Issue #111: The underrated folk genius of Dan Bern
The first time I saw Dan Bern, or even had heard of Dan Bern, it was 1997 and my friend and I had gone to see Ani DiFranco at Central Park Summerstage in New York. I’d gotten us free tickets after working at the venue over the summer (I think they were a fat twenty bucks, and lord knows that’s steep for a highschooler), so we met up after school in stringy tank tops to buy cheap beer from the bodega near my apartment that we knew would never say no and make our way over to the show giddy, teen-drunk and ready to see our folk idol. We wanted to carve out a good spot on the grass, so we arrived early enough that the opener, Dan Bern, hadn’t even started his set yet (to be fair, back before set times were posted on the internet, you almost always saw the opening act unless you were truly a risk taker. I took a lot of risks in my day, but missing the headliner wasn’t going to be one of ‘em).
When Bern walked onto the stage, in ripped jean shorts and a white muscle tank, I turned to my friend and we rolled our eyes in unison. What the fuck, respectfully, was this guy doing fronting a feminist Ani DiFranco show? I’d seen DiFranco once before, opening for Bob Dylan earlier that summer. I didn’t quite understand why she always had to be surrounded on stage by men, even if they were men I liked very much.
But then Bern started playing a song about balls. “I got big balls,” he sang, on a tune called “Tiger Woods” that transitions into a bit of hilarious braggadocio for the entire first verse, and ends just how it came. “But even though my balls are big, sometimes I wish they were bigger.” They’re wild lyrics to type, and I laughed hard when I heard them – how many times, even at our young age, had we heard men not just brag about stuff like this, but mean it? About the size of their power, their dicks, their brains, their anything? Oh, I realized. He’s on our side. Here he was on stage, mocking the misogyny he was supposed to help perpetuate, and, I’d later realize, our constant need to position every man with a guitar as the “next Dylan,” which I think is a lot harder when you start singing about balls.
A few months later, when his second album, Fifty Eggs, came out, my suspicions about his intentions where only confirmed. “Tiger Woods” made the cut, but so did songs like “Chick Singers” which was an ode to all the female voices he loved and his own role in being an asshole to them, and “Cure for AIDS,” where he’s fantasizing about sleeping with “Julie, Melissa and Jake,” sex-positive before we even had a word for it. Produced by DiFranco herself, some songs were funny while others were tender: they challenged what I thought folk music could be at the time, and how we could approach a political or protest song with a certain kind of lightness or humor and have it punctuate the pain even more. I'd thought up until that point that good musical activism had to be very serious to work, and Bern showed that sometimes we just gotta laugh at how ridiculous it all is before we can do something about it.
I stuck with Dan Bern, through New American Language and songs about baseball (he sure loves baseball), though always returning most to Fifty Eggs. And I waited, patiently, for him to earn his post as one of the Americana and folk forefathers, clearly referenced by today's artists but almost always left out of the conversation. I waited, even through album anniversaries and everything else, and wondered why it still didn't happen. I don't have a good answer - some great things just get lost, and Bern doesn't seem like the type of guy to come for his flowers with a vengeance. It's never too late, though, even for a song about balls.
