Rain Perry: Press

RAIN PERRY "Cinderblock Bookshelves" (Precipitous Records) four stars

Part of a larger autobiographical multimedia project, singer-writer Perry's astoundingly insightful song cycle takes on subjects ranging from growing up with an artistic but irresponsible father (the title track and several others) to the emotional impact of California's landscape ("Yosemite"). This is confessional folk-rock at its best: wise, specific, sometimes harrowing, funny in places, smart about personal mistakes and truly grateful to those who made her the fine artist that she is (whether they consciously helped her along or not). Each cut has a distinctive, pleasing arrangement, and Perry's voice, though dominantly sweet and wearily dry, is a marvelous instrument of
many supple colors.

Growing up naked
Ojai singer Rain Perry relives a hippie childhood in song and on stage

Growing up in the 1960s, Rain Perry had the kind of childhood your grandparents warn you against. As a young child, she had to depend on a hippie dad with not enough money and too many girlfriends. She shared houses with roommates with names such as "Superman" and "Bear," wore hand-me-down clothes from other poor kids, ate rennet-less jack cheese sandwiches for lunch, and was told never to smoke pot - except with her dad.

Was it a tragic experience?

Not really: Perry survived, as children usually survive the excesses of their parents, and along the way grew up to be an award-winning singer-songwriter, becoming the sort of semi-famous artist her late father always wanted to be.

Now, with characteristic good humor, she is opening a theater show about her upbringing, having some fun with her hippie past, but also giving audiences a chance to hear in song (and see in photographs) exactly what it felt like - the joy and heartache of growing up a "wild child."

A new song by that name tells the story of her youth in foggy West Marin County, to the north of San Francisco. Now the area is known for bed-and-breakfasts and well-off tourists, but at the time Inverness was an obscure little town with big farmhouses that could be rented cheaply - ideal for hippies living communally. Perry sings: "Played tag on the ridge by moonlight/Just because it was a lovely night/Everyone in a circle/We had so much time."

The songs she wrote for the show will be part of a new album, her third, but as she began writing the songs after her father died of cancer in 1999, she found she had too much good material to fit into 12 songs.

"I was working with a musical career consultant named Kari Estrin," Perry says. "She told me to write everything out in prose, and figure out later what would work in songs and what wouldn't. I came up with what I thought was a lot of really great material. I knew that it was bigger than an album, but I didn't know what to do with it until I took a class with Kim."

Kim Maxwell, a fast-talking and animated actress who co-founded Theatre 150 in Ojai with her ex-husband Dwier Brown, specializes in helping students find their voice on stage. When Perry took Maxwell's acting-writing class, she found it liberating, both as a performer on stage, and as a writer. It especially benefited Perry's sense of humor, which isn't always easy to fit into songs, but gets plenty of exposure in the show.

The humor also comes out as she rehearses the show with Maxwell, who has gone on to become the director of Perry's show (called Cinderblock Bookshelves, which is also the name of the soon-to-be-released album).

While going over a scene from her teenage years, Perry reveals that when she moved from California to Colorado as a teenager, she found herself going from a hippie world where "everyone was naked - often" and women didn't shave at all to a conservative town where the girls shaved not just their legs, but their arms as well.

"Oh my God, they did not!" cries Maxwell in mock horror. A little later, as she works on the movements onstage with Perry, she decides Perry should return to a central chair on stage, to make a central turn in the narrative clear.

"Run back to the chair," she tells Perry. "Run back to the chair and wait for the arrival of your sexuality!"

Perry smiles with wry appreciation. Looking back at her childhood, Perry sees both good and bad, but one of the worst parts of it was what she called the "too much information aspect." Because her mother died when she was a young child, she grew up sharing everything with her dad, and ended up learning far more than she really wanted to about his personal problems.

"In talking to my childhood friends now, I think we agree that there was an epidemic at that time of parents over-sharing with kids who really weren't old enough to understand adult issues," she says. "I'm trying not to do that with my kids."

Perry stresses that she feels the counterculture brought a lot of good to American culture, much of which she believes we now take for granted. She cites patients' rights, the questioning of authority, natural childbirth, the peace movement, and yoga. On a personal level, she is deeply grateful to her father for believing she had something worth saying and worth writing down.

"My dad taught me to value my expression," Perry says. "A lot of kids aren't raised to value that at all, and it becomes a huge struggle for them as they grow older."

After her father died, as the only survivor she inherited his papers, and spent months reading through his letters, screenplays and diaries. (She didn't worry about prying into his private life, knowing he always wanted to make an "autobiographical epic" movie of his life at some point.) Reading letters from his stern Midwestern father, who wanted him to go to a prep school back East, who couldn't understand why he named his daughter Rain instead of Lorraine, and who never approved of his interest in drama, Perry gained a new appreciation of why her father had rejected his in-laws. But she also knows from personal experience how difficult it was for her as a kid, which she describes poignantly in a couple lines in the title song: "On the highway together, my daddy and me/From where we can live freely to where we can stay for free."

She has been working on the show for the last three years, taking it through two versions, but neither she nor Maxwell was entirely happy with the past performances. Before planning a big premiere at the new and much-larger version of Theatre 150 in Downtown Ojai, they gave the play to veteran English screenwriter Peter Bellwood for editing.

Bellwood, who learned a great deal performing on stage with famous friends such as Peter Cook and the late Dudley Moore, made some crucial changes. First, he cut the show, to maintain its momentum, which also allowed Perry to sing her songs from start to finish (previously, she had only begun many of the songs, fading them out partway, which was frustrating to audiences, given her songwriting ability). He also asked Perry to play her story "completely straight, without any kowtowing to the audience."

Too much self-deprecation makes audiences nervous," he says. "As the chairman of her supporters' club, I don't want Rain to say or do anything that suggests she should be given a free ride. I'm so impressed with Rain; I want her to get in the audience's face while telling her story, to just do it without any apology."

This she now does. At one point, she plays a brave young teacher, trying to teach sex education to a rowdy assembly of middle-school kids, answering questions written under anonymity and passed up to the front of the class. Naturally, the mostly immature kids ask the rudest questions they can think of, forcing the teacher to pretend to be far more comfortable with the subject than anyone facing a crowd of middle-school kids could possibly be. Perry plays the teacher's mortification directly. It's hilarious.

From Perry's perspective, the irony is that although everyone expected her to become some kind of free spirit when she graduated from Nordhoff High School, she was only able to become an artist after she became a soccer mom first.

"When I graduated from high school, I knew I wanted to be an artist, but I had no idea what I was doing," she said. "It wasn't until I settled down that I was able to figure out how to do it."

Maxwell, who admits her life has become "disheveled" in the aftermath of her recent divorce, admires Perry's ability to focus, and even has taken lessons from her in stability, such as how to use Quicken and control her finances.

"I grew up in a completely different town, with parents who could hardly have been more different than hers, but I see the exact same struggles in her family as I had in mine," Maxwell said. "All parents want it to be perfect for their kids. That was Rain's father's intention, and that was my parents' intention, and none of them could do it."

Maxwell tears up a little, thinking about her own struggles as a parent, and reveals that since she started working on the show, she has been spending more time trying to make sure her kids are her first priority.

From Perry's perspective, these kinds of worries are inevitable - but as a kid who survived a good deal of neglect, she has a philosophical outlook on the question.

"I think kids understand a lot more than parents think they do," she says. "They just ‘ozmose' it. Not telling them everything doesn't mean that you're lying, and that's OK."

Cinderblock Bookshelves: A Guide for Children of Fame-Obsessed Bohemian Nomads opens Feb. 8 at Theatre 150 in Ojai - 16 E. Matilija St., Ojai, 646-4300 - and runs until Feb. 17. For performance dates, times and other information, visit www.theater150.org. For more information on Rain Perry, visit www.rainperry.com

“Rain Perry’s guileless lyrics and infectious melodies remind one of Dar Williams’ best work...the arrangements add organic ornamentation without drawing attention from the innate power of the songs.”

Warm, deep and brave, Rain Perry is someone you won’t regret getting to know, if only for 90 minutes of her fascinating life.”

Confessions of a post-hippie wild child

June 16, 2008 12:00 AM

Ojai-based singer-songwriter Rain Perry has been plying her wares and courting her folk-pop muse for several years, with a creative voice that first made public with the 1999 album "Balance," released on her own indie label, Precipitous Records. But her latest endeavor, "Cinderblock Bookshelves," bumps up many notches in ambition and artistic -- not to mention highly, nakedly personal -- distinction.

This impressive album, with guest spots from Victoria Williams and Eliza Gilkyson, was recorded in Austin, Texas, and is a concept album that doubles as an intriguing autobiographical song cycle about her childhood growing up with a hippie-drifter-dreamer-sometime-drug-dealer-would-be-screenwriter father, who passed away in 1999 of colon cancer, at age 53.

As she explained Sunday at Center Stage Theater, the piece also is a belated and elaborate eulogy, for both her father and mother, who died when she was young. On another level, the piece also is a tragicomic account of lost 1960s idealism and the wayward pathways of its progeny.

Beyond the musical component, Ms. Perry has created a multi-media opus by stitching together archival images, letters and other artifacts. Various threads come together in a venturesome 90-minute one-woman show theater version of the project, which she premiered at Ojai's Theater 150 earlier this year and also brought Sunday to Center Stage. Guitarist Danny B. Harvey was her versatile musical ally, who supplied quotes and riffs from classic rock tunes as a way of hinting at certain eras, and who supplied the support for the series of songs from the album -- mostly presented in abridged form here to allow for theatrical flow throughout the evening.

By the nature of her past, the work is something of a humble audio-visual road movie, literally and psychologically. Her narrative goes from Pasadena, where her Midwestern father had landed and met her mother, creating what he called a "utopian, Bohemian family" with their child and her offbeat name. Her parents scampered on the outskirts of showbiz and theater, having brushes with Paul Williams, Tom "Billy Jack" Laughlin and Nancy Sinatra, who cut Ms. Perry's songwriter mother's song, "Kind of a Woman."

After a breakup, her father moved to Northern California for a life of odd jobbing and marijuana growing, a rambling life into which Ms. Perry was flung after her mother's death. Her bittersweet title song, "Cinderblock Bookshelves," refers to the temporary nature of their home, as they moved from place to place with their cinderblocks, and it also ties into the centrality of words and creativity in their life. Her father long imagined writing a screenplay that would fulfill his dreams and lift him out of a life of debt and sometimes fun, sometimes unsettling transience. Meanwhile, growing pot and dealing ecstasy helped keep food on the table.

Ms. Perry had her own rough road to deal with, including a diagnosis of Rheumatoid Arthritis, which robbed her of her ability to play guitar. She also recounts her brush with Werner "est" Erhard's psycho-religious movement. Ms. Perry skillfully punctuates her memoir with songs highlighting stops along the way, including her early life as a songwriter and musician ("Girl in the Boy's Room"), a tribute to the girl who stole her would-be boyfriend, allowing her to meet her current husband ("Dear Dana") and a sad paean to her father toward the end of his life, as friends and family hovered around him ("Many Moons of You").

Such a nakedly autobiographical piece as this could easily drift toward the cultural transgression sin of excessive navel-gazing or the blog era's habit of oversharing. Yet Ms. Perry keeps us empathetically tuned in, through humor, her engaging way with a song and the smart theatrical structuring of her piece.

"Cinderblock Bookshelves" is the songwriter's grand attempt to get some closure or the illumination of perspective on her life. "Bent or broken, it's a family tree," she sang philosophically in closing.

Rain Perry's High Wire Walk
Cinescene
Rain Perry's songs on her new CD "Balance"[Image] alternate between frustration and joy, happiness and disgust, brooding sexuality and fear.

Through her songs, Perry works out her complicated life of trying to be a mother, a wife, and an artist.

If Rain Perry was a character in a film, she'd probably be cast as Winona Ryder -- the two share the same eyes and the same haircut. But Ryder seems to offer my life very while Perry's music has enough stuff to get me through the hardest days.

Perry wrote music played piano and guitar most of her young life until she was stricken with Rheumatoid Arthritis and unable to really move her fingers enough to play. Where that might make someone like me fall into a pit of despair, possibly even turning to something like Smack or severe alcoholism to ease the bitterness, Perry worked it out then went on to write beautiful songs.

I can't remember the last time an album brought me to tears. Perry's "Girl in the Doorway," a lullaby of sorts, written about the last time she saw her mother who died, leaving a seven year old Rain to be raised by her father. Remarkably, the song is written from the mother's point of view, making it all the more moving; what is harder than losing a child, even if it's you who's dying?

"My girl in the hospital doorway saying good night to me. I say I'll be here in the morning, but you know I won't be."

Perry has endured the death of both parents, her father's only last year.

What makes the album so great, aside from the writing and Perry's clear, lovely voice, is its dramatic structure. It moves with ease from the brooding "Girl in the Doorway," the fourth cut on the album, to a cover of Randy Newman's "Let's
Burn Down the Cornfield," building up and bringing down the listener, creating a sense of story.

"Yosemite," the third cut, is nothing short of a masterpiece. A clear, dead-on metaphor; an insightful declaration of Perry's own genius: suffering makes great art, not because of the present pain but because of how much more glorious life becomes in the wake of it:

"I've seen the brightest sparks
Glowing in the faces
Of my friends whose lives have been
The biggest mess
They don't make landmarks
Out of ordinary places,
Only landscapes that have seen
The most distress.

"Ten thousand tons of ice
Are crushing you
Into a beautiful one-of-a-kind
The thaw will come
And you will be
Yosemite."

The farthest down Perry goes after "Girl in the Doorway" is a dark portrait of a child molester.
Like the other songs on the album, "Idaho" is directed at someone. The "you" changes from song to song, making it clear that the writer is working out her relationships and roles to these varying forces in her life, hence the title "Balance."

"The Real Thing" closes the album, drawing a kind of resolution to it all, describing what must be Perry's workable philosophy of life. Finally, it's about what you can count on when all else fails: "Welcome to the real thing/where the girl's not always pretty/and the bed's not always made/and often you're both too busy/or too tired/but the passion that she shows you/it is because she knows you/what more could you desire?

What more, indeed. "Balance" is exceptional debut album and Perry is the real thing.
Sasha Stone

CineScene 1999