Carl Wilson, “‘This Happy Hour’s Got Us by the Balls’: Why David Berman Wanted to Spoil the Party”
Where's the paper bag that holds the liquor,
Just in case I feel the need to puke?
If we'd known what it'd take to get here,
Would we have chosen to? Would we have chosen to?
— Silver Jews, “Punks in the Beerlight,”
Tanglewood Numbers (Drag City, 2005)
Every anecdote about the late poet and songwriter David Cloud Berman evokes his charisma, his humor, the way people flocked to him at parties. Unless they’re stories instead about his reclusiveness, quitting projects midstream, refusing to play live, disappearing. From the early 1990s, through multiple incarnations of Drag City band Silver Jews, his dramatic 2009 announcement quitting music, and his 2019 death at his own hand on the eve of a planned tour with his new Purple Mountains project, Berman's artistic dedication tangled with his ambivalence about, as the Groucho Marxist line goes, joining any party that would have him as a member. Even among the peers who named him his generation’s greatest lyricist (non-rap division).
In Berman songs like “Suffering Jukebox,” “Party Barge,” “Candy Jail,” and “Drinking Margaritas at the Mall,” party pleasures are the seductive existential trap laid by American culture—his father Richard’s career as a D.C. conservative spin doctor was never far from his mind. In his poems and songs, Berman was alternately turned on and threatened by the party mythos of rock and pop. These gatherings that enable music and fellowship are also danger zones—not only did he more than once nearly die by overdose, but Berman also feared the ego inflation of crowd adulation. Then there is party as alignment, whether social or political, given Berman's constant wry use of American institutional and historical language. As the name Silver Jews indicated, Berman identified as an outsider even among outsiders. In a 2008 interview, he said, “Neither Greil Marcus nor the state of Israel is going to acknowledge me in the next couple of years. I’m never going to be a part of the Great Singers Club or the Pure Jews Club. And those are the two things that I’m interested in.” (Berman was Jewish only on his father’s side.)
In all this, his was a singular variation on views shared by many Gen X “indie” artists, an intended anti-capitalist radicalism that risked becoming its own form of exclusionary elitism. Yet today it sometimes feels that any search party for meaningful autonomy has disbanded under pressure of scarcity, and artists are expected simply to follow where the broader cultural party leads, under the guise of “influencers.” At Pop Con, I’ll consider how Berman’s life and work might speak to those questions in 2023, in a suitably lo-fi audiovisual talk.
