BERLIN: SEX MUTANTS MAKE THEATRE OF THE HOT

When given the choice between sex and celibacy, why are more and more people choosing cryogenics? Will sex be to the 1980s what bowling was to the 1950s? If you had sex in outer space, how distracting would it be to see discarded articles of clothing floating around the room? I mean, what is all this sex business anyway? Twenty years of sexual revolution and sex has become a moldy old burlesque skit that nobody admits they've seen a million times before. Just glance at the brainless glitz of the "sex industry" and then ask yourself: who deserves more pity? Someone who was too old for the sexual revolution or someone who wasn't?

And now here comes Berlin, assailing us with a syntho-dance throb, a threateningly sexy lead singer and a hit song all about, that's right, sex. It only took me a couple of listens to realize that Berlin's "Sex (I'm A...)" would soon be the theme song of every porn/peepshow/talk-to-a-live-model place in the country. Nice going, guys. Then again, a lot of bands have made mortifying first impressions and might just deserve a fair hearing the secona time around. Sometimes there's more going on than meets the eye.

Guitarist John Crawford was in his junior year of high school when he formed Berlin. The group's name had a lot to do with Southern Californio, as John explains: "All the bands that started out of that area used the word 'the' in front of their names and they all got thrown in with the Knack and the skinny ties and the '60s twang guitar...That was exactly the period we started. When you're tryng to be different, it seemed to me, to provide a darkersounding name would be good. Just the sound of the word is kind of dark and powerful, which I like. And to a kid from suburban Orange County, which is probably the most conservative place in the whole country, the image that Berlin carries with it is very exciting. Whether it be true or not I don't know. I've never been there. I really haven't read that much about it."

Meanwhile, there was a young woman named Terri Nunn who was looking for a band. The product of a father who studied Eastern religions and a mother who was an astrologer, Terri Nunn grew up a very liberated kid. Not everybody could handle that. "I was always the corrupting influence in every friendship," she recalls. "There was something that I'd do..." Terri admits to being a tad rebellious, but is quick to add, "but not in the direction of drugs or violence." After working sporadically as a back-up singer and even as a television actress, Terri joined Berlin in 1979. Not long after releasing their debut 45, "Tell Me Why" b/w "The Metro," Berlin broke up. A year later, John Crawford, Tern Nunn and guitarist David Diamond revived Berlin and recorded their Pleasure Victim EP for under $3,000. In the coming months Berlin would expand to a full band with the addi tion of Matt Reid on synths, Rob Brill on drums and Ric Olsen on guitar. The Pleasure Victim tape was making the record company rounds to uniformly chilly receptions.

"I was always the corrupting influence in every friendship."-Terri Nunn

It was local radio station KROQ that took up the Berlin cause and turned "Sex" into an underground hit. The exposure paid off when Pleasure Victim was picked up by Gef fen Records. Tern relates with amusement: "All the record companies here turned down the tape of Pleasure Victim because it was too European-sounding. Everybody. Including Geffen." I wondered how long it took Geffen to come around.

"After they saw 25,000 copies sold," says Tern. "They didn't offer us as much money as other people, but they offered us more of a long-term commitment."

Once Berlin became a "major" act, the money got bigger and the businessmen started playing games. "The numbers game. It's a game that they play," explains Tern. "It means so much to them. 'Where is it? What number?' The record, it doesn't matter how good that is. They like it if it's high-and if it's not high the record's no good anymore. And that bothers me. Because you can't win the game, you're eventually gonna lose the game." John quickly adds, "They judge the numbers, they don't fudge the music. 'It's number 12, you put out a great record!' Most of my favorite records are down about 148 and stuff..."

Pleasure Victim was one of the surprise hits of the summer of '83, despite the open ing track "lell Me Why," on which Tern Nunn sang with enough squealing affection to challenge Dale Bozzio. The EP was not without its successes. "The Metro" rolls relentlessly onward at the insistence of its staccato synthesizer accompaniment; the song's electronics are evocative without be ing overpowering. For me, the loopy gem of the EP is "World Of Smiles," in which Tern's little-girl vocals mesh well with a cheerily bobbing keyboard riff. But for everybody else, the principle attraction was "Sex."

"Sex (I'm A...)" begins with a serpentine "sssexxx," which hints at forbidden fruit throughout the ages and launches into a percussive keyboard lick with runs the same way as "The Metro" does. Suggestive voices pop in and out of the mix like foulminded poltergeists while Tern sings the lilting, bluesy verses and lets male vocals twist rough harmonies around them. My resistance to such an obviously catchy tune had everything to do with its uncomfortable proximity to pant/groan disco of the 1 970s. This led me to the question I'd always wanted to ask Berlin: What is all this sex business anyway? "The sex thing spawned from the song 'Sex,' " says Tern. "Which we didn't really write for the radio-didn't expect it to get played at all. If we'd wanted a Top 40 hit from sex, we would have done it like all the other bands do it. We'd kind of go around it and say, `Well, let's make it baby.’ It doesn’t really deal with it right now. During it. It’s always leading up to it and then a big guitar finish or whatever...”

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“Sex” had become the quickest way to characterize the band, a condition that John Crawford can seldom bear. “There’s only one song about sex on the whole record—that’s why we wrote it. We said to ourselves: ‘What do we have inside us that we haven’t put into this record?’ Sex! We hadn’t done that yet. Then everybody says that was the whole record, and it’s really annoying because it proves that they’re not listening to it. You listen to it one time and you’d hear five songs that have nothing to do with sex.”

I suggested that it may have generated such an intense reaction because it sounded so sexist. Terri sees it this way: “It was female-chauvinistic. I wrote it and I made the man boring because men tend to be real scared talking about it more than doing it because it’s hard to say, ‘Hey, I don’t feel like being aggressive tonight. I just want to be babied. Hold me tonight.’ Men, in my experience only, are real scared to do that—so I just made the man stay that way. ‘I’m a man, I’m not going to tell you anything else. This is the way I am.’ And the woman says, ‘Hey but I wanna do this and I wanna be a kid and I wanna be a goddess and I wanna be everything. Let’s do it!’ He’s going, ‘Oh, shit, I’m just a normal guy.’” This was all well and good, but I couldn’t get over the feeling that the fantasies the woman expresses in the spng came from a male mind. John replies: “Everyone looks at it as the girl’s just doing these things because the man wants her to.. But that’s wrong. ‘Sex’ is from the girl’s perspective. It’s the female’s point of view, the female wanting to be things and the man having stereotypical macho fear of being weak or being anything but ‘the man’ all the time.”

Berlin has never been known to offend anybody’s sensibilities, except for maybe the guy from San Diego. “He was a priest,” Terri explains, “who went on the air denouncing the band and saying ‘Don’t go to their shows here.’ And when we went there, there were signs up—I framed one of them—they said: Berlin: Parental guidance is suggested. Subject matter may be unsuitable for pre-teenagers. ”

“And 15,000 of ’em showed up,” John adds with a smile.

Berlin’s Love Life LP was the band’s first chance to dispel the sleazy sex-rock image they’d acquired as well as the band’s first endeavor as a complete unit (which. John refers to as a “six-person marriage ). Aside from such readily-dispensible tunes as “When We Make Love” or “Dancing In Berlin,” Love Life has some undeniable hooks, like the chorus of “Now It’s My Turn” or the seductively naive “Beg, Steal Or Borrow.” “All Tomorrow’s Lies” features a slick, ringing guitar solo framed by graceful vocal lines that soar into multi-tracked splendor. Then there’s “No More Words,” whose anthemic airwave assault proved that Berlin wasn’t going to fade away after the panting stopped. “No More Words” was the basis of their third video, one in which the band appears as the Bonnie & Clyde gang, racketing across the dustbowl with tommyguns blazing. Of course, in this version the big-hearted bandits leave all their loot to the smudge-faced Okies and speed through police gunfire without so much as a nick. Hooray for Hollywood.

It’s in live performance that Berlin makes the most sense. Using the full length of the grand old Beacon Theater stage, it was clear that Berlin wants to put on a good show. There were numerous blackouts, dropped curtains and costume changes. The band changed at least once—Terri herself went through no less than four changes of wardrobe. At one point, a cleverlydesigned urban backdrop appeared and made the band look as though they were playing on a twodimensional streetcorner.

The onstage personae of the band members took on an almost operatic air of dramatic interplay. During “Beg, Steal or Borrow,” Terri and fabulous backup vocalist Mariette Waters tussled with one another like unruly siblings, until the intrusion of John and Ric resolved the incomprehensible scenario. The show came to a close with “Sex,” which John and Terri started singing back-to-back, and then, as the song progressed, shifted positions, embraced and disengaged again and again. For a band that wasn’t really about sex, they put on a rather physical show, which concluded with a cover of Prince’s gleefully risque “Controversy.”

And speaking of controversy, what is all this sex business anyway? The band may contend that instead of sex, Berlin now had much more to do with relationships, as unfriendly and polysyllabic as that always sounds. But when I recall the hundreds of swaying bodies clustered around the stage at the Beacon Theater and the sheets of infectious dance rhythm hammered out by Rob Brill, I begin to think that underneath it all, Berlin really is about sex after all...