Prison Drama

Though I'm a habitual list-maker, I never even thought of trying to count down the top five records to come out of Seattle until I heard Steven Jesse Bernstein's Prison and immediately decided it was one of the best this town has ever made. Released on Sub Pop in April of 1992, Prison, the poet's only proper album, simply arrests you. Scored by notable composer, experimenter, and producer Steve Fisk, Prison matches Bernstein's acerbic, razor-sharp cadence with gorgeous and illustrative jazz, hip-hop, and rock-based sonic fixations. But what makes Prison especially poignant is that the majority of it was completed after the poet died. What will make the EMP exhibit especially poignant is that Fisk will perform a skewed sonic retreatment of the record at the exhibit's opening night party (6-9 p.m. Friday, Oct. 10).

Upon meeting me in the back room of Second Avenue Pizza, Steve Fisk, the guy who recorded all those weird Screaming Trees records and had a couple of his own rather strange releases out on highly esteemed punk labels like SST, begins with a blunt disclaimer about Bernstein: "He was a really sweet, sweet guy. But we weren't really good friends."

He doesn't mean to disassociate himself from Bernstein, just to clarify their relationship. "I was Bruce's buddy," he says, referring to the founding father of Sub Pop, Mr. Pavitt. "Bruce hired [me] to make his record sexy when it wasn't sexy."

And Fisk got the job done. Insofar as synchronous trip-rock and spoken-word song/stories about demonic, drug- addled societal misery can be sexy, Prison is the most beautiful hard-core porno flick you've never seen. But it didn't start out that way.

In the late '80s, around the time William Burroughs was collaborating with people like Sonic Youth and ex-Velvet John Cale, Pavitt, Jon Poneman, and others at Sub Pop thought it'd be cool to record Bernstein in the style of Johnny Cash's At Folsom Prison. So they recorded Bernstein spewing his modern-day Beat poet songs for a bunch of convicts at Monroe, only it didn't really work. The performance and recording were done fairly early in the morning and the prisoners, though by all accounts quite taken with Bernstein's recitations, were quiet and reserved. The recording lacked the raucous audience participation that makes At Folsom Prison so captivating and real. But the dream lingeredit just needed some rethinking. Eventually Sub Pop put the two accomplished eccentricsFisk and Bernsteintogether.

"The idea was to take fixed material and score to it," explains Fisk. "The thing was, [Bernstein's] got such a wonderful voice that if you wanted to do what everyone does with Burroughstake four measures and cut it to a hip-hop loopwell, Jesse's telling stories."

And Fisk, whose history also includes Ellensburg's underground literary scene, was committed to keeping the stories intact. He was given cassettes of some spoken song-stories that Bernstein had self-recorded and he started doing what he does best: slinging samples and composing offbeat scores. And then, after only one track had been completed, something awful but not entirely surprising happened. On Oct. 22, 1991, Bernstein killed himself.

A few months later, Fisk went back to work. "I finished it because I knew it was going to be good and I knew it was going to be strong," he says, "and I knew the context was going to be unbearably sad."

The two had finished working on "No No Man (Part One)," a song that Soundgarden would later frequently use as intro music for their live shows, and Fisk had played Bernstein early versions of the definitive track "More Noise Please" and the poet fully endorsed the composer's pulsing, shimmering, stomping sonic accompaniment. In fact, Bernstein had given Fisk "complete permission" to do exactly what he wanted with all the tracks.

Not that he always wanted to do a lot. "With a piece like 'Face,'" Fisk explains, referring to Prison's longest track, a 12-minute discourse that brutally defines Bernstein's tormented, illness-ridden youth, "you want to stay out of the way."

"Face" begins with the poet stoically and sarcastically stating, "The following is pure fiction. Actually I have been handsome and popular all my life," and then goes on to proclaim, "There has always been something wrong with my face." No music is heard for the first minute and a half of Bernstein's narrative, and then a building buzz begins. A whirling, squishy hum accompanies the poet as he dryly explains how, as a boy, he wanted to cut off one of his ears but ended up with only a pathetic dribble of blood. True to Fisk's guiding inclinations, "Face" is one of the album's least musical tracks.

And yet, Fisk explains, "there's more hokum in 'Face,' actually, than on any other tracks. There are two places where he's surrounded by his peers and they're ganging up on him, one [of the background sounds] is lions slowed down and the other is bees slowed down. It's subtle, it's very, very quiet, but the ambience gets bigger and creepier."

BACK WHEN I first heard Prison, I had guessed that Fisk must have had to make extensive notes or perhaps even build a complete map with graphic relief in order to guide himself through the pained sea bottoms and hilarious, sarcastic, jesting mountain peaks of Bernstein's vocal work. But he says that wasn't the case at all.