Art puts snarl back in rock

The Province (Vancouver)
Monday, April 16, 1990
By Tom Harrison

Art Bergmann reaches for his cigarettes on the coffee table, lights one up, considers what he's going to say.

"Rock and roll is just one big career move now," he observes. "You go to school, go to classes, you go to rock conferences - it disgusts me. Alannah Myles gets a number one record in the States and she says, 'It's my job.' Well, I thought the idea of doing this was to avoid having a job."

One listen to either of Art's two albums, Crawl With Me or the new Sexual Roulette, confirms there are a lot of things that disgust Bergmann. If you thought he was p.o.'d on the first one, you ought to hear the Chris Wardman-produced sequel.

You will. Bound For Vegas, the first single, already is bound for airplay at every self-respecting rock station across the country, but there is more - lots more - to Sexual Roulette.

The best real rock and roll to be released by a Canadian act this year, it has put back the snarl of guitar that John Cale removed for his production of Crawl With Me. While Cale's strategy let the songs shine, the prettified ugliness wasn't what Bergmann's fans wanted or others, who knew Art only by reputation, expected.

"John Cale, I think, was looking for atmosphere, but my atmosphere is filthier than his," Art says, bemused. "Wardman was good; he and I agreed on everything. We kept all the bubbles, squeaks and farts from the amplifiers. We had the attitude that things sound best just before they blow up."

If Wardman (producer of LPs by Chalk Circle and NEO A4, demos by Tragically Hip and The Pursuit Of Happiness) has returned to Art and his band of Susann Richter, Ray Fulber and Taylor Nelson Little their sound, Bergmann has delivered songs that bristle with excitement and spray the blood of humanity all over the carpet.

Consider the title track, a song about a serial killer whose murder weapon is AIDS that has Art screaming aloud his fear of being the next victim; the heavy-lidded despair of the characters in Bar Of Pain; or the psychological games people play daily in the song Gambol that prompts Art to volunteer that "I like to gamble with my sanity."

Insanity is well represented on Sexual Roulette, not only in Gambol but also in More Blue Shock and especially Dirge No. 1. Some people claim to be on the street; Art Bergmann is there every day, bottling not only its life but its stink.

Dirge No. 1 was written after several days of hanging around Toronto's Kensington Market, a densely-populated cultural enclave with its share of crack houses.

"I was staying at a friend's place," Bergmann recalls. "He was undergoing severe cocaine psychosis and thought every black man was a drug dealer and he wanted to kill them all."

It's no wonder that Art is a fan of poet-reprobate Charles Bukowski and black humorist Louis Ferdinand Celine, whose work has armed him intellectually to play the devil's advocate, and also to see a purpose in the "wild and vicious mood swings" that have made Art's club dates legendary for their unpredictability and palpable danger.

If these characteristics make Bergmann the closest heir to Iggy Pop, then good, great, hallelujah: The cavalry has arrived. It was a line from an Iggy Pop interview that inspired Bound For Vegas and it is an Iggy-like sense of humor (in Hospital Song, Swamp Food Thing and the Velvet Underground steals of She Hit Me) that tempers Sexual Roulette's seamier obsessions.

Art Bergmann's background - soft-spoken prodigal of a nice family of German origin from Surrey-White Rock - also parallels that of Iggy, who was born James Osterberg in Michigan. And, much to their families' distress, both men have made their music a model of their lives.

"My mom says, 'Art, write some nice songs,' " Art Bergmann states, smiling fondly. "I say, 'Mom, Jesus lived with whores.' "