When TheSCENE was setting up interviews with Art Bergmann for his forthcoming album, Late Stage Empire Dementia, a response came: “Art here, last hint; the songs, NOT ME. Musick holds clues as well; many references; why does no one ever get this??????? bye.” So of course, I sent him the Stones’ The Singer Not The Song. Oops. Okay then. The songs.
Entrophy
Starts with classic melodic Clashy guitar layers and images of refugees in water, then bullets hitting a train carrying a child, and unanswered questions about whether it was the Red Army or White. Unanswered because in the end, it doesn’t matter. The child is fleeing the Russian-Ukraine war in 1923. The song moves on to the image of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian refugee baby lying dead on a beach in Turkey, and ends with all of us as refugees from something or somewhere.
Bergmann explains the child on the train. “That’s my father. Yeah, (his family) was part of the Mennonites who were allowed to come to Russia from Germany in late 1700s. Catherine the Great gave them all this land and took if from the fucking Tatars that lived there, of course, and settled them on this land, and they made it prosper. Meanwhile they’re fucking subjects on foreign native soil.”
A local man who’d been on the wrong side of power influenced the elder Bergmann. “He had been in prison with all the socialist revolutionaries and that was a party in Russia. He learned a bit of anarchism and revolution from those guys and a little knowledge goes a long way.
“Anyway, my dad saw his neighbour’s son murdered in a field and they got out by the skin of their teeth really, and came to Canada. That deal’s another weird deal where they fucking settle on native land in Saskatchewan. I mean, who’s at fault here?
“To a 10-year-old, it’s horrifying. That’s what he became; he became a deep reader into theory and history, and worked for the NDP or CCF (Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation) before. You know, Crazy Communist Farmers, and Tommy Douglas who gave us (free healthcare), and (he) worked for a union. He was a carpenter and was working the copper mines in BC and rode the rails, but still had his Mennonite heritage at the same time.”
In speaking of the Syria portion of the song, Bergmann says: “The guy who gave us the photo for the song (Paul McNeill’s image of piles of refugees’ abandoned, jumbled life vests; listeners can download the album booklet), he’s working on a documentary for the island. The whole camp had a fire and was destroyed, and you know Greeks are attacking them so it’s still a horrifying situation. And there’s climate refugees now, and all kinds of refugees from what I think is imperialism gone fucking nuts man. The USA gave us Al Qaeda; they gave us Isis. They backed these people in Syria.
“And now they’re backing Ukrainian fascists against the Russians, and there’s Americans now in the Ukraine fighting with those guys now. They’re gonna come back to the USA full of fucking shit.”
For a few simple verses, it’s a song of remarkable breadth. “Yeah,” Bergmann agrees, “There’s a lot of coverage in that song.”
Christo-Fascists
Gallops in with walloping drums underneath guitar roaring like a wounded animal, courtesy of Wayne Kramer (of fabled Detroit band MC5). Fittingly, the lyrics pick up right around when that band imploded, at the end of the 1960s. Bergmann explains how he continued his run of working with storied musicians like John Cale (The Velvet Underground) and Chris Spedding (who worked with Sex Pistols, Paul McCartney, Jack Bruce). “I have no idea. I think someone paid him in my original (now splintered) deal with Porterhouse Records. I don’t know, some kind of magic happened there.
“I’ve never spoken a word to him. I’ve read his bio, The Hard Stuff, which is an amazing book, especially his chapters on psychiatry of addiction stuff. He’s a hardcore addict and he was thrown in prison. He got to go to Lexington, Kentucky; they have a special prison for hardcore addicts. He played with Johnny Thunders after that.
“The song just has a great Detroit fucking late ’60s meltdown vibe to it. It’s just magic that he got to play on it.”
There’s zero degrees of separation between Kramer and Patti Smith, whose albums Easter and Horses Bergmann cited as two of his favourite records in a 2020 episode of InnerView with Mike Bezzeg. Smith married Kramer’s MC5 bandmate, Fred Sonic Smith. “Right, right, right! Holy shit. Yeah.”
So where did the song come from? “Watching people encouraged to be their worst fucking Nazi selves. And they were always there the whole time. I don’t know, like the rap song: ‘Overseer, overseer, officer, officer’ (KRS-One’s Sound of Da Police).
“And what did I get, 2000 views (of the video)? I don’t know what to do, man. I’m begging whatever artists are out there to fucking raise your voices.”
Second Amendment
Floats in on airy, open guitar with melancholia between the strings. And while it seems to be a song about the United States, Bergmann quickly connects it back to Canada. “(There’s an) awesome article this morning I just read about Lester Pearson, who got a Nobel Peace Prize. Meanwhile, he was sucking up to the American war effort in Vietnam.
“We’ve got a long way to fucking go. It’s a world problem because the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous People won’t get them clean water, won’t get them any land back. We attack them with the RCMP.
“There’s fucking people here that want to be those fucking … Nazis.”
As the beautiful lines, Bergmann has no idea. “They came out of nowhere. The kind of lines that are magic, like the first verse is, “He’s up a tree at his glimpse of eternity,” and I didn’t know what it was, but then I realized it was a lynching. Those are the kind of lines that are far and few between; it’s coming out of the air.”
Beautiful music abutting ugly topics equals impact. “Yeah. That’s my schtick.”
La Mort de L’Ancien Regime
A spirited shuffle that references heads rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue and smoke rising up from foreign fields where bodies won’t heal. Hmm, wonder which country? We got going and blasted right by this one without discussion.
Amphetamine Alberta
Tears it up with a grinding vibe sweetly reminiscent of Bergmann’s 1991 song, Baby Needs Oil, fittingly, as both question the waves made in areas that harvest fossil fuels. Special fun is Bergmann’s calling out of Kenney, “Fakin’ it ‘til the cows come home.” As Bergmann says, “It’s alive and well here, Albamaberta.” A bit of advice from Bergmann pops up in the song: “You’re just babies, don’t let despair be your suicide/Rebel or die inside.”
“They are just babies! I’m fucking an old man, no one’s gonna listen to me!” Bergmann says. As for the line, “Sell your daughters at the well,” he says, “It’s the Bible, don’t you know. Fucking Abraham.”
So where did the delicious grinding riff come from? “It was bare bones. It was just me and a guitar and (bassist) Peter Clarke and (drummer) Ian Grant. No time, no money, so just bare bones, laid it down, usually me with an acoustic guitar, or an electric on that song. Then me and Lorrie (Matheson, owner of Arch Audio where bass and drum tracks were recorded) fell apart, and then I lucked out with Russell (Broom, co-producer and guitarist), and the rest of it’s all Russell.
“Doesn’t it sound like a semi going down the icy highway? I think of those highway cameras when I hear that song, and huge semis fucking sliding down the freeway. Mrroww. Russell, oh my God, I can’t say enough about him. He’s a fucking master, genius musician. I’m so lucky.”
Beyond being a genius musician, Broom is grounded, helping the mercurial Bergmann be so as well. “He is totally business-like; gave me a few lectures. He apologized for them after, when I got the message.” Which was? “Basically, calm down. And treat other people with respect. I’m bad that way.”
Los Desaparecidos
A musically gentle song which invokes a longing for something unreachable as experienced by the people chronicled within it. Bergmann got the idea from art on the border wall between the US and Mexico as featured in California Magazine. “I just saw the guy in the museum at Mexico City who made musical instruments out of stuff left at the border by all the children, like shoes and shirts and string and bits and pieces of their clothing. The most amazing one to me was like the old Roman cross of crucifixion but with their shirts strung across them.
“Mostly they’re fucking refugees from the USA fucking around for fucking decades down there. The fucking 1980s, ’90s, the fucking United Fruit Company (formed in 1899, they dominated many Latin American countries). They sent armies down there: Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, everywhere backed by the US.”
In contrast to Bergmann saying no one is writing about theses things, I mention Corb Lund’s 2007 song, Student Visas, written from the perspective of a Contra in Nicaragua. “Well good. There’s somebody who should talk more about that stuff. He is an amazing writer.” We touch on Tom Russell’s California Snow and Who’s Gonna Build Your Wall? as well.
Late Stage Empire Dementia
The apex, starting with a haunting, wistful glimpse into the culture sold as a golden vision in songs like The Rivieras’ 1964 Billboard Top 5 hit, California Sun, then undressing all that happened to get there. Bergmann references Henry Glover’s first lines before falling into a wake-up-with-it-stuck-in-your-head hummed riff that laces together a grim journey scattering forward the seeds of Caligula and Nero into fatal colonization of First Nations’ land, slavery, global military intervention, and more, all delivered by Bergmann in a sneering, deathly calm style befitting his punk lineage. There is so much here.
“Two-hundred years’ worth,” Bergmann agrees. How? “A lot of writing, a lot of cutting, a lot of writing, a lot of cutting. Just, pages and pages. (I started it) probably six or seven years ago.”
One verse references generals with tits making millions bombing children. “I read a story that the CEO of (major US defence contractors) Raytheon and Grumman were women. I’m going, ‘Fuck! I’ve written off all the fucking men, now I’ve got to write a couple of you off, too. My God!”
If … Animals (The Anthropocene)
The album winds to an end with this spare, dirge reminding listeners that for all that we do to animals, we, too, are animals who should perhaps be put in prison to stop what we do, well, to animals. The first line “Our guts full of plastique/A chemical feast” underlines the accompanying photograph — a dead bird with more plastic than a Barbie condominium in its guts, bringing tears. “It should. Because they’re innocent.”
(Photo courtesy David Kotsibie.)
