Locked down? Open up to… the Silver Jews

During late-night guard duty shifts in the army, I used to croon to myself the Silver Jews’ tune, “Random Rules,” flicking open and closed the ejection port cover of my M-16 to the sparse beat.

“In nineteen-eighty-four, I was hospitalized for approaching perfection,” I’d sing into the night.

“I know you’d like to” — FLICK — “line dance, with everything” — FLICK — “so democratic and cool. But, baby, there’s no guidance” — FLICK — “when random rules.”

“Random Rules” is the dynamite first track on The Silver Jews’ dynamite third album “American Water” from 1998. It’s a song about being forced to change, about people saying you’ve become unrecognizable from what you were before. It felt like a song that fit the mood of army service. At three verses, it was also short enough that I could remember it verbatim at 3 a.m.

Lead singer and lyricist David Berman’s voice was almost as bad as my own, so I never felt like I was butchering his lovely words.

“All my favorite singers couldn’t sing,” he half-sings, half-speaks on the album’s seventh track, “We are Real.” (Same here, man.)

The band was officially formed in the early 1990s by Berman, with Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich, both of whom were also part of the indy band Pavement, though the three had already been playing together for several years. Throughout its roughly 15-year run, the Silver Jews changed makeup repeatedly, but always with Berman at the helm. The group disbanded in 2009, and Berman largely faded from the spotlight until he came out with a new band and new album in 2019 — both named Purple Mountains and critically lauded. Berman, who dealt with substance abuse through most of his adult life, committed suicide about a month after that album came out, in August 2019.

Though Berman is a Member of the Tribe, the band’s Judaic name has never been definitively explained, with a variety of answers being offered over the years: A humorous misreading of a billboard for “silver jewelry”; a nod to the bands the Silver Apples and the Silver Beatles; a term for blonde-haired Jews (which this life-long Jew has never heard before).

Shortly before his death, Berman told a podcast that he came up with the name to signify Jews of patrilineal descent, who wouldn’t be considered Jewish by Orthodox and Conservative standards, who would therefore be “outsiders to the outsiders.”

Though more Silver Jews’ songs talk about Jesus — including the song “Rebel Jew” off their first album — than about overtly Jewish concepts, later in his life Berman developed a deep connection to his religion, which began when he started regularly visiting a Conservative synagogue while getting treatment at a nearby rehabilitation center.

“In the rehab unit, you couldn’t leave the facility except for this one loophole, which allowed you to go to church or temple if you wanted to. So what started out as a ploy… turned out to mean more to me than I expected,” Berman told the Jewish Journal in 2006.

The band even performed in Israel twice in 2006 on its first world tour, resulting in a documentary about the visit released a year later, “Silver Jew.”

The Silver Jews certainly aren’t for everyone, but if they’re for you, you’re in for a treat, with songs that are painfully beautiful, clever and delicate, but packed to the brim with clever turns of phrase and evocative imagery.

“You can’t change the feeling, but you can change your feeling about the feelings in a second or two,” Berman sings on the album’s “People.”

“American Water” contains some of the band’s more brooding numbers with rambling instrumentals and pensive lyrics, dealing with themes of loneliness, alienation and a search for innocence.

“Honk if you’re lonely tonight. If you need a friend to get through the night, a toot on your horn, a flash of your brights. Honk if you’re lonely tonight,” Berman sings on the hopelessly romantic “Honk if You’re Lonely.”

The phenomenal, picaresque “Smith and Jones Forever” tracks the eponymous hobo pair, with pants held up by extension cords, shoes duct-taped together and brains altered by huffing glue, as they make their way across the State of Texas, where Berman grew up.

“I’ve got two tickets to a midnight execution. We’ll hitchhike our way from Odessa to Houston. And when they turn on the chair, something’s added to the air,” he sings electrically.

I would recommend one of Berman’s two books of poetry — “Actual Air,” from 1999, or “The Portable February,” from 2009 — but as they were each only released in limited runs and the cheapest I could find them online was well over $100, that may put them out of your — and my — price range. (Indeed, the only in-print Berman poems I own are in the anthology “Legitimate Dangers.”)

Though I’ll always go back to “American Water,” the somewhat easier and lighter “Look Out Mountain, Look Out Sea” — Silver Jews’ final album, released in 2008 — should not be overlooked, featuring some linguistic gems and fun tunes.

The record includes the jaunty and clever “San Francisco, BC.” It’s a modern-day fable of young hipsters with “sarcastic hair” and “lewd pseudonyms” sucked into lives of crime and capitalism, including the delightful euphemism for a punch that is “he came at me with some fist cuisine.”

The pleasant track “We Could Be Looking For the Same Thing” contains one of my favorite lines about the passage of time while in love: “Way, way out past where the sidewalks disappear and up through bright blue blocks of sky, where the days turn to weeks in the months of the year, and we’re together, you and I.”

The world tragically lost Berman and his genius last August, but his songs and words will remain with us. If you’re locked up by the coronavirus, now’s a good time to open up to them.