Forty years ago, David Baerwald broke into the Top 40, co-writing and creating the David + David album “Welcome to the Boomtown.” It was fueled by his daily life.
“Downtown Los Angeles was my muse,” Baerwald recalled in a recent video interview. “I’d go to a restaurant called Chop Suey that Raymond Chandler hung out in and try to connect with his spirit and Nathanael West’s while I wrote.”
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Baerwald followed that with the acclaimed solo album “Bedtime Stories” and co-wrote most of the songs on Sheryl Crow’s smash debut “Tuesday Night Music Club,” named for a gathering of musicians he’d co-founded. Baerwald has continued writing music through the decades, including the Golden Globe-nominated “Come What May” for the film “Moulin Rouge.”
A Gibson guitar rested against a couch behind him during our interview, but his latest project is far from the pop charts: A six-hundred-page historical novel, “The Fire Agent.”
While the book is heavily fictionalized, it explores the real-life experiences of Ernst Baerwald, the author’s grandfather. Ernst Baerwald was a German Jew (and cousin of Albert Einstein) who was an accomplished musician and a businessman in Japan. During the First World War, he was a prisoner of war in Japan; despite that, he loved the country. Then, during the Second World War, he became a U.S. agent in the O.S.S., the precursor to the C.I.A.
David Baerwald spent his early years in Japan before the family landed in Los Angeles.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: How different was writing a 600-page novel from writing songs?
This took everything I’ve ever studied, ever done and ever trained to do. I wouldn’t have begun this process if I hadn’t written 2000 songs. When I was a kid, we’d go to movies at the Press Club in Tokyo and I saw “The Flight of the Phoenix” there. A character posits himself as an aeronautics engineer, but all he’s ever done is build model airplanes. He says it’s the same, just with more of it. So I just thought about this as writing 600 songs. It’s daunting, but it’s not impossible.
Q: Were you using the largest sweep of history to write about your family or writing about your family to examine the larger forces of history?
It started out as the former, with me being curious about the nature of epigenetic traumas and what secrecy does to families. I said I’m going to go do family research. I didn’t really know where it would lead.
The more I learned about the source of traumas, the more I realized that I was looking in the wrong place, and that the two — the family and the larger forces of history — are symbiotic. I’ve heard from members of my family that the book clarified things about stuff that they didn’t know, but it also helped me to understand how the flows of capital have really taken the meat out of governing.
Q: There’s a lot that feels timely about greed versus governance and myths and propaganda. How much were you thinking about today while you wrote?
One thing that drove me to write this book was finding a way to say these things. Sometimes the best way to get people to look at their own behavior is to show other people acting like you and asking, “How does that make you feel?”
I wrote this book because it’s something I can do, my last attempt at doing something civilized for the world I live in before I become deranged.
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Q: How did your childhood shape your view of your past and of 20th-century history?
There was always this mystery about everything. I grew up hearing outrageous things from high-ranking state department people because people always think that children are not paying attention. And a girl who lived on our campus found photographs taken after Hiroshima, the most gruesome things you’ve ever seen, and we were kids seeing this stuff.
Japan in the late ’60s was a fractious place with riots. My father ran a university campus there and was considered by some to be a running dog of the American corporate elite and possibly a secret agent sent to destroy them. There were traumatized U.S. GIs in Okinawa committing crimes and raping people. And it was becoming clearer to the average Japanese citizen how little say Japan had in much of its own activities: the Japanese constitution was written by Americans, the dominant Japanese political party was founded by Americans. And the Japanese government was behaving in a really high-handed way, so people were extremely upset.
Then suddenly, we fled and I wasn’t able to say goodbye to anyone. When we tried to leave the campus to go to the airport, all these people came out of the trees with ski masks on and tried to turn the car over. They probably were correct in saying that we were fleeing so that uncomfortable questions needn’t be answered. I never got a satisfactory answer for why that exit was so abrupt.
Q: Los Angeles must have been quite the contrast.
It was crazy. I was blonde and looked Californian, but had absolutely nothing in common with anybody I talked to.
When we played handball in Japan, you’d practice your Japanese numbers, and I was doing it in Los Angeles without realizing it, and this little girl, who’s still a good friend of mine, asked what I was saying. I said it was Japanese. “She says, ‘What’s Japanese? And I said, ‘The language of Japan.’ And she said, ‘Where’s Japan?’” I felt like a complete alien. And my parents didn’t say anything. They just said, ‘Look at this cool neighborhood.’ It was Crestwood, which is extremely posh now but wasn’t then.
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Q: Did you think about how your family would react to the book?
I did wonder. Eventually, I stopped showing them drafts because I’d get comments like, “He would never scramble eggs.” And I didn’t care. That was between him and his chicken. My mom was impossible that way.
But there was some great stuff from people and from my research in the family papers that helped me think of everyone as real people. Edwin Reischauer, who was a diplomat, carried a cane, and I learned he always left marks on the kitchen floor. And Albert Einstein, who was a cousin – there’s a great picture of him with uncle Emil on a beach – and I got the sense that Einstein and the Baerwalds liked going out drinking and being naughty together. And also, at one point, someone said of the prime minister, “A lovely man, but his farts were impossible.”