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

King Nathan

by Jesse Jarnow

"The record business is not a freak business. It is the same as being in the coffin business, or a funeral parlor..." - Syd Nathan

At an industry dinner, Goddard Lieberson--the president of Columbia Records for nearly 20 years--once introduced an associate as "that rare combination, a practically unknown combination, I would say--a charming, cultured witty man, an astute businessmen... and a gentile." Lieberson was clearly not referring to Syd Nathan, founder and "Chief" of King Records.

Like Hollywood, the early record world--and especially the independent corners of it--was littered with Jewish entrepreneurs--Jerry Wexler of Atlantic Records, Morris Levy at Roulette, the Chess brothers in Chicago. All have their own rightful claims on pieces of rock history, and their own lore to go with them. Levy, born Moishe Levy, was the onetime owner of Birdland who died in 1990, a later-indicted Mob buddy who pirated John Lennon demos after personally borrowing the tapes from Lennon.

What distinguishes Syd Nathan of Cincinnati's King Records isn't merely that he established the first self-contained indie record company, which included A&R, studios, pressing plants, a publishing company, a groundbreaking branch system, and that everybody from Motown to Matador owes him a debt. And it's not even the groundbreaking catalog that integrated early sides by James Brown and the Five Royales with hillbilly favorites like the Delmore Brothers and Moon Mullican. It's that Nathan was batshit enough to record an LP documenting himself straight babbling about it for two generous sides. For anybody interested in a field recording of the archetypal shyster Jewish bastard record company swine, look no further, Syd Speaks is primary source material.

"Boys, this is something I should have done five or six years ago," Nathan croaks just after the needle-drop, and one can almost hear the saliva gumming the cigar to his lower lip. "Unfortunately, you or other people may disagree with me 100%, but somebody has to be the chief, and I am elected as the chief. I'm spending my money, not yours, therefore, unless I change my ideas, then it has to be as you will hear on this record." He sounds like Waring Hudsucker in the Coen Brothers' Hudsucker Proxy, from big-headed intonation to his comedic rhetorical dead ends. "I'm more Dutch than I am Jewish!" he declares later.

In one version of the story, Nathan got into the biz because--when he was working as a radio salesman--he was paid a debt in the form of 300 used 78s, which he turned for a profit, and smelled dollars. It was a scent singed permanently in his nose.

"Nathan once congratulated one of King's most successful country artists, "Cowboy" Copas, for refusing to pay $50 for the rights to a song he discovered on one of his scouting forays down to Nashville. "You did the right thing, Copas; ain't no song in the world worth fifty bucks," said Nathan. (That might have been a shortsighted view: The song was "The Tennessee Waltz." from Music Man: Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantic Records, and the Triumph of Rock'N'Roll by Dorothy Wade and Justine Picardie.

Nathan was an almost literal cartoon character. "A nose like Porky Pig and two Coca-Cola bottles for eyeglasses," a former employee once described. But like a semitic, penny-pinching Mr. Magoo, he accidentally became a civil rights pioneer in the bargain.

King Records, founded in 1943, was the launching point and melting pot for R&B singers like James Brown and Country and Western artists like the Delmore Brothers. Brown and the Delmores had a common attraction for Nathan: they sold records. But it went deeper than that. Though black artists were initially confined to the Queen imprint, they merged with King proper and Federal Records by 1947. Later, the label encouraged its country artists to cover songs by its R&B roster, and vice-versa.

Nathan's staff was likewise fully integrated at every level, including top A&R man Henry Glover, who signed artists (including Hank Ballard), oversaw sessions, and contributed several hits. (In 1976, he arranged the horn section for The Last Waltz.) During the World War II-driven labor shortage, King's several hundred employees included whites and blacks, alongside Chinese, Japanese, and Appalachian immigrants. Nathan needed people to do the work and he saw no reason why they couldn't. Pallbearers at Nathan's 1968 funeral included James Brown and protege Seymour Stein, whose supply of Nathan anecdotes should someday fill a proper biography. (Indeed, the recording of Nathan helming an A&R meeting in 1954 is rumored to be a Stein bootleg.)

King disappeared after Nathan's 1968 death, swallowed into the industry afterlife of bone-picking licensing deals. It lives on in the music, of course. If there is a lesson to be found, it's the value of a focused craziness able to see the big picture. "Some wild deals are being made by record companies and we know it," Nathan observes on Syd Speaks. "We don't intend to compete with some these crazy damn deals that are being offered. And we never will compete with them ... We can all be smart enough to eat DAMN WELL, if we are smart, patient, and observant."

"The day will come when I pass on, and maybe King will be better for it, I don't know," Nathan concludes later. "I'm going to wait, because I don't have any contract with God. I'm just going to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, it's got to be done, boys as we see it here. And if you don't want to do it that way, then the best thing to do is say, 'I disagree, I will not concur, and give me my hat' and I'll give it you and Godspeed."

Download:

"Syd Speaks (Part One)" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1964.
from an in-house promo for King Employees

"Syd Speaks (Part Two)" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1964.
from an in-house promo for King Employees

"Syd Nathan Addresses an A & R Meeting" mp3
by Syd Nathan, 1954.
available on King R&B Box Set




"Blues Stay Away From Me" mp3
by The Delmore Brothers, 1949.
available on Blues Stay Away from Me



"Blues Stay Away From Me" mp3
by Lonnie Johnson, 1949.
available on A Life in Music Selected Sides 1925-1953



"Think" mp3
By The "5" Royales, 1957.
available on It's Hard But It's Fair: King Hits and Rarities



"Think" mp3
By James Brown and the Famous Flames, 1960.
available on Star Time

********************************

This is the seventh of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

Living In Hope

by Jesse Jarnow

I asked Tuli Kupferberg once, "Did you really jump off of The Manhattan Bridge?" "Yeah," he said, "I really did." "How come?" I said. "I thought that I had lost the ability to love," Tuli said. "So, I figured I might as well be dead. So, I went one night to the top of The Manhattan Bridge, & after a few minutes, I jumped off." "That's amazing," I said. "Yeah," Tuli said, "but nothing happened. I landed in the water, & I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore, & went home, & took a bath, & went to bed. Nobody even noticed."
- Anne Waldman and Ted Berrigan, Memorial Day, New York: Poetry Project, 1971.

"The basic unit of human society is the human body. You have to know how to use it and enjoy it."
- Tuli Kupferberg, Perfect Sound Forever Interview with Jason Gross, 1997.


Tuli Kupferberg was never blessed with a traditionally sweet voice. He sounded like, and was, a dude from the Lower East Side. It was his Yiddish-tinged baritone that gave the Fugs' harmonies their delightfully guttural unhingedness. Yet it was also Tuli who produced perhaps the Fugs' two most legit pop tunes--the bubblegum stomp "Supergirl" and the folk-pop charmer "Morning Morning"--and thus the radical poets' most radically mainstream dalliances.

Already 41 at the time of the Fugs' 1964 founding, Kupferberg, a self-described anarcho-pacifist, remains philosophically a lover, not a fighter. And, despite the brief crisis of confidence that resulted in his infamous bridge-jump, documented in Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" ("who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten"), he has at least never lost his ability or desire to express it. And though the Fugs are mostly (and, to be fair, accurately) remembered for their political humor, there remains a rich vein of love songs in their discography, many of them by Tuli.

For Tuli, love was an entrance point to politics, because it was the most important thing about humanity. "On the 6th of August in 1945, a bomb on Hiroshima killed 120 brides," he sings on a duet with the otherwise unrecorded Viki Pollon, his first, deeply humanist concern about the atrocity. On "the Hidden Dissuaders," a track on No Deposit, No Return, a 1966 collection of found poetry, he recites an article from a beauty magazine, which becomes the inverse of "Supergirl," a giant wink from Tuli, who knows (his sarcasm implies) what makes for a genuine, beautiful human being. (see also: Frank Zappa's "You Can Take Your Clothes Off When You Dance.")

Whether any of this is profoundly Jewish, or merely humanist, is irrelevant. But it's definitely not not-Jewish.

Since the Fugs' 1984 reunion, it's not that Tuli's voice isn't what it used to be. It's exactly what it always was. Only more. In the latter-day Fugs, he has sometimes passed gentler tunes to junior Fug Steven Taylor, who has sung "Dover Beach" (a setting of a poem by Matthew Arnold on 1985's No More Slavery) as well as "Try To Be Joyful" (on the The Fugs' Final CD [part I]), both reissued digitally by Fugs Records this year.

But once a lover always a lover. On the latter album, though Tuli passes his "Joyful" off to Taylor, he then delivers a throwaway "Septuagenarian In Love" Dion parody, but then "Where Is My Wandering Jew?" "Does ecstasy count in the fall of the night?" he asks, sounding very much like a 70-year old Jewish man, still figuring out the human body, even in its inevitable decline.

Since 2007, Kupferberg has seeded YouTube with nearly 150 videos, including song parodies, lectures about labor relations, collaborations with Jeffrey Lewis, Yiddish folk tales, and daily "perverbs." Even after suffering two strokes in 2009, and losing much of his eyesight, the bed-raggled Kupferberg continues to offer daily aphorisms.

Included in the YouTube flood is a quietly stunning November 2007 take of Tuli's own arrangement of the song "Moscow Nights," retitled "When I Was A Young Man." Tuli sings a capella. The official description notes that "Tuli has said this is the song he would most like to be remembered by." "Czars shall come but different czars will go, but darling, I still love you so," Tuli sings on the refrain.

It belongs on a collection of field recordings, one of those places where tradition and expression and politics collide in one, natural place -- the pure process of tradition and creativity entwined. Maybe not so radical, after all.

"Living In Hope" mp3
by Tuli Kupferberg, 1990.
available on Rutles Highway Revisited

"Supergirl" mp3
by The Fugs, 1965.
available on The Fugs First Album

"Morning Morning" mp3
by The Fugs, 1966.
available on The Fugs Second Album

"Love and Ashes" mp3
by Tufi Kupferberg and Viki Pollon with Peter Rawson, 1967.
available on East Village Other: Electric Newspaper

"The Hidden Dissauders" mp3
by Tuli Kupferberg, 1966.
available on No Deposit, No Return

"Dover Beach" mp3
by The Fugs, 1985.
available on No More Slavery

"Where Is My Wandering Jew?" mp3
by The Fugs, 2003.
available on The Fugs Final CD, Pt. 1

"When I Was A Young Man" mp3
by Tuli Kupferberg, 2007.
available via YouTube

**************

top photo:
Jackson Browne, Tuli Kupferberg (center) Stefan Grossman and Steve Noonan by David Gahr, 1967.

Gospel Zone

by Jesse Jarnow

There is a story my uncle tells that might be apocryphal, but--knowing my uncle--probably isn't. Sometime in the late '60s, he walked into the MoMA store and saw a spherical white motorcycle helmet, on sale as an art object. He bought one. When he got it home, he says, he felt silly owning a motorcycle helmet without a motorcycle. So he bought a BMW bike.

After all, like Bob Dylan said, "we all like motorcycles to some degree."

I imagine this might have been the case for Dylan himself, when in 1978 he found himself with a full coterie of back-up singers and no gospel to sing. So he found Jesus.

And now it is the case with me, where--as a Dylan fan--I find myself at a stage of my listening where I have a stack of music from Dylan's Jesus years, but no Jesus to believe in. Perhaps that will come eventually. Who's to say? But I'm certainly not going to be saved by three albums and some smoking bootlegs. At least not this holiday season, no matter how many bottoms have fallen out.

But that doesn't mean it's not useful. It's not like I don't believe in Bob Dylan's music. I probably believe in that more than ever, in the primacy of listening to John Wesley Harding when the branches are barest, or New Morning when things are right. Or Blood on the Tracks (or, more often, the New York acetate) when things aren't. Or humming "Moonlight" from "Love & Theft" when walking down an empty street. Or "Not Dark Yet" on a sleepless summer night. Sure, I believe in Bob Dylan, and--like the proverbial injun hunkering down for winter--I believe in using the whole Bob. So why not Jesus? Or, at least, Jesus-Bob?

One way to treat Bob Dylan's music from between 1979 and 1981 is simply as music with a form and a purpose. Like any other gospel music. But that's not really what I want. I want to feel it. The solution is the simplest thing in the world: just treat it like Bob Dylan. His lyrics have always been weird, filled with resonances both intentional and unexpected. The only real difference here is that, during the Christian period, Dylan--as author--offered an overt opinion about their meanings. Surely, as a songwriter, Dylan has always had some idea about what his songs meant to him. Given who he is, these personal, idiosyncratic explanations--maybe not even known to Dylan himself in anything other than the form of the songs themselves--are probably at least as weird as Christianity. If not weirder.

For the listener, the long sermons which proceeded "Solid Rock" in its live outings--see below--are misdirection. Leading the witness, as it were. But thats where Bob was. Ultimately, it's a sturdy f'n song about personal conviction, and that's useful. Sure, the phrase "solid rock" is obviously religious imagery, but that doesn't mean I don't have my own foundation as a modern secularist. If Dylan could leverage the civil rights movement to be a great songwriter, as he has sometimes has claimed, there's no reason why we can't, in return, appropriate his spiritual tunes for our own needs. It's sometimes good to know that you won't let go and can't let go. Best of all is Dylan's performance, both in the studio and live: desperate, raw.

"I Believe In You" scans similarly to me, though less desperate, and actually kinda tender. Really, how is "I believe in you when winter turn to summer/I believe in you when white turn to black" different than any devotional verse about a relationship-in-progress from "Girl From the North Country" or "Shelter From The Storm"? And then, of course, there's "Every Grain of Sand," its placement as literally the last song on the last proper Christian album, 1981's Shot of Love, just as strong as a statement as the song itself. Formally, it is nearly the complete opposite of its foil, "Gotta Serve Somebody," which kicked off 1979's Slow Train Coming with a binary insistence of being either pro-God or, I suppose, pro-Satan. "Every Grain of Sand"--especially in its demo form, with Little Feat's Fred Tackett on guitar--is pretty easy to accept as a Great Dylan Song, all world-weary doubt curled into softness.

There are just straight delightful musical curiosities form the period, too: a live cover of Dion's "Abraham, Martin, and John" (see below) that strips period gaudiness into pure harmony; a sit-in from Michael Bloomfield during Dylan's 12-night run at San Francisco's Warfield Theater in 1980, Bloomfield's spitfire Highway 61-era lines teleported into Dylan's then-new tunes (and Bloomfield only months away from his February 1981 overdose); the unreleased "City of Gold" (later covered by the Dixie Hummingbirds on the fantastic Larry Campbell-produced Diamond Jubilation).

And, on top of that, there's plenty of auxiliary material, too: Paul Williams' sympathetic and human Dylan--What Happened (now collected in Watching the River Flow), which Dylan himself ordered 114 copies of to give to friends to explain his conversion. There is Saved! The Gospel Speeches of Bob Dylan, a pocket-sized collection of Dylan's gospel sermons, edited by Clinton Heylin, published by Hanuman Press. And, for good measure, there's Dylan's appearance with Harry Dean Stanton on a 1989 Chabad telethon. But that's another bag of iconography altogether. In these weird times, it's better just to believe in Bob. And what better way to start?

Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah

Download:

"Sermon/Intro" mp3
"Solid Rock" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1980.
from Solid Rock
bootleg

"I Believe In You" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1980.
from Solid Rock
bootleg

"The Groom's Still Waiting at the Altar" mp3
(with Michael Bloomfield on guitar)
by Bob Dylan, 1980.
from Warfield Theater, San Francisco 11/15/1980
bootleg

"Abraham, Martin, and John" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1980.
from Yonder Comes Sin
bootleg

"Every Grain of Sand" (demo) mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1980.
available on The Bootleg Series, Vols. 1-3 : Rare And Unreleased, 1961-1991