Art Bergmann's Kitchen Band - Kathleen Nisbet, violin, Paul Rigby, mandolin & guitar

The person writing this is not an expert or music critic. In 1973 my foreign students in an American School in Mexico City asked me if I knew who Alice Cooper was. My answer, a question elicited guffaws, “No, who's she?”

In 1975 my wife and two daughters moved to Vancouver. By 1977 I was working for Vancouver Magazine. There was a new (and first ever for the magazine) column in the magazine called In One Ear written by Les Wiseman who being a very good music critic was a snob. He told me that if I was to like anybody it had to be Lou Reed. And in Vancouver the only equivalent was Gary Cramer and his band The Works.

Gary Cramer & the Works

One of Wiseman’s first pieces, not an In One Ear column but a feature was called The Night of the Living Music. In 1979 (I believe) when he wrote this, Vancouver was crazy over canned disco. Wiseman’s article was about city establishments that offered something different, live music. I was to shoot it. One of the places (I was scared about going as I had read in the Vancouver Sun about constant police interventions) was the Smilin' Buddha on Hastings.

Left, Maddalena Di Gregorio - right my first photo of Art Bergmann

On stage was a tight and very loud three piece band, (warming up for the all female Dishrags) Art Bergmann, guitar and vocals, Jim Bescott, bass and vocals, Barry Taylor, drums. I did not know then but Wikipedia has confirmed that the Young Canadians (formerly called the K-Tels) was the first punk band to play in the establishment. The Young Canadians was also the first punk band I ever heard.In one of those strange coincidences the woman appearing in that Art negative is Maddalena Di Gregorio, I had yet to meet her, but there she was a the Buddha. I  would photograph her many times for years after.

Within minutes of being there I found a place in a corner for my equipment and I joined the crowd to jump up and down (it was called pogoing). I could not believe the intensity, charisma and passion of its singer/guitarist Art Bergmann.

Young Canadians on Victoria Drive circa 1979

The sound, as loud as it was, made the lyrics quite unintelligible except for what for me is the quintessential Vancouver song, Hawaii. Had I bothered to hear the lyrics of Bergmann’s other songs (particularly my fave Data Redux) I would have had intimations that almost singlehandedly his lyrics were no different from the protest songs of the 60s and 70s. Looking back and in light of having heard (and this time around the lyrics were clear) Bergmann this last Sunday at the Vancouver Folk Festival I can see that he may have invented something that I call punk folk.

Data Redux - Young Canadians

Since that night in 1979 I have frequented as many concerts of whatever band Bergmann has fronted until the present.

With Wiseman as a mentor I became an amateur musical snob. And in his company listening to the Young Canadians at Gary Taylor’s Rock Room and witnessing the less intense (laid back I mean) but certainly no less interesting Gary Cramer and the Works I could see the attraction of this type of popular music that had an extreme Vancouver stamp. To this day I believe that my initial photographs of these two bands are my favourites and best (even if I had no real idea of what I was doing).

Since 1975 I have come to believe that in spite of all the charms and possibilities (and Vancouver has been kind to my photography via good money for it) this is a city of a restrained and almost cold modus operandi. I live in a desire for the warmth of my Latin America, of the ochres and browns of Mexico in the winter (not the cold cyan and greys of this city in winter).

But there are moments that for me vindicate my living here. One of them is the constant, dependable honesty of Bergmann with his music (and especially) and lyrics. He has been an unwavering beacon that to me (and Wiseman would agree) may have been rivalled with the intermittent, short bursts of unalloyed brilliance, passion and virtuosity of our departed ex-New York Dolls Johnny Thunders.

Wiseman and I would go to Thunders concerts (once here and a few times in NY) not to see if he would die of drugs or alcohol on stage as many fans did but to witness that raw passion.

Vancouver is a city with a troubling lack of memory. My little essay for the Vancouver Sun in November of 1998 reminds me that Bergmann and his band Poisoned played at the Orpheum. The Pretenders at the Queen Elizabeth? Naw, Bergmann at the Orpheum!

I can now wind this blog down by mentioning Bergmann's new band which I call his Kitchen Band. At one moment of the very intimate (and warm in spite of some loud four letter words) concert Bergmann indicated to violinist Kathleen Nisbet that she move closer to him. She mentioned that they usually played in a kitchen. I asked her later and she told me it was her kitchen.  With her amplified violin and Paul Rigby's fine (smaller that Bergmann's) guitar and mandolin the group sounded like a full fledged folk group. Except.

Except that Bergmann's voice (not like Lou Reed's or Gary Cramer's) with just a hint of singing/talking is a unique voice in Canadian music. The only parallel could be Neal Young's voice.

That one of the songs featured the word Catalonia and another was based on a Paul Theroux essay on cluster bombs simply told me that Bergmann reads and is up-to-date on the failing mechanics of our present world.

But in all that warm doom and gloom there was a silver lining. Bergmann sang one of my fave songs (and Les Wiseman's, too) The Hospital Song which ends with that wonderful: 

Maybe later, we'll get together and have a relapse

  A snippet of the Hospital Song on Youtube from this past Sunday

And with present current events I have this nagging lyric (loud in my ears) of Bergmann's Data Redux where he seems to say over and over

I fell in love with the enemy.

I know the song is about spies but I have been unable to find the lyrics. I once asked Bergmann about them and he answered something like, "They are dumb lyrics."

Bergmann with wife Sherri Decembrini

I love to look at that photograph of the couple in the kitchen. When I first photographed Bergmann on Victoria Drive he was scary, cold and remote. It was all a false front. He is a warm man who sometimes does his best to hide it. But we know better.

      

As a 75 year-old Buenos Aires born man fútbol is supposed to be in my blood.

By the time I was 8 or 9 I was playing with the circular figuritas or estampitas that featured players from the professional football clubs of Buenos Aires and the provinces. We played a game with them. We would throw them to the edge between the sidewalk and the house walls. The owner of the estampita’s that was the closest to that edge would win all of them. Or we traded one of these for four of those when the player was especially famous and valuable.

My neighbours were fans (called hinchas in Argentine Spanish) of Club Atlético Boca Juniors and fanatically followed the loud speeches of General Juan Domingo Perón and his wife Eva Duarte de Perón. The radio was played loud and my father cringed.

Because we were snobs of English origin, fútbol was the sport of the lowly masses and we followed the more “elegant” rugby particularly since my first cousin Rollo Barber played for the Club Atlético San Isidro as still do his cousins, nephews and grand-nephews.

But I do remember my father taking me to one Buenos Aires classic, Club Atlético River Plate against Boca Juniors. The best part of the match was drinking the ice cold chocolate milk Vascolet.

Once we moved to Mexico City my mother was the fútbol fan particularly when the Argentine selección would come to town to play the Mexican side. Invariably the Argentines would lose and they would blame the city altitude. My mother called the Mexican sports announcers “buitres” (vultures) as they were obviously partisan.

In the middle 60s when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy one of the few privileges of the uniform is that I could go to any fútbol game for free as long as I wore my uniform. In that uniform I saw Pelé at his best when he played for Santos.

But by the 60s the fans of the sport had deteriorated the conditions of going to a game. Women were not to be seen anywhere. Cans and bottles were banned so those in the upper stands would piss into paper cups and pour the contents down on the fans below. The boundary between the standing only cheap places and the rest of the stadium was a tall metal fence with spikes at the top.

Going down the spiral ramp of the River Plate Stadium (the largest) was an excruciating experience as one would walk on inches of urine. Fans would piss on the wall.

I remember being on a colectivo (bus) on my way to the Boca Juniors bombonera (stadium) for a River/Boca classic. From the bus I could hear a loud roar. The game had already begun and half of the stadium was loudly screaming at the referee, “Hijo de puta, hijo de puta!” (son of a whore).

Now in this century the previous president of Argentina to Presidente Macri (who at one time was the director of Boca Juniors) Cristina Kirchner, by presidential decree, banned the fans of Boca from going to River Plate Stadium and vice versa.

What is strange is that across the charco (pond) that is the River Plate, football matches in Uruguay are perfectly civilized.

I can now report that somehow my two daughters (both born in Mexico City) Alexandra and Hilary are fans of fúbol and have been avidly watching the world cup.

I cannot bear to watch the final today as Ale keeps me posted and we are depressed that Croatia is losing. But there is one thing that makes me smile. Somehow Ale watching the game on TV reminds me of my mother. It would be my mother who would remind her that up to 1970 the trophy cup was called Jules Rimet.

As a working commercial photographer I rarely made mistakes or had a situation where I would go back to Vancouver Magazine, and other magazines to tell them that the big fish had gotten away. The reason is that I had two of everything in my studio or on assignment. As a photographer I was aware of Patterson’s Law that stipulated that Murphy was an optimist.

Now in the waning days of my life when I work in my little Kits studio I trip over cords and have a hard time finding stuff. I keep two flashlights so that I can look into my Mamiya lens to adjust the f-stop.

Anybody watching me in action would use that that wonderful word shmuck to describe me.

This morning I looked at all those black rectangles of pictures that represented the ring flash failure.

But behold! I tweaked here and there and the result amply proves that some accidents happen for good reasons.