David Berman and the Days Between

thinking about music, writing, and the icy bike-chain rain of Portland, Oregon, five years on

Some time back my former Pitchfork colleague Matthew Schnipper—you should read his great Deep Voices newsletter—told me about Jerry Garcia and The Days Between. The period between Jerry’s birthday on August 1 and the date of his death, August 9, are called “the days between” by Dead fans after a song he wrote toward the end of his life that the Dead never recorded in the studio. It’s become a time to celebrate his life and his music, which is a nice idea, and also poetic: We’re all just passing through, enjoying a brief sliver of light bookended by two eternities of darkness. 

I’ve been thinking about another Grateful Dead fan. In July, I drove to Virginia solo from our home in upstate New York, which is about nine hours away, and on the trip I listened to Purple Mountains, the final album from David Berman, formerly of Silver Jews, several times in a row. As solo driving music goes you can’t beat it—it’s the kind of record where you tune into what the singer is saying and the story he shares and then your mind drifts back to your life and you start drawing connections. It also feels like an invitation to make something of your own and try and put something beautiful into the world.

Purple Mountains came out on July 12, 2019, and Berman died a few week later on August 7. I learned about his death from Schnipper, in fact. He texted me at home around 8 pm that day and asked if I would write something for Pitchfork. I was sitting in my living room with Julie, who loves Berman’s music and writing as much as I do, both of us stunned. We cried a little, then I packed my laptop and started walking to the G train. I was renting a desk at a writer’s space in Cobble Hill, and I’d be there for the next 5 or 6 hours working on my piece while trying in vain to stay off twitter, where so many people I know were posting song lyrics and sharing stories.

I’ve found myself deep in the Berman zone these past few summers, revisiting thoughts and feelings that return annually, like a comet. When Purple Mountains came out it seemed, for a time, from the outside, and despite its dark bearing, like a kind of rebirth, since it had been so long since we’d heard his songwriting.

I’ve seen people mention that they have trouble listening to it because so many of Purple Mountains’ songs foreshadow his death, that it’s even a “suicide note,” which makes a certain amount of sense. But that’s never been true for me, maybe because the feelings he describes are so close and the guy sharing them was so funny and talented his work makes you want to live life more deeply. It’s one of those contradictions that’s hard to explain, how connecting with art about pain can ease your own. Songwriters feel it too. I’m thinking of Lisa Walker’s line from Wussy’s “Teenage Wasteland,” a song where she describes hearing the Who as a kid and suddenly the world looks different, bigger. And yet it’s a connection formed in sadness: “It don't take much to sound like a sleeping prophet/When your misery sounds so much like ours so far away.” 

***

You may know that this newsletter gets its name from a line from a David Berman’s poem “The New Idea,” from his collection Actual Air. I got a little chuckle when I was first considering the name: I googled the line to make sure it wasn’t already being used for a publication of some kind, and the first two results were actually things I had written—a column about Bob Dylan I wrote for Varyer in 2021, and, for some reason, no good ones I can think of, a review of a Fennesz album I’d written for Pitchfork 21 years ago. I was worried that someone else was obsessed with this phrase and had used it for their own thing, and it turned out it’s just me that was obsessed. 

This is the passage from the poem: 

I was in high school
when I realized that not doing anything
was categorically different from deciding to do nothing,
but beauty blew a fuse, the hold music put me in a trance,
and what was black and heading towards me
transported me here like a cow in a comic hurricane.

This stanza is a good example of what David Berman’s writing can do to me—fear and darkness collide with absurdity and laughter and it’s like particles in a cyclotron smashing into each other and forming new matter. For me, the four words of his I selected for this Substack convey perfectly the too-muchness of it all, which can be both inspiring and debilitating. 

* * *

In the fall of 2001 I was assigned to interview Berman for Pitchfork. Then, Berman did most, or maybe all, of his interviews via email. He said he wasn’t particularly good at speaking off the cuff, he said and preferred to state things as clearly as he could after he had had time to think about his answers.

This was just after 9/11, which coincided with other changes happening in my life. In November, Julie and I moved from Greensboro, N.C., to Richmond, Va. I got a temp job in a law office downtown, working for an ambitious young attorney who made me nervous and had a photograph on his desk of him and William F. Buckley smiling together on the deck of a sailboat. 

I spent most of my days in a little office that was really a closet, a space stacked floor-to-ceiling with bankers boxes filled with files from a case that had just wrapped. I had to move them around to create a path to my desk. This closet was in the center of the building, no windows, and the fluorescent lights overhead flickered. I spent my time typing letters and briefs dictated by Mr. Buckley Guy, using a tape machine I controlled with a foot pedal. I’d kill time by reading news stories about the investigation of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks.

There was something vaguely Bermanesque about the whole situation, like this was the day job for a person who spent his nights working at the airport bar, where life is like Christmas inside a submarine. Sequences from Being John Malkovich played in my head. It was a bleak period, but I also felt a sense of hope and there was something amusing about it too. I guess you wouldn't call it a scene. 

I’d check my email to see if Berman had responded to the questions I’d sent. Ryan Schreiber kept asking me about the piece. I hit up Drag City once or twice, but they couldn’t help me. Radio silence. And then, in January 2002, while at work, I got an email back: Berman said that he’d been drinking many cases of beer and watching the NFL playoffs and had lost track of time. I wish I had that email now, it was brief and hilarious. He said he’d have answers in a day or two and he was true to his word. His email arrived when I was sitting under the buzzing lights and I felt an overpowering sense of wonder reading what he’d written. There was one particular Q and then A where I noticed something while living my life and thought, “This reminds me of a David Berman song.” I asked him about that and he said he understood what I meant. That was big. 

The interview went up (the date on the site is December 31, 2001, but it ran closer to the end of January 2002) and I’d mixed up a song title. Berman emailed me within a couple of hours to point out my mistake, which I then corrected. He said he was trying to prevent the snarkiest of the Joos message-board-types from going after me. I knew then that he was reading this stuff that had been written about him, sometimes at least. Four years later, I saw Silver Jews live in Charlottesville and wrote about it. This was an early show in the first real tour of Berman’s life, and he was clearly nervous. He read his lyrics from sheets of paper he kept on a stand, craning his neck and rarely looking up at the audience. I mentioned this awkwardness in my little write-up, while also trying to convey how awesome it was to him sing his songs. That was April. In July, Berman gave a radio interview in Chicago where he mentioned my piece on the Charlottesville show and said that he’d committed himself to memorizing the songs after reading it. 

In 2008, I wrote a column about the uncanny brilliance of Berman’s writing and how his work had both rewired my brain and shown me things that were there all along and I just hadn’t noticed—which I now know are fairly typical observations about his work. Shortly after it went up, a Drag City publicist forwarded me an email Berman had sent them, alerting them to the piece and saying it was “pull-quote city,” i.e., indicating there might be a line that could be used in a future press release (going from memory here, another lost email I wish I’d saved). 

I mention these events not because they were unusual. Berman clearly read his press, even though, like many in his situation, he sometimes said otherwise, and he liked hearing from people whose work meant something to them. Earlier this week, Steve Hyden published a newsletter about the Purple Mountains record, and he mentions that, prior to the release of the album, they had corresponded via email after Berman had reached out to him. Even knowing all this, it’s slightly weird to write about someone whose work means as much to you as Berman’s did to me and know they are watching. 

In 2008, I reviewed the Silver Jews’ Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea, a record I thought was solid but wasn’t the band’s best. One role of critics, to me, is to make distinctions and situate an artist’s work in the context of what they have done before, which is doubly important when a musician is on their sixth album, as Silver Jews were at that point. I found much to admire on Lookout, and there are songs from it I’ve returned to many times since, but, for me, it didn’t hang together as a record the way every Silver Jews album since Starlite Walker had. 

Seven months after the release of the album, Berman retired Silver Jews and went away for a while. In a Kreative Kontrol podcast interview with Vish Khanna—you should listen if you haven’t, it’s great—Berman said that he took some of that time to indulge a fantasy he’d had since childhood, of being able to devote entire days to reading and not much else. Here and there over the next few years, he mentioned that the reviews of Lookout Mountain were disappointing and that he was afraid of making bad music, and that was part of why he stepped away (the reason for the breakup he gave at the time had to do with what he was going through dealing with his father, lobbyist Richard Berman). Not surprisingly, quite a few people on twitter over the years said my review sucked, I was a bad person for writing it, and I bore some responsibility for the demise of the band. I turned it all over in my mind, felt a certain amount of guilt. 

* * * 

A couple of months ago I was a guest on a podcast created by my former Pitchfork colleague Dave Maher called “This Is Your Afterlife.” Guests are invited to imagine visions of heaven and hell that might await them after they die. I described heaven as a feeling of freedom, the sense of having a weight lifted, of starting over. I mentioned graduating from high school, and the day of the graduation itself, and feeling a deeply pleasurable sensation for the first time: Thank fucking god, that’s over. Everything to that point, all the questionable decisions and compromises I’d made, every idea of who I was that had been reflected back by those around me, had been cast off. I felt light and centered, fully in the moment, possibly for the first time in my life. 

Of course, that sense of freedom only lasted for so long. The next couple of years were rich with experience and halting attempts to find my way in the world, but a sludge of bad feelings eventually overtook me, and once again I felt stuck. And then, during a summer when I was 19, things began to shift. A relationship ended. I moved into a new house. To quote a favorite line from Neil Young, pretty soon I met a friend, he played guitar. Me and my new friend talked about books, and, out of nowhere, with no previous interest, I started writing poetry. This writing was nothing I would ever share with anyone, at least initially, and sharing it wasn’t the point. What mattered was doing it. I put a little spiral-bound notebook into my backpack. I was on a mission to document the joy that comes from noticing things. 

I wanted to read poetry, in part to confirm that the writing I was doing could reasonably be described as such. Two books plucked from the shelf at Paramount News in East Lansing made an impact. One was called The Haiku Anthology. This compressed three-line form, it seemed to me, was all about noticing things—it appealed to me immediately and I started writing haiku myself. The other was an anthology edited by Andrei Codrescu called Up Late: American Poetry Since 1970. I liked that the starting point for the collection, the marker of what was new and what mattered now, was 10 weeks after my birth. 

The first poet featured in Up Late is New York School writer Ted Berrigan, and on page 2, he had a poem called “People Who Died.” It’s a list of people he knew with their cause of death and the year they passed, that’s it. Just seeing it in print thrilled me. I didn’t know you could do this. Was it poetry? I wasn’t sure, but I knew I liked it. Many years later I found an recording of of him reading it in 1971. I downloaded an mp3 of it and it rarely leaves my phone. I listen to it like a song. 

***

Quick Aside: You might know that poet and songwriter Jim Carroll would later borrow his friend Ted’s line and concept for a song of his own. In 1973, Carroll released a book of poetry called Living at the Movies. In it is a poem called “A Fragment” that for me primed the pump for taking in David Berman’s work, and which I think about often:

**

Ten years after Up Late, several albums deep into my Silver Jews fandom, I came across Actual Air. I was living in San Francisco ‌and I can remember bringing it with me when I went to meet my friend Josh at a bar called Edinburgh Castle. I was a little early, and I was flipping through it with a beer while I waited. Turning the pages, I couldn’t believe it, how he could pull in so many references and imbue each line with ache and wonder while rendering it all in writing that sparkled. 

This guy noticed things. And man oh man was he funny. 

I was sitting by the space heater,
numbly watching you dress,
and when you asked why I never wear a robe
I had so many good reasons
I didn’t know where to begin.

That’s from “Self Portrait at 28,” which I read when I was 29. I didn’t really scribble poetry anymore, but I was still writing—mostly, by that time, about music—and still working to notice things. Actual Air became a totem of inspiration, I could just see the spine on the shelf and feel like I wanted to create something special. It gets me excited about being awake, nourishing the sense of possibility. It was such a gift. Which makes it so very sad that the guy who gave it is no longer around and left this world far too soon.

***

When I first read “People Who Died” my life was almost miraculously untouched by death, and now I’ve experienced it up close, with increasing frequency. I’m bracing myself for what’s to come. I never knew David Berman, never spoke to him, but his work has always been there when I needed it. Something, maybe, like a friend. I think of how Berrigan ends his poem: 

My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now. 

And then I think about The Days Between, and I go back to Jerry’s songwriting partner Robert Hunter, and a line he wrote for Phil Lesh’s song “Box of Rain,” a line that makes nme want to appreciate every day while you I it: 

Such a long, long time to be gone, and a short time to be there.