Sing a Song of Paranoia : David Baerwald turns out tales of urban chaos when not tracking the latest conspiracy theory

David Baerwald was stuck.

“One morning I woke up and I was in this (expletive) major rut of singer-songwriter (expletive),” he recalls, using the cliched term singer-songwriter as the worst of his pejoratives.

Luckily, the place in which he woke up this disgusted with himself creatively was his apartment in Venice, which is anything but hermetically sealed.

“The alarm woke me up, and there was some guy doing construction; there were police sirens; there were dogs barking; my coffee machine was making this horrible noise. And I realized, this is what life sounds like today . There’s not so much babbling brooks and lonesome highways as there are just congested urban landscapes with all kinds of chaotic stuff happening.

“So that actually was the beginning of: OK, how do I incorporate this traditional narrative folk structure thing I like with what the world actually sounds like, so you’re not just some dusty balladeer with a knapsack? So you actually are talking about what’s happening now and doing something with it musically, too?”

Venice itself--this season’s international symbol of urban angst , since “Falling Down,” anyway--helped Baerwald shake off the figurative knapsack of singer-songwriterdom that was the monkey on his back and go for something more literally urban -sounding.

“It’s noisy. Every Friday and Saturday night there’s some form of shootout. Police helicopters like this area to hang out in. There’s a general feeling of fear, paranoia and dread. A lot of unfriendliness, tension, arrests, undercover cops, crack heads . . . a lot of really poor people who are surrounded by all this opulence and luxury, which doesn’t really help. . . .

“I think it’s just about keeping your ears open, really--and not just musically, but to everything else. There are sounds you want to create that don’t necessarily have to do with traditional musical forms but have to do with creating an environment. A big thing for me was bringing in this contractor to play with power tools and an arc welder and jackhammer and carbide saw and stuff like that.”

The anti-bucolic result of that alarm-bell epiphany is Baerwald’s new album, “Triage,” a tour de force of catastrophic characters, apocalyptic paranoia, gallows humor and sophisticated aural landscapes borrowing imagery from everyone from James M. Cain to Jim Jones (in the same song, no less) while maintaining a unique vision amid its diverse slices of leavened dread (see review, Page 61).

“Music is about cross-pollinization, especially in this kind of environment. I mean, if you live in L.A. and you’re a country singer, you’ve had a lobotomy,” Baerwald braves to say, chortling through a cloud of cigarette smoke at his own indignation. “ Because we’re not in the country! “

“Triage,” Baerwald’s second solo album, probably makes too many jarring musical left turns and demands too much of the listener to serve as cocktail party music, which, like it or not, is the reason a good percentage of CDs get bought--perhaps even including some copies of “Welcome to the Boomtown,” the slick 1987 album on which Baerwald debuted as half of the off-again, on-again duo David + David.

“It’s certainly within our capacity as ‘sonic technicians, man’ to make some sort of smooth, reggae-tinged, world music, soulful thing that would sound good in an expensive restaurant,” he allows. “But as seductive as that is, how do you perform a song about a cop who’s about to kill himself and make it sound ‘hey’ “--he snaps his fingers, imitating a wannabe hipster--”and not be completely full of it? It would make the whole thing into a lie.”

The key, he says, is to find expressions that “make you feel like you’re actually in the world . . . tempting as it is to try and cocoon yourself up into something.”

The phone rings a lot at Baerwald’s place. There’s the usual flurry of business surrounding the new album release; there are calls about the hourlong film being made to accompany the project; discussions are even under way about a second album by David + David, Baerwald having reconciled musical differences with once-and-future partner David Ricketts.

But, apart from all that, the phone rings because Baerwald has a virtual second career going--volunteer point man in the world of conspiracy research.

Documentarians, alternative journalists and others dial him up with questions about the cryptic. And makeshift reference librarian Baerwald has at least a surface knowledge of a dizzying array of arcane topics. Need a tip on where to turn for info about the DEA and CIA allegedly training torturers and running drugs and guns into the country? Bill Casey’s takeover of the Reagan campaign? Who really programmed Jim Jones for destruction? What Daryl F. Gates knew about an offshore Iranian-run drug operation? Which government agency developed the patent on AIDS? Or for garden-variety stuff . . . the Bobby Kennedy killing, anyone?

No wonder Baerwald’s an inveterate chain-smoker.

The multitudes of shadowy theories “all sound crazy when you first hear about them,” Baerwald admits. “The easy thing to do is to say that these people are nuts. And all these people who think there’s some vast, single, overarching conspiracy are probably wrong. But the fact is that there are a number of small conspiracies happening all the time that are pretty heavy and work very well.

“The creation of a national security state was a conspiracy among a very few people, created out of a false paranoia about the Soviet nuclear threat, which didn’t exist at the time, and because of that you get things like the B-1 bomber, which is a classic history of incompetence and stupidity and short-sighted greed. Those two things combined together to create this (expletive) devastated landscape that we live in, where our poor people are kept poor and are pissed off so we have to have more cops and give up more civil rights to keep ‘em down, and the whole thing spirals.”

He lights up what is at least his third smoke this half-hour.

“The trouble with conspiracy research as a hobby is that you’re always at least five years behind current events, because things take that long to be declassified, leads take that long to happen.”

There’s another problem with conspiracy research as a hobby: It almost invariably makes for lousy art. As entertainers, Covert Action Journal subscribers usually tend toward lunacy at worst and sanctimony at best.

That makes the achievement of Baerwald’s “Triage” all the more substantial--first, as the rare, bona fide political album by a white guy in the ‘90s; and second, as one leveraged with trenchant sketch writing, polemical ambiguities, private passions and self-parodying humor.

“You don’t want to make music a documentary,” says Baerwald. “So basically, it’s about what I feel as an ordinary outraged American taxpayer, in the middle of a race war that I want nothing to do with. The thing to do if you want to write about this stuff, which I don’t recommend to anybody, is to steep yourself in it so much that it actually becomes as much a part of your experience as anything else you do--love, cars, drinking, whatever.”

Baerwald has had a fascination with the secret underpinnings of politics, war and governments from a tender age: “It related to the dinner conversation around my house.” His father, a German national born and raised in Japan, used to work for the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, so “it’s always been an interest of mine, for some kind of Oedipal reason or whatever.”

Having gone from Boy Scout to convicted dope dealer to reformed musician at a young age, Baerwald has long had contact with pals on both sides of the law, many of whom are sources for theories and rumors about the Powers That Be.

Ironically, it was the success of his music that led him to become a full-blown, research-driven conspiratorialist.

“I think it was when I started paying a lot of taxes” after the success of David + David, he confesses, laughing, remembering the crucial moment of conversion: writing a $40,000 check to the IRS at the same time he was watching a TV documentary about a covert American CIA assassination plot in Chile, producing an insatiable thirst to know just which clandestine activities his check would cover.

“And walk across the street and there’s an elementary school over there, and 25% of those kids are homeless, living out of cars. . . . Our priorities are just a little bit whacked, I think, and as a taxpaying American citizen, it pisses me off. Then you see people talking about building a post-industrial economy with 21% illiteracy. What are you, (expletive) crazy? It’s outrageous.”

Baerwald is laughing uproariously through this stream-of-consciousness diatribe, it’s worth noting. Here, as in “Triage,” he finds black humor amid the encyclopedia of social ills, even satirizing his own obsession with impending doom. “People touch on the troubling and disturbing aspect of the record, which is there, but I also think it’s hysterical. When I wrote ‘HydraHead Octopus Blues,’ I laughed for three days, I thought the unbridled nihilism was so funny.

“Nihilism is one thing, but if you’re gonna be completely nihilistic, then you should just save the world some space and kill yourself, as I saw on this great bumper sticker. You have to reaffirm your humanity somehow. Love and hope and forgiveness are good qualities to try to keep ahold of, and vengeance is not mine.”