How To Pronounce Berman

[Jovanna Ponder]

RebeccaGleiberman she/her is a (reluctant) Florida based lover of any and all things related to books, writing and nature. In her spare time she can be found forming excessive opinions about the state of the world, making charcuterie boards and basking in a sun patch with her two cats.

David Berman is an author/poet and the principal songwriter behind the Silver Jews. I say "behind" because the band, generally mislabeled a Pavement side-project due to a shifty lineup often featuring Stephen Malkmus and/or Bob Nastanovich, rarely (if ever) performs as a physical entity, much less with Berman out in front. In fact, the best way to see Berman perform live over the past several years has been to catch him at one of his infrequent poetry readings. And until Drag City recently revealed that the Silver Jews would be releasing a new album, the highly amped Tanglewood Numbers (due in October), any word of concerts was to be taken with a bag of salt.

This interview took place via email over the course of a month. It is the meeting of what Berman dubbed "college journalism sports section vigor" and his own "cool mist of non-fiction." He was kind enough to go on record with damn near anything I could think to ask. So I was kind enough at times to inquire of familiar stories or Nashville locales, and avoid follow-up questions relating to his near-suicide. His responses reveal a confident, serious writer excited by prospects of commercial viability and a possible breakout record, but somewhat befuddled by the current level of e-scrutiny aimed at his beloved songs.* * *

Berman: When I was seven my parents divorced. My father went to Dallas. My mom fled to the shelter of my grandparents in a strange central Ohio town of 22,000, Wooster. When it looked like I was growing up to be a wimp I was forced to live with my father, which I did not want to do. Dallas in that time-- especially '79-85-- you'd never believe how interesting that place was.

I drank my first pitcher with two twins, Tim and Kim, after work. The bar manager liked to give us beer and then punish us later. We were busboys at a polo club. I remember "One Thing Leads to Another" by the Fixx was constantly playing on the radio that fall and it sounded amazing on the fry-cook's boombox washing down the floors at the end of the night. The twins, at high school they would be called "ropers." Guys who wore cowboy boots and listened to ZZ Top-- farmboys or imitation farmboys. It was just another category like "headbanger."

Berman: Cassie [Marrett, Berman's wife] and I moved here in 1999. I'd been living in an apartment colony called Mallard's Crossing beside an office park on the outskirts of Louisville. When I looked out my window, I wasn't necessarily in "sour old Louisville," an idea of a town with which I had an antagonistic relationship. The surrounding mallscape, it could have been anywhere-- Falls Church, Plano, Toledo.

In my beery mind this display of exurban contempt was the equivalent of a lone "boo" during the silent section of a live Rodan set. Sure my neighborhood bar was a BW-3, but at least I didn't have to deal with the sullen and homely hippy women that make up so a large portion of that town's rock scene. The day after Cassie graduated from college we left. It was the Titans' inaugural season. It was a great time to move to Nashville.

Berman: Listen to the song "Van Lear Rose" on Loretta Lynn's last album, and for the words "Johnson County" replace with "Louisville," and for "miners" put "local rockers." Cassie is the Van Lear Rose. I'm the stranger who comes to town. Sprinkle in a lot of wide-bottomed hippy women.

Berman: I haven't read Jeff Tweedy's poems. I leafed through Billy Corgan's but not long enough to make a judgment. These guys are professional musicians. It's kind of like football players in the 70s who started endorsing ballet lessons. Who am I to argue against sharpening agility?

All musicians should write poetry or at least read it if they want to improve their game. Except for people who believe lyrics don't matter. This is the Brian Billick theory of songwriting: Defense (the music) not offense (lyrics) wins championships (Grammys). The best teams of course have both. And the Ravens were very dull and unlikable. They weren't built to last. My songs are built to provide years of shadowplay.

Berman: I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room. I am trying to make my name as an acute observer, as a witness. I think I have always had my heart set on a certain kind of body of work I would like to leave behind. I believe that intermittent live performance has cut short the writing lives of touring musicians. If you are making an argument with history you don't waste your energy and brain cells on sales, publicity, relentless travel, and other adjoining tasks. The less my body moves, the more energy my brain has to write.

Berman: I don't know if the record makes me want to play live so much as it makes me want to play the songs again through a loud amp with a drummer there and some other players going off around me. Whether or not you plan some big "event" around that. I don't know.

Berman: Last year, I made about $16,000 from the four records that are in print. Drag City takes care of its own. Everybody who makes records for Drag City is getting the most money possible. The Silver Jews have never bought an ad. Ever. Well, once in Alternative Press in 1994, for The Arizona Record, but it was in the back and...

BMI checks are a couple thousand a year. Another couple thousand from foreign licensees. I made a movie with the artist Jeremy Blake last year. There are a couple movies with [Silver Jews'] songs in them that keep playing on Scandinavian cable at 3 a.m., apparently for the last four years.

I've never gotten a grant. Well, that's not true. I had a fellowship to go to graduate school. I never had to pay for tuition while I was there and teaching paid your other living expenses. My father paid for my undergraduate tuition. There's this famous story in my family of when my father took me out to eat when I was 18. I had been too lazy to apply to college so he'd had his secretary apply for me late. To the University of Texas and the University of Virginia (because I romanticized Virginia as a kid).

Well, I got into both (Texas was automatic). The tuition difference was large. UT back then was $350 a semester. Virginia was, what $12,000 a year? My dad likes to make games of things. He told me he wanted me to go to UT so I'd be closer to home and said that if I went to UVA he'd pay my tuition but that would be it until death. And four years of health insurance, I guess. Instead, if I chose Texas he'd pay for that plus give me the difference between the two schools' tuitions to live on. I am frankly amazed I chose Virginia. I don't remember my reasoning.

I worked in the morgue at the UVA hospital all through college to pay my rent. In the 15 years since I've graduated he's loaned me $5,000 two times when I was in trouble. The first one in my 20s, which he kindly absolved, and a second one last year trying to get back on my feet. I still owe him that one and I hope this album will enable me to pay him back because he holds it over my head every single time we get into an argument.

I guess I should add that he did pay for my rehab, which I let him, figuring at the time it was his fucking idea, and what did I care? Also, when I got out, this organization called Music Cares at [The National Academy of the Recording Arts and Sciences] helped me pay bills. It's a charity, and hopefully I'll be able to send some money back their way once America starts paying me a living wage. It probably goes without saying that I've got a credit card rotisserie system that would dazzle the ancients.

Pitchfork: You allude to personal crises of chemical habit in your songs pretty regularly. The more official pictures one can find (Drag City site, in pink shirt and ballcap, standing at what appears to be the jukebox of the legendary Nashville shithole, Springwater) make you look either shitfaced or crazy. And you are now sober, in the land of "club soda unbridled," as you once put it. How is it?

Berman: My Y2K party lasted four years longer than I expected it to. It was fun. Not the last year. The last year was bad. I went to rehab. Relapsed a couple of times. Doing good now. I went down in 1999 for a long, suitcase-battering journey of sub-aqueous intoxication, only resurfacing on January 1, 2004 in a tiny Minnesota village. There is a recent Fader article that does a good filmic version of my time away. After that article came out, I read someone on the internet who felt betrayed, by me; that I'd become a cliche. There's nothing I can do about that. The problems of performance have begun already.

Berman: There were many phases, but the final one (and the one that takes you down fast, no matter how long you've been juggling powders and pills and think you're above the lowliest drug of all) [was] crack. And Dilaudid when I needed to sand the edges off the horrorscape. Also vodka. Always and everywhere vodka. The vodka is how you clean yourself. I actually thought it was cleaning my organs.

[I took] every drug in every way from 15 on. I smoked love boat [PCP] every day my sophomore year of college. At the end it was down to crack, vodka, and binges of I.V. Dilaudid and cocaine. All backrounded by heaps of nerve-soothing pills.

Berman: I would like to turn it into a mitzvah-- be useful, maybe to a reader in trouble. Somehow. Not about drugs, about how to be strong in the face of trouble. So I gotta draw up some lessons. But in the meantime, know this: Even if there is only a one in a million chance, you better respect that chance.

Berman: Steve is always amazing. To me, he is the best guitarist in the world. If I could convince him just to play guitar for me, I'd never kick him out of the band again. Everybody writes his own parts. I showed them the songs the week before recording started. We practiced in my basement. Low-hanging pipes were cracking everybody on the head except [drummer] Brian Kotzur. The rest of us were literally collapsing on the floor with cracked skulls. On the last day of practice I bought everybody hats.

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