Name of the game is change
Vancouver rocker Art Bergmann ready to take on nation

The Globe and Mail / July 9, 1987 / by Stephen Godfrey

ART BERGMANN has what it takes to hit it big. On that, the local press is in rare agreement.

"The most talented man in Vancouver rock," says Les Wiseman in Vancouver Magazine. "Diamond-cut passion . . . epic, slashing, urgent rock 'n' roll," says Tom Harrison in The Vancouver Province. "A national treasure," says John Mackie in The Vancouver Sun.

It's taking a while for the nation to catch up, although there are plans to change that soon. Bergmann is pretending he doesn't mind the delay.

"This isn't a career, this is my life," he says of his playing, singing and composing for Poisoned, the group he fronts. "I would do it no matter how much money I got." A low grumble. "Not that I get much."

Poisoned is the most stable of the bands Bergmann has been involved with over the past 10 years. He started in his home town of Surrey with the Shmorgs in the mid-seventies, and then joined a Vancouver band called the K-Tels. The band had to change its name six months later after K-Tel International threatened a $50,000 lawsuit over the use of the name - partly because of the band's penchant for such songs as I Hate Music. The band changed its name to the squeaky clean Young Canadians, and produced another punk hit called Hawaii, an epic rant against the middle-class dream of going to Hawaii for a week-long winter break.

Bergmann quit the Young Canadians to join a band called Los Popularos, which was popular but after a couple of years began to self-destruct. "We were pretty uneven," says Bergmann. "Some nights we were great, but other times . . . We were really good friends, and I think that we spent too much time together. We went off the rails a little bit."

In 1984, Bergmann formed Poisoned, and the band now includes Ray Fulber on bass guitar, Taylor Nelson Little on drums, Gord Nicholl on keyboards and Suan Richter on vocals and percussion. Once again, though, there may be a name change. "There's this trash-glam band out of L.A. called Poison," says Bergmann with evident disgust. "They've sold a couple of million records, so we have to change our name not to get confused."

Throughout all the bands, Bergmann has kept the stark view of life that guarantees him exile from commercial radio play. Instead of upbeat love songs, he sings about depression and suicide, with inroads into incest, heroin and murder. His best-known recent song, My Empty House, deals with a man who murders his wife in blind rage at his continuing poverty. Bergmann's over-all output has inspired comparisons with Lou Reed, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello.

"I'm interested in the sub-strata," Bergmann says. "The chronically unemployed and unemployable. People who are gambling with their sanity.

"When you're scratching to survive all the time, you tend to look at the dark side. What I know of life just doesn't look very good to me."

Bergmann's own progress beyond the Vancouver music scene has been plagued by a self-confessed lack of focus about his career and a reputation for unpredictability.

"There's a lot of bad-mouthing around here," he says. "They say I don't finish my projects, that I'm difficult to work with, that I do too much drugs and alcohol." The only one he readily admits to is booze, but he says "those days are over."

Not that Bergmann radiates wholesome good health on stage; his charisma comes from a kind of negative energy, tough and unpredictable. An emaciated figure dressed in black, he scratches his already tangled hair and then hunches his shoulders to settle into what he calls "that great crunch" that comes from power chords and screaming guitar solos.

He is a gut-wrenching singer, and the intensity of his playing and singing leaves him soaked in sweat, but unbowed. He wanders the stage with the look of a card-carrying member of the urban dispossessed, searching the floor for the source of his fury.

To those who say that what Bergmann does is just too tough to win a broader appeal, his manager, Sam Feldman, has an answer.

"It may sound like a corny comparison, but people used to say the same thing about Bruce Springsteen. I'm not saying there's much similarity between the two, but the point is Springsteen was not a pop songwriter; he was considered very much an alternative artist. Things change according to what we become familiar with."

To that end, Bergmann is finishing a recording session, and Feldman will hawk the 10-song tape to various independent record labels this summer, looking for the recording contract that could bring Bergmann the kind of widespread notoriety he already enjoys in Vancouver.

"Art has a rebellious, anti-establishment image, and I doubt a big label will take a chance on him," says Feldman. "I mean, incest, heroin, suicide - we're not exactly appealing to cheerleaders with this. But he's great. And we're going to find more people who think so."