Wilderness, antiquity and family were the touchstones of the earnest country rock of ‘We’ with its references to cedars burnt, wood split and water carried by “mighty hands”. Justin appeared to be imagining himself as a family elder, close to death and communing with his family and history out in the woods, weighing his worth by the labour he has put into working the earth. The lyricism was too vague here to cohere into any distinct theme though and it would stand as one of Vernon’s least successful DeYarmond lyrics.
‘Dash’ was far more affecting and direct, adorning a lustrous sweep of keening trumpets and lamenting guitar with the sort of religious questioning that Vernon had explored at length on Self Record. Aligning himself with Carl Jung’s take on Christianity* in the line “Carl Jung and I are out on the ocean”, i.e. the ocean of alternative theological thought, he asked his listeners if the “vague thesis” of a Jesus “up in the sky” was a realistic or viable idea, pointed out that religion is a result of the fact that “all of us ache for answers to questions” but that asking “Gabriel, when will you speak to me?” often gets no reply. Offering a different sort of vision of St Paul’s enlightenment on the road to Damascus, one in which Paul’s apparent visitation from the crucified Jesus led us all into “the lion’s den”†, Vernon wielded his pen against the church’s structures once more: “we think it’s all held together by services and sacrament/And faith is a permanence, clay bowls and firmament/Oh honey, I am the honest one”. The concluding lines offer the concept of a lost and terrified humanity floating on an ocean of ignorance when it comes to the true meaning of life, and moving in whatever direction anyone cares to push it, “moving along with the slightest swells”. As summations of the ludicrousness of Biblical fairy stories, half-truths, exaggerations and superstitions affecting generations go, there’s none more succinct than ‘Dash’.
The album ended with the most silent sign of them all. The quiet, minimalist ‘Time To Know’, a song so delicate it was barely there, just the faintest twinkles of piano and Justin’s gruff voice barely a hiss, spinning a picture of a couple floating in a rope-tied rowboat, watching the stars. Conjuring an atmosphere of serene isolation, Vernon drifted off into verses of memories of that same relationship as it slowly broke apart. “The struggle came,” begins the second verse as the pair found that their differences “broke our back”, leaving Vernon shattered, his life an endless torment: “now the seasons have trouble passing/Through the creases in my hurt”. Home design magazines in grocery aisles plagued him with images of happy home lives as he realised “it was time to know that it was time to go”, and the album wafted to a close on waves of dream-like, hallucinatory images, “every sidewalk sale, every finishing nail, every dress that’s worn, every baby born”, amorphous lines drenched with regret. A favourite of Justin’s (“I really like that still” he’d tell Volume One magazine26), it was a fittingly bleak end to an album criss-crossed with Vernon’s lingering emotional scars and bubbling with suppressed damage, but laid out with a poet’s touch.
DeYarmond Edison played one show in Eau Claire to promote Silent Signs, the album launch party in July 2005, Joe’s first gig back with the band. Again, the local buzz was deafening, but it failed to infect Vernon, and he’d eventually see the fact that the album would fail to get them signed and stayed a cult classic as a blessing in disguise. “If this record had picked up,” he said, “I’d be a very confused person right now because we’d still be playing and we’d still be in a band … and I’d be lost in this stuff right now. And I’m lucky … because it’s a good record and it got the attention of a few people, but I’m glad it didn’t snowball. I needed that time alone to disassociate myself with myself and attach myself to what I wanted to do. Joey, Brad and Phil were my inspiration to play because I just looked up to them so much as brothers and friends. That, ironically, became the thing that rendered me unable to write for myself– and that’s what they wanted me to do.”27
Justin would be just as dismissive about all of the albums from this pre-Raleigh period, claiming in 2008, “I’ve made three or four records in the past, and we’ve sent a billion out to different people. And they just don’t land. I’m really glad none of my shit from the past has gotten out there, because I’m embarrassed by it now.”28
At the time, though, DeYarmond Edison wanted to shed their roots and take their new album out into the world, to show it what they’d got. Within days the gradual evacuation of DeYarmond Edison and their entourage from Eau Claire, bound for Raleigh, had begun. On the morning of July 30, Phil, Brad and Keil hopped in a Ryder truck full of DeYarmond’s gear, waved to Brad’s girlfriend, Kate Johnson, who’d join them a month later*, and headed south, back along Interstate 94, with Keil’s iPod, on random shuffle, delivering some sort of divine countenance in the form of a Tom Petty song called ‘Time To Move On’: “It’s time to move on, time to get going/What lies ahead I have no way of knowing/But under my feet, baby, grass is growing …”
These words of hope drifting from the open windows, they believed they were headed for a new frontier where they would make their name.
Instead, the move would tear the band apart.
On the brink of a breakthrough: Justin plays a showcase for blog site Brooklyn Vegan at the Bowery Ballroom, October 2007. RYAN MUIR
Keeping it local – Justin at Eau Claire’s Nucleus club, October 2007. AARON LANDRY
Everyone’s a drummer; Bon Iver at The Turf Club, 2008. JOHN BEHM
Justin Vernon: Snow Angel. D.L. ANDERSON
Next stop Wembley Arena – Bon Iver rock one of Brighton’s tiniest stages at The Great Escape Festival, 2008. ELINOR JONES/REX FEATURES
Bon Iver’s stripped-down stool section huddling up at London’s Serpentine Sessions, 2009, (L-R): Matthew McCaughan, Mike Noyce, Sean Carey and Justin Vernon. ANDY SHEPPARD/REDFERNS
Master of Bon beats Sean Carey rocks out at Leicester’s Summer Sundae Weekender at De Montfort Hall And Gardens, 2009. OLLIE MILLINGTON/REDFERNS
Non-stop eclectic cabaret at Gayngs’ Last Prom on Earth. ANDY HARDMAN
The backwoods Wildman of Bonnaroo, 2009. MICHAEL WEINTROB/RETNA LTD./CORBIS
Rehearsing for Sounds Of The South in Durham, North Carolina with Sharon Van Etten, Brad Cook & Phil Cook, September 2010. JEREMY M. LANGE
Freaking out to the Sounds Of The South in September 2010 as Vernon reinterprets Alan Lomax’s field recordings with Megafaun, Fight the Big Bull and Sharon Van Etten. JEREMY M LANGE
Justin Vernon and Kathleen Edwards making sweet music at the Dakota Tavern in 2010. TANJA-TIZIANA BURDI
Vernon squeezes onto the stage alongside hip-hop’s biggest ego at the Kanye West’s secret Bowery Ballroom show in November 2010. WALIK GOSHORN/RETNA LTD/CORBIS
Justin gets the concept of ‘put your hands together’ crowd participation slightly wrong with Gayngs in 2010. RYAN MUIR
* Sometimes styled anticon.
* When Dinner With Greg eventually split, several members joined with some of DeYarmond Edsion to form a new electro-rock side project called Amateur Love.
* Its sleeve once more smacked of a warmth for nature, featuring a tree brushing up to a whitewashed building, shot in sepia.
* The Soo Line was a train that ran through Eau Claire.
* Some commentators even claim that Justin references Roman poet Catullus in the line “and every time you sneeze, as a wise man once said, I believe in love”, suggesting the quotation from Catullus 45 which reads “Love sneezed approval on the left as before on the right”.
* Although, by the end of DeYarmond Edison, Vernon had landed a publishing deal with Nashville’s Bug Music, the band were still self-releasing their own albums.
* Chris would eventually go on to launch his own music career in Field Report.
* Indeed, the female slant to the title suggested his protagonist here was a woman.
* Jung’s interpretation of Western theology was based on the idea that Christian symbolism and words were actually ref
erences to the workings of the inner psyche and represented our need to understand and connect to our own unconscious, saying “Our age wants to experience the psyche for itself … knowledge, instead of faith“, as noted in “The Spiritual Problem Of Modern Man”, Civilization In Transition. Vol 10, The Collected Works Of Carl G. Jung, tr. R.F.C. Hull. Bollingen Series XX. Princeton University Press.
† Some doctors have claimed another alternative interpretation of the story, pointing out that the blinding light, loss of bodily control, aural hallucinations and temporary blindness experienced by St Paul have much in common with the symptoms of sunstroke.
* As would Joe; Justin and Heather would be only a week behind the first truck to Raleigh.
CHAPTER FIVE
Eau Claire, Au Revoir
“The advantage and disadvantage are kind of the same. You’re brutally disadvantaged because there is the ‘whole world’ out there, and you are advantaged by the fact that your whole world can be right here. For me, as an example, I believed so hard in this place that I stopped believing in myself and had to move to North Carolina for a fresh start. So there is a balance. You have to be a strong entity as one person – to help make stronger fabric of a larger community.”
–Justin Vernon on growing up in the Chippewa Valley1
THE huge white house on Everett Avenue was a model of communal democracy. Cross the porch where the inhabitants – Keil, Justin, Heather, Katie, Brad and Phil* – sat for dinner together on warmer evenings and you’d enter the hallway where a huge whiteboard was erected to display any debts owed between housemates in the form of an elaborate spreadsheet divided into boxes linking each pairing – a scrawled dollar amount in the Phil/Justin column, for example, indicated that was what Phil owed Justin. Elsewhere you’d find a daily chore rota (Justin was a devil for forgetting to do the dishes), lacking the unspoken shared responsibility that everyone took to look after the household pet, Peking duck Crackers, which Keil had purchased for the grand sum of $1 from a student at the Morrisville elementary school where he’d taken a teaching job.
Each housemate had their social role too. Phil and Heather were like the parents of the house, Brad and Katie the playful kids. Justin was the creative powerhouse and Keil was the technical geek. Spotting the vast array of differing musical interests within his housemates, be it roots folk, gospel soul or avant garde electronica, he used his electronic know-how to put together a network of servers on Linux whereby anyone could individually access one of the 7,000 albums the collective jointly owned, or have it play throughout every room.*
For most of the guys though, this was among their first experiences of supporting themselves, much to the mild chagrin of their girlfriends. “They all have wonderfully supportive and loving, but also enabling, mothers, who have taken care of everything their entire life,” said Heather. “It can be kind of hard for them to realise that they do have to do things like buy toilet paper for themselves.” “Mom’s not going to stop in and buy you toilet paper and change your sheets,”2 added Katie.
In general, however, there were very few rows between the Everett Avenue housemates, and their system worked a charm. By day the members of DeYarmond Edison’s posse worked at record stores, schools, autistic wards and restaurants. By night they drank in the Village Draft House or socialised into the early hours with their nearby neighbours, spreading their community spirit as wide as possible. At weekends DeYarmond Edison would retire to a rehearsal room on Capital Boulevard to practise and write, making sure to put down everything they played on an enormous computer recording system that dominated one wall. After all, they didn’t want to miss out on their musical epiphany.
Grayson Currin, a local Raleigh music writer who was among the first to interview DeYarmond Edison on their arrival in town, noted that “with the move, everyone’s guards went down and their vulnerabilities as bandmates were exposed”3, but with this personal openness also came a musical one. The musical community in Raleigh was open-minded and inclusive and inspired DeYarmond to evolve and expand their roots-rock template much further than they had before.
“We moved down there and then instantly … were wedged in with this great social circle,” Justin recalls. “Chapel Hill, Durham is kind of this big conglomeration … the people are holding it together.”4
“The whole Raleigh thing is just awesome,” he’d elaborate. “It’s kind of this town where it’s not necessarily where everyone wants to be, but everyone stays, because everyone is there.”5
“When I got to North Carolina our minds were sort of exploded with a new community, new people, with new perspectives on music,” he said. “We got this residency at an art gallery and started doing really experimental music and things like that. And so in that regard, it completely smashed open the windows of music in my life.”6
The residency at Bickett Gallery – a show a month at the start of 2006 –was pivotal in the development and the demise of DeYarmond Edison. Having made an immediate splash in the Raleigh scene with their initial run of shows and gathered a solid local fanbase within months of hitting North Carolina, they were riding the rush of their instant cult fame and the vindication that they could reproduce their Eau Claire success on a bigger scale in whichever town they happened to stick their pin in. They felt as though anything was suddenly possible, and wanted to take on board the experimental influences they were hearing from their new scene-mates all around them. The plan for the gallery residency was one of total indulgence and experimentation – each member would be allowed to call the shots for one show, leading the band down whichever weird and wonderful path they fancied.
After what they described as a “palate cleanser”7 show at the multimedia gallery*, playing stripped-down versions of their previous DeYarmond Edison material on acoustic guitar and upright bass, they discarded their familiar canon for entirely new musical journeys. Each member was tasked with delving as deeply as possible into a genre, style or musical concept of their choice then, four times a week for two hours at a time, the band would convene at the Capitol Boulevard practice space and whoever was curating the exhibition piece that month would guide the rest of the band, at great length and exhaustive depth, into their new specific musical niche, working towards developing a suite of music to perform at the gallery.
Joe opted for the relatively safe ground of free-form improvisation, hoping the group would learn from his sessions to play with a sense of freedom and really express themselves through their notes. To emphasise the power of restraint and patience, Brad helped them concoct lengthy ambient phase works called things like ‘Four Keyboard Phase In A’ that were in debt to Brian Eno, Steve Reich and outré 20th century classical composers such as Philip Glass. To strengthen their knowledge of and abilities in the area of classic Americana, Phil scoured hundreds of antique roots records of blues and string band artists to put together a set of traditional songs to be played on the original instruments. When it came to Justin’s turn, he decided to focus on the shift he hoped to make in his vocal style, experimenting with what the band could do with just their voices. He made them bawl out spirituals at the tops of their lungs and scream 15-second blasts of demented vocal acrobatics. It was also where Justin sang his first song entirely in his haunting falsetto, tackling Mahalia Jackson’s ‘A Satisfied Mind’.
“There are these moments when you’re not sure, and you’re on the cuff of feeling insecure about what you are about to do,” Justin said. “Then you do it, and it works.”8
The intention of the exercise was to develop additional techniques and exotic styles that would add texture, colour and inventiveness to DeYarmond Edison’s creative process, but their stylistic advances caused ructions from the very start. On February 3, 2006 the band played their second ever show at Raleigh’s Kings Barcade venue, opening a two-night benefit event called Double Barrel Benefit, organised by North Carolina State’s radio station WKNC 88.1. With a one hour set to fill, the band used the first half hour to play only two pieces, bo
th lengthy ambient drone experiments built from the atmospheric sounds emitted from Justin’s guitar and Phil’s Hammond organ, dotted with extreme bursts of ear-splitting volume. The room was enthralled, but even the closing half hour of songs from their two albums occasionally reached such serene and silent interludes that the bartender thought their set was over and turned on a CD of between-band funk music. Joe exploded. “It’s OK, you can play music in the next room while we’re playing in here,”9 he fumed as the barman fiddled with the buttons to make the noise stop, then launched furiously into a raging soul song called ‘Set Me Free’ to drown out the muzak. By the end of the song he’d beaten through the skins and Justin, joining in his destructive fury, was shredding feedback from his amp. Kings was blown away; DeYarmond were partially blown.
Joe’s intensity and forcefulness in pushing the band to grow and develop had already been rubbing up against Justin. As the band member most dedicated to the art of a well-crafted melody, he was frustrated at Joe’s need to let numbers roam free, as he was trained to do at Bennington. Justin’s emerging talent at pinpointing moments and emotions through stark impressionistic images and poetry was clashing with Joe’s desire to reach a similar sort of understanding through the vagueness of improv. Justin was gazing into clear skies; Joe was finding truth in the density of clouds.
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