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.