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16. The Natural Bridge (Part 2)
55 Plays11 months ago
The second part of our deep dive into the 1996 Silver Jews album The Natural Bridge.
Silver Jews recorded on Drag City records.
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:00
Speaker
I really am not interested in your interpretation of anything whatsoever except the line, little glowing cum buckets on her ankle. I'm just here for that exegesis, really. What's funny though is that I actually have an answer to that. Hey everybody, welcome back to Candy Jail part two of our deep dive into
00:00:29
Speaker
The Silver Jews album Natural Bridge from 1996. We tackled the first three songs in our episode last time. And I said that this is going to be a two-parter. We're not sure yet. This may end up being a three-parter. But we figure if you're here, that's because you love spending time with this stuff as much as we do.
Deep Dive into 'Ballad of Reverend War Character'
00:00:54
Speaker
So we finished up last time talking about track three, Black and Brown Blues. And that's going to take us to track four, Reverend War Character. Ballad of Reverend War Character. Ballad of Reverend War Character. Miss Mary Jane measures rain in a cracked cup on the sill.
00:01:22
Speaker
In Embry's last photograph, he disappears over a hill. Darrell Dodson waits in the grass for a fight. Robert, go ahead and pick it back up, man, whenever you're ready.
00:01:47
Speaker
Well, I definitely get straight into the granular details in this song in ways that maybe I certainly did in the others, but I go, I basically dive headfirst into like some of the interesting, I don't know, factoids, if you want to call it that, that I was able to either
00:02:08
Speaker
with more or less 100% confidence, verify, and corroborate, and others that are pure speculation. So before we get into that aspect of the song, what was your general feeling about this one? Did you like it? Did you dislike it? Favorite lines? Anything that comes to mind for you?
00:02:27
Speaker
I love this song and I'm trying to get the lyrics to come up on my computer right now so that I don't have to bring them up on my phone and I keep hitting the wrong button, I think. Do you know that Windex tears are flowing from your monitor's face? They actually usually are because I have a glass monitor and I'm always spraying Windex on it to get my grubby little fingerprints off of it. There it is.
00:02:52
Speaker
That pristine feeling when you buy a new laptop and you take it home and then you touch it and then you feel like you've despoiled it. Yes. It's like even if you're not watching porn on it, you still feel like just by virtue of using the laptop, you've somehow lowered it from its state of celestial out of the box designed by Apple and California purity.
00:03:18
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Then I just think of the Foxconn factory in China and feel better about it since it's already despoiled just because it exists, right?
Themes of Wealth and Power
00:03:29
Speaker
Yeah, you're absolutely right. So my favorite line in this, by the way, is the new girl in Tahoe has swallowed Sinatra's cum, which is just...
00:03:43
Speaker
If you don't pay attention to it, it sounds like a gratuitously obscene kind of throwaway remark, but it's really not. Like it conjures really that couple, it conjures this entire universe of kind of wealthy mid-century debauchery and the, you know, you can imagine the entire scene and you can imagine Sinatra being exactly that guy who is
00:04:11
Speaker
constantly surrounded by young women who are being paid to sexually please him, whether they fully understand that's what they're being paid for or not. And there's this sense of seediness, manipulation, corrupted power dynamics, general hedonism, and I'm usually in favor of hedonism in all its forms, but this is just such a
00:04:39
Speaker
sort of a loosh, seemingly depressing kind of hedonistic world that gets conjured up by that single line. And yet delivered without judgment, you know, you don't get this, and there's not like a follow up like, and that was fucked up. It's just like, or maybe delivered without comment. It doesn't editorialize on top of the
00:05:01
Speaker
pronouncements, he just paints the pictures, right? Exactly. It's just one little scene in a series of scenes, each of which evokes something. In Embry's last photograph, he disappears over a hill. I don't know what Berman had in mind when he wrote that. When I ever hear that line, I think of, just for whatever reason, because of the way my brain works, I think of Mallory and Ervin on trying to summit Everest.
00:05:32
Speaker
the last photograph of them before they disappeared on their summit attempt. I think that kind of explorer from a bygone age is what he's trying to capture with that. Well, let's linger on that for a second because the title of the song is Ballad of a Reverend War Character.
Historical and War Allegories
00:05:53
Speaker
ballads are obviously well trodden traditions kind of song. Maybe it's tied to a particular time period, even the ballad itself as a sort of poetic form, but I don't necessarily want to go there. I want to go with like, he's a reverend war character. How do you understand that? If the person singing in theory
00:06:20
Speaker
is, I mean, Berman singing, but is assuming the persona of a reverend war character. Which war might this be tied to? Just forgetting about like the chronological mess that would come from like, wait, there's freeways, there's cars, so it can't be that far back. Don't worry about that. What's the first war that comes to mind when you think of whichever war this reverend might be tied to in Berman's imagination?
00:06:50
Speaker
I don't even know how to articulate the way that I've always heard those words together in my mind. I don't know. I have no idea what the fuck it means actually.
00:07:04
Speaker
My guess is he was thinking of the Civil War. I did do some digging into these names because he name drops a lot of people, which could very easily be names he made up, but I did happen to find actual human beings that were tied to some of these names.
00:07:23
Speaker
Now granted, Embry is tougher because we only get a first name, we don't get a last. We could assume actually it's his last photograph like he himself is a photographer, even though Embry is disappearing over a hill. It could be a self-portrait, but I discounted that. Here's what I got.
00:07:44
Speaker
My best guess after doing a little digging is James C. Embry. He's a bishop from the Civil War era who played a prominent role in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. I found a portrait of him taken in the 1870s or thereabouts, but no photo of him, quote, disappearing over a hill and quote. So maybe a different Embry, maybe the self same Embry with a photograph I've yet to find. But I'm going to give you more details about these other names that I think will
00:08:14
Speaker
hopefully make a case for he did actually find real people to draw from. Whether or not they're known or obscure is a different discussion, but I'm going to make the argument that they are in fact real people that existed. Period. But actually interesting, Embry himself, right?
00:08:38
Speaker
was essentially irreverent. So now I'm like, huh, I wonder if he actually is assuming the persona of James C. Embry. That would take a lot more digging for me to figure that out. But anyway, any thoughts with what I just shared before I keep going? It's interesting sometimes the way that I approach Berman, I am normally the sort of person where
00:09:07
Speaker
I want to know what the references are. I want to know not just what the superficial meaning of something is, but what the subsurface meaning of it is. In fact, I don't like references that I don't get. If somebody makes a reference that I don't get, I want to go look up that thing so that I know it, and I have that now in my mental library. With Berman,
00:09:36
Speaker
sometimes are often actually stop myself from doing that. And I'm not saying that that's the right thing to do. I'm saying that there's so much with Berman that has to be unpacked and that can be
00:09:56
Speaker
you know, so many sort of scholarly routes that you can follow that can take you so far afield and each reference leads you to another reference leads you to another reference and you keep digging and you keep digging and it is almost a kind of literary exegesis even though we kind of are using that word semi-seriously here sometimes and
00:10:21
Speaker
I just sometimes haven't, because I know once I start, once I start, then I'm not going to stop. And once I figure out who Embry is, then I'm going to have to figure out who everybody else in the song is, and I'm just going to keep going. And you've done that work, or at least you've started to do that work. But it's unusual for me to have to be so comfortable with the fact that I have not done that work about something that I like so much, if that makes
Cosmic and Existential Themes
00:10:47
Speaker
sense.
00:10:47
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. And I would say like, I've never done that work until four days ago. And the only reason I did it was because I wanted to be as exhaustive as possible. So I agree with you that like, back to what we said, opening this now multi-part episode on a single album, the point if there's, if we could even say there's a point is to just enjoy the music.
00:11:11
Speaker
and to connect with the music emotionally before you try to get at it analytically, cerebrally. I'm just doing it because this was the opportunity to do so, but I'm definitely in your camp of like, I resisted that, not like actively, but I just never felt compelled to until it was finally dawning on me, oh, we're gonna discuss this album in a potentially methodical, systematic way. This is the time to do it if there ever was a time.
00:11:39
Speaker
Anyway, Daryl Dotson waits in the grass for a fight. I have no idea who Daryl Dotson is, but I did look up that name, and that name came up multiple, multiple times in different registries of southern states. So it wouldn't be surprising to me that he had come across this name.
00:11:59
Speaker
I suspect it's the pleasing alliteration that rolls right off of the tongue, and that's why DCB chose to use it. So then we get a reference to Stars, which is another recurring image spread throughout the whole album. I brought that up maybe in part one, but
00:12:22
Speaker
I know we brought up eyes. So I want to bring him another one, which is stars and just say like, we need to start tracking when he mentioned stars because they come up multiple times in the album. This I think is the first reference. So he sings, the stars don't shine upon us. We're in the way of their light. And he repeats that twice. In this moment, the reference to stars seems to throw human beings into negative relief.
00:12:52
Speaker
The stars don't shine upon us. We are simply in the way of their light. So certainly it's a poetic way in my mind of Berman sharing his views, perhaps on the ultimate value of humankind, maybe, but at the very least, like we are, it is beneath the stars to shine on human beings. That's how I understood it. How did you, does that more or less work for you or did you read it differently?
00:13:17
Speaker
No, I didn't really read it differently. It evokes for me something maybe a little bit astronomical or scientific than it does for you, especially because in a minute there's going to be the line in space. There is no center. You're always off to one side.
00:13:35
Speaker
It's a little bit like, are you familiar with the pale blue dot speech? No, remind me. The television show Cosmos that Carl Sagan hosted back in the 80s that was remade a few years ago with Neil deGrasse Tyson. There's a famous, the most famous scene in that miniseries is the farthest photograph that was ever taken of Earth.
00:14:04
Speaker
is Earth as taken from, oh, I don't know if it was, I don't remember if it was a voyage or something exiting on its way out of the solar system, turned its camera back and took a photograph of Earth, and Earth looks like a pale blue dot in an infinite black void. And Carl Sagan gives this wonderful voiceover about how
00:14:27
Speaker
everything, everything we know, everybody who has ever existed, everything that everybody has ever loved or fought over or worried about, every living thing that has ever lived and died is on that pale blue dot in this photograph. And when you reframe it that way, in Sagan's mind, what you're doing is not saying humanity isn't significant, what you're doing is saying
00:14:53
Speaker
this shit is precious and we need to stop thinking that we're at the center of everything because we're not and nobody's going to come to save us so we need to take care of ourselves and it also makes me think of a debate and I don't mean to go this is a long-winded answer but it's an honest answer what this line makes me think of there's a kind of uh
00:15:20
Speaker
fallacious thinking where people, when they're discussing the origin of humanity and the place of Earth and the cosmos and all that kind of a thing, they'll say, well, look at how everything had to go right for life to arise on Earth. We have to
00:15:38
Speaker
The axis has to be tilted at this exact angle. We have to be tidally locked with our moon. We have to be exactly this distance from the sun. We have to have exactly this amount of this element in the atmosphere and in the crust and everything. And if everything is so finely tuned, it has to be deliberate. It cannot be an accident that we're here. And the response to that is you're missing the point. You're looking at this the wrong way.
00:16:09
Speaker
maybe all of those things had to obtain in exactly that way for life to arise. But then by definition, any life that will arise will be like, huh, everything is finely tuned. Isn't that interesting? And it's a way of not necessarily making humans insignificant, but of misunderstanding what the significance of human beings means. So when Berman says,
00:16:37
Speaker
the stars don't shine upon us, we're in the way of their light. At first blush, it sounds like, how did you frame it? A negative reframing? That's humans and negative relief. Yeah, negative relief, right. And it does. But I don't know that we necessarily need to understand that in an overly bleak or pessimistic way.
00:17:01
Speaker
I'm going to politely agree, but also push back because I'm going to say that this line we're talking about the stars don't shine upon us. They're in the way. We're in the way of their light. We'll link up with other star references that are more of the theological variety. Whereas the second one that you reference in space, there is no center. I'm definitely in agreement with you is of the scientific variety.
00:17:26
Speaker
as in it's making maybe a hard scientific claim or statement to offset these sort of chosen, exceptional, whatever you want to call it, religious, spiritual, intelligent design explanations for how we came to exist on Earth.
00:17:48
Speaker
So I hear you. I'm just like, I want to cling to that for my own argument, which has not been fully revealed yet. But so we'll return to it and you'll see if I convince you. OK. So going off of what you then.
00:18:06
Speaker
Commented upon what comes next which is connected to this line and that we're still dealing with space imagery in space. There is no center We're always off to the side. I wrote basically essentially the same thing as what you said just with a little bit more I guess like
00:18:21
Speaker
I'm tying it to the world history narrative as I understand it. So, strikes me as a kind of 20th century update on Galileo's heliocentric universe. In the same way he empirically demonstrated the Sun, not the Earth, being at the center of our solar system. I know that even our conceptions of the universe and how big it is has changed dramatically even in the past 50 years, but that notwithstanding,
00:18:48
Speaker
The Catholic Church had a tough time with Galileo's statement, since it meant planet Earth was not as cosmologically special as they believed it to be.
00:18:59
Speaker
And in a similar vein, Berman's line that in space, there is no center, we're always off to the side humorously gets at how just like earth is not the center of the universe, neither are we. And in spite of how convinced we are of our central importance, the main protagonists of our own movies, you know, if you want to go that route where everyone and everything around us takes on a supporting role. Yeah. Fucking right. You know, give me a break. We got to get over that.
00:19:28
Speaker
I don't know if that is a nice compliment to what you said, but... Yeah, absolutely it is. And it also has scientific validity to it. Yes. And science is real, by the way. Well, some science is real. I don't know. Some of this... Amen. I've been drinking bleach and I haven't gotten sick once since. I've died a few times. Just take another sip of that invermectin there, Robert. Thank you so much.
00:19:57
Speaker
But it is, as far as we understand with the way that the universe is expanding, every point in the universe, as I understand it, appears to be the center if you are standing in that point, because everything is moving away from everything else in exactly the same way, which is hard to visualize. It's a bit counterintuitive.
00:20:19
Speaker
His way of formulating that, though, in space there's no center, we're always off to one side, is kind of an inverse or a negative relief, actually, again, of the idea that in space everything is the center, saying that nothing is the center is exactly the same principle, it's just putting the emphasis in a different place. God, that's good, man. I like it. Yeah.
00:20:41
Speaker
Which also means like appearance is not always what it seems. Like look again, don't take what you're experiencing if it seems self-evident to automatically be true. Um, anyway, that's its own rabbit hole, but I like that as a, as a kind of mantra. Yeah. And I think it is like, it is, I'll just say this here. Like we have the first line about stars.
00:21:08
Speaker
then we have this line about space, then in pretty eyes we're going to get, I believe that stars are the headlights of the angels driving from heaven coming to save us. And all of these things together make me think of Berman being preoccupied with cosmology, with the earth and sky and the night sky and the stars and all that kind of thing.
00:21:36
Speaker
If I had to guess, I would say that he'd been reading some of that stuff for, you know, Cosmos. I'm sure he watched Cosmos when he was growing up, you know, he was the right age for it. And but it does seem like a thematic and visual preoccupation here. I totally agree. Totally agree. OK, next name, John Parker, the third steps over a bird on a Wall Street window ledge. There is there are John Parker, the thirds out there, but nothing that screamed like this was the reference. But
00:22:06
Speaker
Anyway, I always assumed this was a reference to the 1929 stock market crash and the rare but nonetheless documented instances in which Wall Street investors did in fact jump out of their office windows and sometimes hotel room windows that they had checked into.
00:22:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I don't even know if it has to be specific to 29. I kind of took it as like, he's sketching these little scenes for us, these little miniature scenes. And one of them, I think he picked the name John Parker III just because it sounds like a trust fund baby. Yeah, true, true.
00:22:40
Speaker
I think one of these scenes is just a rich guy with a rich guy name who's about to kill himself because all of his he just lost all of his money through bad financial decisions and that's all we need to know about that scene.
00:22:54
Speaker
Good. Yeah. I think that's good. And also like, just to comment on the, uh, whatever you want to call it, the skill involved here, right? Just the economy in that, right? Absolutely. Yeah. Such densely packed narrative into as few words as possible is pretty impressive.
00:23:12
Speaker
Exactly, exactly. And the same thing goes for the Sinatra bit. Yes, yes. Okay, so Mahalia Roach, I looked that up. I found two, one that was born in 1859, died in 1941, born and died in Kentucky.
00:23:29
Speaker
Another born in Georgia and died in Illinois. So still, right, like essentially still southern states, save for Chicago. But it's almost as if Berman dug through some southern census data himself to extract these names for his songs. The US census I did look up was founded in 1902. So obviously they wouldn't have been registered in terms of birth, but they would have in terms of death.
00:23:56
Speaker
Um, so it wouldn't shock me, but you know what? I bet I'm in my head. Actually, I started to go, I wonder if he just started walking around graveyards and, uh, found names that he liked and wrote them down. What do you think? Yeah, I think that's as likely as anything else.
00:24:14
Speaker
Okay, classic line. In a horror movie when the car won't start, you give it one last try and he does that twice. I love this line. I think it's interesting in basically how he's naming a predictable trope cliche that we've all grown so accustomed to where fatigue by it.
00:24:34
Speaker
And yet in simply naming it, for me, it re-sensitizes me and draws my attention to it in a fresh way. Somehow it lands as an insight rather than just an apathetic throwaway observation. But how did the line land with you? Well, I read it almost as encouragement.
00:24:57
Speaker
He's reminding us, like, is the suggestion. We are in a horror movie, but we need to give the engine one more try. Interesting. Like, we all have every reason to think we know how this shit is gonna turn out, but, you know, a la Camus Sisyphus, all we can do is keep trying.
00:25:18
Speaker
That's good. And I also think like not to get too literal, but to track some of the details like automobiles do play a role throughout the album. So you have the trucker with another comment that I won't reveal because it's a key one for me to make the eyes argument work for later stuff. But then you have, as you pointed out, uh, stars are the headlights of angels driving from heaven.
00:25:44
Speaker
You also have a horse, of course, the horse is clearly not a car, but he's playing a lot with modes of transportation and we could even argue iconography that's classically tied to Americana, certainly horses and most definitely cars.
00:26:06
Speaker
and cars are essentially the modernized horse. So anyway, I don't think there's necessarily like, what's the word, tightly knit through line with the car imagery, but I do think it's noteworthy that it shows up throughout. Any other thoughts before we move on?
00:26:30
Speaker
I'm checking one thing that is not remotely important, but now I'm curious and okay, I checked the only thing I needed to check, so we're good to
Language and Cultural Reflections
00:26:40
Speaker
move on.
00:26:40
Speaker
Okay. So in a zine interview that Berman gave in 1996, the interviewer asked him, and I'm going to ask you to be Berman, if you don't mind in this exchange. So the interviewer says, ballot is another interesting song on natural bridge. Who is the extra in our midst? What did Berman say, man? Okay. The extra in our midst is supposed to be the devil from the perspective of the Reverend.
00:27:08
Speaker
The devil has brought these different characters to their individual miseries. This is not the way I see the world. It's funny though, I found out after I wrote the song by reading the origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels that an ancient Israel census taking was against Jewish law.
00:27:25
Speaker
King David tried to have one taken in 1000 BC for the purposes of taxation. The people were very upset and tried to revolt. In the Old Testament, it is explained that Satan tempted David into instituting the census. Pretty interesting, right? Yeah, so that is interesting. So I've always read that line, there's an extra inner midst. I've always read it as religious in some sense, probably in a
00:27:55
Speaker
a Jewish sense more than anything else. To me, that line almost ties into the line about Adam not being the first man and the thing with no mouth and no eyes. I could not have, however, settled on the fact that the extra in our midst was specifically Satan. I don't know if you remember, but there's a poem of Berman's where he makes a reference to
00:28:22
Speaker
something that as far as I know he made up, which was a group of mysterious uncommunicative passengers on the Mayflower who were not part of the Puritan group and who immediately walked into the woods and disappeared when the Mayflower landed in Massachusetts. And that I've always gotten such a thrill reading those lines because he so evocatively conjures this
00:28:50
Speaker
unsettling mystery and he does exactly the same thing in this song and to know that he went on the record saying it's the devil and not only that but the fact that from the perspective of the reverend the devil has brought these different characters to their individual miseries that's uh that's interesting definitely definitely so to your cum buckets question and the cum uh
00:29:16
Speaker
imagery that does pepper the album so we have this we have uh uh well it's swallowed Sinatra's cum in this one then we have cum buckets in her ankles in Dallas and we have time surf sand and cum from uh the frontier index
00:29:34
Speaker
So this person was asking Berman, speaking of work, I was reading the lyrics to the Natural Bridge on the clock yesterday when a woman I work with snatched it and began reading it. After about 30 seconds, she said, gosh, they sure do use the word come a lot, don't they? And what does what does he say to that man?
00:29:53
Speaker
Cum shows up three times on the record. When I was a kid, people always used to say cum bucket. It made a picture in my mind, cum slopped over the edges. I forgot about the word for years until forming this album. It came up again and kept sneaking into songs. Cum is a very private issue. The natural bridge has a lot of privacy issues going on inside. I thought that was an interesting, again, classically enigmatic final line, right?
00:30:21
Speaker
It has a lot of privacy issues going on inside, even the way that that's worded, as if it's the separate entity apart from himself, which I guess it is, but he clearly birthed it. I don't know, it's interesting. Yeah. We do have to remember that this is situated in 1996.
00:30:44
Speaker
references to cum, whether called cum and spelled C-U-M or not, were pretty rare in music, even like indie rock music. I mean, I remember
00:30:58
Speaker
It was five years earlier in 1991, I think was when Tori Amos's first album came out, but there's a line on her own that just because you can make me come doesn't make you Jesus. It is and I remember what a stir that line called because people were like, Oh my God, did she actually say that?
00:31:16
Speaker
And we don't bat an eye at it so much today, but I think in 96, even if you were David Berman and you were an adult and you were in an indie rock band that didn't give a shit about a lot of conventions, it still would have come across differently than it does today. And it might've been a little bit, if you were the person writing it and putting it out there, you might've been a little bit more fixated on the, or you might've thought of it a little bit differently than we're inclined.
00:31:45
Speaker
to think of it today in a different era. Yeah, I think it's a prudishness, right? That people are responding to negatively with that word, I'm assuming, right? Prudishness, yeah. American puritatical, prudish bullshit. I think people may be when that word is used to refer to a woman. Right. I don't know if there's any value in this whatsoever, but
00:32:14
Speaker
Think it's more likely to be used as a verb when it comes to women and it's more likely to be used as a noun as it is here when it comes to men and the way that we like as a society think about like female orgasms versus male orgasms is not at all the same and You know you you talk about a woman coming and all other things being equal. That's sexy That's a positive thing you talk about a man's cum and all other things being equal. That's gross and I
00:32:45
Speaker
And so I think it's a word that evokes a certain sort of sordidness when it's tied to men that is maybe, especially in something written in 1996, a little bit inescapable. Whereas I don't see myself in 2023,
00:33:06
Speaker
thinking of cum as being really like a private thing. Like it's a, how do I say this? It's like Linux. It's like Linux. It's open source. For some people it definitely is open source. Other people are rather proprietary about it. Those pieces of shit. They've got some serious DRM copyright shit on there. But I guess I just mean,
00:33:36
Speaker
Of course it's private, but the concept of coming is not private. I may not want to talk to you about your orgasms, you may not want to talk to me about my orgasms, but that doesn't mean that we think the concept of having an orgasm is a private thing. Whereas in 96, I might have thought that way, I don't know. I mean, I was 16, 17 at that age, but it really was
00:34:04
Speaker
a different time. Even though it was only 25 years ago, and Berman was a man of his time in some ways. For sure.
Behind the Scenes of the Album
00:34:14
Speaker
Moving on. Number five, the right to remain silent.
00:34:40
Speaker
What are your thoughts? This is an instrumental that sounds really cool and I'm glad it's on there and it actually kind of serves as an extended
00:34:49
Speaker
musical introduction to the song Dallas because it shares a similar musical motif. I like listening to it. I have nothing to say about it whatsoever. Sure. Me, they're really other than maybe also Pallet Cleanser for the second half of the album. Like they mentioned, he consciously referred to the Pallet Cleanser instrumental on Starlight Walker. I'm pretty sure you get an instrumental track on every single Jews album. You don't get one on Purple Mountains, but I think every single Jews album has one.
00:35:19
Speaker
I don't know if they're all in the middle of the albums or not. I'm inclined to say no, but we can check. Um, and then obviously the title is funny. The right to remain silent since there are no lyrics being sung. Exactly. All right. So Dallas, uh, unless you had anything else you want to add to instrumentals? No, just it really does sound good. Like every time that song comes on, I'm like, Oh, I love listening to this song. And I don't, I don't, I have no idea if Berman's even on it or if it's just the, the.
00:35:47
Speaker
the band members, the real instrumentalists. Yeah, it's interesting. Just to add a little bit of background on the actual recording sessions. I guess he was always anxious prior to recording, but this sounded especially wretched. Apparently he couldn't sleep for a few days, literally at all, prior to the recording and it got so bad he was taken to a hospital and they put him on something that could
00:36:17
Speaker
help him get to sleep, and he did finally sleep. Listening to some of the comments from the band that he worked with, I feel like it was the Scud Mountain Boys, actually. I need to double check that. So he did record with the Scud Mountain Boys. I don't know if it was, I think it was after, so he was in with Malcolmus and Estanovich and West,
00:36:42
Speaker
That didn't work out. He left. Then he recorded, I believe, with the Scud Mountain Boys. That didn't go anywhere. So then it was that what you're hearing on the album is actually the third band that he worked with. Wow. Okay. Okay. Thank you for clarifying. So the third band said,
00:36:58
Speaker
He I think they knocked out the first three songs maybe the first day and like in one or two takes like very easy and then it got brutal and he was like really struggling through some of those middle songs and apparently in pretty eyes that's all him playing. He's playing the guitar the whole fucking time there's a maybe a couple backup guitar to in the background but the main strumming is him and they were
00:37:25
Speaker
They thought that was noteworthy, number one, I think because he essentially knocked it out in one take and that it was just him, which was not necessarily the case for these other tracks. So this was a rough one, man. Just like psychically, physically, he struggled to make his way through this. And as you described with bailing on Malcomus and Nastanovich and company,
00:37:51
Speaker
I'm going to argue somewhat douchely. I mean, it sounded pretty rough. Like, I don't know what ruffled his feathers because they did about apparently an hour or two in the studio that had been booked by Drag City. And it's expensive, right? So they booked five days after the second hour on day one, he cut out without telling anyone. And they wound up using the recording time for pavement stuff just to try to make the best out of a shitty situation. But like,
00:38:18
Speaker
Um, even having that right. Hanging over your head before you even begin your second attempt. Um, it just seems like it was a lot of pressure. He had, uh, both inadvertently and maybe from his own decision making brought on himself, right? Yeah, no, I don't, I wasn't there. I don't know the, obviously the details, but yeah, somebody behaved like shit in that situation for sure.
00:38:47
Speaker
Yeah, it'd be interesting actually to find out what it was precisely that spooked him, or got him so frustrated that he bailed on the whole thing, because that's a pretty big decision. I didn't get that, and I'm not sure it exists explicitly, but it might be worth trying to find out. Well, I mean, it's not hard to imagine that, I mean, pavement is already famous at that point, or they're pavement famous at that point, right?
00:39:16
Speaker
And we know, because he said so, that he was concerned about Jews being seen as a pavement side project. We know that he and Malkmus were both forceful personalities in different ways. And for him to want to be in control of what was going to happen, while at the same time knowing that he was the most inferior musician in the room, at the same time knowing that Malkmus had already
00:39:44
Speaker
found success with pavement and just being incredibly self-conscious and anxious all the time. And one has to assume that Malcomus probably was not. Malcomus was probably energetic and confident in the studio, one can imagine. And I can see someone like Berman just being like, I can't
00:40:06
Speaker
This isn't what I want. I can't deal with this right now. I don't know how to communicate to you that I want you to shut the fuck down, shut the fuck up and listen to me. I don't like that idea that you're doing. That's not the sound I want. Peace out. Well, what's interesting too is like, I mean, it was, I don't want to, I'm not trying to make these comments seem like they're shot through with harsh judgments of Berman, but
00:40:32
Speaker
It was interesting because Nostanovich went on the record and said he and Malcomis found out from someone else that the natural bridge had come out. And they apparently both did a bit of a double take and did feel a little bit of, what's the word of a sting in that? Because they're like, wait, we thought as of five minutes ago, we were actually members of that band and apparently we're not. So they both felt like they had been
00:40:57
Speaker
unceremoniously but also without being announced that they were fired and It was a bit of a flight, you know, you know, it is funny There's a certain amount of irony in the fact that you know, we talked about Rattle and hum a while ago in this podcast and and you were talking about you know you you don't like you to you don't connect with them they strike you as like big and glossy and artificial but you were kind of gobsmacked by
00:41:24
Speaker
the lack of rock and roll shenanigans in the film. Now we switch over to talking about Berman. We've got it all. We've got people storming out of studios without proper notice. We've got bandmates ghosting other bandmates. We're going to have some serious drug addiction down the road here in a little bit. There was a sense, I think, in which Berman was living the rock star life there for a while.
00:41:49
Speaker
maybe like in behavior, but certainly not in paycheck or in notoriety.
Exploring the Song 'Dallas'
00:41:55
Speaker
But yes, I can see that maybe within their own small universe, ecosystem, indie music, ecosystem he was.
00:42:36
Speaker
I passed down on the 14th floor The CPR was so erotic A blizzard flew in through the door So, uh, Dallas, what were your thoughts on Dallas? Dallas is in some ways the most straightforward
00:43:06
Speaker
Well, I said that about black and brown blues, I guess, but it is in terms of having a chorus that, you know, is easy to follow, like a pop song chorus. Oh, Dallas, you shine with an evil light. How'd you turn a billion stairs into buildings made of mirrors and why am I drawn to you tonight? It's kind of a classic pop song chorus and it's a really, musically, it's a really satisfying song and
00:43:36
Speaker
It to me reads as fundamentally a song about what it's purporting to be about, which is, he's, it's somebody who's in Dallas and it's like, God, this city is shit. And I don't know why I'm really drawn to it right now. And I suppose if you were going to make the argument that this was a, as our anonymous blurb writer for Apple Music did, that this was a road trip record. I suppose you could certainly cite this song as evidence for that, but, um,
00:44:06
Speaker
You know, we have a lot of great. I mean, the first the first couplet of the song is I passed out on the 14th floor. The CPR was so erotic. But even some of his his lyrics, like, you know, the second line or second verse, once you taste the geometry of a church and a cul-de-sac. You're going to want to sit with the bad kids in the back. Well, that makes perfect sense. As someone who grew up in the suburbs, that makes perfect for consents to me.
00:44:35
Speaker
I don't need anybody to explain that line to me. So yeah, I believe this was actually a single for the album, wasn't it? Sounds right. I mean, it has that single, that singly, jingly, in a good way, quality to it. Yeah, this is the A&R man for the record company was like, this is it. You have to put this out. This is going to be a hit, kid. Well, he said, hey,
00:45:02
Speaker
manager suppers on me, this record's definitely going to go aluminum, right? Is that line in this song? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Another great line in this song. Let me just quote it exactly. Hey boys, suppers on me, our record just went aluminum. Yeah. It's a funny song. It's a very funny song. But then it ends with
00:45:31
Speaker
some kind of strange kind of magic happens when the city turns on her lights, which is really, I mean, there's, again, country music, there's a long tradition of, you know, like the song Streets of Baltimore, for instance, there's no place on earth more beautiful than Baltimore at night, like country people coming to the big city and seeing the city lights and falling under the spell. There's a tradition of that again in country music. And again, it seems like Berman is maybe channeling that a little bit here.
00:45:57
Speaker
And I think you're right. And like, there's an emotional resonance in that final line and delivery that I find to be genuinely moving. I mean, it's sort of incredible what he is able to do again with that, with that unusual ability to allow humor to sit alongside some sadness or just genuine emotional catharsis. Uh, it's, it's, it's uncanny really. Yeah, it is.
00:46:23
Speaker
If you connect with it i think there's some that just aren't and it's not again as you put it like it's so subjective right what we connect and don't connect to and some of that is so chance related like just what voices you're drawn to we don't always know why i couldn't explain why i like this voice over another necessarily but
00:46:43
Speaker
Yeah, I find it to be every time. It's weird, right? You could hear a song 50 times and still kind of get hit a little bit by them. This one doesn't, doesn't fail to do that. Yeah. And I don't want to over it. Like we shouldn't, we're not going to do real musical analysis here. Um, maybe we're not even really getting into like chord progressions or anything, but
00:47:06
Speaker
It's not all the words like this is a good song musically. It's tightly constructed. It has a very it's just it's a very well built pop song with a good hook that doesn't overwhelm you. The band does an exceptional job with laying down exactly the right sound for this lovely little piece that Berman has constructed well musically as well as lyrically.
00:47:34
Speaker
Well, and just to add to that, like he was the first to tell everyone that he wasn't a particularly natural musician. It didn't come to him naturally. It was hard won what he was able to ultimately be able to do. And I think he still.
00:47:50
Speaker
And not only was just false humility, like he's not a bad player, but he's not Malchemist by a long, long stretch and couldn't be. And he brought up like two things I think are interesting because you brought up we're not doing a progression analysis, which I couldn't necessarily, but I happen to know just from looking at the sheet music of his.
00:48:12
Speaker
based on his own ability is that he's like, listen, all the chords, essentially in all the songs, with the exception of a few, you know, Malcomis is especially like on American water. They can get somewhat complex, even a couple on this, a little more complex, but basically they're all open notes. They're all open notes. Uh, open cord. Excuse me. Uh, is that the correct wording? Open cords, open cords is what you mean. Excuse me. So he was like the stuff you learn as a beginning guitar player.
00:48:43
Speaker
essentially is carried over through the entire catalog because that's what he felt comfortable with.
Berman's Songwriting Approach
00:48:49
Speaker
There's another detail that I think is interesting in terms of his creative, what do you want to call it, approach. And apparently this is very, very unusual for musicians, singer-songwriters. He constructed the melody before the lyrics.
00:49:07
Speaker
he would spend apparently quite a bit of time crafting for himself, even if they were open chords, so somewhat simple arrangements. He would create the arrangement and then fit the lyrics into the arrangement. And apparently Malcomus went on the record saying like, that's not how that shit usually fucking works. Like it's, he'd never met anyone that did it in that order. So I thought that was curious, but also interesting.
00:49:33
Speaker
I think Malcomus is wrong. It's interesting that Berman did it that way. I don't think it's that unusual. I think a lot of songwriters do that, that they write a vocal melody to go with a given chord progression and then the words are the last to be filled in.
00:49:48
Speaker
interesting okay fair enough well anyway at the very least that's a little bit more of a view into how he constructed these things and it's and it's a good reminder that this was this was not a case of him saying well i've got these poems i guess i could set him to music like right
00:50:05
Speaker
The reason the musical parts of this, your former guitar teacher aside, the reason the musical aspects of this are usually so satisfying is that he was taking them so seriously.
00:50:19
Speaker
Yes. And I think we also shouldn't discount mercurial friendships or not, how much these folks might have helped him make the song sound better. You know, he probably came with some progressions and with his lyrics and probably in the best moments, Malchmus was able to say, you know, if we just do this, that or the other, it'll really, it could really improve the song. And I'm sure that was happening at different points with the bands that he
00:50:47
Speaker
would always, I think in a kind way, references bands that he rented because they were players that were far, far better than he was and he needed that to make it work. Yeah, for sure. And they were happy to oblige. But I think it's interesting as you bring up the fact that he clearly was, that was maybe like further evidence, he's not just putting his poetry to songs,
00:51:15
Speaker
But his poetry was clearly a breeding ground for song ideas, and there were definite resonances, if not full-blown copies and pastes at times.
00:51:30
Speaker
So this comes from a super fan commentator on Genius that dug this up. So the line that you brought up, it opens with, I passed out, is it the 13th or the 14th floor? I can't ever remember. I believe it's the 14th. Okay. The CPR was so erotic. So the Genius commentator said, this line reflects a theme David Berman previously explored in an odds and ends piece published in the Baffler.
00:51:56
Speaker
three years before The Natural Bridge was released, it's a poem entitled The Mechanics of an Audience's Arousal. Do you want to read this for us, man? Yeah, absolutely. A young lady patiently waits to cross the street. She is a philosophy student, and while waiting for the traffic light, she considers its evenly changing mind. The light goes green and she steps off the curb.
00:52:25
Speaker
The driver whose mind is wandering does not see the light, strikes the girl, flipping her onto the roof of the car. He breaks and she rolls off into the street. She is cut unconscious, not breathing. A man in a brown sweater with a book under his arm kneels beside her and begins performing CPR. He has never touched a woman this beautiful before. Her lips are full and soft.
00:52:53
Speaker
He sends his breath deep down inside of her. Everyone at the rescue scene becomes vaguely uncomfortable. So it's interesting, right? It's not just like a CPR reference. You can see like the arousal associated with a CPR scene being, again, like condensed, packed into that opening line in Dallas. So I think he's right to latch on to this, right? What is the movie?
00:53:21
Speaker
I'm never going to remember this, and you may not know it. There is a movie, and I couldn't even tell you what decade it's from, that has a scene where a bunch of pubescent boys are obsessed with this buxom college-age lifeguard, and one of them pretends to drown. The Sandlot? Is it the Sandlot? It might be the Sandlot, actually. You might be right about that. It's the Sandlot.
00:53:48
Speaker
But there is, I mean, there's something that maybe predates Berman's notice where that has been occasionally in pop culture that, you know, the connection between CPR and sex has been kind of riffed on before. And I think Berman's tapping into it that same vein.
Cultural References and Anecdotes
00:54:05
Speaker
Good point. Yeah. There are plenty of scenes actually where like protagonists are saving someone's life that they're actually in love with and it's their first chance to actually kiss that person, so to speak. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Good point. Good point.
00:54:18
Speaker
So again, from Genius, thank you commentators on Genius. We love you. You are loved, you are seen, and you are accounted for in our census. You're not an extra in our midst.
00:54:30
Speaker
So in a 1996 interview with Addicted to Noise, Berman said he wasn't sure if he actually saw, oh, this was in reference to the line, we saw B.B. King on General Hospital in the Oak Cliff dram house where we stayed. I always heard it as Oakland, which is clearly wrong. So it's Oak Cliff dram house, which is a fucking mouthful. Can't believe he got that out without bungling it.
00:54:55
Speaker
So in an interview, he said he wasn't actually sure if he actually saw BB King on General Hospital or if he had misread an episode's credits while channel surfing. He said, quote, I had a fever last winter, says Berman, noting the line's origins and quote, I was just sort of sitting there flipping through the TV. I hit the end of General Hospital when they were showing the credits. And I guess BB King had been on the show.
00:55:19
Speaker
But I wasn't really sure if I had seen right I don't really know if it was BB King or a guy named Bob King or whatever Whether King was actually on didn't matter because what intrigued Berman was the contradictory picture He saw again quote the kind of misery on soap operas and the kind of misery in the blues and what kind of weird friction mix that would be and
00:55:40
Speaker
white, black, and everything. That was great. So I did look it up, and BB King actually was on General Hospital, so in spite of his fever and doubts, he was correct.
Emotional and Humorous Elements in Lyrics
00:55:51
Speaker
So then just to what you spoke to, but to reiterate it, like that final line pours a mouse every morning enriches a cat every night. Some kind of strange magic happens when the city turns on our lights, as you put it, like the delivery of the line. And then the music to accompany it is just so emotionally rich, I found and still find. Powerful song.
00:56:15
Speaker
Okay, inside the golden days of missing you. Inside the golden days of missing you. With the people of Cleveland, we've suffered for so many years.
00:56:37
Speaker
The shattered glass cussed And when it broke it spoke to us It said, hey It said, I know you What were your feelings, thoughts, impressions?
00:57:00
Speaker
This is one of my two favorite, sorry, two least favorite songs on the record and by that I do not mean that I dislike it particularly or that I think it's a bad song but this and one other track that I won't get to yet on the back half of the album just doesn't, I don't find it as interesting or as satisfying but maybe you, maybe you will have something to say about that that will change my approach a little bit.
00:57:29
Speaker
I had the same impression of this song for the first 500 listens and for the second 500 I came to really like it and it has grown on me since and I do think it stands as a worthy song that should be in the album. So this is actually from Genius.
00:57:50
Speaker
According to Berman, the idea for the song's title came to him when his girlfriend was watching Saturday Night Live, and he misheard the title of a faux romance novelist book in a sketch. He apparently asked, quote, did he say the golden days of missing you? Berman asked his girlfriend and she said,
00:58:11
Speaker
The golden ache of missing you and he then responded okay that's mine then so his mishearing of the skits turned into the title for the song cuz he liked liked it so much.
00:58:25
Speaker
So my favorite line is the shattered glass cussed, and when it broke it spoke to us. It said, hey, it said, I know you. What's your name? And he repeats that twice with his idiosyncratic humming. And I wrote, there's something so warm about a shattered glass personified and asking questions.
00:58:45
Speaker
Here's another recurring theme, personifying inanimate objects. In American Water, this happens twice, first in Smith and Jones, quote from those lyrics, when the sun sets on the ghetto, all the broken stuff gets cold. Then in the same album, but different song, We Are Real, he sings repair is the dream of the broken thing.
00:59:08
Speaker
And somehow empathy seems more possible when it's coming from a shattered glass or broken things as opposed to human beings. I don't know what's going on with that. That's how where I took it. But he's very smitten with
00:59:26
Speaker
breathing life into objects and letting objects speak from their own perspectives and certainly the ones that are broken or shattered. Well, he also sees great significance in, I think we talked a little bit in the Starlight episode about his preoccupation with hallways.
00:59:46
Speaker
and light, the light in hallways. And at the end of this album, there's going to be the line, one of these days, these days will end through the kitchen window. The light will bend. And that's all, that's all he says is the light will bend. And then you find yourself wondering, is that, is that a metaphor for death? Is that a reference to the last thing you will see before you drop dead in your kitchen? And he definitely seeks
01:00:15
Speaker
meaning not just in the inanimate but in the ordinary, sometimes to such a degree that the meaning seems to be coming almost from not anything unusual happening among the ordinary things but from the very existence of the ordinary things themselves. And of course, my favorite line, well,
01:00:40
Speaker
The song opens inside the golden days of missing you with the people of Cleveland who've suffered for so many years, which just makes me laugh. But then at the end, he says, what if life is just some hard equation on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts? Then you can live again, but you'll have to die twice in the end. And once again, we find ourselves somewhere
01:01:06
Speaker
sort of blinking in the light of a much more serious observation at the end of the song than we did at the beginning. It's not his best line, but I'm fond of that little verse about a science class for ghosts. Yes, definitely. I have one comment on that that's tied to his personal biography, but I'll back up and just read a previous line before connecting.
01:01:34
Speaker
He also sings, well, I wish they didn't set mirrors inside a bar because I can't stand to look at my face when I don't know where you are. Then the feeling fades away, but you sort of wish it would have stayed inside the golden days of missing you. And I just wrote, so funny and yet still walking the seemingly impossible tight rope of funny with a dash of irony cooked up with a continuous undercurrent of earnestness.
01:01:58
Speaker
And it also seems like a playful take on country genre tropes, which you seem more familiar with than I am, but I know enough about the basic rudiments. So in this case, obviously dealing with the unceasing and eternal fixation on heartache. And back to your equation piece. So I always thought of the fact that Berman actually lived in a chemistry professor's lab for a stretch.
01:02:25
Speaker
because the rent was so cheap. Now Stanovich discusses this in the preparation work he and Malcomis engaged in with Berman before recording Starlight Walker. They met to discuss the album in his literal rented science lab turned bachelor rental. So I always like to imagine this line, what if life were just a hard equation on a chalkboard in a science class for ghosts?
01:02:51
Speaker
somehow associating with his actual multi-month experience living in an actual science lab. It's not a joke this particular one. There's a song coming up that will basically be built around jokes, but his humor often has
01:03:14
Speaker
a quality that could be captured in a single panel cartoon by somebody like Gary Larson, for instance.
Spiritual and Existential Reflections
01:03:21
Speaker
Yeah, that's good. And I'm with you that the final line, even if it didn't, maybe you didn't feel like it's an all timer, I felt like with Dallas, that that line, even though we'll have to die twice in the end,
01:03:38
Speaker
We will nonetheless meet again, as he puts it. This has honestly provided me with a little solace after Berman's passing.
01:03:48
Speaker
I like to interpret it as a Walt Whitman-style commentary on death wherein Leaves of Grass or Song of Myself, Whitman wrote, What do you think has become of the young and old men? And what do you think has become of the women and children? All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses, and to die is different from what anyone supposed and luckier.
01:04:10
Speaker
As far as shattered glass Whitman takes on death goes, it might be luckier than we suppose and maybe we will meet again. I don't know. There's something in this that feels, again, maybe theological is too strong a word, but spiritually and has a kind of spiritual inflection point, doesn't it?
01:04:32
Speaker
Yeah, and that spiritual might be too vague of a word actually because he's making, you know, and this comes up for the first time in New Orleans when he says, sings very insistently, you can't say that my soul has died away. Like he's very insistent in that song that there is something that continues after our bodies die and he's returning to that idea here and it's
01:05:01
Speaker
something he seemed to come back to repeatedly throughout the course of his life. But I think that he was, obviously he thought about death a lot. He was preoccupied with it, of course, that's hardly an observation of any kind. But he pretty consistently seems to come down, at least in his lyrics and his verses, on the idea that he believes or needs to believe that there's something after.
01:05:26
Speaker
I think that's an apt observation and a good one to tie it to New Orleans and maybe other, it's all over the place. So yeah, I like that idea. Either he believes it or he wants to believe it. Or needs to, I don't know. Needs to for sure, I think. Please don't say that my soul has died away. He almost gets didactic on the point sometimes. Yeah, that's interesting.
01:05:52
Speaker
The dead know what they do what the dead know what they're doing when they leave this world behind I I think that Like the purple mountain stuff like even that line even that song but certainly the whole album like I'm inclined to feel like that one is even harder to read in some ways than these previous
01:06:17
Speaker
afterlife references with with a kind of hopeful tinge like I'm not sure I read a the soul on some level or consciousness or some aspect of me remains like I'd have to sit with purple mountains longer to really feel fully confident in what I'm about to say but my inclination is to say
01:06:40
Speaker
he dropped that, at least in the public sense. I don't see that as clearly presented in Purple Mountains, but I think that's an interesting, I mean, what do you think? We're not at that album, obviously, we have a ways to go, but I do think it's an interesting question, like, because clearly his faith was important, but we know that he had kind of turned his back on it, at least in terms of
01:07:10
Speaker
its most, some of its most explicit activities at the point at which he did Purple Mountains. Like he had completely renounced participation in any kind of organized like synagogue or temple. Didn't really have good experiences with rabbis from what I've read. He wanted to, but never felt really at ease with it. And so I wonder if he actually turned his back on his, his spiritual identity.
01:07:40
Speaker
by purple mountains or if it just changed and we're witnessing a kind of a different way of relating to a spirituality that might have been tried and tested but is still kind of sort of there. What's your sense of that? Well, I know that he retreated from and then approached closer to his Jewish heritage at different points in his life.
01:08:07
Speaker
I also know, speaking as a non-Jew, that belief in an afterlife does not form a significant part of Jewish theology in most traditions that I'm aware of. I'm 44. I think if you'd asked me when I was 24, what do you think happens after death, I probably would have shrugged my shoulders and said, I don't know.
01:08:29
Speaker
If you asked me at 34, what did I think happened after death? I would have said nothing. Of course, obviously it's nothing. Now at 44, I find myself, and I don't think I'm any less of a hardcore materialist or an atheist than I used to be, but at 44, I'm like, I don't know. I mean, probably nothing, but also maybe not. Like how could I presume possibly to know that? And as we get older, we just,
01:08:59
Speaker
if we're, I think, the sort of constantly searching person that Berman was, we have different ways of approaching these questions. And so I don't know how much connection there is between his Jewish faith or his spirituality and his conception of an afterlife. They may be more or less separate questions, separate issues. Of course, I've been humbled by the void. And here's the line, much of my faith
01:09:29
Speaker
has been destroyed. So he says it right front and center, first song. Much of his faith has been destroyed. I didn't say all of it's been destroyed, but much of it.
Conclusion and Next Steps
01:09:41
Speaker
Okay, so we're going to wrap up there for today. We're going to exercise our right to remain silent, which some of you may wish we had started exercising hours or perhaps even weeks ago.
01:10:21
Speaker
And with that, we will say goodbye to you for now and we'll be back in a couple weeks.