Canadian punk icon Art Bergmann has a career that stretches back 50 years — a wild run that has brought him into conflict with industry figures, fellow musicians (including the Boomtown Rats and John Cale) and himself. He was a pioneer in Vancouver's punk scene, played in some beloved bands, had a celebrated solo career, and was even named to the Order of Canada.
The whole journey is chronicled in The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann, by former Exclaim! editor Jason Schneider, out today through Anvil Press. It features stories from Bergmann himself, as well as quotes from dozens of the people who witnessed the musician's exploits first-hand.
As a taste of the many wild stories found in The Longest Suicide, Schneider shared a few excepts from the book — including the bittersweet story of Bergmann's JUNOS win, a drug deal gone bad in Spain, and the time he peed on the stage while the Boomtown Rats were playing.
The book is available to order here.
Doctor Shmorg vs. Valdy
Art's first band the Shmorgs (a.k.a. the Mt Lehman Band) forged its own pre-punk reputation for anarchy during the early and mid-1970s, playing small halls and schools around BC to a loyal audience of bikers and other assorted hooligans. Fronted by singer David "Mitzo" Mitchell (Doctor Shmorg), who would go on to become a Liberal MLA, the band also had a notable encounter with early JUNO-winning singer/songwriter Valdy.
One memorable night occurred when they were booked into the Surrey Centennial Arts Centre along with the artist known as Valdy, at that point a regionally popular folk singer in the James Taylor mould, based near Victoria and a leading exponent of the era's "back to the land" philosophy. It was an odd pairing, to be sure, and since the show was taking place on the Mt Lehman Band's home turf, their usual rowdy fans made up most of the audience. The crowd subsequently booed Valdy mercilessly to the point where he could not perform, and police officers there to keep the peace were forced to quell a mini-riot before the Mt Lehman Band even hit the stage.
For Valdy, the experience proved so traumatic that soon afterward he put it all down on paper in the form of "Rock and Roll Song," released in 1972 on his debut album Country Man. It became a minor radio hit thanks to the newly enacted Canadian-content broadcasting regulations, and further led to Valdy winning a JUNO Award in 1973 in the category of outstanding folk performance.
Art: "The show with Valdy was our last before Doctor Shmorg went off to university. The place was jam-packed. Mitzo pretended to die onstage and was carried off on a stretcher. Some people were actually convinced that he was dead. As we played, I could see chains glinting as they swung through the air out of the open fire exits. It was definitely not a love-in."
The K-Tels vs K-Tel
Art formed The K-Tels in early 1979 with bassist Jim Bescott and drummer Barry Taylor, becoming — along with D.O.A., the Subhumans and The Pointed Sticks — one of the foundational bands of the Vancouver punk scene. However, before year's end they ran afoul of the K-Tel corporation for appropriating its name.
As the band came offstage after a sweat-drenched performance for an appreciative crowd on the Simon Fraser University campus, they were handed legal documents by two people whose only words were "Here, you've been served." After gathering themselves and changing clothes, the band got the gist that K-Tel was suing them for $50,000 for besmirching its name. Although the threat was real, the biggest question for the band was whether they were prepared to fight it. Fortunately, some of the other bands in town had already been receiving legal advice from a sympathetic local lawyer, who was willing to help out the K-Tels as well.
"What was interesting at that time was that you never knew who was on the fringes of the scene," Taylor said. "You obviously knew the hardcore kids by the way they dressed in public, but there were also lots of other people with high-profile jobs who would put on their leather at night and go out to the clubs. We were introduced to a lawyer who was one of these people, and he laid it all out for us that we could probably win the suit, but it would take a couple of years and cost a ton of money. So a meeting was set up and K-Tel flew out their lawyers from Winnipeg. The three of us were there and we made a deal to change our name in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. The funniest part about it was after we signed the papers and our lawyer drove K-Tel's lawyers to the airport. He had the UBC station CiTR on the radio and an ad came on for our next show there at the Student Union Building — 'This Saturday, don't miss the K-Tels!' I thought that was a pretty appropriate send-off."
Art was quick to wring every drop of mock persecution from the incident, saying that the lawsuit was an affront to three upstanding young Canadians. From then on, the band would be known as the Young Canadians.
The Young Canadians vs. Bob Geldof
The Young Canadians got a chance to play outside Vancouver in early 1980, doing runs across Western Canada opening for XTC and the Boomtown Rats, two vastly different experiences.
"[The Boomtown Rats] were a bigger draw than XTC, and the Young Canadians found themselves playing theatres and arenas for the first time, while dealing with an entirely different breed of rock star. "Bob Geldof was cool, he was kind of quiet and kept to himself, but the rest of the guys in that band were fucking assholes," Barry Taylor said. "They would leave us only ten minutes to set our gear up and were just generally standoffish, which was in complete contrast to XTC, who couldn't have been more friendly and accommodating. Thinking about it later, it seemed like it was a matter of confidence. XTC knew they were really good and weren't egotistical about it, whereas with the Boomtown Rats, I don't think they felt they could live up to the hype they were getting at that point."
As could have been predicted, the situation with the Boomtown Rats brought out Art's worst tendencies, and he got a modicum of payback at the April 3 show at Edmonton's Northlands Coliseum. "One of the habits we got into when we played those big venues was to explore them just as a way to kill time," Taylor explained. "So that night, I remember we all got up into the rafters somehow after we played our set. Art was pretty drunk by then and, well, when you gotta go, you gotta go. He started pissing on the stage as the Rats were playing, but we were so high up I don't think anybody noticed."
Art vs. the Alaska Highway
Art's next band, Los Popularos, became even more legendary for their debauchery, enhanced through being bankrolled by a notorious Vancouver drug dealer. When they returned broke from their first Canadian tour with Calgary band the Presence, Art had to make a quick decision, as told by the Presence's drummer Rob Hayter.
"I had a good friend, Rob Brink, who had a career working on seismic crews that did geological testing for big construction projects and oil companies. Rob arranged for Art and I to apply for jobs at Western Geophysical, working as 'jug hounds' on his crew. We applied and were duly hired, and before we knew it, we found ourselves in a camp at Mile 173 on the Alaska Highway in northern BC. It was completely surreal. Art likened it to working on a prison chain gang."
The pair had to quickly adapt to being awakened each morning at 6 a.m. and working with grizzled veterans whose jobs were simply described as "slashers" and "blasters." After several weeks under those harsh conditions, Art and Hayter begged the camp medic to take them in his ambulance to the nearest town with a liquor store, 150 kilometers away, in order to stock up on beer and Scotch.
"That changed the mood of the place," Hayter said. "We had gone on this adventure seeking solvency and sobriety. Well, the solvency part worked. But at nineteen, I was drinking like a sailor on shore leave. Hungover, the job became more bizarre. We were flying to the line in an ancient helicopter with a bent door, driving enormous track vehicles, listening to huge explosions, talking on radios, wiping our asses with moss, and eating enormous lunches with our colleagues in the freezing wilderness.
"Eventually one day, after some months, tired and jaded, Art decided he wanted to go home. Easily led, I agreed and we hatched a plan to escape. Our friendly ambulance driver gave us a ride to Fort St. John, three hours away, where we got on a flight to Edmonton, then to Calgary. How we paid for the tickets I have no idea—neither of us had credit cards. I just remember sitting in the Edmonton airport bar, still in our seismic gear, unshaven and stinky. We were drinking paralyzers, mouths agape, ogling the first women we'd seen in months. It was the end of a great adventure, truly our Fear and Loathing in the Great White North."
Once back in Vancouver, Art was forced to confront the individual who had been funding Los Popularos and try to explain why he wouldn't be seeing any return on his investment anytime soon. The dealer responded by pulling out a gun and making threats, leaving Art with no choice other than to calmly describe the realities of the music industry and why, especially in Canada, it was much less lucrative than everyone thought. Somehow, he made a convincing argument — no small feat, evidently, considering the dealer would receive a life sentence for murder a few years later.
Art vs. John Cale
When the Velvet Underground's John Cale agreed to produce Art's debut solo album Crawl with Me, it seemed a perfect pairing considering Art's profile as "Canada's Lou Reed." However, things did not go smoothly.
Art: I should have known by [Cale's] aloofness that he was the wrong choice, but the guy's one of my all-time idols. The guy's done amazing work, but he was on [anti-alcoholism drug] Antabuse and playing squash at 6 o'clock every day while I was trying to do the album. I gave up in disgust and that's why that album has no guitar on it. People love that album, and it brought the songs out, but so what? All this tinkly keyboard shit all over it — we had to nip that in the bud.
The idol worship had long worn off by the time the album was mixed, and according to [bassist Ray] Fulber, no one was in the mood to listen to it. "I was having a complete mental breakdown from my drug use. I was hospitalized slightly just before we went out there to record, and I was in very serious post-cocaine psychosis, so there was a lot of insanity and everything. The night we got the mixes, we took the [rented] truck, got onto the 401, slapped in the tape, and cranked it up. I think we were about two songs into it — I was driving, Art was in the passenger seat — and I looked over and I saw tears rolling down his cheek. Like, he knew. We knew. But by that time, the money was spent, and we kind of had to go into denial."
Art vs. Spain
Art's 1991 self-titled album marked a new beginning in many ways, largely through meeting his soon-to-be wife Sherri Decembrini. However, he was still grappling with heroin addiction, which added some stress to a trip to Spain arranged by his A&R man, former Mountain drummer Corky Laing, in order to shoot videos for the album.
"Right after Art signed the PolyGram deal in Toronto and Corky called me to do the videos, I remember a bunch of us going out for drinks to celebrate," director Roy Pike recalled. "It was a great night, everyone was really happy for Art, but then he went back to Vancouver, and I'm not sure what happened. The next time I saw him, when he got off the plane in Spain, that guy looked like fucking death. I was like, 'Holy shit, we're in trouble here.' I was innocent to all that stuff, and I learned he was in withdrawal. One of the first shoots we did was at the aqueduct in Toledo, and Art was so tired he could barely walk."
It became a moment when Laing's experience in the rock and roll trenches of the 1970s proved most valuable, as he recognized what needed to happen. "Corky didn't say anything, he just did what he had to do to get Art what he needed — in this city, Madrid, that he'd never been to before, mind you," Pike said. "When he made a connection, he told me to go to this café and give money to this guy, who then pulled a big aluminium foil ball out of his mouth. When I brought it to Corky, he started unwrapping it, peeling off layer after layer until it was clear there was nothing inside. So Corky, being who he is, goes to this guy's house in a barrio and starts yelling from the street, 'You son of a bitch! You burned the wrong person, motherfucker! I'm gonna come up there with an axe and chop you to pieces!' And so he got the drugs."
Art vs. the JUNOS
Following his participation in the Neil Young tribute album Borrowed Tunes, Art got the opportunity to make a record for Sony Music Canada, 1995's What Fresh Hell Is This? It earned him a JUNO Award the following year, a bittersweet moment at best.
In 1995 the JUNO Awards created a new category, best alternative album, in response to rock music's recent evolution. The following year, What Fresh Hell Is This? was nominated alongside the debut album Fluke by Rusty, the band One Free Fall had morphed into, as well as excellent offerings by the Inbreds, the Super Friendz, and Hardship Post that sufficiently represented the national indie rock community. Both Art's age and the fact that he was signed to a major label seemed to make him the odd man out, so when he was announced as the winner during the non-televised portion of the gala held at Hamilton's Copps Coliseum, the surprise he and Sherri felt was entirely genuine.
What went unspoken was that Art had been informed that very day that Sony would not be asking for another album from him. "We'd received the news earlier that day, so winning the JUNO really meant nothing," Sherri said. "I mean, was it going to get us another album? No. It was just a kick in the balls. I felt terrible for Art, but on the other hand I couldn't be angry with the people at Sony who had been working directly with him, because they were all completely supportive. Other people who didn't know Art, and didn't know how to market his music, made this decision. It really put us in this incomprehensible position of being back at square one at a moment when the industry had just acknowledged how great he was."
The whole journey is chronicled in The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann, by former Exclaim! editor Jason Schneider, out today through Anvil Press. It features stories from Bergmann himself, as well as quotes from dozens of the people who witnessed the musician's exploits first-hand.
As a taste of the many wild stories found in The Longest Suicide, Schneider shared a few excepts from the book — including the bittersweet story of Bergmann's JUNOS win, a drug deal gone bad in Spain, and the time he peed on the stage while the Boomtown Rats were playing.
The book is available to order here.
Doctor Shmorg vs. Valdy
Art's first band the Shmorgs (a.k.a. the Mt Lehman Band) forged its own pre-punk reputation for anarchy during the early and mid-1970s, playing small halls and schools around BC to a loyal audience of bikers and other assorted hooligans. Fronted by singer David "Mitzo" Mitchell (Doctor Shmorg), who would go on to become a Liberal MLA, the band also had a notable encounter with early JUNO-winning singer/songwriter Valdy.
One memorable night occurred when they were booked into the Surrey Centennial Arts Centre along with the artist known as Valdy, at that point a regionally popular folk singer in the James Taylor mould, based near Victoria and a leading exponent of the era's "back to the land" philosophy. It was an odd pairing, to be sure, and since the show was taking place on the Mt Lehman Band's home turf, their usual rowdy fans made up most of the audience. The crowd subsequently booed Valdy mercilessly to the point where he could not perform, and police officers there to keep the peace were forced to quell a mini-riot before the Mt Lehman Band even hit the stage.
For Valdy, the experience proved so traumatic that soon afterward he put it all down on paper in the form of "Rock and Roll Song," released in 1972 on his debut album Country Man. It became a minor radio hit thanks to the newly enacted Canadian-content broadcasting regulations, and further led to Valdy winning a JUNO Award in 1973 in the category of outstanding folk performance.
Art: "The show with Valdy was our last before Doctor Shmorg went off to university. The place was jam-packed. Mitzo pretended to die onstage and was carried off on a stretcher. Some people were actually convinced that he was dead. As we played, I could see chains glinting as they swung through the air out of the open fire exits. It was definitely not a love-in."
The K-Tels vs K-Tel
Art formed The K-Tels in early 1979 with bassist Jim Bescott and drummer Barry Taylor, becoming — along with D.O.A., the Subhumans and The Pointed Sticks — one of the foundational bands of the Vancouver punk scene. However, before year's end they ran afoul of the K-Tel corporation for appropriating its name.
As the band came offstage after a sweat-drenched performance for an appreciative crowd on the Simon Fraser University campus, they were handed legal documents by two people whose only words were "Here, you've been served." After gathering themselves and changing clothes, the band got the gist that K-Tel was suing them for $50,000 for besmirching its name. Although the threat was real, the biggest question for the band was whether they were prepared to fight it. Fortunately, some of the other bands in town had already been receiving legal advice from a sympathetic local lawyer, who was willing to help out the K-Tels as well.
"What was interesting at that time was that you never knew who was on the fringes of the scene," Taylor said. "You obviously knew the hardcore kids by the way they dressed in public, but there were also lots of other people with high-profile jobs who would put on their leather at night and go out to the clubs. We were introduced to a lawyer who was one of these people, and he laid it all out for us that we could probably win the suit, but it would take a couple of years and cost a ton of money. So a meeting was set up and K-Tel flew out their lawyers from Winnipeg. The three of us were there and we made a deal to change our name in exchange for the lawsuit being dropped. The funniest part about it was after we signed the papers and our lawyer drove K-Tel's lawyers to the airport. He had the UBC station CiTR on the radio and an ad came on for our next show there at the Student Union Building — 'This Saturday, don't miss the K-Tels!' I thought that was a pretty appropriate send-off."
Art was quick to wring every drop of mock persecution from the incident, saying that the lawsuit was an affront to three upstanding young Canadians. From then on, the band would be known as the Young Canadians.
The Young Canadians vs. Bob Geldof
The Young Canadians got a chance to play outside Vancouver in early 1980, doing runs across Western Canada opening for XTC and the Boomtown Rats, two vastly different experiences.
"[The Boomtown Rats] were a bigger draw than XTC, and the Young Canadians found themselves playing theatres and arenas for the first time, while dealing with an entirely different breed of rock star. "Bob Geldof was cool, he was kind of quiet and kept to himself, but the rest of the guys in that band were fucking assholes," Barry Taylor said. "They would leave us only ten minutes to set our gear up and were just generally standoffish, which was in complete contrast to XTC, who couldn't have been more friendly and accommodating. Thinking about it later, it seemed like it was a matter of confidence. XTC knew they were really good and weren't egotistical about it, whereas with the Boomtown Rats, I don't think they felt they could live up to the hype they were getting at that point."
As could have been predicted, the situation with the Boomtown Rats brought out Art's worst tendencies, and he got a modicum of payback at the April 3 show at Edmonton's Northlands Coliseum. "One of the habits we got into when we played those big venues was to explore them just as a way to kill time," Taylor explained. "So that night, I remember we all got up into the rafters somehow after we played our set. Art was pretty drunk by then and, well, when you gotta go, you gotta go. He started pissing on the stage as the Rats were playing, but we were so high up I don't think anybody noticed."
Art vs. the Alaska Highway
Art's next band, Los Popularos, became even more legendary for their debauchery, enhanced through being bankrolled by a notorious Vancouver drug dealer. When they returned broke from their first Canadian tour with Calgary band the Presence, Art had to make a quick decision, as told by the Presence's drummer Rob Hayter.
"I had a good friend, Rob Brink, who had a career working on seismic crews that did geological testing for big construction projects and oil companies. Rob arranged for Art and I to apply for jobs at Western Geophysical, working as 'jug hounds' on his crew. We applied and were duly hired, and before we knew it, we found ourselves in a camp at Mile 173 on the Alaska Highway in northern BC. It was completely surreal. Art likened it to working on a prison chain gang."
The pair had to quickly adapt to being awakened each morning at 6 a.m. and working with grizzled veterans whose jobs were simply described as "slashers" and "blasters." After several weeks under those harsh conditions, Art and Hayter begged the camp medic to take them in his ambulance to the nearest town with a liquor store, 150 kilometers away, in order to stock up on beer and Scotch.
"That changed the mood of the place," Hayter said. "We had gone on this adventure seeking solvency and sobriety. Well, the solvency part worked. But at nineteen, I was drinking like a sailor on shore leave. Hungover, the job became more bizarre. We were flying to the line in an ancient helicopter with a bent door, driving enormous track vehicles, listening to huge explosions, talking on radios, wiping our asses with moss, and eating enormous lunches with our colleagues in the freezing wilderness.
"Eventually one day, after some months, tired and jaded, Art decided he wanted to go home. Easily led, I agreed and we hatched a plan to escape. Our friendly ambulance driver gave us a ride to Fort St. John, three hours away, where we got on a flight to Edmonton, then to Calgary. How we paid for the tickets I have no idea—neither of us had credit cards. I just remember sitting in the Edmonton airport bar, still in our seismic gear, unshaven and stinky. We were drinking paralyzers, mouths agape, ogling the first women we'd seen in months. It was the end of a great adventure, truly our Fear and Loathing in the Great White North."
Once back in Vancouver, Art was forced to confront the individual who had been funding Los Popularos and try to explain why he wouldn't be seeing any return on his investment anytime soon. The dealer responded by pulling out a gun and making threats, leaving Art with no choice other than to calmly describe the realities of the music industry and why, especially in Canada, it was much less lucrative than everyone thought. Somehow, he made a convincing argument — no small feat, evidently, considering the dealer would receive a life sentence for murder a few years later.
Art vs. John Cale
When the Velvet Underground's John Cale agreed to produce Art's debut solo album Crawl with Me, it seemed a perfect pairing considering Art's profile as "Canada's Lou Reed." However, things did not go smoothly.
Art: I should have known by [Cale's] aloofness that he was the wrong choice, but the guy's one of my all-time idols. The guy's done amazing work, but he was on [anti-alcoholism drug] Antabuse and playing squash at 6 o'clock every day while I was trying to do the album. I gave up in disgust and that's why that album has no guitar on it. People love that album, and it brought the songs out, but so what? All this tinkly keyboard shit all over it — we had to nip that in the bud.
The idol worship had long worn off by the time the album was mixed, and according to [bassist Ray] Fulber, no one was in the mood to listen to it. "I was having a complete mental breakdown from my drug use. I was hospitalized slightly just before we went out there to record, and I was in very serious post-cocaine psychosis, so there was a lot of insanity and everything. The night we got the mixes, we took the [rented] truck, got onto the 401, slapped in the tape, and cranked it up. I think we were about two songs into it — I was driving, Art was in the passenger seat — and I looked over and I saw tears rolling down his cheek. Like, he knew. We knew. But by that time, the money was spent, and we kind of had to go into denial."
Art vs. Spain
Art's 1991 self-titled album marked a new beginning in many ways, largely through meeting his soon-to-be wife Sherri Decembrini. However, he was still grappling with heroin addiction, which added some stress to a trip to Spain arranged by his A&R man, former Mountain drummer Corky Laing, in order to shoot videos for the album.
"Right after Art signed the PolyGram deal in Toronto and Corky called me to do the videos, I remember a bunch of us going out for drinks to celebrate," director Roy Pike recalled. "It was a great night, everyone was really happy for Art, but then he went back to Vancouver, and I'm not sure what happened. The next time I saw him, when he got off the plane in Spain, that guy looked like fucking death. I was like, 'Holy shit, we're in trouble here.' I was innocent to all that stuff, and I learned he was in withdrawal. One of the first shoots we did was at the aqueduct in Toledo, and Art was so tired he could barely walk."
It became a moment when Laing's experience in the rock and roll trenches of the 1970s proved most valuable, as he recognized what needed to happen. "Corky didn't say anything, he just did what he had to do to get Art what he needed — in this city, Madrid, that he'd never been to before, mind you," Pike said. "When he made a connection, he told me to go to this café and give money to this guy, who then pulled a big aluminium foil ball out of his mouth. When I brought it to Corky, he started unwrapping it, peeling off layer after layer until it was clear there was nothing inside. So Corky, being who he is, goes to this guy's house in a barrio and starts yelling from the street, 'You son of a bitch! You burned the wrong person, motherfucker! I'm gonna come up there with an axe and chop you to pieces!' And so he got the drugs."
Art vs. the JUNOS
Following his participation in the Neil Young tribute album Borrowed Tunes, Art got the opportunity to make a record for Sony Music Canada, 1995's What Fresh Hell Is This? It earned him a JUNO Award the following year, a bittersweet moment at best.
In 1995 the JUNO Awards created a new category, best alternative album, in response to rock music's recent evolution. The following year, What Fresh Hell Is This? was nominated alongside the debut album Fluke by Rusty, the band One Free Fall had morphed into, as well as excellent offerings by the Inbreds, the Super Friendz, and Hardship Post that sufficiently represented the national indie rock community. Both Art's age and the fact that he was signed to a major label seemed to make him the odd man out, so when he was announced as the winner during the non-televised portion of the gala held at Hamilton's Copps Coliseum, the surprise he and Sherri felt was entirely genuine.
What went unspoken was that Art had been informed that very day that Sony would not be asking for another album from him. "We'd received the news earlier that day, so winning the JUNO really meant nothing," Sherri said. "I mean, was it going to get us another album? No. It was just a kick in the balls. I felt terrible for Art, but on the other hand I couldn't be angry with the people at Sony who had been working directly with him, because they were all completely supportive. Other people who didn't know Art, and didn't know how to market his music, made this decision. It really put us in this incomprehensible position of being back at square one at a moment when the industry had just acknowledged how great he was."
