Chris Berry

I was driving on I25 northbound last week, curving around La Bajada’s peak where your field of vision gets lit up by the lights of Santa Fe, when Two Step by The Throwing Muses started through my speakers. I’ve always loved this song, but it was all the more crushing hearing it on my mix because it was ten years since Chris Berry died. Chris loved the song, too. Maybe more than I did.

It blew my mind after I moved back from California in 1993 when Chris told me his band used to cover Two Step. How the hell do you pull something like that off, I wondered? Two guitars often playing different time signatures, and a female vocalist? Impossible for me. Yet, I never doubted he did it justice. Chris, for all of you that never heard him, was the most brilliant musician that ever lived in Santa Fe. This is not hyperbole; this is not the raving of someone still smarting from his friend’s death ten years ago – it’s simply the truth. With all due respect to the multitudes of bassists who attempted filling Chris’ shoes in The Floors in the last 15 years – and I’ve played with some great guys – Chris’ shoes are impossible to fill. No one, and I mean NO ONE, ever played bass like Chris Berry. The bass was an extension of his body, and Chris was its master. His picking was so flawless and smooth, his tempos so metronome-like, and his understanding of the neck so absolute… there were many times when I felt embarrassed having him play my songs. He was light years ahead of anything I had to offer.

Chris was also the most prolific musician I ever knew. Whereas I would be busting my balls trying to write even ten songs a year I could live with, Chris routinely wrote an album’s worth of songs every month. He was unstoppable. He would play bass in Monkeyshines, bass in The Floors, and then write and record a dozen songs with Daniel Ellis-Green in Billow. Then he’d come back next week and we’d start all over again. He’d been operating like that for years. Before he got sick in August of ’97, we had agreed to start our own record label to record our bands. Here was life as I always imagined it – neither one of us cared about getting married, or raising kids, or career, or any of that bull shit. We were going to record CDs and tour.

After Chris died, I managed to buy a van, put out a crappy Floors CD, and book some gawdawful tours, but it was two and a half years of heartbreak; I was playing with people who didn’t give a shit and didn’t ever help out. It was a miracle I single-handedly got us on the road at all. I still find myself wondering how different life would’ve been with Chris and I doing it together.

But that’s all bullshit, really. I can live without the band, and I can live without touring. I miss playing with Chris, but much more than that, I just miss my friend. I miss talking about movies with him, I miss watching Baseball Tonight with him, and I miss eating dinner with him. There’s no telling what Chris would have accomplished with his life, and how many people he would have touched and inspired.

Of all the lessons I’ve received in my 38 years that life is unfair, this was the most unnecessary. Thank you for the refresher course Mother Nature, God, The Fates, or whatever force (if any) controls the universe, but I read my history books about World War II and The Black Plague – you didn’t need to do this. There's been enough unfairness, enough misery, on the planet already. You could’ve left Chris here. I suppose that’s just selfishness on my part, but I don’t see the logic in robbing one of the most wonderful, beautiful, talented people any of us ever knew of his life.

Of course, there is no logic. And I’ve found you will drive yourself crazy trying to find any. Charles Bukowski once wrote, “the gods play no favorities.” So I, and the Berrys, and the rest of Chris’ friends, are left with just the memories now. Memories of Chris that come up frequently for me – his laugh, his company, listening to him talk about his love of The Cure, his love of Mozart, his love of playing bass, and his love of us.

Last week I tried writing a poem about Chris, but I’ve never been a poet. As with all the poetry I attempt, it was crap. Only the last couple of lines don’t embarrass me; they’re maudlin, but they sum up what I felt rounding the top of La Bajada last week:

now

the only way I can see my friend

is to turn the light

off

and fall

asleep.

Los Angeles, Part II

Maila Nurmi died on January 10th of this year.

If you’re one of the vast multitudes who doesn’t recognize her name, it is my condescending, snobbish contention that you are not making the best of your time here on Earth, and really ought to make a bigger effort to find out what life actually has to offer, beyond talking on your cell phone about the dumbest crap imaginable, and shitty, corporate-manicured top-40 music.

So here’s a chance to learn: Maila Nurmi came very close to not having anyone remember who she was, but for a fateful decision to dress up like Charles Addams’ femme fatale character from his New Yorker cartoons, and attend choreographer Lester Horton's annual Bal Caribe Masquerade in 1953. It was here that TV producer Hunt Stromberg, Jr. saw the Finland-born beauty, and got the idea of having her host a late-night horror movie program. Maila (or her writer-husband Dean Riesner, depending on whose story you believe) christened the character Vampira, and the first episode of The Vampira Show aired on May 1st, 1954.

It is an accident of history that Maila Nurmi and Vampira will forever be associated with Ed Wood and 1959’s Plan 9 from Outer Space. Acting as one of TV's first horror hosts, and pioneering the sex-and-death look that is ubiquitous today, The Vampira Show actually brought Maila a lot of attention: Life, Newsweek, and TV Guide ran articles about her (despite the show only being aired in the Los Angeles area), and she was nominated for the Most Outstanding Female Personality emmy in 1954. This is what she should be remembered for, but the plug was pulled on The Vampira Show after barely a year because the fiercely independent Nurmi refused to sell the rights to her character to ABC.

Somewhat adrift in Hollywood, Nurmi got parts in other movies during her short stint as a movie actress (Sex Kittens go to College and The Magic Sword, among others), but it was her decision to accept 300 one dollar bills from Ed Wood, and dust off her Vampira costume for his tour de force Plan Nine From Outer Space, for which she’ll always be fondly remembered. Nurmi worked for one day only, refusing to utter one word of the dialog Wood had written for her (“I can’t say these words. It’s too moronic. Can I do it as a mute?”), and went on with her life. Twenty years later Wood became the apotheosis of Cult, Plan 9 became the darling of the cult crowd, and Vampira was suddenly a worldwide phenomenon.

The wonder of Maila Nurmi isn’t that she gave us Vampira, and appeared in Ed Wood’s most famous movie. It isn’t that she worked with Lili St. Cyr, or that she dated James Dean. And it isn’t that she was a beautiful woman. The wonder of Maila Nurmi is that she survived it all – she didn’t burn out on drugs and become a raving lunatic, dying young, a la Dean, Marilyn, and hell, even Ed Wood, for that matter. She was a genuine Hollywood survivor who stayed creative, making her own jewelry and clothing, and painting until late in life. And instead of becoming a jaded old crank (Night of the Living Dead’s Duane Jones), refusing to talk about Vampira and Ed Wood, she happily related tales about Ed, and Plan 9, and everything else fanboys like me asked her about for the last 20 years of her life. And she did it with grace and happiness and a calming bliss that she exuded up to the end.

In a world where senseless war, selfishness, avarice, and thoughtlessness overwhelm us from day to day, even hour to hour, I ask you to check out what Maila had to say about life, and see if any of us measures up:

“I used to wake up in the morning, every morning for years and years and years and years. I’d wake up with the first gleam of consciousness from sleep, and – beginning to come awake – I would leap out of bed, leap out of bed and say, ‘Good morning Mary Sunshine!’ To nobody in particular. But no – to the world. If I had a roommate, (she would say) ‘Shut up! Do you have to do that?’ But I had to do it. Every morning: ‘Good morning!’ I had to say, ‘hello world!’ It’s the world, and it’s me in it! It’s the whole miracle of day waiting for me in this world!”