Art Bergmann in 1980.Bev Davies/Supplied
- Title: The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann
- Author: Jason Schneider
- Genre: Biography
- Publisher: Anvil Press
- Pages: 168
Well into his career, in the 1980s, the Canadian punk rocker Art Bergmann recorded some song demos in Vancouver that were good enough to land him a record deal in Toronto. The songs were re-recorded and released in 1988 as the John Cale-produced Crawl With Me, leaving the original (some say, superior) demos to languish in a basement. In 2009, the mythologized original recordings were unearthed and issued as an album called Lost Art Bergmann.
What a perfect title that would have been for the tight new biography on him – Lost Art Bergmann. There was always something off-course about the musician. And missed opportunities.
The book’s actual title is The Longest Suicide. Plot spoiler: Bergmann, 69, is quite alive. But having never taken care of his career and health very well, he’s not in the greatest shape – self-inflictions have hurt him.
The reader has just settled into their comfortable chair and is still blowing into a hot mug of tea when the subject of disappointment is addressed square on, before Chapter 1 even begins. “The story of Art Bergmann’s career is perceived by many to be a succession of failures,” Vancouver writer Michael Turner observes in the foreword. “But the story of Art’s life ... magical.”
So, the book’s author, Jason Schneider, has his work cut out for him: Can he capture the magic in 168 pages?
Mostly he does. We learn that Bergmann, the son of Mennonite parents, grew up in the Vancouver suburb of Surrey singing German hymns. He didn’t stick with that. As a fan of Little Richard, the guitar-playing teenager joined the cult of Awopbopaloomopalopbombom.
Later, Bergmann went through a hippie phase with his band the Shmorgs, whose shows in Surrey, B.C., were LSD-soaked bacchanals. “All the laws of God and man had been suspended,” recalled one of the author’s interviewees.
Schneider is the author of Whispering Pines: The Northern Roots of American Music and the co-author of Have Not Been The Same: The CanRock Renaissance 1985-1995. He’s a hardcore music documentarian who has used his expertise in Canadian music history to give deep (if sometimes tedious) context to Bergmann’s rugged life and sardonic music. The Vancouver punk scene of the 1970s and ‘80s in particular is well-explained.
Supplied
Chapter 5 begins with the history of Canada’s heroin laws. Why? Because Bergmann was addicted to the opiate for years, and he wasn’t the only one. At one point the drug dealer who had been financing Bergmann’s band Los Popularos pulled a gun on the musician because the return on his investment wasn’t what he expected. Years later the dealer was convicted for murder.
Bergmann would go on to write the Bowie-esque rocker Guns and Heroin for his 1995 album What Fresh Hell is This? There’s a line in it equating a career in the music industry with prostitution, which tells you all you need to know about Bergmann’s level of cynicism when it comes to selling records.
And Bergmann did sell some – about 20,000, for example, of Crawl With Me. “Hardly a failure,” Schneider writes. On the strength of that album, Bergmann was nominated for a 1989 Juno Award, but he lost out to Colin James as the year’s most promising male vocalist. It was nearly 1990 and the industry was formally recognizing that the Canadian punk-rock pioneer from the 1970s might have a future.
The irony was not lost on Bergmann. His follow-up album Sexual Roulette began with a satire on show business, Bound For Vegas: “They call me the performer, I guess they always will. Call me the entertainer, don’t retire me yet, I ain’t over the hill, I ain’t had my fill....”
Everybody has their limit. Bergmann quit the music business for long stretches in the 1990s and 2000s. He found the love of his life and moved to a farm outside Calgary. Deteriorating discs in his back, however, threatened to paralyze him. “They went through my neck and put some titanium around my spinal cord, or else I would have been a paraplegic within a year,” Bergmann told the author.
In 2020, Bergmann was made a Member of the Order of Canada, for his 'indelible contributions to the Canadian punk music scene, and for his thought-provoking discourse on social, gender and racial inequalities.'Kenneth Locke/Kenneth Locke
In 2014, Bergmann’s comeback commenced with the release of the politically motivated EP Songs for the Underclass. In 2020, Bergmann was made a Member of the Order of Canada, for his “indelible contributions to the Canadian punk music scene, and for his thought-provoking discourse on social, gender and racial inequalities.” Last year’s album Late Stage Empire Dementia, featuring some of Bergmann’s sharpest and most poetic lyrics, was longlisted for the 2021 Polaris Music Prize.
“Like countless preceding generations,” Schneider writes in the final chapter, “the punks believed they could make the world a more tolerant egalitarian place in their lifetime.” In an era when music has been devalued and musicians are struggling to make a decent living, The Longest Suicide shines a light on the causes and struggles of all artists.
As for Bergmann, he’s still trying to change the world. Not a failure, his fuse is just a little slow.
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