If folk know the name Cindy Lee Berryhill it’s most probably due to her role in the 1980s’ Anti Folk movement in New York’s Lower East Side. It’s rumoured that it was Berryhill who coined the term Anti Folk which saw her and the likes of Beck, Hammell On Trial and Michelle Shocked adding a punk sensibility to acoustic music.
Born and raised in California, Berryhill moved to New York in the early 80s, looking to play in hallowed Greenwich Village haunts but by then they were pretty much a closed door to up-and-coming musicians. Instead she fell in with fellow insurgents who went on to create their own little scene. Her first album, “Who’s Gonna Save The World”, released in 1985, featured her playing in a trio format and was a minor hit, primarily due to the sharp wit displayed on the college radio favourite, ‘Damn, I Wish I Was A Man’. A biting piece of satire it had Dylan-like wheezing harmonica blowing alongside Berryhill’s role reversal lyrics such as “Damn, I wish I was a man. I’d be sexy with a belly like Jack Nicholson”, these words accompanied by a hilarious double bass boom. ‘Ballad Of A Garage Band’ is a classic badlands ballad, recalling early Dylan but with a mention of Johnny Rotten embedded within while the ostensible protest song, ‘This Administration’, finds Berryhill as vital as Patti Smith.
Not surprising then to see that Patti Smith’s right-hand man, Lenny Kaye, elected to produce Berryhill’s second album, “Naked Movie Stars”. It should have been a match made in heaven but it strives too much to emulate a folkier version of Smith at times and is all the less for that. Nevertheless, Berryhill is prescient when she lambasts a then much-derided real estate crook on ‘Trump’ and she dives into Tom Waits’ boho territory on ‘12 Dollar Hotel’. There’s beatnik finger popping on the vaudevillian ‘Baby, Should I Have The Baby Or Not’ but it’s the 13 minutes of ‘Yipee’, admittedly a song/monologue much influenced by Smith, which points the way forward to her first classic album.
Following the tepid response to “Naked Movie Stars”, Berryhill retreated for a while, travelled, and ended up back in California. 1994’s “Garage Orchestra” found her in thrall to the likes of Brian Wilson’s symphonic arrangements for The Beach Boys, her sonic palette expanded in part due to a working relationship with Randy Hoffman, a man with a swell collection of instruments including tympani, vibraphone and marimba. While there’s not a significant shift in Berryhill’s subjects, the songs throb with a vitality, elevated by the quite wondrous arrangements. Her admiration of The Beach Boys is most apparent on ‘Song For Brian’ and on the instrumental ‘Father Of The Seventh Son’ but most of the songs come across as a quite brilliant mix of Berryhill quirkiness and wrecking crew studio boss notes. Top of the pops here is the potpourri which is the zany ‘UFO Suite’ while ‘Every Someone Tonight’ shows off her garage orchestra at its best.
It was when recording “Garage Orchestra” that Berryhill met and eventually married Paul Williams. Williams was one of the founding fathers of rock journalism from his early days with Crawdaddy magazine and a renowned authority on Dylan. Shortly after the marriage, Williams suffered a head injury from a bicycling accident, an event which eventually led to his early death from a trauma-induced dementia. Initially this didn’t derail Berryhill as she released her most realised album, “Straight Outta Marysville” in 1996. An album with an epic sweep, it’s less ostentatious than its predecessor with fewer debts to Wilson but it’s still an intriguing melange of solid songs propelled by imaginative arrangements which bear comparisons to Joni Mitchell, Victoria Williams and Laura Nyro. The solo acoustic rendition of ‘Unknown Master Painter’ is a fantastic abstract construct, a word salad which raises more questions than it answers. Throughout the album Berryman speaks in riddles, or at least, challenges the usual construct of verse, chorus, verse. ‘Diane’ rocks along on a rubbery bass line as Berryhill lays out an obscure tale of an ex friend who seems to be quite poisonous and ‘The Virtues Of Being Apricot’ summons up a cool Velvet Underground-like groove. Her voice, slightly nasal, untutored and sounding almost as if it were Sissy Spacek lecturing us, comes to the fore on the jaunty ‘Just Like Me’ which is a teenage fever dream. Central to the album is the amazing ‘Elvis Of Marysville’, a quite astonishing song which, aside from its resounding delivery, posits a fishy tale suffused with Elvis mythology.
There was a 12 year gap between “Straight Outta Marysville” and her next album, “Beloved Stranger”. Williams’ health was deteriorating and Berryhill was his full time carer, and finances were tight as medical bills rolled in. However, in 2008 she released “Beloved Stranger”, an album she referred to as Anti-Country (an obvious nod to her earlier tag) which was less arranged than its predecessor and was a slight return to her debut. With guests such as Dave Alvin, John Doe and Peter Case appearing, Berryhill delivers some political songs such as ‘When Did Jesus Become Republican’ and ‘Forty Cent Raise’ while on ‘Make Way For The Handicapped’ she refers to the plight of disabled war vets. There’s some country twang on ‘Cry Me A Jordan’ and ‘Bars, Booze & Boys Clubs’ clips along with a bar-room feel. Meanwhile, ‘Where Are They Now’ slouches quite brilliantly with a true garage band sense of Patti Smith in its grooves.
Paul Williams died in 2013, having spent his last four years in a nursing home. Four years later Berryhill released “The Adventurist”, dedicated to her husband and “to true lovers everywhere”. The album revisits the Garage Orchestra era, the songs simple at heart but adorned with a variety of sounds, some exotic (strings, vibraphone, marimba, horns and glockenspiel), some mundane (including a dishwasher and a wall heater) but throughout Berryhill offers some fabulous melodies while her excellent vocals are often enhanced by some fine harmonies from friends such as Syd Straw. There’s an immediate attraction to the opening song, ‘American Cinematography’ with its Beatles-like guitar refrain (although the piano gets wackier as the song progresses) and ‘I Like Cats/You Like Dogs’ is a glorious slice of crunchy pop folk pumped up with magnificent scrabbled guitar dashing through the horns towards the end. Less immediate but ultimately as satisfying is the seductive swell of ‘Deep Sea Fishing’ which floats on a fuzzy keyboard riff and the towering ‘Gravity Falls’ which is like slo-mo grunge. Towards the end of the album Berryhill strips her feelings down on the orchestral pop of ‘An Affair Of The Heart’, a melancholic yet defiant song which can be read as a farewell to her husband which pulses with the heartbeat of LA writers such as Gene Clark. The album closes with an instrumental revisit of ‘Deep Sea Fishing’ retitled ‘Deep Sea Dishing’ with Berryhill’s guitars set above the repetitive cycle of a dishwasher that mimics the sound of surf, a fine nod to one of her heroes, Brian Wilson.
“The Adventurist” completes (so far) the recorded Berryhill. Whether another album is forthcoming remains to be seen but she continues to perform live and is active on Facebook. In the interim, I humbly suggest that she has at least two classic albums under her belt and is well worth investigating.
