ln his not-quite-seminal but still great novel Sweet Thursday, John Steinbeck included a couple of chapters entitled “Hooptedoodle”, in which, he said, he had decided to place all those flowery descriptions that didn’t necessarily move to the plot forward. It’s a book I read while studying marine zoology in university and, like its more famous sister novel Cannery Row, it features a character called Doc who, like Steinbeck had been, is himself a marine zoologist.
My excellent zoology professor at the time, Noel P Wilkins, who was teaching us about the great taxonomist Linnaeus and, in particular, the idea of species being the unit of evolution (not the supposed selfish gene, I note now), with a signature swashbuckling lecturing style used Steinbeck’s concept of hooptedoodle as an analogy for all that information contained within a DNA strand that is gobbledegook.
In other words, posited the prof, in your DNA there lies a whole bunch of information that is not essential to the “story” that is you. The “important” alleles, the plot-driving stuff, if you will, that results in the shape of your earlobes, how low your testicles drop and your predisposition toward, say, depression, only occurs sporadically among the chains of code in the chromosomal mush.
When I told my father, who was a prof in the English department and was himself a huge Steinbeck fan, and who knew and very much liked Professor Noel, he grumbled good-humouredly that perhaps the good zoologist was missing Steinbeck’s true point. Because of course Steinbeck was being a little bit tongue-in-cheek, and his hooptedoodle assertion was a gentle spray of literary acid at those critics and readers who might have cast shade on his flowery ways, which, they felt, distracted from the all-important plot. For the Hooptedoodle chapters, in fact, are essential to the readers in synthesizing for themselves – perhaps subconsciously – some of the messages or feeling of the story. In other words, hooptedoodle, if one could categorise such a thing, isn’t a distraction, though it can act as a welcome distraction. It’s not nonsense, though it can be nonsensical. It’s the very opposite of gobbledegook. I suppose you might call it poetry. And it’s essential.
There aren’t that many songwriters who also made it as poets (for lyric writing is not poetry! I will fight you about this, if you fancy) but David C Berman of Silver Jews was someone who could claim such an honour.
How essential a poet he will prove to be, I've no idea. I do know I like his stuff. I had the good fortune to take part in a tribute night to the fellow not long after his rabbit soul departed this lonely rock. As singer in this once-off band, this meant my having to learn by heart many of his lyrics. And for me it was the transformative experience of the pearl diver or the first-time astronaut; I went from being a casual Silver Jews fan (who knew them through their association with the more famous Pavement) to becoming a Silver Jews obsessive.
In the year that followed I regularly broadcast to (nay, assaulted) my daughters’ cochlear receptacles with the master’s dark-brown voice, allowing it to waft through the recycled air of our family car like light through subspace. That happened every day of 2021, pretty much.
One song we didn’t cover in the band was The Frontier Index, which is on my favourite Silver Jews record, The Natural Bridge.
A flawless album. You should listen to it.
Like some of my other favourites, The Frontier Index is a song I think about it a lot because it’s infectiously driving and also it features some cool sci fi stuff in it -- I love it when Berman (aka DCB) does that. And like a lot of Berman’s lyrics it is head-scratchy and obscure. You find yourself saying “What the hell is he talking about?” quite a lot.
Berman would say he was not a storyteller, although that, in the words of Lester Bangs when pencilling on about Van Morrison, is bullshit. Some songs, such as I Remember Me off a later album are as straightforward and arc-ish as, I dunno, Treasure Island or something (guy is in love with a woman, gets hit by a runaway truck, she moves to Oklahoma - it's very sad). But he was, for the most part, a post-modernist, post-grunge sort guy who couldn’t keep his attention on one thing for too long and counted on his listeners to feel the same. Splodges of imagery and weirdness and abstract humour do just fine in getting across a raw and shimmering sense of something so much better, maybe (who knows?) than the ho-hum idea of saying something straight. It was, I suppose, a “thing” at the time in rock – perhaps a response to the politico-cultural uncertainty of those years (Cool Britannia? A sax-wielding US president? And some of the musicians were even worse than the politicians. We recoiled, presumably having coiled some time in the late '80s.)
-- and of course, it gave a lot of dickhead songwriters like myself an obscure lyrical place to hide at times.
But here’s the thing about good writers like Berman; they stay the course, they walk the line, and you always sort of know what they’re getting at, even if you can’t quite put in words exactly what it is. And that makes the songs all the more more fun to be around, like a frustrating friend whose snit you can’t quite put your finger on. But perversely – and this is important -- with a bit of research you can actually dismantle these Bakugan-like constructions and find tangible, at least relatable if not understandable things inside. And while sometimes with songs (or anything, maybe, from religion to marine life) one should let the mystery be, as Iris De Ment once sang, with Berman that’s not completely the case. A bit of background reading enriches the listening experience. But still. Not all of it makes sense. And that’s as it should be.
First the title. "The Frontier Index" makes no appearance in the lyrics. What the hell is it all about? It could refer to the concept of a “frontier index”, that is, a term relevant to stock investments and frontier economies – a quick Internet search reveals that, as does an amazing tribute artwork by the wonderful songwriter and cartoonist Jeffrey Lewis.
Or maybe it refers to the Frontier Index, a newspaper that was run by two brothers in Wyoming, US and other parts of the wild frontier – it was known as the ‘Press On Wheels’ as it literally travelled around and served the railroad workers of the time with their news and, well, propaganda (they also happened to be anti-Chinese and anti-Native American white supremacists, something I cant believe DB knew).
In any case, neither possibility yields any solid explanation. What it gives to me (and this is just my take on it) is a feeling. A feeling about Berman out on the frontier of a space, of existence, calling out to God and documenting the wildness and perhaps the futility of such an act. Maybe.
Of all of the people I knew
I always looked up to you
And after millions of years of crime
The sun still shines and shines
I get the sense that he’s really out there, really out on a limb, strung out. And the music only enhances that. That verse sets a loose structural template for the verses to follow, all having four lines each. But that’s where the similarity stops. Although these all have a sort of internal logic, each apparently has nothing to do with the verse either side of it. And yet it all seems to cohere.
Verse three is my favourite.
Robot walks into a bar
Orders a drink, lays down a bill
Bartender says, "Hey, we don't serve robots"
And the robot says, "Oh, but someday you will"
Profound and hilarious. And in verse six when he ends with a lyric apparently stolen from a Randy Travis joke…
Boy wants a car from his dad
Dad says, "First, you got to cut that hair"
Boy says, "Hey, Dad, Jesus had long hair"
And Dad says, "That's right, son, Jesus walked everywhere"
Hearing that, you wonder, hang on a minute. Is this guy taking the piss? And the answer is, of course he is. It’s nonsense. Or Seuss-esque, very funny nonsense, maybe. But in that nonsense he’s presenting you with something precious; a stark silhouette of someone isolated and lonely, a permanent outsider – and perhaps the most famous jew of them all -- embracing the wildness, the randomness of the universe. And that’s something you either sympathise with or you don’t. If you don’t, fine, maybe just enjoy the joke. But if you do, well, you have a friend forever in lyrics like this.
The Frontier Index is by no means Berman’s weirdest song (that award may go the daft but also-brilliant Like Like the the the Death off the next, more acclaimed album American Water).
Nor is it home to his strangest lyrics. Take, for example, this one from one of his 'hits' (by Silver Jews standards), Random Rules:
Broken and smokin' where the infrared deer plunge in the digital snake
What?
But like that song and many other songs of his, The Frontier Index has is share of oblique moments, or general oblique-ness. And these oblique moments are not just interesting. They feel necessary to the songs. Could it be that their strangeness makes the more decipherable lyrics all the more delightful? I'm not sure if that's fair, as it implies that the weirdos among us are here to make the cool, straightforward people more noticeable. As a weirdo I resent that, and I think DCB would too.
I actually think that DCB preferred these non-understandable bits, that he regarded them as the important bits, because they reminded him, and maybe us, that the universe is random and if songs be a natural thing, you better get used to being bewildered.
And like the hooptedoodle in Steinbeck, and who knows, maybe those bits of supposedly useless in DNA in you if the scientist Stephen Jay Gould is to be believed, are important and your biology/brain/soul synthesizes these moments of nonsense to make some honest picture, if not sensible one, of what the personality of nature/the song is. And when that moment arrives for me in listening to the songs of David C Berman, it's a feeling of being hit by a runaway truck like the unfortunate character in I Remember Me.
Lately I’ve been trying to re-find the obscure songwriter of my past and think about how to approach lyric writing in this way. I’m not always successful (who am I kidding? I’m NEVER successful) but put a lot of effort into it and have a lot of fun/misery trying. I don't expect much of this effort to ever make any sense.