Early Years
Not many musicians could truly claim a background sufficiently steeped in American roots tradtion to boast the label voodoo chile but if there was ever another among them it would be Aaron Berg. Born in 1984 and raised by ‘mom & pop’ record store owners in upstate South Carolina, he spent his childhood days largely under a record bin and was playing upright and fender bass by age fourteen in nightclubs, cafes, and bars with a variety of folk, blues, and rock n roll bands. In addition to having owned the record store in Greenville, SC since 1975 (called Horizon Records) during his teenage years Berg’s family also ran a regional concert promotion company which promoted artists such as Buddy Guy, Robert Cray, Lyle Lovett, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Sam Bush, Gillian Welch, Los Lobos, Wilco, Lucinda Williams, John Prine, Dr. John, Tony Rice, Bela Fleck, and The Band, among many others. During these early years Aaron was never far from sight absorbing from the wings of a dozen different stages a spiraling array of American folk and roots music.
“I met Jimmie Vaughan when I first started playing,” Berg recalls. “I will never forget him leaning down with all those rings and his greased back hair to shake my hand. All he said was ‘play what you want to hear, son.’ I think that could be the best advice anyone has ever given me.” Aaron sights delta blues and Appalachian folk as his initial sources of inspiration. “I think John Lee Hooker is the closest cousin to the music of the future. His music is made almost entirely of soul and improvisation. It is most of all about the raw intention of the singer. Hip Hop is what will be drawn inside next. Blues and Rap have a lot more in common than has been realized.” Despite Berg’s heavy draw from folk and blues as primary influences his background stretches in virtually every direction as does his music.
New York City
At age eighteen he moved to Greenwich Village, New York City to attend music school and study bass on scholarship at the New School For Social Research. "My grades in high school were so bad," Berg confesses, "that I couldn't really get into any universities including the state schools. I wanted to go to New York so I found a way. Ultimately, I knew I think that I was looking for something else." Before dropping out of The New School after less than two years he held the coveted position as the lone student of contemporary jazz bass guru Larry Grenadier. “It was a funny thing,” Bergs says. “I met the master himself. The guy we were all trying to emulate and I realized almost instantly that it was not my calling to play that kind of music. He was a virtuoso artist and a beautiful soul but I just knew right away I was not destine to become that type of musician.” Around this time Aaron began to write songs almost by accident. “Originally songwriting was more of an off-handed late night amusement,” Aaron explains, “but somewhere in there it became more organized.” Rebecca Martin, an internationally accredited folk and jazz singer and wife of bassist Larry Grenadier heard many of Aaron’s earliest performances. “Aaron has some of the best phrasing of anyone I know singing songs", claims Martin. "There are lines in every song that just floor me. Aaron is big talent.” Berg’s first album “Songs For Madame X” featured an eclectic line up of Brooklyn friends and former schoolmates. Instrumentation included bass, drums, acoustic and electric guitars of all kinds, lap steel by Canadian sound pioneer Myk Freedman, as well as piano, Fender Rhodes, Moog and Nord keyboards, and various electronics by New Hampshire's ambient-master Michael Effenberger. "Songs For Madame X" is available for download at 
Dan Armonaitis, syndicated Southern music critic and senior writer at The Spartanburg Herald-Journal said of the band's first and only release, “One of the finest folk-rock albums ever made by an Upstate musician. Only 22 years old, Berg sounds like a sage with a deep-throated vocal style that at various turns recalls Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, or Tom Waits. Hardly a typical singer-songwriter release Berg’s debut is full of lush musical arrangements and diverse instrumentation that make it clear Berg is a serious artist with unlimited potential."
Meeting the Troubadour
Although Aaron's interest in performing and singing made its debut in 2007 with 'Songs For Madame X' the initial traces of inspiration begin three years earlier when he landed a gig playing upright bass for bluegrass icon Peter Rowan (known also from The Grateful Dead song as Panama Red) who was guitarist and leadsinger for Bill Monroe in the sixties and bandmate of arists such as Jerry Garcia, Tony Rice, and Sam Bush. “I met Peter Rowan in New York City on the morning of my twentieth birthday at the Washington Square North Hotel. I was sitting in the marble lobby under a giant reproduction of the John Singer Sargeant painting ‘Madame X’ which as fate would have it ended up being the title of my first album. Peter walked in with a silver-banded sombrero, a silk shirt, and a red headed daughter. In terms of being a traveling, singing performer that pretty much sealed the deal.”
"After I met Peter I really started going out and singing more in the city, staying out all night and meeting lots of strange people. This was the time when things really started to change. I lived pretty much anywhere that would have me. This was a much different kind of madness from what I had seen during my brief art school days. These were people truly standing in the cracks you know, in a transition beyond their own understanding, speaking an incomplete language. Some were homeless, divorced, unlucky. Others just seemed to find comfort in the view from the fringe." Berg's songwriting during this time began to take a more fragmented view, the images and chords delivered faster and with greater tension. "I wrote my first songs in one sitting during that time and really got the machinery of it together. I was experimenting all the time."
'Midnight Shing Sun' is born amid Family Tragedy
During the winter of 2006 Berg started writing his first prose work, once again essentially by accident. "That was my fourth winter in New York. I had what I guess could only be described as urban cabin fever. I couldn't stand to be in any apartment anymore. I needed a new space. As it turned out I spent a lot of hours that winter sitting in diners mostly in the middle of the night. My two favorites were the Kelloggs Diner (before the renovation!) in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Union Avenue and the Waverly Diner on Waverly Place in the Greenwich Village which I had hung out in since my New School days eventually becoming friends with the mostly foreign, exceptionally mood staff. Since I couldn't play a guitar while having eggs and coffee I usually brought along a notebook to scribble in. Somewhere in between staring out the window and waiting on refills I started to write." The completed work entitled 'Midnight Shining Sun' eventually topped 16,000 words and is set to be officially published early 2010. The writing is fluid and psychedelic. Although one might rely on a cliche such as 'stream of consciousness' to describe isolated sections of the book, overall the narative structure and mood of the writing draws as much from Rainer Marie Rilke, John Steinbeck, or Mark Twain as from Kerouac, Faulkner, or Ginsberg. "I was reading Eugene Jolas and the transition writers at that time", Berg says. "That style of writing to me seemed simple and raw but infinitely convertible. It could be a children's folktale as easily as an acid trip or a love letter."
In November and December of that year a family tragedy back in South Carolina drew Aaron home for the first time in over two years, a fourteen year old first cousin who worked at the family record store had taken her own life. The family gathered around to grieve. After the funeral Berg returned to Brooklyn planning to come home again over the Christmas holiday. When he arrived once again at the airport in December, he was informed another first cousin age fifteen had taken his life exactly one month to the day after the first. "My family was completely devasted loosing two children in such a short span of time. I was off having my own adventures and roaming around when suddenly these two tragedies unfolded. All the chapters of my family history which might have been lurking in the dark came rushing to the front. It was a multi-dimensional wake up call in the middle of an already strange undefined period of my life."
Early days on the Road
In the Spring of 2007 Aaron traveled on a brief ten day tour through the South and back to New York. Joining him on the trip were two friends, later redrawn in the completed rendition of 'Midnight Shining Sun' under the pseudonyms Johnny and 'the bearded man in overalls'. Although Berg had performed extensively in New York City gaining a small but highly devoted following, he now set his sights on touring. "Once I did that first little East Coast tour I realized the importance of the road. It's the crowning piece to the musician's craft. I basically started without knowing what I was doing." Living in his van and crashing on couches Berg spent time in Philadelphia, the Hudson Valley, Chicago, Nashville, and Western North Carolina. Eventually he wound up back in Brooklyn drawn north by the familiar circle of friends and the endless rolling hours of city living. "I spent a lot of time just listening to people tell their stories. If you give someone the proper chance you will be amazed what they will tell you. I hung out once again at diners and friends houses as well as Pete's Candy Store, The Lucky Cat, Rosemary's Tavern on Bedford, all over."
Living in the van and reaching for California
"I had the van parked and was sleeping one day near Lorimer Street when somebody started knocking on my window. I opened the door and found Rosy Nolan standing on the pavement with a friend. They were walking the friend's dog. The dog just started at me and panted. I got out of the van and we went and got breakfast. Those were great times." Nolan, a native Californian and a songwriter herself, also shared Aaron's desire to do an extended tour. The pair met originally in the summer of 2006 and quickly became friends. On the road they performed both seperately and together blending their distinctive brands of American folk into a fascinating counterpoint of music and poetry.
Berg and Nolan ultimately traveled nearly 15,000 miles over four months from the coast of Wilmington, North Carolina to California's Pacific and back to the very same beach where they began. The pair slept in state parks, occasionally in motels, and in the car. Shows ranged from dive bars, house concerts, and coffee houses to small local theatres and clubs. “Traveling that year changed me in ways I had not expected,” Aaron reflects. “The feeling of being completely anonymous both in terms of identity and geography took hold somehow. Not only that we were broke too. I mean really broke. I remember at one point in Texas stealing firewood so we could cook our dinner later at the campsite where we were staying in Pedernales Falls outside Austin.” The duo traveled as far North as Minneapolis and as far South as New Orleans meeting an incredible cast of characters along the way.
Returning to the South
In 2008, Aaron returned to South Carolina where he began to record in a two-room garage apartment in his hometown of Greenville located in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains just south of Asheville, NC. The resulting tracks combined with live tapes from the road, bootlegs, rap remixes, and the occasional thread-bare hotel demo have made up the monthly podcast 'Love & Coffee Tapes’ for the past year. A fourteen song compilation of the music from the podcast is available as a public download.
On the song, ‘Behind Closed Doors’, a chorus of ambient crickets can be heard roaring through the windowpanes from the garden outside. The piano used throughout is a 19th century carved upright grand passed down as a family heirloom. On 'Madonna Of The Evening Rose' a sampled mono drum loop is remixed with an M-2 parlor-sized Hammond organ resulting in a cosmic folk rhaposdy building to an extended razor-edged fuzz guitar solo at the end. 'The Bluest of Blue' is a nearly seven minute uncut free style rap bootleg layered with grungy acoustic effects and ragged gypsy guitar. The sound effects, tuba, and drums were lifted from Dr. Dre 'Instrumentals 2001'. Recorded with one mic on Paris Mountain in South Carolina, 'Farewell Song' is a rare glimpse at Berg's newest band rehearsing its own brand of psychedelic hysteria.
Unexpected trip to Asia
One of Greenville's most recognizable figures is multi-platinum pop singer/songwriter Edwin McCain. In need of a substitute bass player with an active passport, McCain dropped by Horizon Records one afternoon to see if Berg might fit the bill. McCain needed the fill-in bass position for a tour of military bases in Asia scheduled to leave in less than two weeks. "I jumped at the chance to go to Asia, " says Berg. "It was an honor to play bass for such an established act and to see our armed forces first hand. Although I am essentially a pacificist, it was hugely humbling to see the faces of our men and women in uniform. You begin to get an idea of how massive and complex the conflict between good and evil is. I saw the Buddha at Kamakara and set foot on a deployed nuclear powered air craft carrier all in the span of one week." The band traveled through Korea, Japan, and Guam, in addition to their final show adboard the USS Stennis (pictured below) on active duty in the South China Sea.
