Jewish Community Radio: Okay, we’re on the air with Dan Bern. Why don’t you tell us a little about that song (G-d Said No), what it means, why your wrote it…

Dan Bern: Well, obviously it’s a conversation between G-d and myself. And it’s an attempt to go back in time and right the wrongs of the past, which of course, is ultimately futile. As G-d says in the end, all you have is right now. So that’s kind of what you’re left with.

Jewish Community Radio: Did you grow up religious? Does that come from synagogue?

Dan Bern: I grew up I would say very mildly religious. Both my parents came through the Holocaust. My Dad was from Lithuania and lost his whole family other then a brother. And my Mom was born in Germany and they left finally in ‘39. So all of that all that history and that cultural history and everything that happens there always felt very close.

Jewish Community Radio: On one of your latest albums you have a song called Lithuania where you’re talking about your father and your grandparents. That’s kind of a long in depth heavy song.

Dan Bern: It’s strange because that history, that past is so recent in many ways its almost you could reach back and touch it but at the same time its incredibly remote. I myself didn’t actually go to Lithuania until two or three years ago and that was one way of attempting to make some ties between present and past and try to make the past a little bit more present.

Jewish Community Radio: Did you write the song before or after you visited Lithuania?

Dan Bern: I wrote the song before. In many ways it’s easier to write in that way before things become tangible when you can simply imagine things.

Jewish Community Radio: Was it different when you actually saw the places you were writing about or you heard from your Dad?

Dan Bern: Yeah, yeah. We went to the little town he was from which is called Schood up in the north west part of Lithuania and I didn’t expect to find anybody that had any recollection of the family or the times or anything. We found an old man riding a bicycle who remembered when they took everybody out and shot them and remembered hearing the shots from his house. And another old woman who was basically living in a shack who remembered the family and who remembered that my Grandfather had a shoe business. Really completely unexpected and amazing to me that there were these living people who remembered what were to me really ghosts.

Jewish Community Radio: That song comes off an album called The Swastika EP. You kind of got some humor going on there.

Dan Bern: Well yes and no. I mean yes… and no… The song that The Swastika EP refers to is called My Little Swastika and I suppose it does use humor to drive something home. Basically what that’s song does is attempt to reassign the swastika, that symbol, and to take it away from people who continue to this day to use it in harmful ways. So it basically tries to subvert the symbol. In the song for example it stands now for Groucho, Harpo, Zeppo and Chico. It stands for John, Paul, George and Ringo. It’s four sevens which is twenty-eight which is half of Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak. I mean, really absurd things, kind of a one-man crusade maybe to take the power away from the people who would still write the symbol on a wall to inflict pain.

Jewish Community Radio: Well I guess the Nazis didn’t invent the symbol to begin with.

Dan Bern: Exactly, exactly. It’s a many thousands of years old symbol and wouldn’t be great if in the future it didn’t have the context that we know it in.

Jewish Community Radio: The song Jerusalem. That song was from your first album. You really went to Jerusalem for ten days?

Dan Bern: Yeah. My sister was studying to be a cantor at the time there.

Jewish Community Radio: Is she a cantor now?

Dan Bern: She’s a cantor in Virginia now.

Jewish Community Radio: So not all your songs are like the past. You got that Al Kida Blues and you’re talking about modern things.

Dan Bern: Oh yeah. I think I try to weave the past and the very present. I think it’s so important to be about right now.

Jewish Community Radio: And not all your songs are about Jewish topics. You got the Tiger Woods song and stuff like that.

Dan Bern: Yeah. Probably more of my songs are not what you’d call Jewish topics.

Jewish Community Radio: But it always comes up, what is a Jewish musician or what constitutes as Jewish music.

Dan Bern: What do ya think?

Jewish Community Radio: I don’t know, I mean I have to choose what to play on the show. People will say, Dan Bern, is he a Jewish musician? And I’ll say, well he’s Jewish and he has some songs that are Jewish. Does that ever come up for you?

Dan Bern: Well I suppose in this context. I mean I think there are some threads that run through. It’s difficult to say what it is. Is Lenny Bruce a Jewish comedian? I mean he touched on a lot of things that are very essential to a lot of Jews and he touched on a lot of things that were more about the society at large. I think that what you’d call the Diaspora, I guess, Jews have always been very much a part of the societies that they lived in as well as being part of the larger Jewish community as a whole.

Jewish Community Radio: So you’re performing this Tuesday at the Beachland Ballroom. It’s just going to be you alone?

Dan Bern: Just me.

Jewish Community Radio: And your band, you call it the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy. What’s up with that name?

Dan Bern: It was partly tongue in cheek I guess. But I guess I wanted some way of telling my Mom that from now on when they talk about the international Jewish banking conspiracy they’re just talking about my band.