From ANDRAS JONES: DAN BERN is someone I could write a whole lot about. He was the first songwriter I met playing gigs (as opposed to on records) who became a huge influence on my writing. We’ve toured together, recorded together, written together. When my band, The Previous, disbanded he made them his band. When I started doing Radio8Ball Dan was a regular guest on the radio show on KAOS in Olympia, Alternative Talk 1150 in Seattle, and once on KPFK in Los Angeles. He joined us live onstage in Los Angeles at The Hayworth Theater and once in Seattle with John C. Reilly with whom Dan collaborated in the film “Walk Hard”. Each one of these sentences could be a chapter in a book but I’m trying to keep it brief. Recently Dan had a snow blower accident and lost some parts of his fingers. We are told they “saved the knuckle” and his fans rallied to support him with a massively successful Go Fund Me campaign. Last I checked it raised close to a hundred thousand dollars. That’s a lot of money but it’s more than that. It’s a sign of how much love and appreciation there is for this guy’s music. I still have a hard time thinking about an accident of this nature befalling a man whose fingers are essential to his craft.
Artistic friendships aren’t always easy to maintain and Dan and I have had our share of fits and starts. In fact, the guy who asks the first question in this trip to the Radio8Vault, the one feigning the offensive gay stereotype voice and doing his best to pick a fight with Dan and me, was responsible for one of these. I honestly forget his name (for a while he claimed one of Dan’s made up characters “Blind Morton Henkin” as a moniker I reference in the podcast) but for over a decade, in the early days of the internet, this trollish dick was an ugly divisive force in the Dan fan community, constantly attacking and insulting Dan’s friends and fellow songwriters who played shows with him. He once set up a fake Andy Shmushkin Twitter account and contacted a bunch of my friends with insulting messages. (Here’s the real Shmushkin). This awful little man even pretended to be me and sent some insulting stuff to Dan which could have ended our friendship if Dan hadn’t given me the benefit of the doubt and checked in with me to see why I was writing mean things to him. Looking back, this evil little troll did a lot to diminish the positive and unifying impact Dan’s music could have had. He was an early version of the dynamic that created our current president and I hold him as responsible for that devolution as anyone. If someone out there remembers his name and wants to call him out I’m all for it but some better part of me has cleared him (if not his impact) from my memory.
I believe this was the first public performance of the song “Breathe” which would appear on Dan’s 2006 album of the same name along with 3 other songs Dan penned that week (Tounge Tied, Past Belief and Suicide Room – about my apartment). When Dan wasn’t writing his next record at The Golden Gavel (a cheap hotel in downtown Oly) we were eating mushroom and throwing the baseball around. Both the mushrooms and the baseballs drew us down to Capitol Lake whose vortexes I covered in my book “Accidental Initiations: In The Kabbalistic Tree of Olympia” for Sync Book Press.
This is coming out on May Day. A day of revolution and revolt. Some, like the boring hater who ruined the Dan Bern online community, will throw bricks and get their fellow protesters arrested, beaten, and maybe killed. Others, like Dan (in the second divination of this segment) will inscrutably ask “Where you gonna find me?” and invite us to join him “by the lake”. And some, like me, will keep inviting chaos to my hometown in the hope of inspiring great songs and difficult conversations so I can write things like this and see what happens…
As I was writing this Dan sent me a screenshot from his Radio Free Bernstein podcast where he’s playing “Election Day” from my old band Mr. Jones & The Previous. This is a very good sign that those mushrooms are still doing their magick.
