The Old Carousel

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When I was a child, I lived some of the time in Delano, a small town in the Central Valley of California and more of the time in Hermosa Beach, west of Los Angeles. For a while,  the few years before my mother passed away, my parents lived apart, some of the time I was with my mother in Hermosa and my dad would come visit me and take me out for the day. 


My mother lived with her mom, Grandma Ross, who was not a happy person, a classic "you kids get off this lawn" kind of grandma. At any rate, dad would come and pick me up, rescuing me from the boringness and stringent rules of grandmas house and take me on drives around LA. We had our favorite places; Breyers Ice Cream shop in Westwood, The Farmers Market on Fairfax, Pony rides at Griffith Park, La Brea Tar Pits, Hamburger Hamlet, Venice Beach and the pier at Santa Monica. 


The cool thing about hanging out with my dad was he was born (1923) and raised in LA and he really knew his way around the old side streets, and he had stories. He'd tell me about the time the freeway was built  in Pasadena and how before that there were these railways that would take you all around the city from Pasadena to Venice Beach (that was the Red Line Railway). He showed me an old building in Santa Monica where there were dances and he saw the young Frank Sinatra lead a band. He walked me by the Venice Beach Canals and talked about his family renting a house there for  summer months. He showed me the movie house where he'd go on saturdays as a kid to see triple and quadruple features with his older brother, who would buy his ticket and leave him there as a a cover so that their mom wouldn't know Uncle Dick was gettin' drunk and carousing around. 


I've always felt like my own physical time in Los Angeles extended beyond my own experience, because my dad was so good at imparting his own history to me. Lately, my ten year old son, and I have been spending some time in some of these same old haunts. Like the carousel at the pier. I have become my dad and Alexander is me, it's my time to tell him the stories. 

The Nursing Home Meeting

Today was a "care meeting for Paul Williams" at the nursing home he's been living in for the past two and a half years. I've been pretty upset about Paul losing his front and side teeth (could be three now) these past few weeks and I prepared myself in advance, so I wouldn't lose it (ie become the raging relative) in the meeting. 

The reason he's lost his teeth is completely down to lack of care by the nursing home, they haven't been brushing his teeth and he doesn't remember how to take care of himself anymore. Actually he will brush and spit when given the tools but you gotta stand there with him and direct the show. 

Anyways I bought a box of See's candies and took it to the meeting, a reminder to myself to keep it light even while getting into the facts and sorting out what we need to do. I found out the dentist is coming tomorrow and MediCal/Medicaid will pay for dentistry, so let's see how far they will go. 

Will they replace the missing teeth? I doubt it. At the very least they can do something, I hope, to stave off the oncoming gum disease. 

Poor Paul. I stood by him while he brushed his teeth and flossed today, the bleeding gums...sad. But the good news is the chocolate's worked their evil charms and me and the staff had a reasonable meeting.

GARAGE ORCHESTRA

Garage Orchestra was released in the spring of 1994 on an independent record company catering to the rising tide of 90s grunge bands. I don't know what this little record was doing there, one wallet chained/ buzz haircut/three quarter length short-pants employee said to me, "I heard your album Cindy Lee and it sounds like a cross between christmas music and tunes for a commercial". Luckily, I took it as a compliment.

And fortunately a few well heeled music outlets shed some positive ink about it that year, like Rolling Stone:

"(****)Squealing and swooping, Cindy Lee Berryhill's voice is a natural gas. Even more wondrous is the San Diego guitarist's arranging. To songs whose raw, free ecstasies recall Patti Smith, Berryhill adds strings-and-timpani flourishes that echo Brian Wilson. By turns quirky and tender in their lyrics, "Radio Astronomy", Every Someone Tonight", and "Scariest Thing In The World" conjure up a visionary, whimsical universe. Ace players like cellist Renata Bratt and percussionist Randy Hoffman flesh out eccentric tunes whose charm exerts fresh fascination and an odd, gripping luminosity."

..And, Record Collector (UK):

"Sometimes you imagine a sound in your head, and there doesn't seem to be any music in the world that can satisfy it. You can dream up your own menu, but mine demanded the Beach Boys' harmonies and Brian Wilson's idiosyncratic melodies coupled with a Dylanesque lyrical vision and the poetic passion of Patti Smith. If the result could somehow be witty, romantic and half-crazy as well, so much the better. Somebody else had the same dream, and the ability and daring to pull it off. Cindy Lee Berryhill's 'Garage Orchestra' from 1994 was the result, the third in an occasional series of visionary albums from the Californian singer-songwriter."

-Peter Doggett(1996)

At any rate, the commercial-christmasy music sounds of the G.O. are back in print via iTunes, TuneCore and other music outlets....

Tooth

Alexander got a mandolin recently and is just learning a few chords. We took it into his dads nursing home so he could show him how he's learned the G,C and D chords. He's playing them over a traditional song called Two Soldiers, performed by David Grisman and Jerry Garcia (you can almost hear them singing from Alexander's iPod).

I'm gonna be honest, it's getting harder to go in for visits. Emotionally, that is. This is a thing where Paul's never gonna get better. And that is a hard fact to face.

Today was especially hard, I noticed Paul had a tooth missing. An incisor, in the front and to the side, so not hard to miss. It broke me up. Last few times I've been in there I've helped him brush his teeth. All you have to do is give him a tooth brush with paste and let him spit into a bowl and rinse and spit, and then floss. But no one is giving him the brush and so he is falling apart.

This is hard stuff. We stayed for a while, I trimmed his fingernails, but I could hardly look at him without wanting to cry about that tooth. Like a little piece of history gone. And the nurses didn't even notice it was gone.

Alexander's ten now, he lost a tooth a week ago. He went to the dentist for the first time and had a glowing report, but a baby tooth had to come out. Then the tooth fairy came that night (geez 3 dollars!)...it's all about teeth. Some come and some go.

So I talked to the nurses at the home, and they will have a dentist come out. What can I say. Nothing will put the tooth back in and make Paul all better. Sometimes you just gotta accept what is, come rain or come shine.

I have a Care Meeting with the nursing home in a few weeks. I got to get my head on straight for this one, dentistry matters especially with someone that's not about to die in a year or so, he's 63 and gonna be here for a long while I suspect.

Sometimes it's about the feelings and there's no getting around that.

MAKE WAY FOR THE HANDICAPPED

A few days ago I received an email from a guy I don't know, the subject line said Make Way For The Handicapped, which happens to be a song from my album, Beloved Stranger (Populuxe Records 2008). The email said this:

Wow! I was trying to find MWFTH on youtube by my former band, the Mumbletypegs, when I came across your video. FYI, I'm not seeking money. I'm just very happy to hear someone covering one of our songs, and a person of your stature, no less. Its like the time a kid from Poland got our album. -Rush Riddle

...I was surprised and flummoxed. What did this mean? So I googled the band and found this link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWUeFvM31M0

Wow!... I wrote back to the guy that emailed me:

Hi Rush, Wow cool to get your email. And found your version on YouTube. Are you the guy singing the song? There's a real story to this tune and if you are him you know the tale. Let me know if you're the elusive "Alex", or if you know, how I can be in touch with him..

all the best, cindy lee berryhill

* * *

Sometimes a story winds throughout your life that is so compelling, it keeps retelling itself, making installments over the long-haul, embroiling you in it's wild weave in the most inexplicable ways. Sometimes it's a story about good stuff, sometimes it's a series of bad events, usually it's a combination of both. This story in addition to being those things is, peculiar.

In the early 1980s I was living just off of Hollywood Blvd. with a couple I'd met in the Music Exchange Newspaper classifieds, when I was hunting for band members. I wanted to start a rock band and call it The Stoopids and play at the clubs around LA.

They, Jane and John, had just arrived from Chicago and had a dingy studio apartment, with a lot of cockroaches and a tiny bathroom. John the 23 year old guitarist and I hit it off musically and we decided to join forces, I wrote the songs, sang and played rhythm and he was great at coming up with classic George Harrison-like rock riffs. His girlfriend was a 45 year old greying hippy, that always wore the same bedraggled bag-dress, but she was really nice, supportive of John and thought I was really talented. So she became our "manager".

Before I moved in with them I was staying in a room in a mini mansion in Bel Aire (the really ritzy part of Beverly Hills), exactly next door to the Beverly Hillbillies mansion. The owner was a wealthy, divorced, financier that had lots of photos of himself and Hugh Hefner. This guy would bring a new bunny-type-girl home every weekend. "Cindy this is Bambii, Bambii this is Cindy". I made this guys orange juice every week day and cleaned his bedroom in exchange for staying at this place (which was a downstairs servants-like quarters). I never slept with him nor spoke more than two sentences to him. It was usually just "Cindy this is Cookie, Cookie this is Cindy"or, "Thanks for the orange juice".

This whole set up would have been a real laugh at the time, but I was depressive from living off of cheap, bad-food, like donuts, Arby's roast beef sandwiches and milk shakes...I think that list pretty much informed my entire diet. A doctor said to me at the time, "are you trying to look malnourished?" and I said "yeh, I'm in a punk rock band and you have to look pretty messed up". I was 19, what did I know.

I got sick of living in the anonymous, luxurious sex-hermitage, servant girl quarters and moved across town, in with Jane and John. Camping out on the floor behind their fold out couch/bed. It was messed up but pretty great, getting 3 square meals a day from Jane. I paid her 20 dollars each week for food, money I made working as a shoe shine girl in Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills. Among others, I shined Jack Lemons shoes, Herb Alperts and Leroy Neiman's, a sports illustrator who made lots of drawings of me shining shoes

John, the guitar player, and I figured out a few songs and then started looking for band members. The first bass player of the Stoopids was Glen, he lived with his navy physicist dad in a house in El Segundo and we'd practice in their garage. Glen was gay and we got along great, he really had a knack for audacity and music and his dad thought I was a genius for some reason.

Then one day our manager Jane got a call from Glen's navy-issue-glasses-wearing-physicist dad, Glen had thrown his bass against the wall and he wouldn't be playing with the Stoopids anymore. He'd had a psychotic break and we had to look for a new bass player.

Almost ten years later Glen called me and explained what really happened. He said he'd been a woman trapped in a mans body and finally got the go ahead to surgically change his sex from male to female. He was super nice as a woman, though quite large. He said I hope you don't mind but I took your name Cynthia as my middle name. It was an honor. I wrote a tribute song for her many years later called Diane, and it's on my album Straight Outta Marysville.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDakhkeGme0

So, Stoopids guitarist John, and I went back to looking for a bassist. We found a guy living in the San Fernando valley, with his mom as I recall, who called himself Alex M. Alex was an extremely talented songwriter. He had an incredible knack for saying inane things that sounded masterful and brilliant. He had one tune that went "I got a neutral shade army jacket on I got a spray can and crumbling wall to lean on". He told me it was inspired by the closing of LA's great and early punk rock venue The Masque.

Alex scared me, so I thought he must be a real punk. He'd say things to get a reaction out of me like: I was at a party last night and they were passing around a jar of human brains and drinking water out of it. He would tell me I'd better toughen up if I wanted to be a real punk. And I did.

One time Alex and I crashed a punk party. I nervously stayed in the main room but Alex careened around the whole place acting like a real fuck up. After a few minutes he ran back over to me with a hand over his eye, saying ..We got to get out of here, I just got punched in the eye by John Doe from X. I thought it was great. We split with him kicking over trash cans on the way out.

One day Alex brought in a new song, Make Way For The Handicapped and I loved it. It was everything I liked about the Ramones and even with a little bit of Talking Heads mixed in. He made me a cassette tape of himself singing his songs over a plodding bass, I'd listen to that cassette over and over laughing my head off and marveling at his musical wit.

One day after practice I drove him to his moms house and we had a talk out front in my car, a 1976 Maverick Grabber. Max confessed he had a crush on me and wanted to be a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. I talked to him a long time explaining how I wanted to be platonic friends and band mates and he seemed to handle it well.

A few days later the Stoopids had a band practice and Alex M showed up kinda drunk and with a guy friend. It was a horrible night, we realized Alex was too messed up to play bass and took a break.

Then Alex needed to talk some more about the girlfriend idea and I told him I thought we'd straightened that out. He was upset and ran off to the bathroom, when he came out he joined John and Jane and drummer Terry Cloth and I at the kitchen table. Acting nonchalant he put his arm under his chin and asked about the next practice date, with blood running down his arm. He'd cut his wrist.

* * *

Do you ever get that feeling like you've messed up someones life. If they hadn't met you maybe they would have faired better. It's a child like concept. Sometimes this feeling happens when something bad happens to a family member or a friend when you're a kid, you're the survivor and you're left wondering if you had something to do with their bad luck.

My mom died when I was eight. It wasn't anyones fault. She had a rare form of cancer, they operated and she didn't wake up. I don't remember feeling like it was my fault. As a kid I actually didn't even know what happened to her, she just left the house one day, (a bad day where I'd been pestering her and grandma had to yell at me to leave her alone) and never came back. No one said why, just that she had died.

Kids can get these weird, wrong ideas that if they'd just been a little better behaved they may have changed the winds of fate. Those feelings can carry on into adulthood too. When my husband Paul had a brain injury in 1995, because of riding a bike recklessly down a killer hill with no helmet, I felt somehow that it'd been my fault. If he hadn't moved to Encinitas to be with me and had stayed in Glen Ellen with his old friends and family this would never have happened.

You see how it works. You know it's not right thinking. But it's what happens when you try to make sense of a senseless happening. Somehow, you feel like if you'd been more in control of the situation, you could have prevented it from happening. The ultimate pretend game of control and it's a losing proposition.

* * *

Seeing that blood dripping down Alex M's arm made me feel faint, I called manager Jane into the kitchen. She told me to calm down. She'd seen this sort of thing before, when she was a girlfriend and groupie to the 1960s UK band Sad Cafe (she talked about them endlessly). She explained there wasn't enough blood to make it a real suicide.

No one said anything about it to Alex M. He put his arm back in his sleeve and said he'd see everyone at the next rehearsal then he took off with his friend. A few days later we'd heard that he got into a car accident on purpose on Freeway 101 with himself and his friend getting concussions. And he broke his arm so he couldn't play bass.

I couldn't hack it anymore. I quit and split LA, moving back to the little town of Ramona and in with my parents. I'd left my guitar at Jane and John's place and when I called and asked them about it a month later they said the Jamaican pot dealer down the hall had taken it, then his place got busted and the cops tore the guitar apart. Probably Jane and John took the guitar to a pawn broker.

Everybody limped away from that fucking band. It took years to get myself out of that black hole. A messed up time I never have to go back to. But I made peace with it long ago and have written about it many times. Here are some of the songs: Jane and John, Diane (Straight Outta Marysville). The Heat, Whatever Works (Who's Gonna Save The World).

And of course Make Way For The Handicapped which is me re figuring, trying to remember Alex M's song and since I couldn't, I rewrote it. (In fact, he has co-songwriting credit on the cd sleeve and copyright). Now after all these years, and thanks to Rush's recent email, I can listen to Alex's version and the sound of his voice and bass brings the past flooding back.

Rush Riddle who's film Averageman, is coming out this year, sent me an answer to my query about Alex saying:

No, I'm not "Alex", but he was in our band! He split for up-north ages ago and last I talked to him...said he was getting a sex change!, and was now "Alexis".

High Jump

http://music.yahoo.com/cindy-lee-berryhill/videos/view/high-jump--2139363;_ylt=AtP6BZLqoJ9Gf57yRylXSXzHxCUv

The single from my 1996 album, Straight Outta Marysville. The video is a throw back to the look of the early 80s, with that sort of MTV-party look, or the Marx Bros. famous State room scene. The song came out at a time when Liz Phair, Alanis Morrisette and Courtney Love were yellin' stuff into the studio mic. I dug some of those sounds but it didn't inform whatever I was up to, which I'm not sure just what it was-I was up to from the looks of this vid...

You'll see my partner, Paul Williams acting like the mean, bowl-cut-hair P.E. coach with the clip board, my long time friend and poet Lois Navrkahl is the big lady with the loud clothes at the end and singer-songwriter Joy Eden Harrison is the evening gown diva. The film maker is actually the 'little girl' that gets her stuffed animal out of her locker.

As for the song, it's me grousing about all kinds of people. The first verse is actually about being the first girl on the Vista High School boys track team, most of the upper grade guys were very critical of me being on the team and would play tricks on me, push me down or would ignore me altogether. Most of the guys in tenth grade like me, were pretty supportive and friendly. The worse experience was being pitted against a guy at a meet who jumped about as well as I did, his team mates were really giving him hell for jumping "like a girl". I got so psyched out about him getting harrassed that I couldn't jump worth a crap, and he won.

The second verse was about a small business employer I worked for, a little recording studio. The owner would come in about once a week sit at the big desk and make drawings of himself with very large noses. I wrote the song Damn I Wish I Was A Man when I worked there.

The third verse is me going off about a long ago boyfriend in New York. Heaven help the guy that dates a singer songwriter...

Straight Outta Marysville, is back in print in a digital-only format, at all the usual places.

(the photo credit on the album cover goes to my dad, he used a Brownie camera and took this photo of me age 5 or 6, just outside of Delano, CA on our way to the Sierra Nevada's)

Booking Shows 2012

We have started booking shows for this year. If you are interested in a date either at a club or a living room concert you can contact us at:

bookingcindyleeberryill@yahoo.com

Right now we are setting up dates for the 2nd and 3rd weeks of April for the U.S. west coast.

And early June for the east coast.

Gravity Falls

I was talking with a girlfriend about romantic-love and how sometimes, if you're lucky and all the cherries line up in the slot machine, it's like standing on a precipice; looking out over the beauty of all things, the big view, an expansiveness that leaves you feeling like you fell into a galactic wormhole and within a few moments, or was it hours, got to sneak a peek at every-thing that ever-was....  

Thank You For A Wonderful Year

Happy 2012 to everybody from us' to you's....And thank you to everyone that supported Paul's care in whatever way you could this year, it's much appreciated. And yes, I still do wanna sell Paul's Dylan collection, just got to get it all in boxes so please keep in touch about that if you're interested in buying his various books, tapes of shows and the like.

I also want to thank everyone that helped me get back out on the road again this year, that's what takes care of my soul and keeps me writing which in turn keeps me happy and thus, I'm much nicer to Alexander when he tells me he has extra homework he'd forgotten about.

Thanks especially to Jerry Lima who put some of the shows together on the east coast, and who couldn't be scared away even after I made faces at him, sent him unfinished/scrappy demo's and warned him I was part alien.

And thank you to those dear friends that let us musicians (Renata Bratt, Randy Hoffman and Paula Luber) invade their homes...Matt and Rachel in Brooklyn, David and Kathrine in DC and David and Elizabeth in Manhattan, Alan and Amyjo in CT, and Paula in Newton MA, oh yeah Amy in Hoboken......

And a very special thanks to Chuck and Susan Hahm and their kids, who watched Alexander while I went off on those little road trips....you guys are amazing friends.

I look forward to 2012 and more new music and more home invasions.....

Nasa's new dust cloud, the Wreath Nebulae, a stellar nursery where baby stars are being born...Happy Holidays to you