucking so surreal to be around my young friend who I was like, you know, drinking beers with, fucking around with as a kid, and then watching him be spoken to almost deferentially by tenured, highly esteemed professors who were treating him that way because he was turning in work at 20 that they were like, this is this person is an equal.
01:01:25
Speaker
an anecdote just to give you another sense of how seriously Berman was taking it. Mostanovich apparently went to his house or where he was renting near the University of Virginia, I think it was while they were still in school, and they were going to pull a prank on him, go around to his window because he was typing in front of his window and knock on the window to be like, hey, asshole, let's go get some beer, stop fucking doing your homework.
01:01:51
Speaker
And just before they were about to tap their knuckles on the window, they noticed, or Nastanovich noticed, he was in a state of deep, intense focus. And he was biting his lower lip so hard, it was literally bleeding, and blood was running down his chin. And he turned to his friend, and I'm not sure if they both had the same thought at once, or if Nastanovich thought it and then said, hey, man. But he was like,
01:02:20
Speaker
leave him alone. He's in the thick of something. Don't fucking interrupt him. But I remember him saying something like, obviously that was intense. And there might be an argument like that that was an indicator of like, maybe you do need to chill a little bit. But also he was taking it very seriously, very early. And I think Nastanovich was recognizing like, whoa,
01:02:41
Speaker
this is kind of what it takes to not only get to the point where he's at but to maintain it and maybe even extend beyond it and just being impressed by that kind of discipline to be a poet at the level that he wanted to be.
01:02:58
Speaker
One other detail, biographical detail that we didn't mention with him was that his father is a well-known right-wing political lobbyist, a man who has and will defend the most evil causes with articulate passion if they pay him enough money.
Impact of Berman's Family & Artistic Collaborations
01:03:22
Speaker
And he's sort of a
01:03:24
Speaker
a living, breathing avatar of literally pretty much every single thing that is wrong with American politics. And Berman, at one point, released a statement calling his father a, what was it, a world class piece of shit? World historical. World historical piece of shit, that is correct. And they, as far as I know, they never spoke again. His father did issue a statement when Berman died, but he was, I think, a man who was haunted
01:03:55
Speaker
I mean, I think he was guilty at being his father's son, and I think he took on himself some of the guilt that his father should have felt, but apparently does not feel almost like he felt it was his cosmic duty.
01:04:10
Speaker
The Berman who is responsible for this shit will not feel guilty about it, so therefore another Berman has to feel guilty about it is almost the sense that I get. If there's a famous Silver Juice song, obviously it would be Random Rules from American Water, which is an absolutely fantastic song. But the closing lines of that song, which is for the most part a funny song, right?
01:04:34
Speaker
In 1984, I was hospitalized for Approaching Perfection as the famous opening line of that song. But at the end, he says, now you know my middle names are wrong and right. And I think he really struggled deeply with ethical questions with how to be a good person, with taking on the weight that he'd inherited from his father. And I think for people who
01:05:02
Speaker
are maybe wired in a similar way. People will recognize that in Bergman, even though he doesn't always come out and say things as clear as, now you know my middle names are wrong and right, but it's there in the music and it's there in the poems. And once you see it, you will start to see it in more and more places.
01:05:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, there's another song where I think it's actually Malchmus singing, although it might be, I can't remember now, but it says something like, and my father came in from wherever he'd been and kicked my shit all over the room. And then it's repeated by Malchmus. And, you know, I think it reveals like he was, he and Malchmus maybe both could identify, I don't know Malchmus' biography too well, but as being latchkey kids to some degree,
01:05:55
Speaker
He was clearly a mama's boy. I'm putting that in the best sense. There's a reason why he wrote, I loved being my mother's son. And his father basically never gets an explicit reference really almost aside from that line, as far as I know.
01:06:12
Speaker
And I don't even know if that's biographical, but it just as well could be. I believe it could be based on what I've read. But yeah, he grew up in Worcester, Ohio and spent a big chunk of his life with his mom who divorced his father. And then I don't remember the reasons why, but he wound up moving in with his dad in, I think it was Dallas as a teenager and it was a very difficult transition for him. And I imagine a lot of the antagonisms
01:06:41
Speaker
as they carried over into his adult life really maybe solidified in those years he lived with just he and his father in Texas.
01:06:55
Speaker
Did you ever get into pavement at all? I've tried, man. There's a couple of songs I really like, I think mostly from Wowie Zowie, which is one of their more famous ones. I think they deserve attention and I they deserve my attention more. And I think part of it, dude, is I've just been too fucking spoiled on Berman's lyrics. And even though I think, you know, to your point, right, not to
01:07:22
Speaker
not to throw the instrumentals or whatever you want to call it, the arrangements, the musical arrangements of silver Jews records under the bus, I would, I think it's probably fair to say without being a pavement expert, they're more technically impressive. But yeah, it just doesn't, there's not enough there for there hasn't been enough there, I haven't found enough to really make me want to stick with them. But I'm, I definitely feel a
01:07:49
Speaker
Continued nagging need to give them their due. How about you? No, I never did any and I'm prime Like I'm the right generation to have gotten into pavement when they were putting out records and I didn't I don't know why I mean I was aware of them and Every time I've come back since I've been older it's
01:08:14
Speaker
It's Malcomus's voice, I think. I love him as a backup singer. I love when he's a backup singer for Berman's songs. I love him as a lead guitar player. He's incredible. But I've never been able to engage with the pavement music.
01:08:34
Speaker
Well, there goes any chance we have of getting Bob Nastanovich on the podcast, I guess. You mean because we are not pavement literate? Yeah, because I was just shit talking Stephen Malkmus' voice. Well, I think that's okay. I don't want to speculate too much, but in a way, he almost lays out that he was stuck in the middle between Berman and Malkmus.
01:09:02
Speaker
and basically confesses himself in saying he's not as talented as these guys and that they are towering talents. And he feels, he felt very blessed to have just sort of randomly wound up in the right place at the right time, not just for a musical career, but just to be around these tremendous people, you know, these tremendous artists and be their friends and work with them.
01:09:26
Speaker
Well, oh, you know, as you just framed it, I think it was almost a perfect framing of Malkemises and Berman's
01:09:37
Speaker
stormy relationship, stormy friendship. I mean, Berman was adamant. I think he wound up recording Natural Bridge in secret, as in he didn't tell Malcomus he'd recorded it because he was adamant on not becoming what he was terming a pavement side project. He really wanted to make it clear, like, I am my own person. I don't need Malcomus. If he wants to come and help,
01:10:00
Speaker
that's great, or work with collaborate, but I'm not his sidekick. And maybe Malcomus, even if it's not as spelled out, felt similarly, right? And there was a, it seemed like there was a constant sort of push and pull. I remember in a phone interview that that one YouTuber had posted that was trying to write a biography or a, at least a band biography of Silver Jews, she was
01:10:26
Speaker
going to throw in her hat for a competition to get funding to do this. Berman had, as was characteristic of him with his fans, agreed to talk to a total stranger about his life for hours. And she recorded the phone calls. The book never got written, but after he died, she was generous and posted the discussions on YouTube.
01:10:46
Speaker
And she asked him about Malchmus. And so he talks about it in lots of different ways, but it was interesting. And the point, I think, he says he and Malchmus' friendship really became strained was when he heard a line on a Pavement album that said, I've got style for miles. Or like, I've got style for miles and miles. And you could just tell like,
01:11:09
Speaker
Berman was reacting to something he felt was too slick and self-satisfied and hip. And I think Malcomis might have also not automatically been that way, but he's not that good of a writer. The same way that Berman's not that good of a guitarist. And instead of that allowing to coexist, I think there was a very, not even beneath the surface, like a fairly exposed competitiveness that might've been there from the beginning.
01:11:39
Speaker
Yeah, I remember listening to a podcast not too long ago, and I don't remember what it was, but I mean no disrespect to anyone who was on it. I think Nastanovich might have been interviewed on the podcast, but it was people who were fans of Berman, but also fans of Pavement. And I remember one of them cited a Malcomist line and said, God, that's such a great line.
01:12:00
Speaker
And I thought, well, it's not really like it sounds OK. I don't think it means anything, but it doesn't also. I don't know. I mean, I understand that all of this is so subjective on some level, but there are phrases that do not make any literal sense.
01:12:18
Speaker
that have the ring of truth to them. And there are phrases that make no literal sense and also don't have the ring of truth to them. And the Malcomus example that he cited, whatever it was, fell into that latter category. Is that enough for me to judge Malcomus' entire body of work? Of course not. But it is interesting to me that both of us, after getting into silver Jews, were sort of stymied in our efforts to get into pavement.
01:12:47
Speaker
I don't say this to throw Berman under the bus because at this point I think it has to be clear to you, but I hope to listeners that this is about as important and dear an artist to me as any artist that's ever existed, any human that's ever existed.
01:13:04
Speaker
He's human, the same way that Malcomus is human. And egos were involved, I think, on some level. And in spite of that, they were able to collaborate on a number of occasions and produce phenomenal work. But it sounds like it was a little stormy, but how could it not be, right? With people this talented, no matter how evolved they are on some level, I think this is just humans being humans, right?
01:13:34
Speaker
Yeah, no. Collaborators always have the same issues over and over again. I don't know how many times I've asked you to not play guitar on this podcast. Don't worry, I won't play because in this instance, I'm fairly clear about my limitations with that activity. I recorded an episode of Candy Jail in secret. I'll let you know when I make it public.
01:14:03
Speaker
I think what we should do is, and we've talked about this a little bit off mic, but I would like to go through David Berman's discography album by album and devote maybe an episode to each album, but not do it all at once.
Future Podcast Plans & Starting Points for New Listeners
01:14:22
Speaker
Definitely.
01:14:23
Speaker
Let's start at the beginning. We'll release whichever one we decide to start with, whether we go chronologically or not. We'll release the first one and then we'll do some other regular Candy Jail episodes for a few weeks and then we'll come back and we'll do Berman again. We'll do another album and that'll be sort of an ongoing project here, but we do need to honor the namesake of our podcast and we have been skirting around him for a while now.
01:14:48
Speaker
And I just want to, for our sakes, but also for our listeners, if this actually sounds exciting to them, when did we release our first episode? And I promise it's, it's tied into this. I don't know. You think I keep track of this fucking shit, man. Hang on. Let me check. May 17th. Okay. How about we make a loose agreement, loose, no binding contracts.
01:15:18
Speaker
that we do an episode on every Silver Jews album by May 17th of 2024. Okay, yeah, that sounds reasonable. On the first year of our podcast, we have taken a first pass at Berman Silver Jews Corpus.
01:15:38
Speaker
Yeah. So anybody who's out there listening, I think we kind of assume that if you're here, if you found us, you probably have some sense of who David Berman is, but if you don't and you're intrigued, is it even possible to recommend like a good consensus starting point, Robert? I actually think it makes sense. There's a, I've thought about this a lot. I think it makes sense.
01:16:02
Speaker
to start with random rules just because it's catchy it's it's got the ingenious lyricism plus malcolmuses incredibly lush and rich guitar and i think it'll provide a good entry point toe hold for new people that are trying to
01:16:23
Speaker
just get a toehold with Berman's work. I've got my own personal quirky ideas about where people could start instead, but my gut would say start there as like a go-to response. What about you, man?
01:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, I think I would agree with that or anything from the Purple Mountains record, but maybe specifically either the song Darkness and Cold or the song Margaritas at the Mall. Yeah, good choices. And that band really was Berman with the Brooklyn band Woods, so we ought to give Woods a shout out while we're here.
01:17:03
Speaker
And they're also a great band in their own right. I really like their music. And I don't think I've encountered an album I didn't like. It's very different from Silver Jews, but it's really good stuff. So yeah, I'm glad you brought that up.
01:17:19
Speaker
Yeah, my understanding was that for a while when that album was in the works, he was working with Dan Behar, aka Destroyer, but that that didn't work out at all, that their working styles were just totally different, and what he really needed was to connect with those guys in woods.
01:17:35
Speaker
There are two podcasters. I haven't dipped deeply into their podcast, but it's called Joker Man, clearly a reference to Bob Dylan. These are big Bob Dylan fans. I was listening to their Purple Mountains episode just to refresh my memory of how they talked about it before we got on. And they bring this up, the Behar Recordings. And apparently,
01:17:57
Speaker
the words that were used to describe what it sounded like were harsh and brittle. And I think brittle was the other one. And both of them were like, if I could think of two words least associated in my mind with Berman's entire sort of approach, it would be those words. So it's clearly, it wasn't meant to be, but it sounds like they both recognize that and parted amicably.
01:18:22
Speaker
Harsh and brittle are the two adjectives used most frequently to describe this podcast. So maybe we should change it to like brittle, harsh, handy, jail, asshole. Not the one you heard about. I'm talking about another house. They spoke of gold in the cellar that a Spanish gentleman had left.
01:18:52
Speaker
I broke in one hundred years ago With a dagger tucked in my vest Legends of gold I tried to hold A grey half-light of a hallway at night One Two
01:19:17
Speaker
We're trapped inside the song Well, we're trapped inside the song