Bergmann wildman

The Vancouver Sun
Thursday, May 24, 1990
By John Mackie

"Schmoozing" is music industry-speak for pressing the flesh at industry gatherings, adding that personal touch to the hype surrounding your new album, tour, or career. Even the king of Vancouver's musical underground, Art Bergmann, went back to Toronto this year to schmooze it up and promote his new album, Sexual Roulette.

But Art will be Art, and by the time the dust settled, the 36-year-old rocker found himself at the centre of post-Juno gossip. At a Blue Rodeo showcase, he leapt up on stage, screamed "one fucking chord!" and led the band through a "spontaneous" rap song before falling over. After he left the stage, he tried to show his appreciation by throwing a flower to the band. Problem was, he tried to yank one out of a plastic flower arrangement, and wound up splattering the flowers and the planter in which they sat all over the place.

At one point, he allegedly entered the women's washroom and ripped off a stall door. At another party, he "thought everyone should go home" and so "threw a TV off the counter face first." And every time he saw a certain ultra-hyper MuchMusic veejay, he screamed: " 'You got some dope?!!' at the top of my lungs."

All of which raises the question: is it true they're scared of you in Toronto, Art?

"So I've been told," Art mutters, sipping on a double rum and Coke. "They're wimps, they're wimps, the whole Canadian music industry is a pile of whussies. Honeymoon Suit. Alotta Miles. It sounds like one big fucking beer ad, it's disgusting. And all these heavy metal bands with their cynical ploy for radio play with their ballads - come on. They call me cynical.

"People are so scared these days," he adds. "Everybody goes: 'It's so alternative!' Whatever happened to Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and John Lennon? The music of '66, '65 when radio was great - it was mean and nasty, coming out of garages."

"Mean and nasty" are two words that spring to mind when you spin Bergmann's latest opus. Producer Chris Wardman gave Bergmann full rein to go nuts, and he did, producing an intense album of unrelenting musical savagery and gripping lyrics.

The title track, Sexual Roulette, deals with sex in the age of AIDS. The blistering rocker Gambol is about gambling with your sanity. The lovely balladry of Sleep masks a rather devious variation (not quite suitable for print in family newspapers) on standard pickup lines.

But the heaviest song of all is Dirge #1, a Led Zeppelin-style number about a strung-out acquaintance of Art's who threatened to go on a murder rampage in Toronto's Kensington Market.

"I think he was undergoing severe cocaine psychosis," explains Bergmann. "He thought every black person was a coke dealer, and he was going to go out and kill them 'cause he'd been ripped off so many times."

Overall, the album seems to be even darker and more twisted than his first album, Crawl With Me (which dealt with, among other things, incest, murder/suicide, and junkies). But Art seems surprised by the observation.

"You think so? Isn't it funny? To me, I'm just another stand-up comedian," says Bergmann, who, wild stories to the contrary, is normally quite soft-spoken and civil. "The jokes . . . some of them just go 'fwooooom' over people's heads. Some people take everything so goddamn literally. I'm in a really stupid business."

As an example, he brings up The Hospital Song, a poppy little number with the addictive hum-along chorus, "maybe later, we'll get together and have a relapse."

What inspired The Hospital Song?

"I got this girl in deep, deep trouble one time. She came in a cab, left in an ambulance."

A true story?

"Everything is true. We're makin' movies here!"

Sexual Roulette should satisfy the long-time fans who were dismayed at John Cale's (somewhat tame) production on Crawl With Me. Going into the studio is always hard for Bergmann ("I hate the whole recording process: it's like making me go inside out or something"), but working with Cale proved to be even more excruciating than usual.

"I can listen to it now," says Bergmann of the first album. "When we were doing the mixes in Toronto, I'd go home and pull my hair out. John wanted to get some kind of weird atmosphere, I think. But his atmosphere and my atmosphere are probably two different things . . . mine's a bit filthier. He was not interested in guitars in the least. I'm a big proponent of rhythm guitars, two of them going as loud as the snare drum, eating their way through the tape."

Crawl With Me was recorded at the Manta sound studio, and wound up costing a cool $120,000. Sexual Roulette was recorded in two weeks at Commercial Drive's relatively low-budget Profile studios, and only cost $15,000. "The thing is, you can record in any studio, in your living room, as long as you've got a good engineer who knows what he's doing," he states. "Make the songs go on tape as loud as possible, and then make them claw their way through the speakers."

The album was actually finished last summer: release was delayed while the tape was shopped around to American record companies. Nothing's been confirmed yet, but there has been definite interest, and it could well see a Stateside release in the next couple of months. (One rumor has Bergmann's label, Duke Street, being bought by Miles Copeland's streetwise IRS.) In any case, Bergmann will be touring Canada with the Pursuit of Happiness in June (he's now being co-managed by Pursuit manager Jeff Rogers), and will open for Midnight Oil and Hunters and Collectors at UBC's Thunderbird Stadium June 26.

Bergmann's "influences" range far beyond music. "For Dirge, I wanted to write a song as scary as the movie Dead Ringers. I came out of there high as a kite, I'll tell ya." He's also been reading Zola, Bukowski, and Phillip K. Dick. His favorite singers are Howlin' Wolf ("that's evil comin' out of those speakers") and Iggy Pop (the inspiration for Bound For Vegas). But don't ask him about guitar players.

"Fuck, I hate guitar players. Hate them. They're a dime a fuckin' dozen. I hate lead guitars: I like two rhythms goin' full blast."

Who's his favorite rhythm player, then?

"There is only one, isn't there? The guy who invented it, Keith Richards. And Paul Westerberg. I like the way these guys record mistakes: that's when things happen. That's why I hate so much of this heavy metal shit. All the distortion is cleaned up, it's smooth, like opera now. Fuck off."