David Berman at the End of Things, or Maybe Near It

"I was not born to be the center of attention in a crowded room."

David Berman loved Johnny Paycheck. And what a great and true and nourishing American sentence that is to type. Johnny Paycheck was not a normal man, but his name represented reasonable things: a regular wage for a day's work, with the appropriate caveats, allowing for the rational allotment of sloth and laziness. Basically any Western European country. America, momentarily, was approaching a kind of perfection too, with Reagan’s “Morning in America” campaign. There was an artificiality to the proceedings, which certainly verged on or abetted madness. The first great slogans of the era were “Just say no!” and then, shortly and ubiquitously after, “Just do it!” Capitalism takes a back seat to no one in dissociative motive and method. 

"Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me Away" is not a lyric to a David Berman song. But it is the thesis of his music: the things which can be grabbed and rearranged and repatriated, but never truly transformed. The gathering and the disbursement and regathering of the spirit. From the flamboyant suburbs of Washington, DC where con artists of every stripe congregate, to take on other con artists already entrenched. I don’t know if it is saying something obvious or something terrifying about our flailing democracy that the digital snake, once evoked, cannot be recalled. In the end he could not ontologically resolve the old ideas with the new ones and took his life as lovers of the law often do. It was murder. The perpetrator was a subtle god.

“I know you like to line dance/ Everything is so democratic and cool.”

Wikipedia says, and I don’t doubt it: A line dance is a choreographed dance in which a group of people dance along to a repeating sequence of steps while arranged in one or more lines or rows.

The enlightened thinkers — some of them anyway — would have appreciated Berman’s paramour’s appreciation of line dances. Think of Voltaire and his well-tended gardens. Or the organizational acumen of Rousseau. Life is effervescent and dynamic. Friends will arrive and friends will disappear. Uncertainty menaced Berman, as certainly as it is menacing and haunting to us all. The rituals we create, and invest in with a passion belying common sense, are sometimes our only thin tether. Of course children were made to dance a happy dance during the great Maoist cleansing. Despite what we learned from Footloose, dancing does not always equal freedom. Let it remain at least democratic, if not cool. 

“I asked the painter why the roads are colored black/ He said, ‘Steve, it's because people leave / And no highway will bring them back’”

This is my favorite verse in “Random Rules,” and depending on your point of view, it is the strangest and most mystical. Why does David Berman, or the song’s narrator, ask the painter such an odd and elliptical question? Why does the painter, in answering, refer to David Berman, or at least the song's narrator, as “Steve?” What manner of painter are we referring to anyway? An impressionist maestro? A house painter? A street painter — literally on the highways? But, of course, that isn’t possible either. Streets aren’t painted, they’re paved. Maybe this is a clue to Steve’s identity. Certainly there is a Steve associated with Pavement that Berman might have occasionally been mistaken for. Or could it be that rampant screwer, Steven Tyler?

Then there is the second part of the proposition. People leave, it’s true — sometimes an exodus of the people — sometimes just one forlorn lover. Highways, however, almost definitionally, at least could bring them back. The choice is with the traveler, not with the road. The one way highway. This highly specific psychological construct would be known intimately to only a few fellow travelers: Chuck Berry, Joni Mitchell, Bon Scott, Jonathan Richman, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan. It is, in some sense, a lifetime sentence without parole. Berman eschewed touring — maybe even dreaded it — but that’s not to say he didn’t relish the rhapsodic reception that took place every day on his first ever tours of North America and Israel in 2006. He saw so many things he might not have otherwise — eye-opening in so many ways. 

“I know that a lot of what I have to say/ Has been lifted off of men’s room walls.”

A confession of a kind, for sure. But where did you think he was getting this stuff from? Voltaire? 

Of course he found true love, and of course it fumbled away from him just like Johnny Paycheck warned would be the case. The new form Berman embryonically efforted on American Water was perfected on the last will and testimony of 2019’s remarkable Purple Mountains LP. That late development that had to get a few jabs in — “She’s Making Friends (And I’m Getting Stranger),” “Margaritas at the Mall” — before he reiterated that he was too beautiful for this world, as lovers so often do. I could fucking kill him.

“Random Rules” is on some days my very favorite song so let me air my grievances without prejudice: Why are you like this, David Berman? So privileged and so perceptive, so self-defeating and so nourishing for those of us who still worry about the infrared deer and the digital snake. Why are you so inscrutable, so vague, so subtle? Did you ever consider that some of us have never been in a men’s room, or whatever counts as the urtext for your especially funny degeneracy? 

“Yeah, you look like someone I used to know.”

That exact desire to kind of understand and recognize him — I can’t prove it but I suspect that this was one of Berman’s grievances too. On the great Kreative Kontrol podcast, there is an episode where the host Vish Khanna talks to Berman as Purple Mountains was coming out, and it felt very scary. It was funny too. And beautiful. And valedictory. Khanna later referred to it as a gift Berman wanted to provide him before he could no longer. 

Half hours on Earth, what are they worth? I don’t know. I remember I was lost in a supermarket when I first heard the news, inevitably looking at my phone from relief of the anxiety of aisle thirteen, and I said to my husband: “Oh no.” And weirdly, because it wasn’t something we’d not spent too much time discussing, he instantly said “Berman?” It was the last night before the much delayed and desperately deserved victory lap and financial boon that the Purple Mountains’ tour was set to begin. Everyone was excited and everyone was concerned. And then the night before, like Ian Curtis did previously, Berman canceled the tour. As the humorist Charles Portis once wrote: “It’s the shame of our age, what we do to our poets.” Was Berman in on the joke? 

He had tried to understand the world, tried to understand America: Dallas, Nashville, Louisville, New York, California, Albuquerque, whatever. He had tried in his way to be free. The paradox of his compassion and contempt had remained steadfastly unresolved. All his happiness was gone. Sometimes the end is just the end. He took stock of his choices, as all of us must. And then he achieved perfection.