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March 15, 2005
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| Barry Thomas Goldberg. Several times he's tried to leave rock music, but his need to have a voice always brings him back. (MPR photo/Chris Roberts) |
Minneapolis, Minn. — It would be convenient if everything you needed to know about Barry Thomas Goldberg could be found in his spot-on impression of Jack Benny. He reverts to Benny when asked how old he is.
"I'm 39. Now cut that out," he says. "Oh, Rochester!"
The 50-something Goldberg's fixation on Hollywood legends comes from his upbringing, but it doesn't fully explain his ability to craft the raw, wounded songs of an American outcast.
Goldberg is a Minneapolis native who, as a kid, suffered from chronic bronchitis. He and his mother roamed the country looking for more climate-friendly communities. Once, she got a job as a waitress at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas.
"So I used to sit around and watch Dean Martin rehearse, and Frank Sinatra, and I'd go to shows at the Sands," he says. "And that's why I'm a normal guy."
Goldberg says he learned his manners from the movies, and considered Robert Mitchum a father figure. After he and his mom moved back to Minneapolis, Goldberg launched his songwriting career by quitting high school and getting a job at Dove Studios in Bloomington, a bubblegum music factory in the '60s.
For the next two decades or more he was in and out the local music scene, touring the Midwest, signing record deals but seeing nothing come from them. He's tried acting and screenwriting, and even had a brief stint as a columnist for an underground newspaper. But Goldberg realizes now he was running away from who he really is, a rocker.
As the '90s progressed, and after being hospitalized for months with a near-fatal infection, Goldberg began to shed the entertainer in him and embraced the artist.
"I just decided if I'm going to write a song, it has to mean something," he says. "It just has to be meaningful. It has to do with compassion, and to say something like a poet, that has different levels that can be read in different ways and may change your life. A line may change a person's life."
Goldberg's new CD, "American Grotesque," is in part his running commentary on the state of modern America. His snarl of a voice sounds like cigarettes and whiskey, part Warren Zevon, part Nick Cave.
On the CD, Goldberg alludes to his opposition to the war in Iraq. It's something most songwriters from younger generations won't touch, even if they feel the same way. The protest or anti-war song as an idiom may die with the baby boomers, but Goldberg says it's totally applicable now.
"Maybe because we've seen a 10-year war, that tragically just destroyed lives, changed all of our lives, just like this war is gonna change so many people's lives," he says.
While Goldberg makes no bones about his position against the war, he says he not a Bush-hater.
"I like the guy. I like cowboys. I like John Wayne."
In fact, Goldberg has his own explanation as to why songwriters, artists, and even the population at large have been relatively quiet lately about the war.
"We don't know," he says. "Bush could be right about all of this. We could be wrong. Freedom. You know, maybe this is all about freedom. I could be wrong. But I've been through this before. It's just a big Machiavellian game. I've seen it. I've lived through it."
Goldberg has been making a little money through an Internet company called CD Baby, where people can download his and others artists music. But he doesn't have a job right now, and is living, as he puts it, off the kindness of his girlfriend of many years.
He may get a band together later this summer and play a few dates, but he's mainly content to record his songs in the studio, then release his world view to the world.
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