“I’d like to encourage the lonely and nervous to come seek comfort in seeing a band led by a guy who didn’t know what he wanted to do in life until he was 40 years old,” David Berman of the Silver Jews said somewhere between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
He was pitching his Eugene show, scheduled for tonight at the WOW Hall, to the thousands of incoming freshmen moving into their dorms the weekend before.
A happy but road-wearied Berman delivered a lengthy “anti-valediction” for those students facing a life ahead on the first day of college. “Right now I suggest that people stay free agents,” he said. “There is no organization or corporation who will show any loyalty to you. No field of study will, either. You have to be your own category.”
Berman, a popular face of the ’90s indie-rock scene, is no stranger to the life-quandaries of American 20-somethings. Out of college, he lived in New York and worked as a security guard at an art museum.
“I figured I wanted to be some kind of artist, but I didn’t know what kind,” Berman said. “I didn’t know whether I was supposed to be a poet, or a musician, or what. And that just went on for years.”
Berman’s band, the Silver Jews, has been “together” in some sense since 1989. The official fan-site of the Silver Jews reports that Berman and former bandmates, including Pavement bandleader Stephen Malkmus, started with rough recordings on their friends’ answering machines. It wasn’t until 2005 – 15 years and nearly 30 band-members later – that poet-musician Berman finally took his musical project on tour.
Though 2005 marked the beginning of physical meandering for the Silver Jews, it also marked a logistical settling of the band. Berman’s most recent albums, “Tanglewood Numbers” (2005, Drag City), and “Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea” (2008, Drag City), have featured a core group of musicians out of Nashville, including Berman’s wife and bassist, Cassie.
“(Cassie) will be performing with me,” Berman said, “so I’ll have all my evidence on stage that you can be a dork, and you can win.”
Berman is a man of diverse influences. Known for his love of poetry and Hasidic folklore, he also relishes in Nashville’s twangy history.
“To be educated about country music and live in Nashville really gives you a sense of proprietorship to ‘the scope’ – what is happening in country music now and what has happened in the past. It’s sort of like being an archeologist living in Israel,” he said.
Berman also considers Monotonix, a frequent opener for the Silver Jews, to be a major draw for tonight’s show. Monotonix is a driving rock band out of Tel Aviv known for high volume and raucous stage antics.
“No rock band lets the opening band be louder,” Berman said. “But for us it’s perfect. It’s like, a total fire and ice experience.”
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