Berlin Tries to Flesh Out a Comeback

When rock fans first got to know Terri Nunn, it was in something approaching the biblical sense.

It was 1982, and Berlin, the techno-pop band from Orange and L.A. counties that Nunn fronted, was putting all its chips on the public’s prurient interest. Berlin’s first single, “Sex (I’m a . . .),” found Nunn engaging bandmate John Crawford in an X-rated audio te^te-a-te^te that was more or less a soft-core porn scene with the picture tube broken.

“I’m a goddess . . . I’m a hooker . . . I’m a blue movie . . . I’m a slut . . . I’m your babe . . . I’m a dream divine, and we make love together,” Nunn cooed, teased and commanded, before abandoning words in favor of a climactic cascade of erotic moans.

In case anyone failed to get the point, the cover of Berlin’s debut EP, “Pleasure Victim,” depicted her as an on-screen object of male voyeurism. The inner sleeve found the petite, bud-mouthed sex-object-to-be clad in nothing but a Farrah Fawcett hairdo and a strategically positioned fur wrap.

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Some would-be guardians of the public’s moral interest were outraged, but the public’s prurient interest prevailed. “Pleasure Victim” sold a million copies.

Berlin--essentially singer Nunn, songwriter Crawford and whatever side players they brought along--recorded two more albums, the gold-selling “Love Life” and “Count Three & Pray,” before breaking up in 1987.

With nostalgia for ‘80s bands now blossoming on VH1’s “Big ‘80s” show, in compilations of techno-pop hits of the era and in comeback tours by the likes of Modern English, Missing Persons and A Flock of Seagulls, Nunn, at 35, has decided to tour again with the old band name and the old songs. Berlin’s shows tonight and Saturday at the Coach House are the first in her summer touring campaign.

Speaking over the phone recently from a rehearsal studio in Los Angeles where she was breaking in an all-new lineup (that doesn’t include Crawford), Nunn--an upbeat speaker with a ready and hearty laugh--said she still relishes making the erotic stage declarations of “Sex (I’m a . . .).” But she also has been dealing with mature subject matter that is not overtly sexual.

In 1991, she recorded her first and only solo album, “Moment of Truth,” which included songs about racial prejudice, domestic abuse and the suicide of her chronically unemployed, alcoholic father.

Nunn says she was 14 when, his marriage crumbling, he learned that he had terminal cancer and killed himself. Her mother, a secretary, was the family’s support; Nunn was still a teenager in Los Angeles when she began landing roles in TV movies and series such as “Lou Grant” and “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.”

“I always got the underbelly stuff. I never got the sweet girl [parts]. I was always a schizophrenic hooker, a junkie. In ‘Mary Hartman,’ I was a baby sitter on reds.

“I got [acting] out of my system. It was a good job, but my big dream was music.” Nunn, a fan of Grace Slick, Bonnie Raitt and Ann Wilson of Heart, had no experience to speak of when she joined Berlin, which had emerged from Fullerton as an all-male New Wave guitar band.

“Synthesizer music wasn’t known in ‘79,” she recalls. “Kraftwerk in Germany and Ultravox in England were the two sounds John and I patterned the band after. Toni Childs was singing with the band when I auditioned. She wanted to leave and do a solo career.”

After Berlin’s run (which was interrupted by a breakup for about a year in 1980-81) and the flop of her solo album, Nunn floundered for several years, looking for a new direction. Last year, she tried to hook up again with Crawford.

Collaborating with Jon St. James, the producer-engineer in La Habra who had helped record “Pleasure Victim,” they worked up some new songs, aiming to relaunch Berlin. But they couldn’t establish a workable new professional relationship.

“John and Terri saw things in a different way,” St. James says. “There was too much water under the bridge,” and that past baggage from Berlin’s ‘80s run “was getting in the way. The vibe wasn’t there.”

Early this year, Nunn started a new band, Sin City. She says she was exploring a newfound influence, the deliciously crude, mid-’60 garage-rock of bands like the Seeds and the Standells, when a call came from an old friend at WMMS, the Cleveland rock station that had been one of the first, along with KROQ, to jump on “Sex (I’m a . . .).”

Nunn says she had stayed in touch with her WMMS contacts and had received annual invitations to reform Berlin for the station’s equivalent of the KROQ “Weenie Roast.” This time she accepted and played two shows in Cleveland in mid-May. (She says that at the larger, amphitheater gig, No Doubt’s Gwen Stefani dedicated “Just a Girl” to her.)

Nunn’s plan now is to play shows for the next two months, with hopes that they will lead to a new record deal for Berlin.

“I was never interested in bringing Berlin back if there wasn’t anywhere to take it,” she said. “I couldn’t find a direction that interested me enough to revive it. But now I have that [in the rawer, garage-rock influence], and it makes it worth it to me.

“This year was the first time I developed material, both with John and others, that I could say, ‘Here’s Berlin now, not Berlin 10 years ago.’ That was never my idea of a good time.”

Actually, Berlin’s ‘80s catalog, fleshed out by five or six new songs, will make up the bulk of Nunn’s shows. The arrangements will be more or less faithful. Live keyboards will replace some programmed parts, she said, and a bit of an industrial-rock edge will come through on certain numbers, augmenting the sleek, gurgling synths and riffing rock guitar that defined Berlin’s sound.

The industrial influence comes from Steven Seibold, leader of the O.C. anger-rock band Hate Dept, who helped Nunn during the rehearsal and songwriting stages for the revamped Berlin. Busy with his own band, Seibold isn’t expected to be on Nunn’s shows. Her lineup consists of guitarist Rick Ballard and bassist Dave Eckles, who played with her in the short-lived Sin City, keyboards player Scott Warren and drummer Steve Klong.

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There was more to the ‘80s Berlin than unvarnished sexuality. The real highlights of “Pleasure Victim” were “The Metro” and “Masquerade,” moodily romantic songs that dispensed with explicitness.

“No More Words,” a catchy hit single from “Love Life,” was another high point. Berlin also scored commercially with “Take My Breath Away,” a formulaic love theme from the “Top Gun” soundtrack that went to No. 1 in 1986. But the vivid first impression Nunn made as lust personified is the one that stuck.

“I don’t think [sexuality] is ever going to stop being an issue with rock ‘n’ roll in general,” she says. “I stopped fighting it. Howard Stern was an example of the reaction we got a lot. His take on an interview with me was (breasts and buttocks) and he didn’t want to know anything else. That’s what I was getting from everybody. ‘That’s all she has to talk about, let’s leave it at that.’ ”

Although “Sex (I’m a . . .)” was blasted by moralists, avoided by many radio and video programmers who thought it too hot to handle, and ridiculed by critics (“tasteless and offensive, with crude lyrics and ridiculous moaning,” scoffs Ira Robbins in “The Trouser Press Record Guide” to alternative music), Nunn says she can still sing it with pride.

“People still come up to me and say, ‘You know how many times I [had intercourse] to that song?’ Great. If I inspired more sex, more pleasure and enjoyment in the world, that’s something. Singing it puts me back in that feeling, and I mean it.

“The guitar player [who duets with her on the number in her new lineup] is hot as [expletive],” Nunn added (referring to his looks, not his guitar licks). “I’m married, so I can’t touch him. But I still love singing that song.”

* Berlin, featuring Terri Nunn, plays tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m. at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. The opening acts are Esoteric on Friday, the Flavor on Saturday. $19.50-$21.50. (714) 496-8930.