ARCHIVE INTERVIEW: David Berman / Silver Jews, 1995

 We were saddened to hear of the untimely passing on the 7th of August of David Berman, Silver Jews frontman and poet, who we initially discovered through his work with Stephen Malkmus and other members of Pavement. 

Roger Simian (of Scottish duo, Avant Kinema) interviewed Berman in 1994 in Sun Zoom Spark magazine, which we are here reprinting...
 
 Where The Pavement's
 Lined With Silver
an Interview with David Berman / Silver Jews
by Roger Simian, 
Sun Zoom Spark magazine, 
January 1995

David Berman allows the phone to ring three or four times before he reaches out, lifts the receiver to his ear and quietly drawls:  Hello? Yeah. This is David. How are you? Are you calling from Scotland? Where in Scotland? Yeah? Is that near Windermere? No?

Oh, well, London's crazy. I love it. I've been here before, so I guess I'm a little more jaded now, but everything's still so different when you go to another country. I remember the first time I came here - I'd never been outside the States - and I was just walking around in a daze, you know? Lamp posts. Mail boxes. The expression on people's faces. The clothes they were wearing. Everything just seemed so different. It was like being on another planet. It's really great dealing with the English. They're all so polite and helpful.
 
Oh, yeah, that's right. You're Scottish.

So, anyway, the band. Yeah? Well, I think that to a degree Silver Jews - at least until this last record - have always been more of a band, in a traditional sense, than Pavement. Pavement is pretty much a one-man-show - with Steve Malkmus basically doing everything - whereas Silver Jews was always just three friends getting together and writing music - playing off each other.

 

Starlight Walker was a little bit of a departure from that, I guess, because I basically wrote all the songs this time round. What I did was, back in May, I rented this laboratory from an old retired chemist out in the woods near a little town called Oxford, Mississippi. I was completely isolated out there and I spent a month and a half with nothing to do but just write songs.

No. I didn't wear a lab coat. All the glassware and chemicals had been turfed out. There was nothing left but air-conditioning and carpeting so I didn't really go about it in a particularly scientific way. Mind you I suppose there was a feeling of danger - of writing songs on the edge - 'cause the lab was used before to train hounds to sniff out explosives. There were big kennels behind the building and the old guy used to put TNT down and let the dogs loose. I was hoping, when I was wandering around the woods, that there was none left lying around.

Yeah, I guess the songs do have a country feel. That's the music I grew up with in Texas. Even rock 'n' roll groups like the Band and the Eagles to a certain extent. I know it's such a clichŽ but the stuff that really turns me on is music that's tied to the land. I'm really interested in regionalism and stuff like that. I'm not really that much impressed by any bands I've heard lately. I'd have to say that I prefer older music.

Actually, to tell you the truth, what inspires me most is books. Cormack McCarthy. Nicholas Moseley. Faulkner. Wallace Stevens.

My major interest in life is my writing. That's really what I put most time into. When I'm 50 I'll probably be doing that rather than playing music. I've not had much published yet, just really in small journals here and there. I'm saving it all up so that one day I can let it all out in one great deluge.

Anyway, to get back to the woods...

After I wrote those songs the other guys came down and we worked on them. It wasn't like a dictatorship at all. Everyone's suggestions - even Bob Nastanovich's - were at least considered.

Berman laughs loudly. 

You know Bob? All he did the whole time was walk around going, 'Hey, guys, I brought the Moog, I brought the Moog! Can we use that?' For the first couple of days it was a little irritating. Every time we were at a crucial moment where Steve Malkmus and I were trying to discuss what to do Bob would be sitting in the background drinking a beer and pestering us about that damned machine.

We had Steve West drumming on about half the songs. He and I are old friends and, since he lives in New York and Bob lives in Kentucky, Malkmus and I have used him a lot over the last couple of years whenever we've wanted to record on the 4-track.

Yeah, that's right. Malkmus lodged with West for a while in New York. For some reason Malkmus refuses to admit that he has any money. He's staying in that same neighborhood with his girlfriend now. They're living well below their means in some little hole in Brooklyn.


How did I meet the other guys? Well, we all went to the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. We used to always play around in college and then, when we moved to New York together, we all lived in this bleak desolate little basement apartment in New Jersey. We worked at pretty hard jobs and when we came home we needed to release, to unwind in some way besides drinking and smoking pot. That meant music.

We used to call people up and play into the 'phone. We thought we were giving them some sort of gift but I think we were actually harassing them. A few people got their numbers changed.

We've really only played five or six club shows as Silver Jews. We much prefer to play on our own territory. We'll have a party and we'll invite a bunch of people over. We'd also like to start playing some 'open nights' - you know? Where a bar will have a microphone and P.A. system set up and anyone can just come along and play. That's something where you really have to win the audience over. We wanna go where nobody knows who we are and see if we can earn applause, rather than going to a place where people are saying, 'Oh, The Silver Jews are playing tonight. Some of them are members of Pavement,' and before you even go out on stage you've received a certain amount of approval. That just doesn't seem very satisfying.

It seems that a lot of people seem to think our album is supposed to be funny or jokey - and that's ok if someone sees it that way - but I really want it to be seen as more of a straightforward warm non-cynical humble record. Something pretty friendly and welcoming. I'd just like people to try and listen to it as a Silver Jews record and not wonder about Pavement or anything like that. It's not a side-project. It's a whole separate thing.

What's that? You want to know what a 'chukker' is? Well that's a period in a polo game. There are seven chukkers in a game.

Ok, then, thanks. It's been good speaking to you, Roger. Goodbye.
 
click. bzzzzzzzzzb.
A Million Chukkers Never Felt Wrong.





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