Strange Victory, Strange Defeat
David Berman, troubled poet of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, left us on August 7.
THAT DAVID Berman, lugubrious voice of Silver Jews and Purple Mountains, took his own life was deeply shocking. Tragically, neither was it a complete surprise. He had attempted suicide at least once before, in 2003, when he overdosed on drugs, including crack cocaine, and insisted he was taken to the same Nashville hotel suite where Al Gore waited hopelessly on the 2000 election result – in his farewell note, he reportedly quipped, “I want to die where the presidency died.”
Born on January 4, 1967, in Williamsburg, Virginia, Berman was US indie’s Leonard Cohen, beloved for his dark humours amid all-eclipsing existential despair. Silver Jews debuted at the turn of the ’90s amid chaotic lo-fi noise, and through the seven albums and sort-of-career that followed,
Berman rarely toured or gave interviews, cultivating his own myth as his output remained the preserve of his devoted cognoscenti.
The first, 1994’s Starlite Walker, drew attention mostly for the contributions of Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, with whom he’d attended the University of Virginia. Yet Berman’s fabulously mordant wit – more direct than Bill Callahan’s, but no less consummate in its melancholy wordplay – quickly shone through in its own right.
Around the time of 2001’s harrowing (and ironically titled) Bright Flight, he hit a low of depression and addiction. But thereafter Berman appeared to find a happier place, bringing in his wife Cassie Marrett as bassist, and tackling less traumatic themes on 2008’s Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea.
The following year, he wrote online that he was quitting music, hours later revealing that his estranged father was Richard Berman, a Trumpian Washington DC lobbyist for the food and tobacco industries, whom he later characterised as “a despicable man”, who “led campaigns against animal rights, trade unions, and even opposed anti-drunk-driving groups.”
“I enjoyed showing him that he had to go to so much effort to get people to follow him,” Berman told The Washington Post this year, “and I didn’t have to do anything.”
In the years following his retirement he lay low, apart from the occasional poetry-reading appearances and pithy notions shared on his Menthol Mountains blog. He also succumbed to a further bout of depression after his mother’s passing, and his divorce from Marrett. Yet with this year’s self-reinvention as Purple Mountains, it seemed as if Berman was back on track.
That excellent, country-style self-titled record was littered with expressions of desperation and, on Nights That Won’t Happen, thoughts of ending it all. But as a listener you felt – or at least, wanted to believe – that there was transcendence and even redemption for him in the songs’ articulation of those trials. Indeed, in an e-mail interview with Minneapolis–St. Paul paper City Pages conducted on the day before his passing, Berman gamely explained how his humorous touches, or “yuks”, were his way of signalling resilience, though he admitted, “I don’t know how I find the ratio betweeen [sic] drama and comedy.” He also confessed he was “having trouble playing a lot of the songs without weeping”. Finally, it seems, those tears engulfed him.
Andrew Perry
“I don’t know how I find the ratio between drama and comedy.” DAVID BERMAN