IT’S KIND OF FITTING that we finally get to the fifth track on this six-track EP in this third and final installation of the review, because in my opinion, “Only Lonely” is the most Seattle-sounding song in the set. Seattle plays a big role in Bern Band lore. Bassist Dave Trump lives there, and drummer Cody Rahn is a self-described “West Coast person.” I’ve been to Seattle plenty of times myself, and can’t yet describe myself as a devotee or not. I’m not in love with the place, but I don’t hate it. I did find it amusing when, on an overcast cold day, I saw people there beaming about the “sunshine.” Seattle continues to filter into musical culture. Some people swear by Seattle, and want to parade you down to the original Starbucks, or even show you some club where Kurt Cobain took a dump back before Nirvana got big. The scene, man.
The scene!
There used to be more West Coast people in my life, with starry utopias in their eyes.
Plus all that weed.
I actually don’t know if the Bern Band used drugs in the making of this record.
D. TRUMP: The difference in Seattle-New York or the East-West sound is tough for me to pinpoint. My perspective is a bit diluted by now, but I still think I know it when I hear it. One aspect would be the sense of urgency that comes out of NY music — deciding on the direction then making the groove happen. Whereas the Seattle sound might be more inclined to let the direction and sound develop. Of course, there are exceptions that could blow that concept out of the water.
C. RAHN: For me being a West Coast person my whole life until moving to New York City in 2010, the energy in rock music out there when I was growing up had a powerful groove that always felt comfortable and laid back even when the music was exploding with intensity. Slower, never frantic. Always space to think in between the notes.
Of course, we have to mention Pearl Jam. The Bern Band’s last record, Just Not Today, was recorded in Seattle in the final days of 2019, before the pandemic reared its head. They recorded at Stone Gossard’s studio, which was once Pearl Jam’s rehearsal studio. Soundgarden’s Down on the Upside was also recorded there, guitarist Hackett recalls.
B. HACKETT: There was just a real Seattle feel to the whole recording. We recorded all the basic tracks ‘live, live,’ meaning there was no click track and we were all playing live in a big room, baffling was the only isolation we used. So they are all one take, live. Which adds such an amazing feel to that album. However, the downside to that recording was that we had a small window to capture everything in the studio, not much time to think through all that we would have liked.
One thing that’s come up with Hackett in talking about the guitar distortion on this record is the weather where we grew up on Long Island, and how the distortion reminds me of the fog that rolls in off the inlet where we used to hang out, known as Conscience Bay.
A more writerly name could not have been selected for a body of water adjacent to such introspective, philosophical lads as ourselves. Most of the houses in the area were built postwar, and in dialogue with a local historian, I learned that the area where we lived had once hosted a hospital during a smallpox outbreak in the 1770s. This rather melancholy detail has only made the guitar distortion seem more ghostly and ominous. Perhaps soldiers during the conflict with Britain had bathed their pox sores in the bay. The same bay we would frequent in our youth, when Pearl Jam and Soundgarden ruled. There’s definitely some “Fell on Black Days” in “Only Lonely.”
Which brings us to the final number, “Another Birthday Before Christmas.”
This one is more like a Hackett solo number, I have to admit. The acoustic guitar, the festive chorus. Even his voice sounds more like him here. This is him, with no masks or shields. Just him. I have to think, it got me wondering about how I even met Hackett. There is a class photo of us together in second grade, but I barely remember him from those years. We definitely were in band — school band — in fifth grade. He was also in my class from fourth through sixth grade. There was a particularly raucous sleepover party which must have been in 1990, because I gifted Hackett a cassette of Vanilla Ice’s hip hop masterpiece, To the Extreme, and we were so animated and sugar high that Hackett’s dad, “Jim,” took us all out jogging.
Later, I remember Jim being taken aback by listening to Vanilla Ice rap about “handcuffs and chains” on “Stop That Train.”
Things probably started to mesh around this point.
But Hackett is a Sagittarius. His birthday is before Christmas, as this festive number informs. What that means is something like this. You go to visit Hackett, but he’s not there, because he’s somewhere else. You go to Point B, but he’s also not there, because he’s too busy smoking something with Jimmy Buffett at an Allman Brothers concert. You go to the concert, but it’s over already. Jimi Hendrix was a Sagittarius. Remember that tune, “Highway Chile”?
“His guitar slung across his back. His dusty boots is his Cadillac. A flamin’ hair just a blowin’ in the wind. Ain’t seen a bed in so long, it’s a sin.” That’s him.
They call him the breeze, he keeps blowing down the road.
I like to think of Hackett as sort of an early breezy guitar hero. He was just that kind of kid. But his guitar heroics earned him enemies. And so one day, while I was standing in the auditorium of Paul J. Gelinas junior high school, someone pressed into my hand a cassette recorded by some Primus devotees — the kinds of kids who wore baggy pants, with expansive “wallet chains” — that was called “Bury the Hackett.” Whose side was I going to be on?
This was the circa 1995 musical equivalent of the Drake-Kendrick feud.
A whole cassette full of diss tracks.
Or at least Nirvana-Pearl Jam.
The hand-drawn cover of the Hackett diss project showed a guitar neck sticking out of some grass.
Not all was well on Long Island. Evil was lurking along those muddy inlets.
Would I betray my lifelong friend, and come over to the dark side, the sinister Primus side? Would I disavow jeans that fit, and a wallet I trusted enough to stay put in my pocket, or would I get those big pants and keep my wallet on a chain? Could I strike some kind of balance between these packs of musical rogues emerging in my midst? Danger, danger. No, it wasn’t always easy being loyal to the Breeze. But he’s still out playing his guitar, ain’t he? And those snotty Primus kids are accountants or something. Their wallet chains have gone crusty.
To borrow a line from Good Will Hunting, “How do you like them apples?”