In a new Art Bergmann biography, the wild, wild life of a genuinely committed rock-’n’-roller gets its due

Whether or not you know who he is, rest assured Art Bergmann is pretty much top of the list when it comes to Canadian musicians deserving of a proper biographical treatment.

If you do know who he is and have some acquaintance with the misleading — though not entirely inaccurate — miasma of punk-rock legend that follows him around, mind you, the obvious followup is “Yes, but what poor fool would attempt to do a proper Art Bergmann biography?” Well, that fool is Jason Schneider. And he got the damn thing done. With Bergmann’s blessing, no less.

“The Longest Suicide: The Authorized Biography of Art Bergmann” trickles out into bookshops this week through Anvil Press. It’s a brisk, plain-spoken and thoroughly well-researched rip through the genuinely wild, wild life of a genuinely committed rock-’n’-roller. One who absorbed rock ’n’ roll’s purest teachings at an early age and helped transmit them to a small-but-devoted next generation of miscreants via such commendably anti-social and heroically badly behaved first-wave Vancouver punk acts as the Shmorgs, the Young Canadians — known as the K-Tels until K-tel’s lawyers intervened — and Poisoned. One who has persevered on the fringes as an utterly uncompromising solo artist to this day despite having his career chronically derailed by half-hearted industry compromises that went nowhere, self-destructive addictions and a reputation for having a bit of a bad attitude. Which is the right attitude, arguably, if you’re gonna stake your turf as a legit punk for life.

“It’s the right attitude, yes. I believe so. ‘Yes, I feel that way’ is the short answer,” chuckled Bergmann, 69, down the line from Vancouver, to which he has of late returned from a longtime perch in bucolic Airdrie, Alta., for tragic reasons to be discussed in a moment. “But I’ve stayed alive is a better answer, despite all my foibles. And persevered as what? Persevered as a poet and a writer? Of course. This is what I do …

“It is what it is and who f—in’ cares? If I’d made a lot of money it probably would’ve been the end of me.”

This writer has known Bergmann for 20 years and, while he’s a tough nut to crack, he’s really not that scary. Quite affable, in fact, in his own cryptic, crusty way. Schneider deduced the same after first encountering Bergmann during the late 1990s while working on “Have Not Been the Same,” the meticulous Canadian alt-rock bible he co-wrote with Michael Barclay and Ian A.D. Jack in 2001.

Bergmann — who’d recently been dumped by Epic Records and Sony Music the very same day he won Best Alternative Album at the 1995 Juno Awards for his solo album “What Fresh Hell Is This?” — was living in Toronto at the time, had long cleaned up a nasty heroin habit and could occasionally be spotted busing tables at Rancho Relaxo on College Street to make ends meet while nursing the next small-scale comeback that would arrive with 1998’s “Design Flaw.”

Schneider was “terrified” to track him down, he admitted, because “I obviously knew his reputation.” But he “gained Art’s trust” and the two stayed in touch for years afterward, to the point that when Bergmann was about to release his searing 2016 album “The Apostate” on local indie label Weewerk it was Schneider who got the call to handle PR for the project.

He was, thus, cautiously emboldened to suggest the idea of doing an entire book on Bergmann’s life and art. And Art agreed.

“Art’s life is one of the great rock ’n’ roll stories that hasn’t been told yet. And obviously there are Canadian musicians we all love and they’re great, but their life stories aren’t that compelling, you know? Their lives aren’t that exciting,” said Schneider, now living in Kitchener.

“I mean, I love Rush, but then when I saw that last documentary it just talked about how, like, when they were on tour with KISS they’d just go back to the hotel room and watch TV after every gig. And that’s pretty much Canadian music. But Art’s life is real rock ’n’ roll. He devoted himself to this life and he paid the price for it in some ways, but it’s a story that stands up with any musician’s story you care to name.”

Many long, late-night telephone conversations between Ontario and rural Alberta ensued over “three or four more years of gaining Art’s trust” while Schneider diligently dug up enough obscure facts and forgotten human figures from the past to impress Bergmann into giving “The Longest Suicide” the grudging stamp of “authorized biography.”

“He’s a factual writer. It’s not my favourite style. If I was to write my own book it would be more hallucinatory, more like my favourite kind of writing, Kerouac or Burroughs. But it’s pretty good for what he does,” said Bergmann, probably giving Schneider a compliment. “If I did my own book I’d probably just sit down and scrawl it out, but I don’t know if I have enough discipline to write a book. I have enough discipline to write songs, so I’m happy about that.”

Getting Bergmann to acquiesce to the whole thing might have been the hardest part of Schneider’s assignment, as it turns out. He found a lot of willing participants, although such noted Bergmann foes as hippie-era CanCon folkie Valdy — who wrote 1972’s “Rock and Roll Song” after being forever bruised by an unfortunate cross-billing with a pre-Shmorgs outfit known as the Mt Lehman Band in Victoria — and John Cale, the utterly disinterested producer of 1988’s “Crawl With Me,” didn’t bother to chime in.

“The funny thing was, when I started reaching out to people and doing interviews, I was expecting at least a few people to say, ‘Oh, yeah, he was a real a-hole.’ But everybody — everybody — I interviewed had nothing but the best, glowing things to say about him. That made everything a lot easier,” said Schneider, who concurs that the reigning Bergmann narrative of “missed opportunity after missed opportunity” might be a little misplaced. Art Bergmann is, perhaps, right where Art Bergmann should be after 50-odd years of kicking against the pricks (a British expression for rebelling against authority).

“I think a lot of that is just the fact that he was from Canada at a time when the Canadian music industry didn’t know what to do with him,” offered Schneider. “And when you’re an artist who doesn’t really have a head for business, and doesn’t want to put his time and energy into dealing with that — and Art would admit this himself — you’re kind of at the mercy of other people to take care of your business and, sure, some sh—y things are gonna happen.

“And the amount of sh—y things that happened to him were probably excessive. But let’s not forget the actual songs. That’s why he’s important: because these songs are important. Why weren’t they hits? Well, because they contained too much truth and truth doesn’t cut it on the radio most of the time.”

Bergmann’s surprise naming to the Order of Canada in 2020 and the release of 2021’s typically ferocious “Late Stage Empire Dementia” LP gave “The Longest Suicide” a naturally happy ending but, alas, fate had other ideas. His love of more than 30 years, Sherri Decembrini, died suddenly last March.

It thus fell to Bergmann himself to write the book’s epilogue, in the verses of “Death of a Siren” tucked into the back pages in lieu of further comment. The new song, haunted by the shattering refrain “Grief is the prize / If you stay alive” and accompanied by a powerful video that features Bergmann wandering the empty fields around Airdrie and openly weeping at his kitchen table, was recently released in tandem with the biography.

“It was not easy, but necessary,” he said. “The result of sleepless endless writing, in denial. She was still alive to me then. I couldn’t write it now. I reduced all my thoughts to an extremely compacted four verses. Very difficult. Excruciatingly so. I am very proud of it as it seems to resonate with so many who have shared their grief with me.”

Bergmann is now writing a new album of “all love songs” he intends to complete upon moving back to Vancouver, back to where it all began, for good.

“I came out for a gathering for Sherri — a funeral — and now I have to go back to Alberta and pack up my worldly goods and then I’m moving to the West Coast,” he said. “It feels like home. Everyone’s being very wonderful. Old friendships never die.”

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