ORCHESTRA LUNA – ORIGINS

I began playing the piano as a kid. First the abysmal lessons which scared and bored me. Later, around 14, I wrote ‘compositions’ improvised out of my silly head, even playing them ‘live’ at a summer talent show in Maine. There was also a job as a camp counselor in the Pocono’s where, after the kids had gone to sleep, I snuck down to the main lodge and played in the dark. Music from nowhere. Unrecorded, not remembered. And then came the ‘homework parties’ at the Voorhees house across from ours in Philly. Instead of homework we hit the underage bottle. We’d bang out abstract chords on the baby grand and have each other guess whos personality we ‘played’. (‘Middle C’ was the idiot down the street.) But the most dramatic time in my odd, developing musical world was spent locking myself in a tower at Yale (1967), dropping acid, and improvising a soundtrack to the movie in my head. I spent hours there.

Returning to New Haven for Drama School I wound up in one of those ‘new’ family/karass of friends households that included a bi-racial gay couple, a divorced architect, a girl (Francesca Reitano) who wrote The Most Amazing Songs I’d Ever Heard In My Life hunched over the guitar like a figure from Picasso’s ‘blue’ period, a clarinetist who accompanied TV commercials and a couple of intense, intellectual pseudo-revolutionaries who made up screwball children’s songs. We got by on dumpster leavings and part-time jobs. We appropriated an upright piano from a church, and I began to play again in earnest. Inspired by my roommate as well as by an artist/songwriter down the street (Ed Askew) I took my first shot at the genre. Writing my own songs. Singing and playing and drawing upon my immediate surroundings and various almost-but-not-quite love affairs. They seemed to pour out of me. One after another. I had no interest in performing them, except for my friends – which is how these things begin for most of us. Friends first, tomorrow…

There was a brief exit to Grenada, West Indies where I was part of the cast of a never to be completed film about the end of the world. Among these were musicians with whom for the first time I actually played my songs. I’d never‘heard’ my songs in any band context, so these bass/drum add-ons were revelatory. At any rate, we were busted (nudity) and flew home. One road or another led me to Boston where my sister Lisa was living and who thought ‘it was the town where I belonged’. She was right. Been here nearly 40 years.

The first place I landed (Pleasant St, Central Sq, Cambridge) had a hippie couple on the first floor that didn’t believe in toilet training. Their 3 year old’s turds were a minefield through which I tiptoed to get to the piano - in a cubicle off the kitchen. I kept writing - tiny, late night songs.

I had no way to, or interest in, recording what I wrote - influenced at the time by Lennon’s Gestalt period, and hopeful references to Joni Mitchell, Randy Newman, Neil Young et al. (They played uncomplicated piano; figured I could get away with it too.). But in order to remember them I had to run them just about every day. (Same is true now.)

That summer I moved to Martha’s Vineyard with my friend Sam Dudley. A group of us took over an abandoned farmhouse on a field in Chilmark. We hauled in 50 lb bags of rice, read by kerosene lamps and scored another church castaway upright. We stuck it in the kitchen and I kept at it. Visiting musicians, family, friends, kept the al night pot boiling, music everywhere. When the summer ended, I moved next door to Lisa in Somerville.

I got a job keeping an eye on teens in a group home for delinquent boys. 24 hours on, 24 off. Intense work, but affording me money to buy my first upright, crane it into my 2nd story bedroom, and keep writing. I quit the group home, picked up part-time jobs, wrote and played. One breezy afternoon while I was banging away, the window open, a shout bounded up from the sidewalk. This guy, Harry Bee, a passer-by, overheard me and asked if we could talk. He wanted to know if I’d ever considered putting a band together. He was in partnership with Bruce Patch (a management company) and suggested that if I got something together, he and Bruce might be able to help out. (This was in 1972 when record contracts were not impossible to come by.) Bruce had a roster of artists he represented and this seemed legit.

We began with vocals (of all things). I asked Lisa and a dear friend, Liz Gallagher - whom I’d met through a summer theater program at Yale, who had this wonderful Fanny Brice vibrato and a fabulous vaudevillian stage presence - to collaborate on harmony parts for roughly 25 songs. We had a blast, laughing and singing - ideas jumping out of our heads. We figured we could build a band around the vocals. (There was an innocence about this vocals-up structuring that I think contributed to the band’s eventual charm. As if not knowing what you’re doing, making it up out of your ass, leads you into the uncharted even as you don’t realize it.)

Scott Chambers saw an ad I’d posted at Berklee. He came over to the house with his bass, liked what he heard, and added his input, his voice, lo-end, and we were a foursome. Lisa worked down the street at a jazz club called Zircon. One of the regular acts was an original band led by a phenomenal guitarist/composer - Randy Roos. He was tiny. Cherubic. Hardly moved on stage. His fingers appeared to float over the fret board. He played a wild assortment of styles and was insanely quick when he wanted to be, notes flying out of him like a swarm of locusts. One afternoon he came over to listen and, God knows what he heard because it certainly wasn’t jazz, but he said: ‘I’m in’. All that remained was a drummer. In any band these are huge shoes to fill. We tried out a shitload, god knows how many, deferring to Randy and Scott (our ‘legit’ musicians) and eventually found this great, sensitive, funny jazz guy, Don Mulvaney, who also wrote and sang (a voice like Stevie Wonder – his idol) and that was that.

A month or two later we moved to a big fat duplex in Allston. Liz moved in on the other side. And Peter Barrett moved up from New Haven. Peter was a poet, I’d heard him recite, and he wore big round glasses, bizarre self-made clothes and shoes and knew all these hot shots in New York. I’d told him what we were up to. I’d always thought of him as someone whose art sensibility was rare, and had enormous musical and literary range. Plus he was gay so at least there were now 2 of us in a band that had at this point, without a drummer, 6 members. Peter was somehow going to work in his spoken word stuff, and set it to music. Why not? The sky was our limit. We wanted everything at once. The more action, sound, behavior, unpredictable we could imagine ourselves to be, the better.

Peter came up with the name – ORCHESTRA LUNA, primarily because he wanted to refer to the girls as the Lunettes. We rehearsed a lot in our dining room, and things started coming together. Although we hadn’t played out, it began to look like we might need someone to pull the act together visually. The girls had down time onstage, and felt awkward.
I asked my friend Barry Keating, who’d been in on the Grenada fiasco and who’d acted in and directed his friend, Jim Steinman’s DREAM ENGINE – which eventually became the songs for the first Meatloaf record: BAT OUT OF HELL – to come up from New York to choreograph the girls, Peter, and myself when it made sense. He also invited, on the cheap, his friend Basha Johnson, a costume designer, who, with the help of Liz and Lisa, sewed up costume changes for both girls. The whole OL ‘show’ as it was to become, had this terrific Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney let’s-have-a-band quality that wasn’t as much pro, or super tight, as it was friendly, user friendly, as if putting on plays for your parents in a barn. It was however, genuinely ‘different’ and unpredictable.

The Doris Dreams aside:

One of my post-delinquent jobs had been wallpapering and painting the beauty parlor at the Ritz Carlton. I’d met this kid, Lorne Chadbourne, the 3rd, at the Other Side (a gay bar memorialized by Nan Goldin in a photo book of the same name). He moved in with us in Somerville, having been tossed about from one orphanage and foster home after another. He’d also been busted for starting fires (pyromania). Lisa and I actually considered adopting him (an insane idea). But he knew the hairdresser who ran the salon at Ritz, and I that’s how I got the job. In a back ‘pantry’ were shelves filled with hair coloring bottles with the most absurd names: White Mink, Frivolous Fawn, Chocolate Kiss, Nice Change, Hide The Honey, Brown Button, Make It Plush, Lucky Copper, Just Peachy, Gilded Lilly, Sweet Dreams, Platinum Boy, Shy Violet, Barely Pink, etc. I started to write a ‘song’ using these phrases that turned into a 14 minute multi-genre (rock, jazz, Salvation Army band, 30’s girl-group vocals, Swiss operetta) which Peter strung together as story about a sad and lonely girl, Doris Dreams, who after a long night of despair, realizes that she is, in fact, beautiful. Barry added masks, quick-change theater, blocking and the song, more than any other, had this huge effect at our live shows, and eventually on the full orchestration by Ruppert Holmes. It culminated in one lone kite-tail guitar solo by Randy that lifted audiences off the ground. It was, right away, our signature piece.

We were, at last, ready to perform, and Bruce decided that our first gig should be at The Other Side where other bands were had early (‘off Broadway’) performances. There was a nightly drag show, MC’d by Sylvia Sydney (The Mess In A Dress) and she introduced us. Lisa, who was supposed to sing Little Sam, had stage fright, and walked to the back of the stage. ‘YOU sing it! Rick,’ she whispered. So I did, but eventually she got it together, sang her songs beautifully and her face, her persona was, I’m convinced another of the many aspects including our eclectic sound, our ‘look’, Peter, that brought us to the attention of the city, and eventually Epic Records.

Bruce thought we should have a regular gig (precursor to ‘residency’). He spoke to the owners of a health food restaurant on Harvard Ave - Jeremiah’s. They didn’t have a stage, it wasn’t a music venue at all, but the owners were open-minded and supportive. We brought 2 Shure columns and pointed them out (it wasn’t until we played the Orpheum that we ever had anything approaching vocal monitors) and Sam mixed a four-channel board. It was as if we caught on overnight. The place was packed. We’d walk down from our house on a summer evening in platform shoes and frilly dresses, laughing and drinking. It was so carefree. They loved us. Every show was different. We’d add a new song or idea of Pete’s or a new movement or costume of Barry’s; we’d warm up in the basement, hooting, leaping, hollering vocal exercises and mount the stage. Randy added an instrumental version of the 3rd movement of Beethoven’s 7th, as well as his own compositions. Peter wrote the set list and performed his manic spoken alliterations alone, with the band or in the context of a song. It was such a great great time, off and running. Bruce got a local rep (Lenny Petze) from Epic to see us, and within 6 months of playing out, we were signed, Ruppert Holmes producing.

We went to New York. We were put up at the Holiday Inn, midtown. It was all brand new to us. The studio. How to sing with headphones on. How to interact and collaborate with producers and engineers. How to be true to our live act and translate that to tape. How to play the instruments without singing. How to multitrack. Ruppert and Jeffrey Lesser (engineer), made it fun, were encouraging and we, as I recall, weren’t even nervous. In post production Ruppert, responding to the instrumental tracks (especially Randy’s) charted and recorded a full orchestral to graduate the band in a way that would have us live up to our name.

We finished the record without Doris Dreams and You Gotta Have Heart (DAMN YANKEES). These had seemed too ‘old’ to record once we got to the city. We wanted to get the new ones. But at a show in Boston the label reps attended, we played ‘em. The big guys wanted Doris and Heart on the record so we returned to the studio and put em down. This was good for Pete’s work because both utilized his writing in fabulous ways. In particular the sound effects and music Ruppert and Jeffrey added to his Bobby Blueberry baseball hero wind-up in the middle of Heart.

Now what? How to market, how to tour this record? How to make sense of what was to us a wonderful idea, but to the rest of the country, and soon, as far as Epic was concerned, hardly ‘commercial’.

In Boston, because of the CBS imprimatur and an aggressive agent at Pretty Polly (Howie Cusak) we scored a lot of great opening act gigs. Roxy Music, The Boomtown Rats at the Orpheum. Weather Report at Symphony Hall (they pulled the plug on us in the middle of Doris). In Manhattan - Split Enz at the Palladium. We also performed Doris in New York for Frank Zappa’s 10th Anniversary party (thanks to The Wartoke Concern’s Jane Friedman). We played alongside LaBelle and Patti Smith (who was at that point a duo with Lenny Kaye). Frank picked Randy up in his arms after he finished his solo. Wow!

Susan Blonde (newly installed as chief publicist at Epic) thought we should mirror Zappa’s long time Mothers gig at The Little Hippodrome in NYC where she could invite press in an intimate and easy to fill setting. Andy Warhol, Rado and Ragny (HAIR), Peter Berlin were among those I remember. Fran Lebowitz wrote about us for Interview. We visited the Factory. But after 2 weeks everything fell apart. The guy who signed us was shipped off to LA, and the newly installed brass who’d come to see us at the Hippodrome didn’t get it. They pretty much hated us for not being The Tubes. (i.e. no hits.)

We went home. Sold few records, never toured. From the top to the bottom in a few short months. The first of many hard lessons learned. Especially in an industry that has few if any second acts.

We did take a crack at a revised version – OL2. It had seemed so easy a climb. Why not try again?
Lisa had had enough and left the band. Randy, Scott and Don were out. Randy to pursue his career in jazz. Don to teach and write. Scott to play bass for Bette Midler. Even the roadies triumphed. Gene Amoroso got a few parts in film (he’d done some small skit acting for us at shows). Mike Scopino wound up managing The Ritz in New York. Liz and Peter stayed on.

I kept writing. Long (Helen Of Troy) and short (Greyhound). We added Chet Cahill (who looked like Brahms - big beard -and actually joined OL I just as we broke up - nice), today he teaches music to kids at a progressive school in W Mass, raises cows and giant dogs, Karla deVito - power vocalist (ultimately joined the Meatloaf Bat Out Of Hell tour), Steven Paul Perry on guitar (who later toured with John Prine). Bobby Brandon (who is now attorney for Madison Square Garden) took over at the piano so I could dance about as LV. Barry returned to help with choreography. We became more rock (sort of), and less innocent. More rehearsed. We split from Bruce and Harry. Billie Best (a close friend of Karla’s, Chet's future wife) became our manager. We moved to Newton Highlands. We played CBGB’s in our white overalls and big smiles - a peripheral part of that scene in its heyday (Talking Heads, Shirts, Blondie, Patti Smith, Television, The Mumps, etc etc). Met Lou Reed. Stayed at Danny Field’s loft. We got demo deals with Elektra and Sire. Elektra passed. Sire (Seymour Stein who loved the songs and band) offered us $100,000 – his usual deal – and we thought it too little to pay for touring, so we said no, and no one else said yes. We did one last-ditch, full-paid ad in the Voice for a show at Alice Tully Hall. I think we looked small on that great big stage. I over performed. Steve and Karla were asked to join Meatloaf. We were played out. It was over.

There would never be a band like OL (especially the first incarnation). We had a reunion of sorts 10 years ago, at Ryles, playing But One, Faye Wray, and Doris, here in Boston. It jammed, nostalgic, sweet. But Peter was gone (AIDS) and though it sounded wonderful, it was something never to be repeated.

It was all too easy, when I think back. The trip from kitchen piano, to make-it-up rehearsals, to first shows, first press, major label signing. It led me to believe that the road to success, to money supporting art, was a snap. I was obsessed for decades trying to regain what had been lost when we were dumped (just as the record was released), to sign subsequent ideas, to try and write ‘hits’ more palatable to the industry. I wandered far from the initial, emotional rush of writing songs just for the sake of it. To touch my close friends, to exorcise and sublimate observations and portraits and feelings about Everything. It took me years to realize that ultimately the luckiest thing in the world was to be able to ‘say something’ in the haiku format of a song. That it was not necessarily the band genre that would be my most intimate medium. That the brass ring of rock stardom could slip away overnight but have no relevance to my work as a songwriter. I have since returned, after many band incarnations (Luna, The Suitcase Band, Berlin Airlift, Rick Berlin The Movie, Rome Is Burning, Berlin Backwards, The Shelley Winters Project), to myself and piano. Just the songs. Take em or leave em.
Most recent: Me & Van Gogh (Hi-N-Dry), and the new, unfinished: Lightbulb In A Dark Room.