| ART WAITING TO HAPPEN |
|
Step Magazine, Winter 92/93, by John Armstrong (aka Buck Cherry) I will be clean as Christ on the cross, I've been so dirty, I will be as clean as Christ on your wall, Restitution for everyone Who died along the way, Having fun "Dirge No. 1" from Sexual Roulette It’s close to 2 a.m. on a Sunday morning. I climb two flights of stairs off Seymour Street to mirrored walls and faded velour couches the colour of nausea. Art Bergmann is playing to some 200 people – if you count girlfriends, members of the back-up band, the bar staff, and several people who seem to have caught the whiff of Extra Old Stock and rum and coke as far away as Pender. In the 17 years that we’ve been friends, bandmates, and roommates, I’ve seen Bergmann play a thousand gigs in sumpholes like this; grimacing like a man trying to cough up an entire disease and spit it out whole on a foot-high stage. If talent were the only requisite for success, I should have had my name checked off the list backstage at the Queen E. or the Orpheum, picked up my laminated “Access: All Areas” pass from the security people, and be drinking a hospitality room beer out of a green bottle. Instead I’m watching my friend, who the Vancouver Sun’s John Mackie calls “maybe the best songwriter in Canada,” grind it out one more time for chump change in this loser’s lounge – a failed leather bar. There are two questions here: just what does such an establishment have to do to fail anyway? And why isn’t Bergmann rich and famous yet? Vancouver’s seen more than several Next Big Things come and go in the last decade while music critics, managers, friends, and creditors waited for Bergmann to, as they say in the industry, “happen.” The Pointed Sticks, the Payola$, the Scramblers…now Kevin Luch, of Brilliant Orange fame (themselves a Next Big Thing three or four years ago) is thudding away on bass two feet from Bergmann’s shoulder. Bergmann. How many times has he been described as Vancouver’s Next Big Thing? He absently smacks the heel of his Stratocaster, sending the frets skating across his mikestand – the most primitive form of slide guitar possible. The howl in his throat becomes a shriek, meeting the whining feedback from his amp in some psychotic duet. Then he mumbles something – a threat, request for a drink, an admonition to drive safely; who knows? But the lyrics of that last song are uncomfortably appropriate: They call me the performer, I guess they always will, They call me the entertainer, I ain’t over the hill Don’t retire me yet, I ain’t had my fill It’s in my heart I’m making a financial start, I’m a never-was, Trying to be a has-been, A has-been on a comeback trail, Bound for Vegas "Bound For Vegas" from Sexual Roulette Master singer/songwriter/guitar player, junkie, madman, reprobate, degenerate, perennial nominee at the West Coast Music Awards, the CASBY’s, and Junos, who, if half the stories are true, should carry a Ministry of Health warning like a human pack of Rothman’s King Size - at 39, currently holding his wife Sherri with one drenched arm and mopping his sodden hair with a bar towel - wonders when is this perpetual Star-In-Waiting ever going to happen? This, after all, is a man whose reputation precedes him in more ways than one. On his most recent tour of Canada, Bergmann was judged so unsavory by the other bands on the bill – or their managers, the stories conflict – he traveled alone by Greyhound much of the way. When director Bruce McDonald was casting about for someone to play Otto, the whacked-out, reclusive rock star in his indie Highway 61, it’s not surprising he picked Bergmann, who got his own rave reviews despite his previous acting experience being limited to videos and the usual conversations with authorities. Are all these people talking about the guy who cooks the world’s best lasagna? “Kids came up to me after the shows and told me their mothers told them not to come because I’m psychotic,” Bergmann says later, not quite laughing. Whether he gets his per diem straight from the Prince of Lies himself is open to question, but one thing is indisputable: having just kicked some big-time rock and roll ass, he needs a shower. Badly. I met Bergmann in 1975, through friends at Princess Margaret Senior Secondary in Newton. I’d seen him play even earlier, when he was still rhythm guitarist in the Mt. Lehman Grease Band, well-known to constables in the Fraser Valley for their all-night sin-and-sweat soirees in community halls rented under bogus names, like the alleged fundraiser for the Young Christian Men’s Hockey Association at Maillardville. Bergmann maintains it was the Cloverdale Community Centre, but specifics from either source are extremely suspect; the drink of choice at these functions was Mt. Lehman brew, a wine-and-whatever incitement to riot served in garbage cans-cum-punchbowls and spiked with surprises from local drug dealers. Wherever it happened, it ended with Bergmann’s younger brother Hans leading an inspired, butt-naked version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while the Grease Band’s singer, a Malcolm McDowell-esque droog known than as Dr. Shmorg (now more familiar as recently-turfed Liberal House Leader David Mitchell), corralled stage-front females with his ever-present cane. I was in grade 11, failing math at Princess Margaret Senior Secondary, and Bergmann was renting a house a block-and-a-half down 72nd Avenue. All I really wanted to be was a guitar player, and by what should have been the final semester of grade 12, I was his room-mate, cajoling guitar lessons in a Marine Drive apartment in White Rock, still minus those math credits in favour of a more rounded education. That he became one of my best friends was one of those bonuses life hands out now and then to make up for everything. Bergmann was not only the most distinctive electric guitarist around, even then he was writing songs for the Shmorgs (Bergmann replacing the now departed Doctor on vocals) that should have been on the radio but weren’t. It’s hard to describe the epiphany of watching Bergmann spend an afternoon in the living room with a pencil and the unplugged ’62 Stratocaster he bought from his brother Joe with a summer’s berry-picking wages, and seeing him show the chord changes to his rhythm section that night at rehearsal. An hour later, they were playing a song that hadn’t existed that morning and sounded like an outtake from Exile on Main Street. My band and Bergmann moved to Vancouver en masse when punk occurred. Most people lose socks or books when they move. Bergmann lost the Shmorgs. As he recalls, “I said, ‘I’m going to town – you guys wanna come or not?’ And they said, ‘Nah, you go and have fun with your weird new friends.’” It took about a year for Bergmann to assemble the Young Canadians, which brings us to 1979 or thereabouts. We lived in three identical duplexes on Victoria Drive (which led to many a rude après-debauch awakening on the wrong couch in the wrong house). The Young Canadians already had the local music press hyperbolizing when they released the Hawaii EP in 1979 – the title track a skewering of the working-class fixation on a two-week vacation UV o.d. – and in between introducing clips on MuchMusic. Veejay Michael Williams says, “Hawaii itself should have made him a million dollars. I don’t think he realizes how much impact he’s had on music in this country. He’s a genius at his craft.” To get an idea how unutterably bollixed Bergmann’s career has been, the master tape to that long out-of-print record has been lost for the last 13 years only to be discovered last year in a closet shelf, under a water pipe, at Little Mountain Studios by Zulu Records’ Grant McDonough while he was searching for tapes to compile a Vancouver retrospective. The artist had no idea where his most-known recording was, nor did he care much; Bergmann loathes the song and hasn’t performed it since the YC’s went their separate ways. And though it’s inclusion on his next album would guarantee him the kind of money whoever the “Rodeo Song” made (for all its frat house popularity, Hawaii is a novelty song of the same type), he won’t do it. Bergmann may not just say no often, but when he does, he means it – even though those buying it for that one song would discover the dozen others on the album. So, while music critics on both coasts and points between talk about Bergmann in the same breath as Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Neil Young, and Keith Richards, why is he standing on the loading dock/fire escape that passes for backstage and waiting for the several hundred already-spent dollars he’s earned tonight? It’s a long and twisted story, longer than any magazine in its right mind would print. A tale where the light at the end of the tunnel is a cop with your name on a warrant, and filled with enough deceits, miscalculations, acts of stupidity, ugliness, treachery, and pure bad luck, it would have Celine himself, a doctor who honed his sense of the absurd in the welfare clinics of Paris, rolling in the aisle. Ho, ho, ho. Someone was driving Bergmann’s Maserati while the Next Big Thing himself was taking the bus to construction jobs prior to the aforementioned Lone Ranger tour. Instead of contract talks with a major label, Bergmann is negotiating with BC Tel for the reinstallation of his telephone. He and his last label, PolyGram, parted ways some time ago when the company suggested Bergmann could make a perfectly fine record on a considerably smaller budget than the meagre-by-anyone’s standards amount they ponied up for the previous one. This is, amazingly, a step up. Bergmann discovered he and Duke Street, his previous partners, were no longer an item when he called their offices while on tour in 1990 to promote the critically-acclaimed Sexual Roulette, which Janet York, Bergmann’s day-to-day manager at S. L. Feldman and Associates, estimates sold about 25,000 in Canada and might have sold considerably more. Bergmann’s call to inquire why he was touring to promote an album that was, as they say, unavailable in stores, is a quick introduction to the music business. The phone was answered by a man who listened to Bergmann’s complaint, then told him, “Look, buddy, I’m just here to pick up the office equipment.” Duke Street, quietly selling themselves, would not be shipping much more Bergmann product. “It’s better than that,” Bergmann says, snickering in the breathy, nicotine-cured voice which combines nicely with a slight lisp to give conversation on any subject a definite Burroughsian flavour. “First they wouldn’t release it - you know how record companies go, ‘We’ve got to release this at the optimum moment because we have all this competition from Springsteen and Madonna’? I’m no fucking competition for anybody, ever. Remember that. “And so you know when they decide to release it? When they decide to sell themselves and go down the tubes, that’s when they released it. There was like nothing, nobody, nowhere. I’m promoting a record you can’t buy.” Bergmann’s reaction to this oblique marketing strategy does tend to support claims that if someone else is driving his car, it’s because he threw away the keys. “Yeah, what happened actually is you always hurt the one you love. I just went into a drinking frenzy and stole the keys to the rented car, drove it into Toronto at seven in the morning and scored some junk to feel better. Me and Mick (then second-guitarist). “I had a carafe of Benedictine, after we’d drank 14 bottles of homemade wine. Mick was mighty sick, I must say.” This last line is delivered in a mock-serious tone somewhere between Dr. Benway and Peter O’Toole, whom Bergmann has come to resemble, his joints seemingly held together by rubber bands like a med-school skeleton. He doesn’t so much sit down as conform to the furniture in something best described as a genteel oozing, bony wrist and cigarette aloft. Bergmann’s aim, like Elvis Costello’s, is undeniably true. Unfortunately, many of his great champions would argue he’s also shown a real proclivity for shooting himself in the foot. “You can only show up at the Junos drunk out of your mind so many times before you’ve alienated everyone who could have helped you,” Much West host and broadcast vet Terry David Mulligan says. “I’ve got enormous respect for his talent but he’s been his own worst enemy.” Then he adds, “Frankly, I don’t care what the rest of the business thinks. I’ll always be there for him.” Ah, the Junos, where the shiny, happy people of Canada’s music industry gather yearly to celebrate each other and cut a few deals while reeling from hospitality suite to hospitality suite. Stories abound regarding Bergmann’s performance at 1990’s corporate daisy chain, the consensus placing it on a par with Norman Maine’s Oscar night entrance in A Star is Born. “What the hell, I don’t know,” Bergmann says. “Blue Rodeo was inviting people up to jam and I was with my record representative, and she’s going, ‘Oh, go on, Art, go on,’ I said, ‘You’re crazy, I’m not getting up there.’ I’m pretty loaded. All these people are loaded out of their minds at these events – I did it once. Once. “So I go up there and oh, it got in the paper the next day – I mean, you know you’ve arrived when you’re in the social columns the next day. I was up there going, ‘just one chord!’ and they launched into it and I was proud of them for it, and I just rapped off the top of my head. And that was it.” Almost. “Of course, I ended up at a party afterwards. And, um, it was a dead party…I threw a TV on the floor and the host said, ‘This party is over.’ And I said, ‘You’re right.’ That was it.” The Province’s Tom Harrison, one of the country’s most respected music critics, was also at the Junos, and has a slightly different take than those industry people who were so outraged by Bergmann’s idea of livening things up they pried their noses out of wine glasses and off mirrors long enough to tsk-tsk. “People didn’t know that Art was invited to play and Blue Rodeo was looking forward to it. Greg Keelor (singer/guitarist) thought it was great. Then Art’s exit was to toss a potted plant across the stage. “I’d been there watching the industry people put their celery in the dip and Art comes in and it’s like – ‘Oh, no, he’s here, what’s going to happen?’ He makes them very nervous. Art is just a little too real for them when they actually encounter him. As a concept, they like it, but it scares them face-to-face.” When Harrison says real, he means it: Bergmann’s writing is in large part pure journalism, as Lou Reed’s songs are. One former girlfriend is immortalized in the lyric, “We met through mutual friends / She’s a hooker and I’m a musician.” “Dirge No. 1” is the condensed, hallucinatory diary of a stay in Toronto that reeks of the abattoir, gunnels running with blood and chunks of boiled-down human grease. “The Final Cliché” is about a suicide, a friend who finally succeeded after several attempts. This is not Kim Mitchell telling the world “I am a wild party.” Harrison recounts Bergmann and band’s now-legendary arrival in Toronto to record their first album for Duke Street, the John Cale-produced Crawl With Me, as another example. “They got thrown out of the Rivoli and several other bars the first night, before they’d even got to the studio, and the Duke Street rep was on the phone to Feldman’s office shaking with anger and fear. They were so proud that they had a rebel, the real thing, to promote, and when the real thing showed up, they were horrified. He’s genuine, and when he’s up there, it’s real drama.” “I don’t know, I always figured that’s the way it’s supposed to be, anything can happen, shiny and kinda dangerous,” Bergmann says with a tone of exasperation generally heard when dealing with new-citizen taxi drivers. “Rock and roll’s supposed to be scary, there’s supposed to be some element of danger to it. Half the time I scare myself.” “And on public occasions that’s why I drink an awful lot. Just to deal with the sheer stupidity of people asking why and how. If you don’t know, as William Burroughs said, don’t ask.” Crawl With Me should have been the album that announced Bergmann to the world as a songwriter and performer who could hold his own with anyone. With former Velvet Underground member John Cale producing (the man behind the knobs for Iggy Pop and Patti Smith’s debut albums, and by all accounts no stranger to Bergmann’s bullet-wound vision) it seemed to most people that all that remained would be hiring some extra hands to help count the money. Again, it didn’t happen as planned. “John Cale also produced Gene Loves Jezebel, and that’s about the time he got to me,” Bergmann says. “He was there for the cheque.” The now-reformed and drug-and-alcohol-free Cale did not turn out to be the simpatico producer envisioned by everyone except those in the studio. Bergmann’s first clue that this marriage was on the rocks came when Cale began keeping a close watch on the clock during the recording of basic tracks. Not because of the high cost of studio time – the man who lent his viola to Lou Reed’s “Venus in Furs” and “Heroin” had a reservation on the squash court. “I was drinking brandy in the other room, warming up for vocals, and he’d be drinking Perrier and reading an AndAbuse pamphlet. I’d be making some God-awful noise on the guitar, trying to get a sound, and he’d say ‘Hurry up, Art. I’m losing interest.’” (This from a man once barred from the Riz Carlton in New York after crawling down a hallway, naked and growling, with his wife’s panties in his teeth.) “After that, I just went, ‘Fuck this.’” At one point, in a gesture recalling the Luca Brasi Fish-O-Gram in The Godfather, Bergmann presented Cale with a dead bird. Despite Cale’s almost guitarless production, akin to recording Charlie Parker and de-emphasizing the horns, Crawl sold a respectable 25,000, almost entirely due to the buzz on Art and the quality of the songs, among them MuchMusic staples “My Empty House” and “Our Little Secret,” the latter a hum-along if ever there was one until the lyrics about incest kick in. Canadian radio stations trampled over each other to add Suzanne Vega’s “Luka,” a song in much the same vein, but were less anxious to put “Secret” into heavy rotation. “Like Lou Reed says, ‘If people can write novels with everything in it, why can’t I write a song about it?’ I guess he has the same problem,” Bergmann observes. Based on his reputation as a rampant consumer of anything handy, it’s not surprising people picture Bergmann living like some character out of a Nelson Algren story: a sagging bed in a downtown hotel room amid old magazines and newspapers, syringes and empty bottles stuck to their pages. Instead, Bergmann and Sherri, his wife of 18 months, and her 12 year-old daughter Naomi, live in a clean and roomy apartment in a small building off Oak Street. Seeing them together is like something dimly remembered from high school, when you were so in love it was necessary to maintain physical contact at all times, if only a finger touching the other’s jacket. They met while judging a talent contest at Richards on Richards, Bergmann, coy devil, impressing the future Mrs. Bergmann by giving all the contestants but one a zero. The next day: “I was in bed with my boyfriend and Art phoned me and said ‘Do you want to have an affair?’ And I said yes.” Anyone who’s seen him toss a guitar overhead across a stage, either for going out of tune or simple exhuberance, or seen him climb the light rigging as he did at Harpo’s in Victoria, might have a hard time reconciling his possessed, abscessed-nerve persona onstage with the same man carefully readying a pot of tea for guests. Or doing housework. “He’s really good about doing dishes and wiping the counter down, things like that. He’s almost anal about it,” Sherri confides. “But he never scrubs the bathtub or polishes the floors. I do that.” “It’s really funny because people expect him to be throwing things around the room and he’s so quiet – it’s two different people when he’s playing. He comes home and says, ‘You wouldn’t believe what I said onstage tonight,’ or ‘I broke a guitar.’ I tell people there’s the man I live with and the man onstage.” (“Quiet” isn’t the half of it – in our cohabitating days, it wasn’t unusual for him to go a day or so without talking. To anybody. On one occasion I left Shmorg Manor early and came home late. Bergmann appeared not to have moved from his chair and book.” “Has he said anything yet? I asked someone. “Not yet,” was the unconcerned reply. We would have waited another day or so before checking his pulse. In moments of extreme agitation, he swept floors with a passion, the way some people chew pencils. In exceptionally desperate situations I expected him to finish the porch and begin sweeping the front yard.) Although they seem meant to be together, Bergmann as male authority figure presents a couple of problems. For one, Sherri has a 12 year-old rebelling against authority, and a 39 year-old husband who’s made a career of it. This last makes things doubly tough on Naomi. “She’ll say something really outrageous to get a reaction and Art will tell her something he did that’s ten times worse and say, ‘And I had blue hair then.’” I like to travel, I like the food I meet I like the people I eat Travel A trip out of town Or a nervous breakdown. “Gambol” from Sexual Roulette On the Big, Bad, and Groovy Canadian tour this September, maybe-the-best-songwriter in Canada found himself not only without a label, but without a band. Performing with only a guitar, he was on his own. Literally. “(Toronto’s) Lowest of the Low told me they were driving through Regina and passed Art, hitchhiking out of Regina. He missed his bus or something and these guys looked at each other and said, ‘Isn’t that Art Bergmann?’” Tom Harrison recalls, and you get the feeling this anecdote is still being honed for entry in the Have I Got An Art Story finals. “They’re writing a song about it.” Los Popularos, a band I played in with Bergmann for two years, once bought the entire Regina city supply of lime cordial as margarita mix for the long haul to Winnipeg. This was a band most members talk of as having survived, rather than having played in, and another example of all things being grist for Bergmann’s mill: the title for the song “Guns and Heroin” comes from an exceptionally stupid Popularan answer at American customs to the questions: “What do you have to declare?” Bergmann surely yearned for his old compadres this time through town. He recalls, “The worst…I missed my bus, I was stuck there for nine hours. That’s where they send out the police to practice, it’s the RCMP Academy. I had this bottle of wine and I was going to take off for three hours and meet a couple of friends for dinner. This security guy, couldn’t have been more than 19, said, ‘Is that your bottle of wine? You can’t take that on the bus with you, you know.’” The bottle-of-wine-for-your-table fad not yet having hit the Queen City, Bergmann experienced some difficulty conveying le concept nouveau. “I said, ‘We’re going to have a bottle of wine with dinner, do you mind?’ He said, ‘If I find you’ve been drinking, you won’t be allowed on the bus.’ I just about ended up in jail right there. When I got back he said, ‘Have you been drinking since I’ve seen you?’ I said, ‘Get off my back, I’m glad to get out of this one-horse – not even half-horse – town.” Let’s leave Bergmann on the outskirts of Regina with a bottle of wine and change of socks and address the obvious question. Why isn’t he on a nice, warm tour bus with, say, Sons of Freedom, one of the three other bands on the month-long trek? The answer, according to Janet York, is the other bands saw Bergmann as big and bad, certainly, but not all that groovy as a potential seatmate. Don Harrison, Sons guitarist and brother of Tom, says this about the tour: “To be honest, there was a degree of that (apprehension) and when all you have is a bus that’s your sanctuary – we weren’t staying in any hotels – we didn’t want to have to take care of someone. And he has a reputation.” “Oh, I was butt boy on that tour,” is Bergmann’s acid-phrased recollection. “Butt boy and they all felt sorry for me. They were all appalled that I was out there by myself.” “He didn’t have it completely together for the first couple of shows like Victoria,” Don says (implying that Bergmann’s opening night indulgences didn’t exactly dispel their fears), “but as we went along, we got to know each other and he hung out with us. He’s no angel but his reputation was greatly exaggerated. He’s actually very quiet, very funny. “He can write – no-one can take that away from him – and his guitar playing is just full of soul,” Don adds, “which is my criteria for more than pure technique. Some nights his solo thing stole the show and by the end of the tour there was a respect for him on the part of everybody that wasn’t there in the beginning. This tour was no cakewalk and it took a lot of balls on his part to do the tour when he probably had the feeling some people didn’t want him there.” By mid-tour, enough respect was won that Bergmann was not only welcome on the bus, but regularly joined the Sons for an encore rave of Iggy Pop’s “Funtime,” and Harrison and drummer Don Short were petitioning to play on his next album. So why hasn’t Bergmann happened? John Mackie has a theory contrary to the more prevalent “too-real and too-scary” line, one he expresses with the resignation that comes with a decade of watching Bergmann slog away while the fake-rock ‘product’ of a hundred Honeymoon Suites, Glass Tigers and their ilk swamps his desk. “Art’s biggest problem is his records have never been as good as he is, because he’s never been given the resources to make an amazing record, and he’s never had a record released outside Canada. He’ll probably never be big in Canada until he’s had recognition somewhere else.” So if the show business fairy turned up with her magic wand and gave Bergmann a label that believed in him (and in this business how much they believe is directly proportionate to how much they’ll bankroll), is he still in line of ascension as Next Big Thing? It depends what you mean by big. Lou Reed’s only cracked AM radio twice in nearly thirty years. Iggy Pop was infamous (and broke) for nearly 20 years before “Real Wild Child” put him in the Walkmans and car stereos of an audience who’d probably hand over their watch and wallet in fear if they met him on the street. But Lou Reed made enough money to buy his mentor Delmore Schwartz’s house, and Iggy’s still getting cheques for radio play. “Like the song says, ‘I ain’t over the hill, Don’t retire me yet, I ain’t had my fill,” Tom Harrison says. “Art only needs to make one record for a company that knows what to do.” Whatever, Bergmann abides. “I do what I do,” he says, “and a lot of people like it, a lot of people don’t, and a lot of people are scared of it. Personally, I like a good song.” |
