The Silver Jew

by Jesse Jarnow

There's no real sport in arguing the semeticism of David Berman, who named his band the Silver Jews, and very publicly rediscovered Judaism himself after becoming sober around 2004. "Ain'tcha heard the news? Adam and Eve were Jews," he'd sung on 2005's Tanglewood Numbers. When the 15-year running outfit started to perform live for the first time in 2006, Berman brought them to Israel, where he was filmed at the Wailing Wall, wearing tefillin and weeping. One doesn't have to go hunting for it. Unlike Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or Neil Diamond, he's probably perfectly happy to be considered a Jewish songwriter. So, what do we do with that information? No where one goes looking for David Berman--his six full-lengths with the Jews, his book of poetry actual air, interviews, documentary, art shows of strange cartoons, his Menthol Mountains blog, even his Judaism--one runs into a strange, unknowable figure.

"That guy's a better songwriter than Dylan," a friend of mine once said of Berman, in an attempt to be provocative. "I bet you didn't know that, did you?" It took me a few years to come around to what he meant, to be able to hold it in my head as a true statement and really believe it -- which I think in a circular way has a lot to do with Berman's Jewishness. His music obviously works with the same basic stuff as (especially) mid-'60s Dylan, verse/chorus forms, surreal/funny non-sequiturs as vehicles for wry beatitude. But where Dylan's songs grab for familiar phrases of folk music, borrowing a change or an image, Berman never seems to need to do that. That is, one can pick apart Dylan's songs -- a line from the Anthology of American Folk Music here, a Woody Guthrie phrasing there, on up through his borrowings from Confessions of a Yakuza in 2001. Those phrases, in their way, remain holes in Dylan's shtick, places where there is quantifiable evidence of his imitative creative process. Berman has no such holes, at least not so gapingly open. Bob Dylan might have written better songs, but I think Berman might really be the better and more original songwriter, if such a distinction can be made. But true originality, even the kind that might be dismissed as simple indie-era post-modernism, is exactly what remains unknowable.

One observable thing about David Berman: his total command of language. Throughout the fantastic 2008 documentary, Silver Jew, he slips into parable. Berman recalled, "One day when I was making [Tanglewood Numbers] I was having a very hard time with the engineer, the producer, and I didn't know what to do--this is the first time I tried it, and I asked for a sign--and I walked the three blocks and, leaning up against a tree at the very end [of the street] there were these really nice shears for pruning trees, just sitting there. I said, 'Okay, well, I still don't believe in super-nature, but maybe this means I should cut the relationship off with this person and pare back the tracks and start the album somewhere else."

Elsewhere, he speaks of coming across a field of wild strawberries and deciding to turn the Silver Jews into a touring outfit. Another story about Berman that struck me pretty hard was Nick Weidenfeld's astonishing Fader piece "Dying in the Al Gore Suite," about Berman's 2003 suicide attempt, in which he attempted to overdose on Xanax and crack in the Nashville hotel room where Al Gore conceded the 2000 election. "I want to die where the Presidency died!" He wore his wedding suit. Sometimes, he just acts in parable. When he retired the Silver Jews in 2009, they played their last show in a cave.

If all of this sounds like cult of personality mumbo jumbo to get at the music of a favorite musician, it might be. But Berman (again, perhaps not quite literally) once declared that the Silver Jews were an abstract art project conceived while he and future Pavement founder Stephen Malkmus worked as security guards at the Whitney. It doesn't really matter if Berman is telling the literal truth in his stories about strawberries and shears or wedding suits. There is the sense, almost always, that he is simply operating on a much more abstract level than most. In a way that is almost completely lost in the over-informed age, he remains the archetypal mystic.

Unlike the once-mysterious S.M. and dozens of other musicians from their generation, Berman has never gone for the big reveal, never outed himself as just a normal guy who likes sports and aims for a pleasant life in the 'burbs. Despite moving to Music City U.S.A., there's not a single Nashville Skyline in his catalogue. In 2009, he declared that the Silver Jews were over entirely. Partially--he said--because of his father, Richard Berman, an anti-union lobbyist apparently legitimately known in his field as "Dr. Evil." "My life is so wierd [sic]," the Silver Jew wrote. "It's allegorical to the nth."

The sum total of all of Berman's gestures shines nearby, but never so close that we can touch it, a mythic figure passing from a life of addiction to redemption, of a seemingly tyrannical father, of poetry, of parable. One might go looking for traditional Hebrew archetypes to describe him. There's the Wandering Jew, the Kabbalistic Jew, the Curious Jew, the Happy Jew, the Quiet Jew. Maybe. Maybe I'm just making these up. But no matter how expert one might be in the old stories, David Berman long ago invented his own self to travel inside, whether or not he records as him again: the Silver Jew.





Download:

"Sometimes a Pony Gets Depressed" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2005.
available on Tanglewood Numbers

"Suffering Jukebox" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2008.
available on Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea

"San Francisco B.C." mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2008.
available on Lookout Mountain Lookout Sea

"Animal Shapes" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2005.
available on Tanglewood Numbers





"Honk If You're Lonely" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1998.
available on American Water

"Inside The Golden Days Of Missing You" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1996.
available on Natural Bridge

"Tennessee" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight





"Buckingham Rabbit" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1998.
available on American Water

"Death of an Heir of Sorrows" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight

"I Remember Me" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 2001.
available on Bright Flight

"Advice to the Graduate" mp3
by The Silver Jews, 1994.
available on Starlite Walker




photos: by Michael Scmelling from Dying in the Al Gore Suite