“Final Words Are So Hard to Devise”

There’s a new interview with Berman in this month’s issue of the magazine. To accompany that piece, we asked fifteen artists, musicians, writers, poets, and friends to remember David Berman and the influence he had on their lives and work. This is what they had to say.

GATE PRATT: What to say, that hasn’t already been said?

David was a wit, a provocateur, a savant, a wise guy and a good friend. Through his creative output he led by example, inspiring us to embrace and champion a punk rock DIY ethos, to mask it in new wave cool, and then to mellow-it-out with an “aw, shucks” country sentimentality. He casually mastered this exacting feat while fearlessly pursuing deep artistic truths delivered in deceptively simple fashion. Though he made it seem effortless, David secretly labored over every word, note and line, reworking everything to conform to his impossibly exacting standards. We’re all the better for it.

David’s talents as a musician, poet, and artist are well documented and rightly celebrated. Mountains of purple prose will be expended chronicling the majesty of the body of work he gifted us with, so I won’t spill ink on these topics, knowing others will say it much better. Lesser known are his many other passions that made him a truly interesting and quixotic character. In true renaissance fashion, David had a deep interest in many other obscure pursuits; perfumery, food photography, Classic country, Americana bric-a-brac, dada collage, fantasy football, wicked practical jokes, deep dark internet wormholes, and other various incongruous arcana.

One of DCB’s little known talents that I particularly appreciated was his encyclopedic knowledge of presidential facts and trivia, extending even to vice presidents and obscure executive minutiae. Ever the consummate historian, I could always count on David to put things in presidential perspective, providing me with some tidbit of POTUS knowledge of inscrutable significance.

On David’s trip from Chicago to Brooklyn, en route to the start of the Purple Mountains tour last summer, his car broke down on the highway in the middle of the night, the difficulty compounded thanks to his Bush, Sr.-era flip phone and lack of the ubiquitous smart phone GPS prosthetic that the rest of us now take for granted as grafted onto our lives. After a harrowing night of trekking the highway on foot, finally getting his car towed in the wee hours, finding a hotel to flop in, and later renting another jalopy, he finally made it to his intended destination of Brooklyn.

As we walked the shady brownstone lined streets of Park Slope, I quizzed him about the details of the breakdown, and he recounted the hassles of the road, the curse of...