I bought Silver Jews’ third album American Water at a now-defunct record store in lower Manhattan called Kim’s. I was 15, maybe 16, and hoped—as I always hoped when I bought something at Kim’s—that the clerks might interpret my selection as a cry for help, or at least a signal that I was up for something cool after their shift. No luck.
The first time I played it—that unsteady strumming of electric guitar, David Berman’s country deadpan—I suspect it was in the living room of my dad’s apartment. He raised his eyebrow and wondered aloud if Silver Jews were the worst band he’d ever heard. I pointed out that he owned two albums by the Doors.
That my dad didn’t understand this rickety human music only brought me and American Water closer together. Berman had even written a line about this, in a way, on a song called “We Are Real”: “Repair is the dream of the broken thing,” it went. “Like a message broadcast on an overpass, all my favorite singers couldn’t sing.” Here was the implicit promise of indie rock—that you could do something even if the Figurative Dad says you sucked at it—compressed into a one-liner, the insult as a badge of honor, or a casually raised middle finger.
The band had started at the end of the 1980s, three college friends making noisy sketches in their Hoboken apartment. (Some of these sketches were recorded direct to the answering machine of Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth—a kind of high-culture prank call that telegraphed Berman’s uneasy relationship to the decorum of indie rock.) One of the three friends, Stephen Malkmus, had also recently started a band called Pavement with his childhood friend Scott Kannberg; Silver Jews were—as sadly befits Berman’s fixation on runners-up and marginalia—often footnoted as a Pavement side project. (Silver Jews’ first album, Starlite Walker, came out in 1994, the same year Pavement hit MTV.)
It was Berman who came up with the phrase “slanted and enchanted,” which Malkmus borrowed for Pavement’s first album, one of the definitive statements of slackness and grandeur of early-’90s indie rock. Berman, for his part, said he got the idea from Emily Dickinson: “Tell the truth, but tell it slant.” Berman’s own world was always creakier and foggier than Pavement’s, less edgy, more rustic—not the conscious weirdness of post-punk, but the unconscious weirdness of the American frontier, of religious talk radio, bumper stickers.