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Authors: Pamela Des Barres

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BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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On his way to a business meeting on April 12, 1966, his recently received draft notice on his mind (among many other things, I’m certain), Jan careened around Whittier Boulevard at high speed, hit a curb, lost a tire, went out of control, and rammed into the rear of a parked Ford pickup. Whittier Boulevard became Dead Man’s Curve for a horrible split second.
“I saw the car after the accident,” Dean continues sadly. “There’s a windshield frame from the inside and it’s attached in the middle. This piece popped off and the frame hit Jan in the head. Other than that he didn’t have any broken bones, hardly anything happened except for a whap in the head.” Yeah, but what a whap.
In 1972 I was walking up Woodrow Wilson Drive on my way to visit the Zappa family when a sports car slowed down beside me and a guy asked if I’d like a ride. Why not? I climbed into the passenger seat and this smiling fellow looked familiar. “Hi,” he said, awkwardly holding out his left hand. “I’m Jan Berry of Jan and Dean.” I instantly recalled the Dead Man’s Curve tragedy, and marveled at Jan’s ability to drive a car again. When I commended him for his bravery, he said to me with a crooked grin, “I’m stubborn.”
Jan was pronounced dead at the scene, but when the paramedics pulled him out of the top of the crushed silver Stingray, they found weak signs of life and rushed him to UCLA Medical Center—the same place Jan studied five days a week. After extensive brain surgery, the doctors said he might never come out of his coma and, if he did, would never walk or talk again. But thirty days later stubborn Jan Berry woke up and said, “Hi, Mom!” Then the work began.
Jan’s former girlfriend, Jill Gibson, came to see Jan at the hospital and he said, “Jill, let’s go home.” He had lost a lot of time and didn’t remember that they had broken up. Jan’s massive head injury left him with his entire right side paralyzed—his arm, his leg, even his eye. He also had aphasia, a severe communication disorder, and had to relearn how to move his tongue to form words. The man in a hurry who always had had too many things on his mind could now handle only one or two ideas at a time—with much difficulty. A therapist moved into his home and taught Jan how to tell time, add, and subtract. He had to relearn the alphabet. Jan’s music and medical knowledge were
gone. The prankster who had faked funny seizures was now having them for real.
His right hand was useless and his right toot pointed upward, which caused him to drag his leg, but against all the doctor’s odds, Jan walked and drove a car. Then the music started coming back to him. He was Jan Berry, musician, not somebody to be pitied.
Jan parents, Bill and Clara Berry, have known their share of grief, having lost a daughter in a swimming pool tragedy and a son in a mountain climbing accident before Jan’s crack-up. They spent almost all of their time by Jan’s side as he struggled to recuperate. I met with the Berrys at their sprawling yet cozy house in Bel Air. “The doctor said that the brain stem was injured,” Mrs. Berry tells me. “After the accident what Jan wanted was to be independent. No grown man likes to come home and be dependent again, so he went through numerous episodes of renting places and having people live with him. Most of them took advantage of him. While he was still in the hospital two young kids broke into his house and took all his hi-fi equipment,” she recalls sadly. Since Jan insisted on living in his own place, the Berrys hired various people to look after his needs. “One time Jan’s brother caught this fellow putting Jan’s clothes into the trunk of his car. We worried because we knew how vulnerable he was,” she continues. “One of the episodes up at his Mulholland house, his maid called and said, ‘You’d better get up here. There are some people in Jan’s office putting cocaine into little packages and he’s not aware of what’s going on.’”
Police survey the wreckage of Jan’s Corvette. Some joker stuck a photo of Jan and Dean in the twisted metal. (THE JAN BERRY COLLECTION)
Jan was frustrated, trapped, lonely. He didn’t see Dean much anymore. He started taking drugs. The Berrys recount several more tales of users and abusers. More than once Jan trusted so-called friends to invest his money, says his mother. “Con men will paint flowers all over you, and that’s exactly what they did to Jan.” Besides losing a ton of money in bad investments, Jan went on gambling benders. “I flew up to Las Vegas twice to stop Jan from gambling,” Mr. Berry explains. “You hate to deprive him of everything, so we went to the cashier and got him three thousand dollars. He doesn’t see to his right, so we decided to stay to see what happened, and in less than fifteen minutes the three thousand was gone.” Dean told me Jan has lost close to two hundred thousand dollars in Las Vegas.
The Berrys’ stories often don’t jibe with Dean’s. They don’t think Dean’s 1978 TV movie,
Dead Man’s Curve,
was very accurate. “In the movie Dean comes in with Laurel and Hardy movies to cheer Jan up,” Mrs. Berry tells me. “But we were there—I remember Lou Adler coming in with the projector.”
Jan called his father from Hawaii a few years ago, saying he was going to kill himself, and his father went to bring his son back home. More than once, Jan Berry has contemplated suicide—what a trial for his parents. “It hasn’t been easy,” Mrs. Berry concedes. But when they recall the days before the accident, it’s a different story. “One of Jan’s professors took a real liking to him and told us that Jan would be working and before long they’d all be watching him work on a cadaver. It was a big loss,” Mrs. Berry recalls. “He had beautiful artistic hands. All of his professors said he was a born surgeon.” Mrs. Berry adds, “If you look at his left hand today …” Her voice trails off as she thinks about what could have been. “When he lived alone after the accident, I want you to know that he scrambled his own eggs and fried his own bacon,” she then says with some pride. “Sometimes when he calls me on the phone, he’ll say, ‘Hi, Mom, how are you? Are you sitting with your feet up?’ I have varicose veins.
He was always generous and always sweet, but sneaky in one way.” She smiles. “If I told him, ‘You’re not to do that,’ he’d say, ‘Okay, Mom,’ then find a way to do it.” Mr. Berry chuckles and adds, “He still does.”
I stop to pick up Chinese food on my way to have dinner with Jan Berry and his wife, Gertie, at their home in Brentwood. Jan met Gertie four years ago on tour in Ontario, Canada, where she was a waitress at Lulu’s Roadhouse, the longest bar in the world (according to the
Guinness Book of World Records
). They got married onstage in Las Vegas in August 1991 during a Jan and Dean concert. When the minister asked Jan, “Do you take this woman … ,” Jan shouted joyously, “Yes, sir!” The wedding cake was covered in blue-icing waves, with the little plastic groom on a surfboard carrying the bride.
I arrive with my steaming cartons and Gertie greets me warmly. She’s a young, bright—eyed blonde who shows me around the former bachelor pad she has cheered with countrified homey touches. “Jan will be out in a minute,” she tells me as she sets the table. “He fell down today and isn’t feeling too well.” I hear Jan shuffling into the room, and as I turn around I’m greeted with that sweet, crooked smile. “Hello, I’m Jan Berry.” Of Jan and Dean. He’s a bit heavier, his hair’s fuller and longer, but he’s wearing a Hawaiian surfer’s shirt and seems pleased to meet me. I remind him that he once picked me up hitchhiking. “I picked up a lot of girls,” he says with his boyish grin, “but it’s different when you’re married.”
Throughout the interview Jan has a lot of trouble finding the right words to say. I think he
knows
what he wants to say, but the damage to his brain won’t allow the words to come forth. He sometimes seems frustrated, and other times pretty happy. He has a naive, childlike quality, an innocence that I’m sure betrays a torrent of jilted high hopes. What comes up a lot in conversation are his feelings about his partner, Dean Torrence. When Jan fumbles for a word or an idea, Gertie lovingly helps him out.
PAMELA:
What’s your relationship with Dean like?
JAN:
Dean is in the past and he loves the past. It’s all wrong but he’s believing it now.
GERTIE:
He wasn’t on the original “Surf City,” he didn’t show up for the session, but he went in and remixed it later. Dean never came to see Jan in the hospital, not once. In the TV movie he did, he remembered it differently. I just want everything to be true. The truth is important to Jan. He used to drink and take drugs, but he quit nine years ago. Dean won’t let him forget it.
PAMELA:
Did you go to AA?
JAN:
Yeah. I just quit.
GERTIE:
Didn’t you quit because Dean threatened to leave the show?
JAN:
In Long Island we finished and he told me, “That’s it, we’re through.” So, uh, jeez, you know, he has beer and alcohol, but you can get them overbalanced somehow.
GERTIE:
He’s saying that Dean still drank.
JAN:
A long time ago I remember I had alcohol and drugs, cocaine. I was driving along the freeway on the 101 and it was just beautiful. I can remember that. A lot of times I can’t remember, but this time was just so beautiful. It was hard for me to quit, so I had to have a UCLA doctor who deals with drugs and we were having appointments two, three times a week. I was off for about a year and a half and then … It was Christmastime. I slipped, you know, so I had to start all over.
PAMELA:
Were you getting high in the early days?
JAN:
Before I had my accident, I used pills, maybe. I don’t remember.
PAMELA:
Where were you headed the day of the accident?
JAN:
I had a letter from the draft board. I was thinking all the time, What’s happening? Twenty-five was my age when I had the accident. Before that I was in medicine.
GERTIE:
He was six months away from his internship.
JAN:
I had an appointment, but I was never there because that was the accident, but we were planning to open a Jan and Dean label. Yeah.
PAMELA:
Did you have to learn to do everything again?
JAN:
Reading, writing, walking, learning the ABCs. I didn’t want to work all the time, but I did have to because my mind said, “Gee, it’s so flustering!” Still I would want to do it. The mind is more brain damaged. It will never be the same since I had the accident.
GERTIE:
Jan can read now, but he can’t read for too long because his mind has to work so hard, he sweats. It seems to be an effort for his brain. If he can’t say the words, he’ll spell things out for me. He’s always had a photographic memory.
JAN:
Gee, it’s too bad I fell down this morning …
GERTIE:
Jan has only use of one side. Even though he does walk, he balances himself and the one arm just hangs. When he loses his balance, there’s nothing to save him. The one foot gets caught, and he falls hard when he falls.
JAN:
It’s hard on the brain.
GERTIE:
He can’t see to his right. Many times he’s passed me and not seen me.
PAMELA:
When did you start performing again?
JAN:
Uh … uh … about ’85.
GERTIE:
Jan went on the road by himself. Dean didn’t want to go out with Jan.
JAN:
No, no, because the movie came on at that time. That’s what happened.
[Much, much effort.]
There were little frictions with me and Dean.
PAMELA:
Did you have anything to do with the movie?
GERTIE:
[Dean] came to Jan and took him out to lunch to see how he acted, how he moved his arm. When the movie came out they gave Mr. Berry
[Jan’s dad] five thousand dollars. I wish they wouldn’t have. It meant he accepted how the movie was done.
PAMELA:
So Dean didn’t stay in touch with Jan?
GERTIE:
No. Jan’s mom was telling me that Dean was always jealous of Jan because Dean had to study hard and all Jan had to do was look at a book and pass his grades. Jan also wrote the music and produced.
JAN:
But for Dean still photography was the business …
GERTIE:
He wasn’t making it, is what Jan means. When somebody asked Jan and Dean to be at a show, they gave Dean half the money that Jan made. He saw this big crowd and saw dollar signs.
BOOK: Rock Bottom: Dark Moments In Music Babylon
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