The Silver Jews have been around since 1989 but it’s only recently that they’ve decided to do any tours – the first being in 2005. Since then they’ve had an ecstatic reception from fans and critics alike and their new album Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea is a departure from their earlier albums in that in deals with the future and is wholly more upbeat and positive.
In 2000 David Berman tried to kill himself amidst a drug addiction and the feelings of enclosure he had in his life but since then he and his wife Cassie (who has played with fellow Drag City artist David Pajo) have found a new lease of life and it is this that comes across in the live performance. At Primavera in Barcelona David Berman’s insouciance and relaxed demeanour was a complete turn around from the introverted and stage-shy Berman of the nineties. We caught up with him in London (half an hour late but he still gave us a whole hour of interview) prior to Primavera to talk of everything from his suicide attempt to Judaism. It was an odd experience…
David Berman: I used to work in an art museum…
BCR: Which one?
David Berman: The Whitney Museum? It used to be only 21st century art. I was a security guard
BCR: What was that like?
David Berman: I’ll tell you what, you have to... mentally compose yourself. You have to be able to compress time. It can be testing especially if you’re hung over and you’re looking at seven hours standing in a room. Especially if the show’s boring. The first show that was up was an American painter, Maurice Prendergast, and it was just so dull. You can make a little interaction with the people there, you can make time go by. You get to know all the other guys and they’re all a little eccentric. It makes you reflective. The guards who were there, the men in their thirties, forties, fifties – the lifers – they all had some charisma, some personality at least. There was a lot of humour in the locker room…
BCR: How old were you then?
David Berman: I was 22, it was right after college. We were unionised teamsters. You had a certain amount of breaks and abused them. You could go to central park and smoke a joint, hoping it would make the day go faster. My first job was at the morgue in college. When I came out of college in ’89 there wasn’t anything in New York, there weren’t any jobs. Today, a kid can move to New York and get a job working at some magazine or website. It wasn’t this massive culture industry, this need for content, so for someone like me, when I first got out of college I worked at restaurants but this museum job was a relief from working in restaurants… What burned me the most about working in restaurants – the service industry – the petty… being the employee, having to carry out the orders of others, it’s just naturally always been odious to me. Being a security guard the instructions were clear, I must stand here and no one is going to say anything to me. There wasn’t the constant checking and looking over your shoulder.
BCR: It must have been kind of nice for someone like you who is reflective and introspective to be afforded that kind of time. Have you always been like that?
David Berman: I’ve always been reflective but it wasn’t until any age that I was able to be expressive. I think that during those years I probably learned a lot about expression. Being around a lot of conceptual art... The Whitney is known for its biennials. Every two years it trots out these artists it finds under a certain age and I think from the very first day I was aware of the opportunity I had. I was going to be in a position even better, almost, than not having to work at all, I could get more work done. If I didn’t have to work at all I could never discipline myself but I was able to fill up notebooks with ideas and bounce things off the ideas I was picking up. There was video art, conceptual art, the painters from the fifties that I had never learned about and the sixties and the minimalists of the seventies. All these, I think, in some way gave me the permission to do the band. It was a sort of conceptual art project. I was seeing these people doing machine made art or Jeff Koons, people doing art that seemed irrational to a common person. Jeff Koons’ perfect vacuum cleaners encased in glass. I’m thinking of a Charles Ray cube, a pink cube that was filled to the very edge with Pepto Bismal. It wasn’t until you went right up to it that you could see that it was open and wet on the top. Just to be around this kind of thing and see that people had respect for the ideas behind them.
BCR: Rather than imposing an idea on it or asking it to say something for them.
David Berman: Exactly. Also, that people would have respect for something that looked like a trick or a stunt but when you thought about it, it actually had the potential to generate ideas. It made me think that maybe I can do this music which really is a concept album because everything looks like a record album except the music is just on a hand held tape recorder and it has titles even though the songs are just made up on the spot. It sort of gave me permission to play with this idea of a pretend band called the Silver Jews. I think that’s how it worked out in the beginning. I only slowly started to think of it as a real band.
BCR: There does seem to be a leap where all of you were wondering about after the college band with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. having to come back again, was that you sort of saying I want to pretend something for a while?
David Berman: Yeah, I think what happened was we started packaging it as the Silver Jews, the first 7” and the first EP - The Arizona Record - we had all moved up there together, to New York and after about a year Steve had finished releasing a series of 7” that had made Pavement really, really well known. That meant that these years that we’d had together seemed to be ending. Steve was gonna let Bob play live and they were gonna tour and I could see that ending. I think in a way, in the beginning, it was a way to conquer-tise our friendship or something…
