Mad World

by Lori Majewski

  I thought “No One Is to Blame” had potential to be a big radio song. I played it to the head of Elektra Records in his office, on the piano, and I said, “I really think this could be huge,” and he said, “No, it’s a B-side.” It turned out to be the biggest hit I had in America. It’s just another example of how you need to stick to your guns and do what you think is right.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Thirty years after the release of “New Song,” the prickly hair may be gone, but Jones continues to tour and inspire his faithful followers. A longtime vegetarian (though now closed, his restaurant Nowhere was a forerunner among Manhattan eateries with meatless menus), he is also a member of the 12-million-strong Buddhist movement Soka Gakkai and oversees one of its choirs, the Glorious Life Chorus, which performs Jones songs in its repertoire. And, true to the title of one of his biggest hits, he still believes that things can only get better.

  JONES: I am constantly surprised by the longevity of the music. The great thing for me is that I still feel very happy playing and singing my songs. Imagine if it was a bunch of lyrics that just didn’t mean anything, and you had to do it over and over again for years—that would be torture.

  I’ve been married to my wife for 35 years now. We have children, and I’ve always tried to get the ideas from the songs across to them. I say, “I have tried to train you to stand up to anyone if they’re saying something that you don’t agree with.” And they’ve become really good at that—so good that they give me a hard time, they challenge me.

  At the core, I’m the same person, but I’ve definitely changed over the years. I’m always trying to become a better human being every day. I’ve evolved and hopefully have become better at putting those philosophies into practice. It’s an ongoing thing until I die.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Positive, Upbeat Songs 1. “Our House,” Madness 2. “In a Big Country,” Big Country 3. “Happy Birthday,” Altered Images 4. “The Safety Dance,” Men Without Hats 5. “Right by Your Side,” The Eurythmics

  “THE METRO”

  here wasn’t a whole lot of room in new wave for girls. Maybe it was because guys had taken over the makeup mirror, the hairspray, and the frilly shirts. When Annie Lennox first burst into our living rooms, she did so dressed in drag. Meanwhile, Alison Moyet wore shapeless muumuus, and early Bananarama were togged up like extras from Oliver Twist. In Los Angeles, though, there was no shortage of women who flaunted their femaleness—the Go-Go’s, Martha Davis of the Motels, Dale Bozzio of Missing Persons. But Terri Nunn was the fairest of them all. A part-time actress (she’d auditioned to play Princess Leia in Star Wars) and onetime Penthouse Pet, Nunn—real name!—was so beautiful that she called to mind Deborah Harry, herself a onetime Playboy Bunny. Nunn planted saucy seeds in the mind of Berlin fanclub member Madonna with songs like the outrageous “Sex (I’m A …).” And yet, it’s the haunting synth-made melodies permeating “The Metro” and the Giorgio Moroder gem “Take My Breath Away” we remember them for. Berlin may have hailed from sunny California, but their sound linked them to their namesake city 6,000 miles away.

  LM: I loved interviewing Nunn. We gossiped like girlfriends. We talked about how hot Bryan Ferry was, how stunning Debbie Harry (Nunn: “The closer I got, the more gorgeous, and it wasn’t the lighting”), how fat Belinda Carlisle was (“She was a house. She would say so herself”). I mean, that’s not the kind of stuff you can talk about with Roland Orzabal. I also loved Nunn’s unapologetic love of her own music and legacy. Nunn was a hot chick in a cool band during the early eighties, and she knows it. And she had a voice that was almost as distinctive as she was beautiful. She may have started out chirping a silly song about sex, but by “Take My Breath Away,” Nunn had matured into having one of the era’s sultriest voices.

  JB: As greedily (and indiscriminately) as the States gobbled up the latest British new wave export to come down the pike, the reverse was not the case. We treated Blondie, the Ramones, Television, and Talking Heads like deities, but we weren’t about to give the phony, plastic, poser likes of Missing Persons, the Motels, the Go-Go’s, or Berlin the time of day. We had our own phony, plastic, poser bands, groups like the Regents, Blue Zoo, Fiction Factory, and a plethora of other atrocities we won’t sully ourselves by writing about in these pages. (See you in Book Two, guys!) But I’m more mature now. I live in America. I know the generosity of its people. I’ve traveled the vastness of its highways. Do I still feel the same about American new wave? Kinda. “The Metro’’ is pretty good, though. Probably because it’s so European.

  TERRI NUNN: Grace Slick got me into music. That was the call of the wild. I saw her on television and said, “I want to be her!” She was so different from all the other women. They were pretty and sweet and nice, but she was the epitome of both men and women in music, because she stood up with the men and went, “Fuck you!” She was throwing off her top and singing as strong as any of the guys—and just as irreverent and sexy and hot. I wanted the freedom that the guys had.

  When I started doing music in the late seventies, it was a completely male-dominated job. Bands like Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith were still ruling the airwaves, and punk had just happened. We opened for Iggy Pop once. I would have loved for us to have had a mosh pit. It always bummed me out because I’d see other bands get mosh pits in the front of the stage and we never had that.

  Then the eighties happened. It was an amazing time, one of the best ever in Los Angeles. There were so many clubs to play, like Madame Wong’s, Club 88. Any night of the week you’d have the best fucking live music you could possibly want. Punk was still happening: the Cramps, X. But the main thing was power pop, so the Go-Go’s and the Plimsouls were initially much more viable than we were. Berlin was “synthesizer music,” and people didn’t really understand it. We got lumped together with Missing Persons because we were the closest to each other—the girl singer, the synthesizers. But we were very different image-wise. Dale Bozzio was more space-age, very Barbarella, with the plastic things over her tits.

  We patterned ourselves after the European bands: Kraftwerk, Ultravox, Roxy Music. Oh, Bryan Ferry—he’s a god! We got to open for him once, and I’ll never forget it. That glamorous, romantic image: the cool guy with the cigarette and the suit, and all the beautiful women who were dressed up with martinis in their hands. It wasn’t like the punk scene or the rock scene; it was classy, very grown-up. And that’s really what I wanted Berlin to be: elegant but sexy. Old Hollywood. The guys in the band wore tuxedoes. I was usually in a dress. No one else was doing that. I wanted kids to look at us and think, It’s really cool to grow up, instead of Look at my parents: They gave up on their dreams. Life sucks for them, and that’s how I’m going to end up.

  By 1982, KROQ was playing some really weird stuff: Oingo Boingo, Romeo Void, Talking Heads. These were bands that weren’t played on any of the rock stations at all, ever. And KROQ was a strong supporter of L.A. bands, which gave us hope that they would play us if we could come up with something that would grab their attention. So we were like, “Okay, how can we be outrageous? What could be a really bold statement?” And that’s how we came up with the idea of our first single, “Sex (I’m A …).”

  I wrote it about a problem I was having with my boyfriend at the time. Sex wasn’t that great. We hit a wall pretty fast, and I wanted to spice it up, but he really didn’t. He said, “It’s fine if you want to try some new things like role playing, but I’m not a burglar, and I don’t want to be a pirate. I’m just a guy, and I like just really boring, normal things, like man on top.” So that’s what I wrote. I wrote that he’s always just a guy: “I’m a man …,” “I’m a man …,” “I’m a man …” But I’m a lot of things! I imagined me dancing around him as all these different characters: “I’m a goddess,” “I’m a virgin,” “I’m a blue movie” … I had never heard something like that talked about in a song, but girls talk about that stuff all the time. Still, I had no idea how the public would respond, and
it was pretty drastic. People were either, “You’re the devil’s children and should not be allowed to live on this planet for saying something like that” or, “Oh my God, this is awesome!” It was never in the middle. I should have had more fun with it, but I was horrified that people were thinking, “You’re the girl on the back cover of the single who’s wearing nothing except a stole around the important parts, and you have no brain.” My mistake was rather than playing with it and laughing, I was like, “Oh, no! I’m a very serious songwriter and singer!” I got defensive. I was 22 years old.

  But that song wasn’t what Berlin was all about. That was “The Metro.” It was ’81 when we wrote it, and we were getting better as writers and playing live. When we finished it, we were like, “That’s it! That’s what we want to sound like!” I’ve heard that from other bands too, that there’s that moment where a sound comes together and defines you. Bam! That’s who we are. We had a template.*

  I had never heard anything like it before: deep, dark, romantic, completely unique, from the sparsity of the sound and the loneliness of David Diamond’s keyboard to the female vocal, the European setting, and the sadness of the lyrics. John Crawford wrote that. He was so incredibly honest about his feelings. It wasn’t just about “Let’s go get laid and party, woo hoo!” It was “My girlfriend is going to Europe, and I’m probably going to lose her. She’s going to meet some great Italian guy, and she’s going to dump me.” That’s what that song’s about. The way he talked about his insecurities was completely universal. That was the beauty of our collaboration: His feelings were not male; they were human.

  * RICHARD BLADE, former KROQ DJ and current host of Sirius Satellite Radio’s First Wave: Terri and I nearly got married. She likes to tell the story about how I took “Metro” to KROQ and broke it there when they still were on an independent label. I found it at a record shop in Long Beach when I was doing overnights on KNAC and took the single with me to KROQ. [Program director] Rick Carroll called up and said, “What are you playing?” I said, “A song called ‘Metro’ from Berlin. They’re either German or local, I don’t really know.” And he said, “Leave it in the studio: I want Jed [the Fish] to play it, and Freddy [Snakeskin]. Every three hours, I want it to come up.” Terri’s producer heard it too and called up and said that the band would love to meet me. I met Terri the next week, and we fell in love instantly and were never apart for a year and a half. “The Metro” was a perfect storm: great female vocals, a catchy chorus, and a story about lost love. It was exotic rather than erotic. It had a driving dance beat that still works to this day. It’s about 168 beats per minute! You put that song on, and you cannot sit on your ass.

  The bridge between “The Metro” and our biggest hit, “Take My Breath Away,” was Giorgio Moroder. Getting to work with him was a huge deal for us, because we loved his work with David Bowie, Blondie, Donna Summer. He was so unique that artists went to him to sound like him. When Bowie did “Cat People,” that didn’t sound like Bowie; it sounded like Bowie on top of a Giorgio Moroder song—and that’s what he wanted! So we begged our record label to ask if he would work with us, and he was so huge at that point that we could only afford one song, “No More Words.”

  It was really just lucky that he was offered to produce and write songs for Top Gun while we were working with him. But he didn’t come to me first for “Take My Breath Away.” He tried out a couple of other, more traditional singers—Martha Davis of the Motels was one—but the producers, including Jerry Bruckheimer, and the director, Tony Scott, didn’t like their renditions. So Giorgio came in one day and played “Take My Breath Away” and asked if we’d be interested in doing it. I immediately said yes. Plus, it was the romantic peak of the movie. But John immediately said no. He just thought that great bands didn’t do other people’s songs, case closed.

  While I didn’t think it was the greatest song I’d ever heard, I thought it was good. But I never thought it would be a number-one hit around the world. The original demo was stilted, rigid. The words sounded syncopated, like they were coming from a Japanese singer: “Watching. Every. Motion. In my. Foolish. Lover’s. Game.” It was so … yuck. The words are so romantic and sad and longing. I just wanted to pull the notes out of the structure—“In my fooooolish loooover’s gaaaame”—to open it up a bit. So that’s how I sang it, and I thought, Well, if they don’t like it, fuck it—who cares? We’ve got Giorgio, we’re working on our album. I had nothing to lose to make it mine, so I did. And they loved it.

  MIXTAPE: 5 More Songs from L.A. Women 1. “Destination Unknown,” Missing Persons 2. “Johnny, Are You Queer?,” Josie Cotton 3. “Only the Lonely,” The Motels 4. “This Town,” The Go-Go’s 5. “Valley Girl,” Frank Zappa and Moon Unit Zappa

  The song was nominated for an Academy Award, and when it came to performing at the Oscars, that was when I went on my ego trip. They said, “We’re going to do a medley, and we want you to sing a verse and a chorus of the song, then we’re going to cut to the next song, and they’re going to sing a verse and a chorus…. That way we can condense everything. And I said to them, “Well, no. If I can’t sing the whole song, I’m not doing it,” totally expecting them to just be so in love with me that they would go, “Okay!” Well, what they said was, “Oh, well, okay, thank you very much. Click!” And they went and got Lou Rawls. Can you fucking believe that? I watched the awards on television while we were on tour overseas somewhere in Taiwan, and I saw that it won. I look back on that with regret.

  While “Take My Breath Away” didn’t singlehandedly destroy Berlin, it was just one more disagreement between John and me. We were going in different directions on everything. We were the two who were signed by Geffen. We always presented it as a band, but it was really the two of us, and we crumbled. We couldn’t agree anymore. By the last tour, we weren’t even speaking.

  And we were exhausted. That’s why record labels want kids, because they want endless energy. They want somebody they can just throw on the road, then put in a studio, then throw back out on the road. It’s this endless cycle, and you don’t know that you need a life until you fall apart or you become a drug addict. It was five years of that cycle and, holy god, both of us were just tired of everything. We were tired of each other; we were tired of not having a real relationship in our lives. We had no friends, we had nothing except each other and this band, and that doesn’t hug you at night, you know? Getting laid once in a while with people you’re not going to see again the next day, that loses it real fast. We were just sick of it all.

  THAT WAS THEN

  BUT THIS IS NOW

  Although 1986’s Count Three and Pray contained the international smash “Take My Breath Away,” the album never gained traction, and Berlin disbanded a year later. Nunn released a solo album, 1991’s Moment of Truth, before obtaining the rights to the band’s name and rebuilding Berlin with an all-new lineup of musicians. Nunn continues to tour and record under the Berlin banner and released the album Animal in 2013. She also co-hosts a show on L.A. radio station KCSN with friend and comedienne Wendy Liebman.

  NUNN: I’m still fired up about Berlin. This writing partner, Derek Cannavo, and I have that kind of thing like John and I had. Derek and I wrote [Animal], and I’m just so excited by EDM music—it’s where electronic music has gone. On this album we covered “Somebody to Love,” and Grace Slick has heard it! Yes! I played it for her, and she said, “Wow.” That was fucking huge for me.

  “I RAN”

  Hip-hop had Vanilla Ice. Hair metal had Quiet Riot. Bloated, inspirational arena rock had Creed. Whatever your taste in music, it will at some point be misrepresented by a monster hit from an artist who makes you cringe and who causes contemporaries to beg, “Please don’t judge us by that!” So it was with A Flock of Seagulls. Even in a genre as ridicule-prone as new wave, A Flock of Seagulls made an easy target, thanks to the name, the singer’s hair, and the absurd sense of B-movie drama permeating “I Ran.” Decades later, though, we remember their name, we certa
inly remember the hair, and we remember the way Mike Score bleated his way through that “I never thought I’d meet a girl like you-ooo-ooo” lyric. A Flock of Seagulls may have been a punch line, but at least they were an unforgettable one.

  JB: As we age, our priorities change. We worry about our bank balances, our aching backs, our prostates. (By we, I mean everyone else. Not me. I’m in tip-top shape. Never better. Well, there’s the odd twinge …) We place less and less importance on cool—knowing what’s cool or being up-to-the-second on cool music. The dwindling importance of cool is a weight off our sagging shoulders. But even in my dotage, when my day consists of when I have to pee and when I don’t have to pee, I still wince a little at the thought of A Flock of Seagulls. In my U.K. homeland, they were seen as a joke act, like a band formed by a bunch of oafish characters in a British soap opera. The fact that they were snapped up without a qualm by American audiences almost devalues the success of stratospherically superior British bands of the same vintage. Objectively, I know that attitude is imbecilic. People are free to enjoy whatever they please, and more than that, I’m absolutely able to appreciate that the 12-inch of “Wishing (If I Had a Photograph of You)” is a long, luxurious wallow. But they’re still not cool to me. Sorry.

  LM: Being one of those qualmless Americans you speak of, I thought they were cool. Prior to the Hairstyle, there was the “I Ran” video, a welcome respite from dull concert-performance clips like Springsteen’s unbearable “Rosalita.” The latter seemed like it was 20 minutes long, and it was so dingy and seventies-feeling it may as well have been in black and white. But “I Ran”—that was full-on, resplendent Technicolor. The revolving mirrored room with the aluminum foil floor! The alien women with the crazy makeup and dresses made out of Hefty bags! The freaky frontman in the red secretary blouse with the singed blond coif singing about the aurora borealis! I couldn’t get away!