Dan Bern

The Bottom Line, New York, July 31, 1998


A Dan Bern show begs many questions. Is this the same guy who critics are overzealously proclaiming the newest folk "legend"? This man who plays the guitar like he just picked it up yesterday? This man who writes farcical songs about pretending to be a painter so he can con women into posing nude for him? Who affects an Okie accent that sounds like a cross between Woody Guthrie and Pee-Wee Herman? This is the next Bob Dylan?

Well, maybe not. But who wants another Dylan? The fact of the matter is, folk music moves like an iceberg. Still, like an iceberg, when it does move it's a significant event. Well, thanks to Dan Bern, after thirty years and a lot of preciously dull festivals, folk is finally relevant again. Bern is a song-writing machine, so close to the curve of current events that he sometimes comes across more as a singing political columnist than a poet.

At the Bottom Line, he performed a song called "The Day They Found a Cure for AIDS," and a truly chilling song about schoolyard shootings a la Kip Kinkel. In "Most American Men," Bern wonders if he needs to take Viagra, even though his organs are all in order, just to stay competitive. As a purveyor of his craft, Bern is fearlessly ambitious, weaving plot lines and sundry themes into multi-layered song narratives. Sometimes he uses two or three-character dialogues to propel a song's story line. In "Gamblin' With My Love," he sings of writing a play about Pete Rose and ex-baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti. The two are discussing Rose's gambling infractions in a hotel room. Bern jumps back and forth between portraying himself trying to write the play and narrating the play itself. He purposely conflates the two so that by the time he sings the chorus, "Are you Gambling With My Love," the words have come to apply (albeit humorously) to both situations.

Bern couples his songwriting skills with an ability to lock into an audience and make them hang on his every word. And, as with his approach to songwriting, he doesn't hesitate to think large. When fans at the show requested a song about Bruce Springsteen and "The Day They Found a Cure For AIDS," Bern decided to play "Cure for AIDS," as Bruce Springsteen, using three distinct impersonations to represent the man at different points in his career, and spontaneously revising the lyrics to mimic the Boss's New Jersey dialect. The song culminated with Bern as a mid-Eighties Bruce bellowing out the bridge to the song (Bern claimed that was the only time Springsteen had musical bridges in his songs, necessitating that particular impersonation). Ultimately, Bern finished the song as himself -- one part bullshitter, two parts provocateur, singing bold and intelligent songs that folk hasn't seen since, well, you know....

JAMIE COWPERTHWAIT