Out to lick Bush

By day Nathan Berg teaches economics. By night he and the Halliburton(s)campaign against the US president, writes Brian Boyd

The agitprop band Halliburton(s) take their name from the Houston-based oil-services company run by Dick Cheney before he became George W. Bush's vice-president. After Saddam Hussein was overthrown last year the company was controversially awarded contracts worth billions of dollars to help rebuild Iraq. "We're waiting for a lawsuit any day now," says Nathan Berg, the main mover behind Halliburton(s). "We don't think putting the 's' in brackets after the name is enough to distance ourselves from them."

Berg is in Dublin for a three-date Irish tour, snappily called Lick Bush, just ahead of the US president's visit. His music is a dizzying mix of garage-rock riffs with lyrics straight out of a Noam Chomsky book. Berg is intent on showing the Irish that political dissent, US style, is alive and well and rocking out.

There's a twist in this tale, though: Berg is not your average polemical rock 'n' roller: he's also a respected assistant professor of economics at the University of Texas at Dallas and, in a previous life, a jazz prodigy. "I used to be an acoustic bassist, and I was spotted at the age of 12 in my native Kansas," he says. "I suppose I was a bit of a big splash in the jazz world when I was younger: I played with the Maynard Ferguson Big Bop Nouveau, toured the world, played at Ronnie Scott's and did the same music programme as Norah Jones."

At 17 Berg made his début as a composer, releasing Fish With No Fins, a work cited in the Penguin guide to jazz - a much bigger deal than it sounds. A year later the influential critic Leonard Feather called him "a bass phenomenon", and jazz-press headlines regularly referred to him as a prodigy.

The jazz world was dismayed when Berg left jazz for rock music and politics. "What you have to understand about the jazz scene," he explains, "is that they see themselves as a persecuted minority. Suddenly, this 'bright light' turns his back on them and they all flip. The word disappointment would be an understatement.

"What happened is I got concerned with issues of here and now. Looking around, I saw no real ideological content in jazz. It's all abstract and indirect. I think there's a lot of musical museum restoration work going on: it's all stasis."

It is safe to say that the Gulf War of 1991 politicised Berg. "It was just at that time that I started reading newspapers as opposed to the jazz press. I was on tour at the time, and I'd get very restless: there was no one on the tour bus that I could talk to about this war and its geopolitical consequences. There was no meaningful political dialogue going on. It was then that I decided to leave the jazz world and go back to university to study."

His decision had surprising consequences. "What was really strange was that I had people saying to me, 'Don't go to college; stay in bars, playing music,' which was a real reversal," he says, "but I went ahead and studied maths and economics. I always felt there is a perception that people on the left aren't strong on economics, which isn't actually true.

"While all this was going on I also wanted to explore politics through music, so naturally I turned to rock. The first band I was in was very much a Frank Zappa-inspired outfit. That led on to Halliburton(s), which is a straightforward political protest band. People sometimes find it funny that I'm playing in a different musical genre now, and while it is true that jazz musicians are more technically developed than rock musicians, there's a whole lot of other skills that rock musicians can bring to the music - and particularly the sort of garage-rock music that we're doing now. They are different music worlds in a way."

Berg is concentrating his efforts on bringing Halliburton(s)' message to as many people as possible between now and the US presidential election, in November. The band, whose début album, Gravity's In, is on their own label, Corporate Sleaze Productions, are part of a broad coalition of artists and musicians determined to sweep Bush from office.

They have built a sizeable following in their base of Dallas - the heartland of Bush neoconservatism - and were recently on US television, filmed playing a protest show outside the headquarters of the Halliburton company.

Among the musical and artistic anti-Bush vote in the US a clear divide has emerged between those who advocate supporting the Democratic Party and those who support the more left-leaning, ecologically driven Ralph Nader. Berg has made his choice. "The fact is there is only a two-party system. I would like a bigger menu, but you have to deal with what is there, and for me the best way to ditch Bush is to vote Democrat."

Although he confesses to being a fan of his fellow activist Michael Moore, Berg's strong economics background means he has reservations. "Michael Moore makes me cringe a little bit sometimes. I think he's very good at showing up certain aspects of US political life, but he doesn't really explain what we need to do about it."

He displays no regrets about leaving the jazz world and seems very content that his work in economics helps him confront issues about foreign affairs and the global economy, and his work in rock music allows him to express lyrical ideas that he feels couldn't be aired within the jazz genre.

And after November? "Well, presuming John Kerry gets elected, we then turn our critical attention on to him."