Bergmann rocks on explosive edge

The Toronto Star
Thursday, March 29, 1990
By Chris Dafoe

In the notes to his anthology album, Decade, Neil Young wrote: "This song put me in the middle-of-the-road, so I steered off into the ditch. The ride is a little rougher, but you meet more interesting people there."

Vancouver's Art Bergmann might offer the same observation. Over the past dozen years, Bergmann has made his mark writing songs populated by the denizens of the ditch: junkies, hustlers, strippers and would-be rock stars, the sick, desperate, strange and crazy.

Although well-known on the West Coast for his work with bands such as the Schmorgs, the Young Canadians, Los Popularos, and his own Poisoned, it wasn't until 1988 and the release of Crawl With Me that the rest of the world found out about Bergmann. Produced by John Cale and released on Duke Street Records, it was a surprisingly polished effort that earned Bergmann a Juno nomination as most-promising male vocalist and another for the video for "Our Little Secret".

Now he has returned with Sexual Roulette, a darkly funny, blistering slice-of-life on which Bergmann applies his mordant wit and throat-shredding vocals to matters such as AIDS ("Sexual Roulette"), cocaine psychosis ("Dirge No.1"), living on the edge ("Gambol"), and the desperation of an aging rock and roller ("Bound For Vegas").

Produced by Chris Wardman and featuring a band - keyboardist Susann Richter, drummer Taylor Nelson Little, and bassist Ray Fulber - that the singer has dubbed Showdogs, Sexual Roulette is nasty and raw, closer to how Bergmann sounds live than the Cale-produced effort.

Bergmann is in town this week to both launch the record and to open for the Tragically Hip on Friday night at Massey Hall.

He laughs dryly at the observation, but there are more than a few spots on Sexual Roulette that seem to teeter on the brink of an explosion. That explosiveness, combined with his apparent fascination with the flip-side of life, has lead some critics to wonder about the sources of his material.

"There's a bit of autobiography there," he says, "although you'd have to take the songs line by line. Sometimes I'll make up a character or play someone I know. And obviously things have to be embellished a bit. But the nastiest bits are usually true."