33 rebellions per minute
"Go down Moses, go down on me, I do not have the strength to fight"
1997
Dan Bern, S/T
"The thing about Laurel and Hardy movies that you can't get from the chopped-up versions on television is how beautiful they are. Things happen at exactly the moment they have to happen. They don't happen a second too soon or a second too late. You can even predict what's going to happen-- and it does happen-- and it surprises you anyway. It doesn't surprise you because it happened, but because it happened so perfectly"-- Walter, in Daniel Pinkwater's the Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death
If the measure of a concert's greatness is the length of time I take telling everyone I can find about it in numbing detail, then Dan Bern's March 28 concert will be hard to unseat as the best I've seen (see my report on the Chad Mitchell Trio's BITTER END for both an abridged (!) public report and an explanation of what the hell it's doing in a Chad Mitchell Trio review). Of course, spoiling Bern's punchlines was not an issue: you probably won't get to see him in concert, and if you do, he'll probably have new ones and the old ones will be banished. In discussing his first full-length record, I could take the same tack, because after all _he_ does. Sure, it's all songs instead of routines (with the tumblingly excited, infectiously interminable "Estelle" as the exception), and almost half the songs are played almost straight, but despite the aid of a band what we're basically listening to is Dan Bern's Dylan-on-articulation-pills voice, Dan Bern's guitar, and Dan Bern's occasional harmonica (he also adds his own cello part to "Too Late To Die Young"). The counter to that is, the jokes on DAN BERN are the same every play. But if that was all that mattered, I would only have needed to hear "Jerusalem" once, and I certainly wouldn't have enjoyed it ever more with each listen. It's the opening track, it seesaws with almost every line between the same two acoustic chords, and I'll keep the serious good song content at the beginning and end-- a relationship song which, however wise the lyrics, might not the smartest thing to dub on a mix for your girlfriend or boyfriend-- as a secret bonus for when you hear the song. But you just know he picked it as the lead track so he could start the record with a song announcing
"Everybody's waiting for the messiahIt's funny because _he_ is funny, and also because he then returns to his original point. Of course, four songs later, he's down to declaring, in a voice so deliberately, drunkenly obnoxious that I for one accept it as charming, that he's "King Of The World"; so maybe the track order was a coincidence.
The Christians are waiting
The Jews are waiting
Also the Muslims
They've been waiting a loooong time
I _hate_ waiting
Like even for the bus or something
A really important phone call
So I thought it would be nice if I revealed myself
I am the messiah
I am the messiah
... yeah I think you heard me right
I am the messiah
I was gonna save it for next year
Build up the suspense a little
But you know how you get a big secret
And you're just burstin' to tell somebody
It was kind of like that
And now that I've told you I feel so much better
LIke there's this great weight off my shoulders
Dr. Nussbaum was right."
The loner anthem "Go To Sleep" and the pro-libertine "Marilyn", selling themselves on catchy melodies, are the representative highlights, amusing without being jokey, presenting serious moral positions without forgetting to have fun, moral positions that are in fact in favor of having fun (okay, one last quip: "There's tomatoes/ chemically engineered/ they come out square/ to fit in boxes./ There's people/ chemically engineered/ they come out square/ to fit in boxes". But the funniest, equals most serious, parts of "Marilyn" are not ones that I, as a future schoolteacher who would prefer not to be a future immediately-fired-under-controversy schoolteacher, should get in the habit of citing). "Too Old To Die Young" is as celeb-watching as "Marilyn" but presents its autobiographic and premature worries about aging with no obvious irony. The verbose, minor-key "Wasteland" takes six minutes to observe Los Angeles with an intensity, passion, and willingness to follow his own logical twists in unexpected directions that immediately renders any complaint that six gajillion other songwriters have turned jaundiced eyes on Los Angeles irrelevant; and if it sounds too much like his buddy Ani DiFranco's "Little Plastic Castle" smugness when he declares "Every single block looked like every single block looked like every single block looked like every single block", he immediately deflates it by putting himself in the picture: "but I kept driving, because gridlock is evil, and not knowing where you're going is evil".
The other songs don't leave as much of a mark on me personally, but are well-written and well-performed: the dry, muted, semi-surreal "Rome", the conventionally folky "Queen", the whiny but probably ironic and at least knowing "Never Fall In Love Again", and the please don't blame your old relationships on me insistence of "I'm Not The Guy". Bern takes on potentially deep enough topics to clarify that he himself is not a deep thinker; but then, most songwriters are not deep thinkers, and the ones who are don't tend to find huge adoring audiences, and I can't think of any good argument for why people who aren't intellectual snobs shouldn't get to enjoy music. Bern is more thoughtful than the average potential listener, and more clever than most of us, and a truly gifted performer. So his debut demonstrates.
1998
Dan Bern, FIFTY EGGS
There's three key novelties to Bern's second album. Good novelty: Ani DiFranco produces, and Andy Stochansky and Jason Mercer from Ani's band play drum and bass. Ani's albums, starting with OUT OF RANGE and kicking into gear on DILATE, have been careful demonstrations of how to put subtle variety and sonic detail into acoustic guitar based songs. So on FIFTY EGGS, "Tiger Woods", with guitar assistance by Ani, starts and ends with dramatic minor chords, and is graced throughout with perfect little guitar filigrees and tiny squalls of feedback. "One Thing Real" and "Everybody's Baby" are slow waltzes with accordian. "No Missing Link" has agile rhythm shifts, more minor key guitar and a deep squawking Dan-played cello reminiscent of the double-bass from Primus's "My Name Is Mud". "Cure For AIDS" is perky and driven by flashy, energetic drum patter. "Chick Singers" is even faster-- propelled by Dan's frantic rhyme scheme, three verses following the ridiculous near-precise rhythm of 71, then 19, then 40, then 30 syllables per line-- but the chorus is a clownishly off-key rewrite of "Tiger Woods"'s intro. "One Dance" is one big fluctuating tempo change with melody and guitar textures that should've been on Fiddler On The Roof somewhere. "Jesus Freak" gets weird little sounds as if he's not merely fingering his guitar strings but trying to scrabble up them above a 40-foot precipice, and the song builds into some harsh quarter-note snare and some space-whoosh bass. Everything else, where not noted, still reminds me of the Freewheelin' Bob Dylan.
Bad novelty: Dan seems to be tired enough of his singing voice that he periodically stretches it in all sorts of places it shouldn't go. On "Chick Singers" and "Go To Sleep", for just a couple syllables at a time, I think it's funny, but on "Everybody's Baby" and "Monica", serious songs, I find it painful, and I practically never find singing painful except in gang chants (Beastie Boys, Red Hot Chili Peppers) or death-metal gargling (Cannibal Corpse, My Dying Bride) or fusions of both (White Zombie). Less charitable listeners might also object to Dan's singing well above his range on "One Dance".
Third novelty is more a clarification: Dan's natural medium is guy lyrics, class-clown lyrics, underachiever lyrics. Oddly, he clarifies this by turning out several of his best songs: "Oh Sister" is a loving tribute to his older sister. "One Thing Real" melds Christianity, TV commercials, and his own stage patter into a critique of artificial routines and a wish for something real (some love song content) (his titles do make a certain sense, don't they?), with the cagey summary "I'd like to leave America for someplace where they would not speak English, so I might be understood". "One Dance" and "Rolling Away" both critique himself as a boyfriend ("I caught a cold and for two days straight my ears have been plugged up/ as if my body's sayin' 'You don't need your ears, you never listen anyway'"); the latter manages to encompass everything from dogs to Andie McDowell to "magazines saying there's something wrong with your face" in its decaying-love analysis. "Tiger Woods" discusses insecurity, shyness, and the danger of having fulfillable dreams.
But like it or not, Dan remains someone who starts his album with "I got big balls"; someone whose discussion of evolution, whatever its merits, seems to exist entirely to let him sing "Aliens came and fucked the monkeys, they fucked the monkeys"; someone who can't salute his sister without including, among the many memories, peeping as she removed her bra; someone whose two most thoughtful songs include silly references to fellatio; someone who namechecks Muhammed Ali, Madonna, Tiger Woods, Jesus, Van Gogh, Michael Jordan, Willie Mays, and Jackie Robinson in just the first four songs, as if there was no other way to make his points. His opinions on race, on evolution, on "Chick Singers", on AIDS, on Monica Lewinsky have sincerity going for them, but the sincerity that comes with two seconds' thought. I still mostly love the record, mind you; he's funny and kind, the music sounds good, and even without the lyric sheet it'd be easy to sing along.
He also serves as a marker: one thing the half-assed songs here have in common is a "Look! I can say this!" outrageousness. You won't find a better song on those topics without luck or effort; he's a marker for what people are too shy to talk about. That has value: why _aren't_ there better songs on race, at least by white people, than Dan's "Different Worlds"? I was a similarly disruptive class clown, in frequent battles with a vice-principal who would fully have deserved his Socialist-Realist name Mr. Massman even if he wasn't overweight. I don't regret it: some topics need to brought up by jokers or they'll never get discussed at all. But now Dan's proven his courage, and maybe if we all buy his discs and keep him in business, he'll have time to supplement it with the intelligence he's proven he possesses.
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