Remembering Klaus Nomi on Film
By Steven Rosen
From Los Angeles Times
Feb. 3, 2005
The artist Kenny Scharf was listening to “Jonesy’s Jukebox” on
Indie 103.1 FM recently when he heard a Klaus Nomi song – a version of Elvis’ “Can’t
Help Falling in Love.” He was startled.
“That was the first
time I ever heard Klaus Nomi on the radio,” he says during a phone call.
And it took him back. East Village – late 1970s, during New
York’s celebrated New Wave era of creative activity. Scharf was attracting
attention as a fashionable young painter; Nomi was applying his ethereal falsetto-based
countertenor voice to both arias and old pop hits. When he performed in clubs,
he dressed like a high-fashion space alien who had fallen to earth to study
Kabuki. Their apartments shared a courtyard and Scharf could hear Nomi practice.
They became friends.
“His voice was otherworldly – you couldn’t believe the
sound,” recalls Scharf, now living in L.A., his hometown. “And in combination
with the way he looked, he was captivating. In our circle, he was a superstar. And
we all wanted him to have mass success, but I guess he was too bizarre for the
masses. But maybe if he hadn’t gotten sick and died, he would have crossed
over.”
The short, strange career of this unusual singer is the
subject of Andrew Horn’s new documentary, “The Nomi Song,” opening Feb. 4 at
the NuArt Theatre. It primarily covers the years between his startling 1978 New
York club debut – which was captured on film – and his death from AIDS in 1983 at
age 39.
During that time, he had fallings-out with old friends and
collaborators as he tried for mainstream success. He never had an album officially
released in the U.S., but became popular in France, his native Germany and
among New York club goers. (There have been posthumous U.S. releases of his European-released
discs.)
Nomi’s high-concept stage show and theatrical look were
striking. Among his favorite costumes was a triangular vinyl tuxedo that
conjured images of an Expressionist penguin. His sharply angular hair seemed
designed by a landscape architect. Combined with wide lost-child eyes and
decorous facial makeup, he had a hypnotic effect on his audiences.
And his voice was siren-like when tackling the art songs he
loved like Saint-Saens’ “Mon Coeur” aria from "Samson and Delilah” and Henry
Purcell’s solemn “The Cold Song.” His
music director Kristian Hoffman wrote some rock songs for him, too, as well as helping him and
his band choose melodramatic oldies like Lou Christie’s “Lightnin’ Strikes.”
As the Berlin-based Horn explains during a recent Los
Angeles visit, Nomi’s show was meant not as camp but as a legitimate part of
New York’s varied pop/rock scene of the time. While the Ramones chose punk, for
instance, he chose opera. “He was against the anti-professionalism of punk,”
Horn says. “He was a guy with a superbly trained voice not trying to be raw. He
was trying to make an operatic spectacle within the means he had.”
Born Klaus Sperber in Germany to a single mother during
World War II, Nomi studied music as a teen, idolized Maria Callas, and worked
as an usher at Berlin’s Deutsche Opera. He moved to New York in the early 1970s,
first finding work as a pastry chef.
“The Nomi Song’s” two German producers, Thomas Mertens and
Annette Pisacane, had made “Nico Icon” about another German-born singer who
became a tragic cult figure in New York rock circles. They approached Horn, a
Manhattanite who had been living in Berlin since 1989. In 1997, he had
co-directed “East Side Story,” on the history of Soviet and Eastern European movie
musicals.
By chance, Horn had known Sperber in New York before he adopted
his “Klaus Nomi” persona. (The name is an anagram of his favorite magazine,
Omni.) “I’d see him around the East Village and my impression was he was an
opera singer, or wanted to be one,” Horn says. “And one day I met him and he
said he wanted to become a rock ‘n’ roll singer and have a band and work with
synthesizers. I found that really bizarre – like Pavarotti doing the Beatles.”
“The Nomi Song’s” footage of the performer’s debut at New
Wave Vaudeville Night at the Irving Plaza nightclub still packs a wallop. After
smoke bombs and light flashes, he slowly emerges on stage in exotic costume and
amid robotic movements sings “Mon Coeur.” A career was launched – or so it
seemed.
Ann Magnuson, now a Los Angeles-based actress and
performance artist, was the director of that variety show and still gets a
shiver describing the scene. “At first, there was a lot of cheering because
there were smoke bombs going off,” she says in a phone interview. “And then
when he started singing the aria, people became silent. The beauty of it
transcended everything. It was completely out of nowhere, as if the mothership
had landed. There was stillness – shock.”
While Nomi’s act was based on being a make-believe alien, he
became an all-too-real societal outsider once he became sick with AIDS. The
film reveals that many of his acquaintances were afraid to visit. Hoffman, now an
L.A.-based singer-songwriter, was one of those who avoided Nomi at the end.
“The movie made me feel better about the guilt I’ve carried
around for 30 years,” he says via phone. “I remember he called me from the
hospital and said, ‘I have that AIDS.’ He wasn’t even sure what it was. There
was a climate of fear at the time. We didn’t know if it was airborne, so it was
self-preservation. For years I didn’t know how to relate to myself for being so
fearful. Now I know I wasn’t alone.”
(www.stevenrosenwriter.com)
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