Updates
With a recent announcement of more live shows (dates follow at bottom), Great Lake Swimmers share their uplifting cover of Art Bergmann’s song “The Legend of Bobby Bird” from his stellar album The Apostate which was released in 2016 by indie label (weewerk).
“I thank Russell Broom for summoning up my request for sirenic beauty of old and Sherri for being that siren…double beauty was hatched. Greg Reely realized it.
Naomi and Zoe must carry on and so must I.
Thank you to Kenneth for the broodingly beautiful video he shot, Thor for the surreal video edit, and to Jason, Phil and TeamArt for moving this out into a callous world.”
– Art Bergmann (July 22, 2022)
As Canada’s punk poet laureate, Art Bergmann has been tearing up stages, and terrifying the music industry, for half a century. Often referred to as “Canada’s Lou Reed,” Art’s story is one of rock and roll’s great tales untold. Until now. From his days helping to lay the foundation of the Vancouver punk scene with The K-Tels, to his acclaimed solo work in the ’80s and ’90s, and a late career resurgence that has culminated with being named to the Order of Canada, The Longest Suicide chronicles every unlikely twist and turn Art’s life has taken.
Anyone who thought the Order of Canada would tame Art Bergmann was wrong. Deeply wrong. The singer-songwriter is as biting and anti-establishment as ever, demonstrated by his latest album, Late Stage Dementia Empire, and his unflinching opinions on his country’s failings. Jessica and George talk with the veteran of Canada’s music scene about residential schools, music, allyship, colonialism, and more.
And there’s lots of music to puncutate the conversation—who needs commas when you’ve got rock ‘n’ roll?
Purchase / Streaming Links:
Bandcamp: https://weewerk.bandcamp.com/album/late-stage-empire-dementia-by-art-bergmann
Other Digital Providers: https://orcd.co/empiredementia
Art Bergmann / Late Stage Empire Dementia / (weewerk)
“2014’s Songs For the Underclass EP and 2016’s The Apostate surprised enough, after two decades of Bergmann’s battles with drug/alcohol addiction, arthritis, and backaches. To get this fiery, deep solo album in 2021 feels miraculous. Following fantastic, 1979-1980 punk-era Vancouver band The Young Canadians and equally short stints in Los Popularos and Poisoned, he’s been a venerated Canuck solo artist, his social conscience retained; last year he even became a Member of the Order of Canada, his country’s second-highest honor. But to heck with laurels-resting, he’s the best kind of protest singer, sticking his (and our) maw in the midst the fascist leanings of modern ultra-conservative parties—especially ours. His older forebear in such unadulterated critique, The MC5’s Wayne Kramer, joins him on a roasting anti-religious-right takedown, “Christo-Fascists” (which musically alludes to The Stooges’ “Loose”). But it’s his own songs and playing on “Entropy,” “Amphetamine Alberta,” etc., that’s as ballsy as YC’s “No Exit” over 40 years ago. Highly involving.” – Jack Rabid / The Big Takeover
Press
What’s more important from a legacy standpoint: being the greatest band, or being the band that writes the greatest songs?
The question is an important one when you’re reflecting on the Young Canadians’ place in Vancouver’s fabled first-wave punk gold rush.
Let enough time pass, and all forms of music eventually get classified as folk. Vancouver punk-rock legend Art Bergmann gracing the 2018 Vancouver Folk Music Festival lineup isn’t surprising at all.
As punk rock icon and Airdrie resident Art Bergmann preps for a re-release of his eponymous third album later this year, the 63-year-old songwriter has much to reflect on – especially as the release coincides with the 25th wedding anniversary of Bergmann and his wife, Sherri.
Airdrie, Alberta, is a small city of about 43,000 in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. On its outskirts lives Art Bergmann, who enjoys a spectacular view of the Rockies, and the sweeping vistas of the Prairie. Fitting real estate for an enduring outsider, who for 40 years has taken a rebel stance and held to it.
Long lauded as one of the original punk influences of the ‘70s, and an equally mark-making figure in alternative rock in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, Bergmann’s current album The Apostate draws from all that and more, in crafting his best-yet collection of songs – and first full-length recording in 18 years. It says a lot about an artist’s persistence and integrity when his prime work is done at age 63; Bergmann is happy about that, as are critics, and the Polaris Music Prize large jury, who long-listed The Apostate in 2016.
Art Bergmann | May 20, 7 p.m. | Fox Cabaret | Tickets: $18 (advance), $20 (door); foxcabaret.com
There’s a morbid allure in the way Art Bergmann calls his latest album The Apostate “my epitaph.”
Twenty years after his last original studio offering, Juno-winning album What Fresh Hell Is This?, the Bergmann we find in recorded form on The Apostate is a much different animal than the sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll fuelled beast that helped define Canada’s punk counterculture in the late ’70s and ’80s.
The Vancouver-born former Young Canadian is 63, has been riddled with health issues that sidelined him for more than a decade, and now lives in Airdrie, Alberta, where Bergmann contends he is battling the “dark forces of beige.”