Not Mad About You

By Amy Sohn. Originally appeared in NYM Press Arts & Listings. October 14-20, 1998.

Poet and song writer David Berman is a rebel, a mess and a mensch. Since 1993, as a frontman for the Silver Jews, he has chronicled disaffection and loss with quirky, intelligent humour and sharp, often ambiguous lyrics. On their new album, American Water, out next week on Drag City, the Jews (whose current line-up includes Steve Malkmus, Tim Barnes, Michael Fellows and Chris Stroffolino) seem smarter and sadder than ever before. Berman says he wrote most of the songs on the road and in public spaces, and it sounds like it. With lines like, “The birds of Virginia are flying within you/and like background singers they all come in threes” and “The factories on muscle relaxers/The pine perfume of hilltown floors/the lover, the thinker, the talker, the singer/won’t be lucid for her anymore,” he takes us on a tour of the country and his own strange mind.

“You’ve been compared to Dylan. How much of an influence is he?

I’ve really just started listening to him in the last couple of years … I think he’s great, but there should be someone greater, and I don’t know what will happen, if it will happen. It’s just not encouraged. Basically, the encouragement you get if you’re a musician is to make use of the endless stupid well of young people and take advantage of that and wear cool clothes and strike poses and speak in only empty conundrums, and when that’s encouraged by rock critics and the rock business and the facilitators, you end up with a really dumb and small pool of talent.”

Examples?

“Green Day, REO Speedwagon and Hole. I had a horrible dream about worms wriggling, grubs and maggots emerging out of Courtney Love’s pussy- this nest of wriggling maggots and worms. It was so awful.

“How do you know it was hers?”

It smelled like it.

“There’s a line on the album, “I love your … Protestant thighs” Why don’t you love Jewish thighs?”

I do love Jewish, but that was a character. Remember the cutters? They were like the townies, and there was the I.U. (Indiana University) fraternity/sorority set, and so he’s just in love with a woman from afar, from the other side of the tracks, and the character’s a Cutter. When you’re younger- and that’s definitely a kid- you want to conquer what won’t have you, and so if you grow up maybe not so wealthy and in a town where there aren’t many other Jews, you already feel like an outsider. You don’t necessarily go for a member of your own tribe. You’re really attracted to what’s unattainable … I grew up in Dallas and in the eighties especially, it was very ostentatious and a lot of wealth, and a lot of the adults were distracted by the pursuit of their own sensual pleasures and money, so the kids were sort of left on their own … I was sort of in that world but without the money …

“Did you go to a public or a private school?”

A private school that was (small) and … hippie … We had a 75-year-old English teacher, this guy who grew up on the Rio Grande, this really old man who seemed like a cowboy, but he would spend a whole week just with the word “fuck” on the board, talking about the power of the word.

“I thought you grew up poor.”

I did. My dad was determined that I wouldn’t go to public school and so he did everything he could to get me in there. But we lived on food stamps for a long time.

“Were you raised religious? ”

Not at all … My dad really turned his back on religion … but in a way, it’s made it easier to raise myself through a kind of religion. I feel like I have a personal relationship with God and I pray all the time. That’s the kind of thing that saves lives.

“Are you living in New York now?”

I’m staying here … I don’t think I can really stay here because I get really self destructive in New York, just party too much. I’m always worn down. I don’t work enough … I’m meant to be a good person and New York somehow seduces me into the darkside. I think I was born to be a rabbi or a reverend or something, but I’m turning into a fucking pimp.

“Is your music a way of being a rabbi?”

Yeah, I think it’s a way, in the sense that if I had to say what about the music was most apparently singular to me, it would be a hyperconsciousness of the listener and speaking to somebody and paying them respect through not speaking down to them … I know a lot of people who really only want to listen to instrumental music … and in a situation like that, you don’t really want to be spoken to. You (just want) a soundtrack to your shopping. Dance music is just sort of a soundtrack to shopping, like Microsoft commercials …

“Who do you listen to that’s contemporary?”

I like Rufus Wainwright’s record a lot … And it’s funny to me because all my friends think I’m not fairly open. I have gay friends and stuff but people think I make fun of homosexuals too much. And I love his music and its openly homosexual … I had some bad physical altercations with lesbians a couple of years ago in Northampton where two or three times some bulldykes tried to kick my ass … We just don’t get along. I don’t have any lesbian friends. I have a problem with them … Melissa Etheridge, ucch … I’d turn on a woman’s music show in Northampton and all the music would be playing to the worst and most cliched stereotypes of male blues rock, like beer commercial soundtrack rock, and this is supposed to be women’s music. Even men, intelligent men, will not play to those bullshit music clichés, and I don’t know why they want to do that, and cut their hair like Eisenhower, lawn-obsessed family men …

“What singers do you like? You say on the album that “all my favourite singers couldn’t sing. ””

These people like Townes Van Zandt and Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen and Willie Nelson, they were all told that they couldn’t sing their own songs. These are the people who were writing the interesting songs, who had something to say, and they knew that they were the only ones who could say it right … When I listen to music, I want to hear a person and a person that I trust. I don’t want to hear the sound of a culture … Rock’n’ roll started when the lessons were ripped up and burned, it was just, “This is charisma, this is personality, this is persona,” and it’s given to you and it’s a real confrontation with the person in the room, and that’s what I seek out … If there’s a revolution in America, which I can never conceive of, it wouldn’t be a rebel army marching into Washington and burning it down. It would be a rebel army marching into Hollywood and burning it down, and everyone would cheer … (I)f Whoopi Goldberg got in a horrible car accident with Sean Lennon, I know a lot of people who would celebrate- not the death of these individuals, but the death of what they mean. Which is a bunch of bullshit, which is basically untalented people who have nothing to offer occupying a lot of space and money and time, and this machine keeps going on and it turns people into audiences and I resent that …

“Is that why you didn’t tour your last album? ”

I have a huge reluctance. I don’t understand why four animals should be onstage while 200 animals are watching them … Unless you’re really bring the music alive in a way that you weren’t on the record, you should just get off the stage ‘cause all you’re doing at that point is asking for more money …

“But you do have plans to tour this album.”

Because of what this record is, because it has a story that isn’t completely written on the record. The other records were done when they were done and I didn’t have anything else to say about them … (With this one,) I need to see the look on peoples’ faces … It’s irresponsible to me to just make music about yourselves, and about your worries. All this bullshit like Elliott Smith or something like that. People are actually asking you to pay a lot of money so you can bring their problems into your house. That’s not what it’s about for me. I’m not going to pay for someone else’s therapy …

“Aren’t you doing the same thing as Elliott Smith, just beneath a few more layers of disguise?”

No, because when I bring a problem in, number one, I’ll try to leaven it with hope or humour, and number two, the problem isn’t just mine … (Smith and others like him) have made their business making me the audience of their problems … When I write music, I really hope, whether it’s true or not, I’m trying to write music for people who aren’t even born yet … Not to tie it down to contemporary or transitory angst … I find Sebadoh’s music already to be dated for that reason, because it seems to be tied up with a kind of self-indulgent, early nineties gloom.

“How did you come up with the name of your band? ”

It was in 1989 and I had just moved to New York and I was on the subway with my friend Steve (Malkmus) and we needed a name for the band and he said, “It should be silver something” … And then maybe there was something across from me with a yarmulke or something … Jew is just a proper noun and it’s a beautiful word and it should be a beautiful word, but Jews themselves have wondered how you can say the word. If you use the wrong tone of voice, it’s a slur … It shouldn’t be that way. I’m interested in cutting off the associative baggage around it …

“Is Malkmus Jewish?”

No he’s not, but in his nature, he’s the most Jewish WASP I’ve ever known …

“Do you think the Jewish male has been emasculated by American society?”

You mean- what’s that guy, I hate that TV show, Mad About You. “Paul Reiser? ” Yeah. If he’s the candidate, then it’s true.

“Do you see yourself as providing any counterpoint to that emasculation? ”

No. I’m not trying to be a Jewish male, but I do feel like we could use some more linebackers and cowboys. But there’s a lot of Jewish mama’s boys out there. It’s the way they’re raised, and that accounts for a lot of the things about Jewish culture, so you can’t really take it away.

“Did you observe the high holy days? ”

I was high.