When confronted with the issue of his past failures, Berry pauses and takes a deep drag of his cigarette. His quizzical expression doesn't seem to indicate any profound displeasure over the inquiry. Still, it seems, he needs a little time to prepare an answer.
"You never know going into things what they're going to be, whether it's marriage, a new job or a new band," he says, turning reflective. "It starts out and it's this honeymoon, and then the honeymoon's over. That's life."
In the romance department, Berry's most recent honeymoon ended last September, when he broke up with his girlfriend of two years, moving out when the relationship "just sort of fizzled." On the bright side, this is the closest to debt-free Berry has been in years -- even if he still doesn't have a phone. He says he's curbed his drug intake these days. And his music? "I'm just sort of leaving it open for the time being," Berry says.
Not that Berry has sworn off performing. In fact, he and some old friends will make a special appearance next Thursday, June 12, at Party on the Plaza. And for a little rejuvenative inspiration, Berry can always look to his son, Hudson, who appears to be following in his father's footsteps -- though with a decidedly firmer grip on reality. A trombone player in the local ska/punk band Half Loaded, Hudson is a junior at the High School for the Performing and Visual Arts, and he plans on sticking around for his diploma. For the most part, he was too young to remember much about his father's 1980s heyday.
"It wasn't that weird," says Hudson of life with Mr. Madness. "It all just seemed like a lot of fun."
And what of his father's turbulent career and seemingly unrealized potential?
"I don't really feel bad. He could have been really awesome and really big, because most of the bands today suck," Hudson says. "Today, it's not even about how good you are. If some big person sees you and likes you, then you get picked. So I guess no one big enough ever saw him. It's just the luck of the draw."
Ever since he was a boy, Herschel Berry has had a thing for Howard Hughes. As a youngster, he admired the way the late oil tycoon took one risk after another. Berry's opinion of Hughes is that he was a daredevil visionary, one who would have found a way to carry out his strange schemes even if he hadn't had the millions to make them a reality.
It's easy to understand why Berry would feel a kinship with Hughes. For a time, he too was among Houston's larger-than-life eccentrics. Not surprisingly, Berry never came within spitting distance of the billionaire -- short of gawking at his limousine parked outside the old Shamrock Hotel one night in the early 1960s, soon before Hughes went into permanent seclusion. A ten-year-old Herschel had been out cruising in the family car with his older siblings when they spotted the white, gleaming beast, an "HH" engraved on each of its gold hubcaps. That only added to the mystique, and from then on, Berry was hopelessly hooked, consuming every detail he could find on the recluse.
These days, Berry isn't quite so obsessed. Still, he stands vigil by Hughes's gravesite at Glenwood Cemetery from time to time. A particularly memorable visit in the early '80s served as the inspiration for one of his most compelling tunes, "Mr. Madness." It's a sizzling, autobiographical white-boy blues number, perhaps the best thing Berry has ever written, with its lead-in line, "I rolled a seven on the dice on Howard Hughes's grave."
According to Berry, he really did roll a seven on Hughes's grave that day. It must have been a curious scene: The crazy rocker communing with the crazy billionaire across the chasm of life and death, clacking the bones in his hand, then sending them spinning across the cropped grass. Waiting to see what he'd rolled. Taking delight in the lucky seven.
A symbolic gesture, perhaps, and one that certainly makes intriguing fodder for song lyrics. Talking with Berry, though, one gets the feeling that it was much more than that -- a sign, perhaps, of greater things to come.
