City's 'wildman' down on the farm

Vancouver rock legend Art Bergmann found fighting arthritis in Alberta

The Vancouver Sun
Saturday, June 2, 2007
By John Mackie

Art Bergmann answers the phone, hears my voice, and mutters the perfect Art Bergmann greeting.

"The last time you talked to me someone died. So who died this time?"

No one, in fact. It's just that the arts editor of the Vancouver Sun wants to know whatever became of Art Bergmann, Vancouver's legendary new wave singer-songwriter and wildman, after a decade or so out of the limelight.

The answer is a bit of a shock. The 54-year-old Bergmann has arthritis in his hands, and doesn't really make music any more, because it's too painful to play guitar.

"It's gotten really bad in the last six months," he says.

"It started in my hands, my hands are all gnarled up. Now it's in my spine, I can't walk too good. Apparently it's just going to get worse."

The other shock is where he's living. After a decade in downtown Toronto, Bergmann and his wife Sherry Decembrini have spent the last year-and-a-half living a rural life on a small farm in Airdrie, Alta., a half hour north of Calgary. Sherry's sister lives up the road, and they're looking after the place for someone who moved away.

"I'm surrounded by 100 acres of wheat," says Bergmann.

"We have 10 acres of decaying old farmyard, with tons of skeletons on it."

Given his past, it's amazing that Art's not a skeleton himself. His songs were filled with references to drugs and guns and all sorts of bad stuff, and a lot of it came from first-hand experience.

Bergmann claims to have been clean and sober for a decade. But he admits his boozing and drugging got pretty bad in the late '80s and early '90s.

"Climbing up an apartment building wall to rip off my neighbour, that was probably my dumbest move," he says.

Really?

"Yep. On Main Street there."

That's when you knew you had to get out of town?

"No," he snorts. "But that was near the end. No, I just went on tour and decided to stay in Toronto for awhile. Of course, I never got enough money to move back."

Twelve years later, he still doesn't have enough money to move back. He probably never will. Which is ironic, because Art Bergmann symbolizes Vancouver's musical underground as much as anyone.

His first brush with fame (or infamy) was with the K-Tels, a new-wave power trio that was renamed the Young Canadians after K-Tel threatened to sue. As a solo artist, he put out a quartet of critically lauded albums on major labels, and even had a semi-hit with the poppy Faithlessly Yours.

But he never made a commercial breakthrough, and after 1995's What Fresh Hell Is This?, he was dropped by Sony. Since then he's been in the musical hinterlands, surviving by doing odd jobs and working at a Toronto restaurant called Rancho Relaxo.

Last year, DOA's Joe Keithley reissued a Young Canadians compilation CD, No Escape. It seems to have found a bit of an audience in Japan, where for some strange reason Vancouver new wave bands from the late '70s have achieved cult status.

A filmmaker named Susanne Tabata is also apparently working on a documentary of Vancouver's punk/new wave era. She recently showed up in Airdrie to interview Bergmann, with DOA's Randy Rampage in tow. (Bergmann laughs that Rampage cut quite an image in small-town Alberta, with his hair dyed a colour not found in nature.)

Now comes news that Bergmann's former bass player Ray Fulber is working on a CD of some demo tapes Bergmann made in the mid-'80s with producers Bob Rock, now one of the biggest producers in the world, and Paul Hyde.

Rock's demo recording of Bergmann's searing rocker My Empty House helped Art nail his first big record deal, with Duke Street Records in Toronto. But when it came time to record an album, Bergmann went with former Velvet Underground member John Cale as producer instead of Rock.

In retrospect, it was a rather dumb move, passing over a young local guy who was about to become red hot internationally for an aging 1960s legend whose glory days were well behind him.

"[Cale] just came and collected his 35 grand [fee] and drank tea and played squash, and that was about it," says Bergmann.

"Got a bit freaked out at Ray, I think. Or all of us, actually. We were in the midst of some psycho-sexual drama. Here's a quote from John Cale: 'I was fighting the demos all the way.'"

Fulber feels the Rock demos are infinitely better than Cale's production.

"When I play it for people they go 'Wow man, if this would have come out, Art would have been a household name,'" says Fulber, whose son Rhys is in the Vancouver acts Front Line Assembly and Delirium.

"He does a version of Junkie Don't Care and the solo is just unbelievable, beyond anything that ever made it to [record]."

Fulber now lives a relatively tranquil existence running a studio on the Sunshine Coast, where he lives with his longtime girlfriend, Bergmann's former keyboard player Suzanne Richter. In tandem with drummer Taylor Little, they were the band on the best Bergmann solo albums, Crawl With Me and Sexual Roulette. Lyrically it was Bergmann's darkest period, with twisted songs like My Empty House (about a murder-suicide), The Hospital Song (inspired by a girlfriend's overdose) and Dirge No. 1 (about a cocaine addict threatening to go on a murderous rampage).

But it got so crazy, the band imploded.

"I remember the last gig we played together," recalls Fulber.

"I think we got like six grand or $5,500 for one set. The next morning Suzanne had a meeting and said 'I'm not going to stay around and watch one of you guys die.'"

She quit, Fulber quit, and Bergmann soldiered on as a solo artist, with records produced by Toronto's Chris Wardman. The Duke Street label went bankrupt, so he moved to Polygram for his third album, Art Bergmann, and then Sony for his fourth.

Bergmann had a powerhouse manager in Sam Feldman and tons of champions in the music biz. But the lack of an American or European record deal probably killed his career. He was probably a bit over the edge for mainstream success, ala Bryan Adams but probably could have done okay selling a few records here, a few there.

In any event, he didn't have either a major label deal or a manager when he made his last recording, an acoustic "unplugged" record (he calls it "defanged"), Design Flaw. It was released in 1998 on the small Toronto label Other People's Music. In 2000, another small label, Audio Monster, released Vultura Freeway, a CD issue of another excellent 1984 demo tape.

Alas, there isn't likely to be much more original Art Bergmann stuff, and not only because of the arthritis.

"I quit doing drugs and alcohol in '95-'96, and haven't written much since then," he says. "I killed my muse, I guess."

But he still has his fans, like Bob Rock.

"He actually called me out of the blue, Bob Rock," says Bergmann. "About a month ago."

What did he have to say?

"Just that he loved my writing as much as James Hetfield's [of Metallica]."

Reached at his home in Hawaii, Rock says he's "always willing to chat about Art Bergmann.

"Continually wrote great songs, and never really ... the potential that was there, they never really achieved it. I think Art personally had some difficulties, as we all did when we were young. Some people move beyond that, and some people get stuck in that. Maybe unfortunately that's what happened to him.

"But the songs don't go away, and his brilliance doesn't go away. And you know what? He was a really great guitar player. I play his stuff all the time, I've got the re-released stuff, and he's a great guitar player. Had a great sound and a distinct style, which is so hard to have these days."

Rock has reunited with his old bandmates in the Payola$ for an album and a summer tour.

Another Vancouver new wave act, the Pointed Sticks, recently reunited to do a small Japanese tour, and Buck Cherry of the Modernettes also did some Japanese dates.

Asked if he would reform the Young Canadians for a Japanese tour, Bergmann doesn't sound all that enthusiastic. For one thing, Young Canadians bass player Jim Bescott was killed in 2005 in a truck accident. Then there's Bergmann's arthritis problem.

"But make me an offer," he deadpans.

"I've been trying to sell out for years, but nobody's buying."