Profile: The Best Is Yet To Come

Written by Katya Schapiro

Dan Bern on Torah, Time Travel, and Taking Action

There’s a guy out there with a guitar, a brutal tour schedule, a working knowledge of household Yiddish, and a dream. And he’s aiming straight at the White House. My Country II, Dan Bern’s summer 2004 release from Messenger Records, is a song-by-song critique of the Bush administration. The album, subtitled “Music to Beat Bush By,” ranges from ballads about Iraq war veterans to attacks on the peacefulness of “Ostrich Town,” USA. From “President,” where Bern lays out his fortnight-long plan for governing the country – including nationalized health care, legal marijuana, and statehood for Cuba and Mexico – to the fervent repetitions of “Bush Must Be Defeated,” the album has one goal: change. Dan Bern is putting his foot down.

A darling of the indie-folk circuit, Dan Bern is heir to the American tradition of folk-rock protest music, a successor to Woody Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, and Ani DiFranco. But Bern also channels Elvis Costello, Bruce Springsteen, Lenny Bruce, and a host of eclectic counter-cultural heroes, and the combination makes his music more unique compilation than derivation. An Iowa native, the son of two World War II refugees, both musicians, Bern grew up surrounded by music of many forms. He studied cello when he was young and switched to the guitar as he began to make his name in the nineties West Coast folk scene. Bern’s first album, Dog Boy Van, came out in 1996. Around the same time, he met Ani DiFranco at a festival and soon afterward began opening for her tours. DiFranco, no slouch herself when it comes to provocative lyrics, has called him the only guy who takes as much flack for his music as she does for hers. These days Bern is based in Arizona, where between tours he builds on his renaissance-worthy body of art, which includes paintings, over 400 songs, and a new self-published novel, Quitting Science.

This fall, Bern has traveled cross-country, sometimes performing alone and sometimes opening for Ani DiFranco’s “Vote, Dammit” tour, one of several pop-cultural efforts to get out the vote this election year. Some have wondered whether efforts like these really sway undecided voters – or even reach them – pointing out that whether activist songwriters largely find themselves playing to crowds already in their camp. But Bern isn’t worried about preaching to the choir. “I go and play,” he says, “and whoever shows up shows up. You can’t follow them home and make sure they eat all the right foods.” A veteran of the folk and activism scenes, Dan Bern realizes his critiques of the status quo won’t make the news. But, he says, even if his activist efforts mean little more than “playing the pep rallies,” they are worthwhile nonetheless.

Bern’s political leanings are earnest, his lyrics and themes self-elevating and often epic in scale. But he never makes the mistake of taking himself too seriously, and with his music – and his Midwestern Jewish twang – he undercuts pomposity with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. Bern places himself in the middle of things – not only of current events, but historical and mythic ones. The narrator of his ballad “Jerusalem” is as surprised as anyone when, he says,

All the ancient kings came to my door
They said do you want to be an ancient king too, I said oh yes very much
But I think my timing’s wrong
They said time is relative
Or did you misread Einstein
I said do you really mean it
They said what do you think we come here for
Our god damn health or something

Bern’s narrator goes on to reveal that he himself is the messiah that most of the world’s major religions have been anticipating for millennia. Then, in an aside, he observes that his therapist was right – he does feel better with that off his chest.

Sometimes Bern is the messiah, sometimes king, sometimes president. Sometimes he’s a time-traveler or a prophet with a direct line to God. But the way Bern sees it, his taste for epic proportions and seeming self-aggrandizement is more than just arrogance. He insinuates himself into the grand scheme of things for the same reasons that he writes songs about current events and political protest – curiosity about power and a desire for social change. Bern says he operates from the view that, “people have power. Not in a way that kings have power, presidents or emperors, but from the bottom up. Revolution begins in the basement.” To Bern, invoking ancient kings, modern presidents, and every-day folk all serves the same purpose: “We do not need to be just spectators,” he says.

Bern’s irreverence extends to his treatment of Jewish themes, which figure largely in his work. He speaks of feeling “close to and comfortable with” Jewish topics, but he is never “so reverent that [he] can’t play with them.” With parents who came to Iowa from Eastern Europe via Palestine, a cantor for a sister, and an obsession with the culture around him – he name-drops with greater frequency than a hip-hop artist and claims an extensive list of influences – it’s not surprising that Judaism crops up frequently in his writing. In addition to reclaiming the name his father dropped circa 1945 – “Bernstein” – Bern is often accompanied by a band called the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy. The band’s name, he says, just “popped into my head. I think it was like when [comedian] Dick Gregory named his book Nigger, he put a preface in there to his mother, that whenever they said that word, they’d just be talking about his book.” The IJBC takes the place of that book – a goofy, bitter twist on an old stereotype.

The IJBC isn’t the only negative cultural symbol that Bern has tried to rehabilitate. His 2002 “Swastika” EP goes even farther, insisting that the swastika be restored to its place as a symbol of simple religious order or reinvented as the emblem of such famous foursomes as the Marx Brothers. “Yellow Star,” meanwhile, reimagines its title symbol as a punk-rock badge of retribution, using the language of the V’ahavta – the prayer following the Sh’ma that contains instructions for posting mezuzot, laying t’fillin, and teaching the commandments to the next generation. Bern’s narrator, the Holocaust survivor in striped pajamas bearing a battered suitcase, vows to wear, he says, a “spiked collar…for frontlets between my eyes,” and “for booby traps on the doorposts of my house and upon my gates.” He swears to channel his uncle, who fought with the partisans in the forests of Lithuania, to be “Emma Goldman with a blowtorch, Harpo Marx with a machete” – so that, he says, “ye may remember and not go meekly to the slaughter,” a bitter riff on the theme of “never again.” On the other side of the spectrum, the twangy “Jew From Kentucky” imagines a good ol’ boy who likes to nosh his kishka with grits and cole slaw – the Southern Jew, two cultural stereotypes interwining.

Given his background, Bern is surprisingly reticent on the subject of Israel. He includes frequent shout-outs to the Middle East and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict – suggesting in “President” that “maybe Israel and Palestine will follow our example and just combine/ and then become Israelestine.” But beyond a general desire for peace, he claims an unlikely ignorance and won’t engage in a more specific discussion of the issue.

Ultimately, the Jewish legacy Bern chooses is, he says, the “classical sort of image of the Jew wrestling with God, challenging and questioning, rather than just humbly accepting everything.” He takes this mandate seriously, frequently featuring narrators that literally wrestle with God. In the wistful ballad “God Said No,” Bern’s narrator meets the deity “on the edge of town,” and begs God to let him go back in time – to save Kurt Cobain, kill Hitler, or pull Jesus from the cross. God predictably refuses, forcing the singer to confront his single allotted era. Other times God is more discursive than mysterious. In “Lightning Jazz,” God appears in a dream wearing a long tunic, white beard, and neon “God” sign overhead, to deliver to Bern’s narrator – a bewildered prophet – an updated list of commandments. At the end of the song, God whispers one last mystery – “the best is yet to come.”

And that’s a good thing. In 1997’s “Too Late to Die Young,” Bern realizes that his window for a James Dean-style crash-and-burn has passed, and that he’d better keep evolving if he wants to avoid Elvis-dom. So, despite a fascination with the future and the ancient past, Bern focuses on taking action in the here-and-now: “We gotta stop sloughing off the present,” he says, “thinking that nothing’s happening.”

With his penchant for idealism and an activist base, Bern is pop-music proof that earnestness is not incompatible with irony. His work bristles with the snarky, the sarcastic, and the mundane – modes in which Bern has often seemed most at home. The urgency of the times, the anti-Bush backlash and the election fervor of 2004 have instilled in Bern a renewed desire for sincere activism. “I feel most comfortable with metaphor and irony and shades of meaning,” he explains. “But sometimes you gotta throw down.”

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Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved.