Photo: Erin Caruso

RICK BERLIN: RAW by Lexi Kahn 12/05
“Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It’s that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that’s what poetry does.’ – Allen Ginsberg

Talking with Rick Berlin incites a strange reaction. I feel a sort of twitchy desire to mentally leave breadcrumbs along the path of our conversation, so that I can find my way back to what would, upon later reflection, seem like an exhilarating crossroad. It isn’t that the amiable sixty-year old artist and performer talks too fast. But he’s lived his own wild stories. He’s over it. He’s totally cavalier about incredible tales of famous friends, romantic obsession, drug binges, world tours, jail time and other folderol of equally free spirits like Ginsberg, Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson.
To borrow some apt descriptions from the late Hunter S., Rick Berlin is a real refugee from the Love Generation, on e of God’s own prototypes, never even considered for mass production. So for this interview, I decided for the first time in a year to roll some tape. I didn’t want to miss a word.
The latest news about Rick Berlin is that his next CD, Me & Van Gogh, will spectacularly complement his body of work. Due out in February 2006 on the Hi-N-Dry label (Bourbon Princess, The Downbeat 5), this release is a ‘tiny little piano and voice record’ that veer widely from Berlin’s norm. His former bands were sprawling, theatrical affairs with multiple voices, spoken word, lush arrangement and ambitious instrumentation. First there was Orchestra Luna I and II, then Luna, then Berlin Airlift, then Shelley Winters Project.
So why a solo record? ‘I’m over having bands,’ he says as we sit in his spotless Jamaica Plain living room. A framed John Lennon watches over us as Rick explains that the content and the approach are simpler, which is both liberating and frightening. ‘The thing I love and that I’m afraid of, as a solo performer, is that the song either works or it doesn’t. You get it or you don’t. But I love the freedom of it.’
Alone with just his piano, it’s as though the man and instrument are both actors in a stark musical, all crazily dynamic in tempo and mood. The piano becomes a character, tittering and teasing or yelling and stomping. At his performances you could hear a pin drop as he meanders through poignant and hilarious and memorable tales, half sung, half spoken. Some are love stories.
‘Hopefully many of the romantic obsessions in my life have subsided and it’s less about the quest for ‘the one’ and more about just the hippie magic of small things occurring every single day that blow your mind.’
In 1945 Rick Berlin was born Richard Gustave Kinscherf III in Sioux City, Iowa. Fueled by a desire to make more money, his father moved the family all over the country. The experience shaped Rick’s ambition. ‘I wanted to be a doctor because I wanted to make money, then I realized that all my father wanted was money and it made him unhappy, so I’d better do the things that make me happy whether they make me money or not.’ He describes his father as an alcoholic and a whoremaster who was very good with words.
Flunking chemistry, he switched to architecture; he was given a full scholarship but refused it. ‘I hated it. So I applied to the Yale Drama School. And I got in there with a full scholarship, and after six months I hated it. And so then I was off on acid trips and traveling. But that’s when I began writing songs for the first time.’
He didn’t admit he was gay until he was 21. ‘This was in 1967. I fought it. I fought the image of it. And it wasn’t until I taught school to escape the draft in a small town in Connecticut when I fell in love with this kid that was one of my students, which was really dangerous. He lived across the street from me in this ramshackle house. His mother was sleeping with sailors and anybody who came to town and there were seven kids. And I wound up sleeping with this boy every single night for six months.’
‘The advantage of coming out and dealing with that is that you have this freedom. The advantage of being older is you also have a similar freedom. You don’t really give a fuck what you look like or whether people like you or not. You just fuckin’ do it. Whatever you want to be. And the sooner you get there the happier you are.’
Most of the experiences that shaped Rick’s artistic personality happened inside the nucleus of one or another group of like-minded individuals. ‘It’s the whole idea that your blood family and your artistic group are equally important in your evolution. You read about Paris in the twenties, or the Beat Generation in the fifties…a key gets unlocked somewhere in you that these people, that you never met, give to you. You always want to…probably not meet them because what the fuck would you talk about? But you want to say thanks.’
While at Yale, Rick lived in a giant house with songwriters, a poet and a sx player and his wife, whose talent was eating light bulbs. ‘It was fucking awesome. Lots of drugs. You really felt that you could do anything. That was the great thing about it. It wasn’t about ‘how can I get famous?’. It didn’t occur to any of us. We were all doing really interesting things. One night the entire cast of the black touring company of Hair was staying upstairs, and they’re singing and it was fuckin’ amazing. Out of this kind of atomic energy, this inter-association of artists, something always happens.’
In 1971 Rick quit drama school. ‘These friends of mine from Amherst had made a lot of money selling drugs and decided to make a movie in the Caribbean. We got this 130-foot, three-mast sailboat with all the drugs we could think of and started filming this insane movie. Me, my friend Barry Keating, who went on to write a musical that was on Broadway, his best friend was Jim Steinman…that how I met Jim who wrote the Meatloaf record. We got busted and put in jail. We’d met this girl, Helen Of Troy Neilson Parker who was sixteen, she was a concubine of the President of Grenada. Her cousin was this guy Maurice, and when we were put in jail for nudity, she got Maurice to spring us’. Maurice was ex-Prime Minister Maurice Bishop, whose assassination let to President Reagan’s invasion of Grenada.
A year later, having moved to Boston at the suggestion of his sister, Rick earned notice for his songwriting. It was 1972.
From 972 until 1979, the series of bands known as Orchestra Luna, Orchestra Luna II, and eventually just Luna, thrived in the Boston and New York music scenes. The first Orchestra Luna, signed to Epic, performed at Frank Zappa’s 10th Anniversary Party with LaBelle and Patti Smith, and opened for Roxy Music and Split Endz.
Karla deVito joined the second in carnation of the band, by then dropped from Epic though they continued to tour and opened for Jim Steinman’s Neverland musical at the Kennedy Center. (Karla deVito left Orchestra Luna to join the Meatloaf tour; she is the girl who sang in ‘Paradise By The Dashboard Light’.)
‘It seemed really easy, we were the darlings of the press,’ says Rick of Orchestra Luna I and II. ‘We were friends with Talking Heads and the guy that managed the Ramones, he used to let us stay at his house and we’d go to see movies Blondie was in and Debbie Harry would hang out. We’d hang out with all these people and so Seymour Stein of Sire Records, who signed all these people, wanted to sign us. He offered us a hundred thousand dollars, we said it wasn’t enough money and he told us to go fuck ourselves.’
A leaner, more prog version of the band, Luna, also got some label interest that didn’t pan out.
From 1980 to 1984, Rick made a great success of a new band, Berlin Airlift. 1979 or 1980 was around the time he changed his last name. ‘Yeah, Kinscherf. No one could spell it. I was reading Isherwood’s Berlin Stories, the book that Cabaret was derived from, and the word Berlin literally zoomed up from the page like a special effect; I thought, that’s it! I went to the Top of the Hub where Oedipus was DJ-ing, interviewing Bob Geldof, and I asked Oedi about the change. In his inimitable surefire way he said, ‘Yeah man, do it.’’ Berlin Airlift had major success in Boston radio and ‘if people have heard of me it’s because of Berlin Airlift.’
With bands like J. Geils, ‘Til Tuesday, Face To Face, and Letters to Cleo also busting out of the region, it was a good time for Boston music. ‘People will shit on it but I think it’s ALWAYS a good time. The difference then was that, at 18 you were allowed to drink, and radio would play unsigned band’s cassettes in drive time. That had New England reach. So you could fill clubs and make a buck, you know? Now I think people get chewed up alive because you have to do it ALL on your own. You have to ride so many horses. Your ability to be creative is diluted because you also have to promote yourself. You’re also fighting with your band because you’re not successful enough yet. You have to start at T.T. the Bears’ on a Tuesday night and play at eight o’clock and hope your friends show up. And it’s not the club’s fault, you know? It’s all insane.’
‘When I was a kid, everything was an earthquake, emotionally. In a great way. I was thrown all over the place. Now the person that I am is less about the tangle of my life, and more about who I’m talking to. And that’s where I get most of my music and songs. Always I thought that the definition of a lifetime were those people that you love and those who love you back the most. That’s what adds you up as a soul. The other side of that is, I’m noticing the number of years available to make stuff, as an artist, are narrowing. And the only thing that would really upset me would be being unable to make stuff. To do art for the day, whatever that might be.’

Abby Lounge
w/ Collisions
7/14
Rick Berlin is alone with a piano tonight doing the freaky queer surreal chanteur thing. These are half songs half stories with very odd poetic digressons & very lush languid (not to say loungy) piano parts. They're fascinating excursions & frequently hilarious & if i can't always follow them it's generally interesting to try.
His voice is sounding a bit ragged this evening but that works well with these pieces.
Steve Gisselbrecht