Paul S Williams

Here's Paul yesterday at lunchtime at the nursing home. Alexander and I rose him out of bed, fed him 1/2 a milkshake which energized him enough to get into the wheel chair and we wheeled him into the mess-hall. These days Paul needs to be fed. He just forgets, I think, that he has food in front of him and his appetite is flagging somewhat. He really enjoyed looking at his 10 year old son, who was sitting nearby reading a book. I couldn't help but think that Paul was thinking "Gee that's what I was like when I was his age"

And what is it with the haircutter person at the nursing home. Months ago I asked for something where he could have a little hair on his head and they went for the late 60s look with his hair hanging in his eyes and then the ponytail because they didn't know what to do with the long hair in his eyes. So a week ago I asked for something short but not a military buzz, something I guy would ask for at a barber shop. So it seems there is only too long or too short. 

Das Energi Handwritten Manuscript

Paul Williams wrote Das Energi in the early 1970s while living with fellow young urban-defectors at a remote location off of Vancouver Island called Apple Bay. He said later in his memoir Apple Bay or Life on the Planet: "...there was no way to get there except by water, short of a ten day hike through fifty miles of uncharted woods, hills and swamp....No ferry. No dock. No exit in stormy weather, which was common in wintertime."

Das Energi, a book of thoughts, was written in between his chores or as he told me a few years ago, "skipping my chores and getting a lot of flack from the others". It was actually the first, (maybe the only) book Jac Holtzman put out on his Elektra Records catalogue (alongside The Doors, Love, The Stooges etc). And it was a hit! In an underground, word of mouth kind of way, with several hundred thousand sold in its first five years.

For many years Paul kept the full hand-written manuscript in a bank security box along with a few other little treasures. I pulled them a couple of years ago to see what was left, things still unsold on Ebay.

At some point I'd like to sell this full manuscript to someone who dearly loves the book. Probably need to get it up on Ebay.....(if you are one of the interested email me at cindyleeberryhill@yahoo.com)

In the meantime, here's one page out of the 161 handwritten pages.

McCabes with Freedy

Goofin' around with my pal Freedy Johnston after his show tonight at McCabes. I helped out on a few harmonies on some of his songs: Evies Tears.. and some covers: Witchita Lineman, Seals and Crofts' Summer Breeze, Neil Young's Comes a Time, and the 

Hollies Bus Stop

The photos are a collaboration of Greg Allen's photographic eye and Susan James iPhone. 

I have Freedy's Fender and he's..., well, I don't know what he's doin with that backwards guitar with the price tag on it....

Lookin' like a coupla yeehaw's in color coordinated plaid

A photo of us found amongst all the debris, the books, the journals, the boxes of stuff, things that were put in to unit 74 haphazardly at the end of 2004 when we moved back to the beach. We'd moved away for 5 months to try living with Paul's mother Janet, she moved here from Boston and after 2 months proclaimed: "You lied to me. Paul is in worse shape than I'd expected and he can't drive me anywhere. Plus all your friends are weak California bourgeoisie!" She moved home after six months and once the landlord allowed her to break the lease.

But that's a whole other story I'm yet to tell...At any rate this is a photo of me and Paul at my parents in May 2001.  I was about 5 months pregnant and living in Venice Beach, still working for Lookout Mgmt in Santa Monica, delivering shoes and stuff to Neil Young and picking up David Crosby at the airport. A few months later I moved back in with Paul at our place in Encinitas.

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This past weekend I met one of the directors for the San Diego Brain Injury Foundation, an organization that helps brain injury survivors and their families. They were having their monthly meeting at a hospital near us and when I passed by I saw their sign and stopped in. I had a wonderful conversation with one of their directors which lead to us talking about me doing a lecture on my experience with my husbands traumatic brain injury, his recovery, the subsequent fall into dementia (too young/his 50s), and then the hard work of getting him care when I could no longer do the job.

Sheesh, this is gonna be a whole lot of talk. I'm gonna have to find a way to do the Readers Digest-condensed version of many years of hope then hopelessness, acceptance of his state of decline, care-giving and advocacy. My talk will be some time in early August of 2013.

The San Diego Brain Injury Foundation can be found here:
http://www.sdbif.org/http://www.sdbif.org/

Crazy Good 45's

Several boxes full of this great stuff from early 60s to mid 90s. What a find in his old storage space today. . .Got to get that record player set up in my apartment now. Spent the day cleaning out one of the 5 spaces which means a savings of 50 bucks a month. Thank you to my great pal Paula and her son Ben.

Too good, had to put another coupla looks up here for ya...

The Other Side of Summer

Alexander and I at sundown tonight, on a run between Beacon's and Moonlight Beach. Alexander just started 6th grade last week at our local public charter school here in Encinitas, same school he's been at since Kindergarten. 

But before school started we took a little driving vacation up the coast, visiting family and friends. Here's Alexander and some of the locals, seals, in Marina Del Rey. 

We made it up to our friends house in Scots Valley/Santa Cruz and stayed for a few days, then Alexander stayed a few nights in Silicone Valley with some of Paul's family. We even got to have lunch at Apple headquarters which was the highlight of the trip for Alexander

We stayed with my long time friend and cellist Renata Bratt and her husband Lee Ray. Since I hadn't set up a proper show we did an online performance for something called Stageit, my pal Steve Poltz has done a million of them, and so I tried it. We had a studio audience on hand of about 20 friends and fans at Open Path Music Studios and had a great time. Folks that signed up to watch us checked us out live via my laptop. Kinda cool. We'll def do that again.

On the way back from the Bay Area we drove along one of my favorite stretches of Hwy 1, at Point Mugu. This sand dune was a favorite of Paul's and when we were first seeing each other we climbed to the top and and checked out the view, he telling me what it was like as a kid on the dunes of Cape Cod and me dreaming of new songs soon to be written

Back home. The golden bluffs of Leucadia..we live about 3 blocks from here

Enjoying the last days of high temperatures, 83 today at the beach, the sun going down, it's the other side of summer

Just a part of the whopping bill from 1995

This letter says it all, $87,868.23. A medical bill from some part of the stay at the hospitals ICU, 2 weeks in fact, we were given a whopping bill. This didn't include the brain surgery or the anesthesiologist...or any of the other stuff. Fortunately Paul had been accepted for Kaiser Medical Insurance just 2 weeks (!!) before his bicycle accident.

There were several other bills that came in the mail, like this one and Kaiser said "put them all in a big envelope and send them to us" and like that, the bills were gone. 

Lucky for us we had insurance and Paul was almost turned down, they were nervous about his reasons for getting out of duty for the Vietnam War (he had his mothers friend, a doctor, say he was not fit for duty because he was rather crazy). A pre condition! Getting out of the Vietnam war.  

Live Performance This Thurs: You can watch cuz it's online

Cindy Lee Berryhill's Live Stageit show link 

Join us from your computer this Thursday Aug. 16th 7pm.

Too busy to go out to see live music cuz the kids need to be in bed at some ungodly early hour? Be an armchair audience! No need to go anywhere cuz you can watch us from the comfort of your own love-seat. This is an online only performance.

Cellist Renata Bratt and I will be performing live from Open Path Recording Studio in San Jose and you are invited. It's 5 bucks (or any donation you see fit to send us) and we will be performing in front of a very small studio audience and you out there in computer monitor land (or even the screen of your cell phone!)

This is my first time doing a Stageit show, so lets have some fun with it. You can Twitter me or FB messages while I'm performing and we'll try to have a read and talk back to some of you hecklers. And the cool thing is I can completely ignore the real hecklers cuz it's all virtual and we have hundreds or thousands of miles of airwaves and underground cable between us....

Here's the word on Stageit's self image:

Stageit is an online venue that allows musicians to stream exclusive LIVE concerts to fans. The vibe is incredibly intimate often featuring performers playing from their homes, directly from their laptop.

here's me and renata at Open Path Studios in 2010

Cindy Lee Berryhill's Live Stageit show link 

The Once And Future Room

I've been working the past 2 weekends, with much help from my dear friend Paula, on my husband Paul's 'office', the room in our apartment where he once upon a time did work, file, ship, write, play solitaire, edit, and lay out Crawdaddy Magazine....

Paul hasn't asked about, nor stepped foot in that room for over 4 years, and he's 3 years now in the nursing home. I think it's time to make it my own room. But man, ...how hard it is to process all those piles of things. Process meaning: throw out, box, mail out to others. And then there are the things you don't really want to find, (not to mention the 7 year old bags of weed). 

A random page, torn from a journal, dated Feb. 1, 2006 Paul wrote: " I'm feeling on the edge of some kind of madness-

unable to find J.L. tapes/cd's- again!

playing solitaire compulsively--

unsure what to do each day, each moment."

Very difficult to move through this stuff. So many things. A life that was lived. Who am I to make the decision to keep or to purge?

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At any rate, we visited Paul at his nursing home Sunday....here's the flip book version.

It Wouldn't Hurt To Go In And Look Around

I had a dream this morning: 


My 2nd mom and her daughter Sherrie, decided to move away from me and my son Alexander. They'd gotten an offer for a corporate job in Chino and decide to take it. I was sad to see them go and it left me with a whole in my soul: that place that feels a loss of 'belonging' and that is at once afraid of being close (and counting on someone) and fearful one will never have that feeling of belonging with another or community again. 


So I, dream-person that I am, toyed with the idea of going to work at a corporate job myself. 


There was a big office building where some folks I sorta knew worked and this place even had it's own recording studio (they touted a list of celebrated mix-media artists that had recorded there). I thought to myself, 'It wouldn't hurt to go in and look around'. 


It was lunchtime when I arrived and employees were streaming out of elevators and stairwells, some were in the lobby with their lunch packs and knotted up in little groups of 5 or 6. I found a group where I recognized about 3 or 4 of them from church or my kids school and went and said hello to them. 


Maybe they didn't hear me, because no one responded to my greeting. I sat on the ground and looked up at them in their lounge chairs eating sandwiches smiling and laughing and talking about nothing much. Not noticing me. So I let my eyes move elsewhere in the lobby with it's hugely vaulted ceilings and fake trees and the advertisement/TV media-wall playing random broadcasts, unwatched.


People that worked here obviously made good money. Look at them...most of these employees had the latest styles on, stuff right out of the pricey showrooms. Cute polka dot blouses with leather cuffs, paper-mache high waisted pants, tailored antennae dresses and men in fashionable pinch-toed shoes. 


These were people that knew how to make money, and knew how to spend it. 
The question was: 
Did I want to work in this vast, seemingly unending building with very few doors in or out, and shoehorn my life into this linear schedule?
Answer: Not enough. So I got up off the ground and woke myself up.