Jessica Eaton

Rabbi, Run | Geoff Berner's "Whicky Rabbi" trilogy concludes with Klezmer Mongrel.

GEOFF BERNER
w/ Bob Wiseman & Doug Hoyer. The ARTery (9535 Jasper Ave). Sat, Mar 21 (9pm). Tickets: $10 in advance (available at Megatunes, Blackbyrd, Listen, and TIX on the Square), $13 at the door.

Geoff Berner’s latest album, Klezmer Mongrels, kicks off with a choppy, guttural moan — imagine an accordion making the same noise as that gaping Japanese kid from The Grudge. It’s an odd sound to open the final album in Berner’s “Whiskey Rabbi” trilogy, which includes 2005’s Whiskey Rabbi and 2007’s Wedding Dance of the Widow Bride. But Berner figures these knee-deep-in-crap times we’re living in are no occasion for pretty sounds.

SEE crashed in on the outspoken but good-humoured musician in his Vancouver home, and found him more than willing to talk about squeezing boxes, disturbing shit, and his affection for our big boom/big crash city.

SEE Magazine: We’re quite excited to have you visit us in Edmonton.

Geoff Berner: I’m glad. You know, Edmonton is the first place I had a draw in this country. It was the first city that kind of “got” me. People weren’t saying, “Well, that’s interesting ...” In Edmonton they were more like “This totally makes sense. Accordion, awesome! Oh yeah, drinking — we’re into that too! Come back soon!” See, Edmonton was especially good before the big oil boom and I expect that it’s going to become fun again now that the boom is over. People talk as if there wasn’t any pain when Edmonton was booming — except no musician could find a place to live for under a million dollars a month. The venues were all shutting down because nobody could afford to run a bar when people wanted to turn it all into condos. Edmonton’s music and culture might be on the rebound, know what I mean?

SEE: Might you venture a guess as to why Edmonton got you before anyone else? Is it that we’re a town with so many Eastern Europeans — I’m sure you’ve heard the “Edmonchuk” jokes.

GB: I think that that’s a big part of it. There was a stigma attached to the accordion in the postwar period that didn’t really take in Edmonton. People were actually into accordion there. Edmonton is not a pretty city, but it has a lot of culture and a lot of people who are into culture. It’s got almost a Winnipeg feel, where people judge you on your merits, rather than on whether they’ve decided you’re “successful.” That’s the Edmonton art spirit: “I don’t give a fuck what you think about me,” and that’s the vibe I’ve always related to.

SEE: Can you share any information about the accordion you think people should know?

GB: I have actually written a book about this. [Berner’s instructional booklet How to Be an Accordion Player was published in 2006.] The most important thing that you learn is that it’s not a piano that you hang on your chest, it’s actually like 1,000 clarinets that you hang on your chest. It’s a breathing instrument rather than a percussion instrument. So you have to treat it as an organic, breathing entity rather than something that you hit.

SEE: What was it that drew you to it? Do you think the old stigma about the accordion is waning?

GB: When I started playing, it was because of a punk rock perversity. Most normal people hated it, so that was one of its major recommendations. Half the room would clear before I even played a note. In Europe I never really experienced that time in the wilderness; over there, it’s just an instrument. My friend Jason Webley believes that accordions are sexier than guitars. He says he envisions a day coming soon where people are embarrassed to admit that they took guitar lessons. I think we’re entering that as part of the Obama era — it’s the resurgence of the accordion and the ukulele.

SEE: How did you come to the cover art for Klezmer Mongrels? It’s very, um, striking.

GB: The artist, Kelly Haigh, who’s done portraits of Neko Case and others, got in touch with me and said she’d be interested in doing a cover. I told her what the album was about, and she got back to me and said, “Here’s what I see.” I thought, “Ehh, well, there’s no harm in giving that a go,” and it turned out to be such a stunning, memorable image that it instantly catches people’s attention. How can you go wrong with a dog-headed lady breastfeeding puppies?

SEE: What is it that attracts people to a mangy mongrel dog?

GB: Wait a minute here. Now, just because a dog is a mongrel doesn’t mean that it has mange. In fact, it’s more likely to be disease-resistant if it’s got that hybrid vigour that geneticists like to talk about. The purebred dog is going to give you more problems with genetic epilepsy and such. So the mongrel is actually your better bet in terms of strength and vitality. I guess people like the mongrel partly because a lot of people these days are mongrels, whether they know it or not. I think we’re riding a zeitgeist here, because we’ve got a president in the White House who describes himself as a mutt. So this is like a mongrel time.

SEE: And in this mongrel time, how do you feel about artists getting into politics? You’ve put in your own share of time running for office with the Rhinoceros Party and the Green Party of British Columbia.

GB: The leader of a political party is really just the frontman, so it makes sense that they pick people who have done frontman work before. I don’t know about Schwarzenegger, but if you’re a citizen, you’ve got a responsibility to participate in the political process. So yeah, entertainers should be running for office, bus drivers should be running for office, sanitation engineers and waitresses should be running for office. The idea that there should be a professional class of politician and only those people are qualified to lead us totally goes against the idea of a citizens’ democracy.

SEE: I have to ask about the song “No Tobacco,” which makes the case for B.C. weed being good enough to roll without tobacco, as is the trend in Europe. I’m betting that song will become a 4:20 anthem across the nation.

GB: That’s what I’m hoping. In Europe they just do that, partly because the weed outside of Holland is weak, or maybe they just dole out the hash in a kind of miserly way. It doesn’t make any sense, really. Marijuana is a relaxant and a hypnotic, and tobacco is a stimulant, so you’re basically decreasing the bang for your buck if you’re putting a stimulant in with it. But let me say this: after I started performing [the song] around Europe, three months later I heard from my friend in Holland that the new rules in the coffee shops in Amsterdam are that you can smoke weed, but you can’t have tobacco in it, because there’s a smoking ban in most of Europe now. So it’s just another example of how influential I have been in world politics. Yes, I write a song, and a few months later the policy changes. That’s how it goes.