The man who fell to Earth

The artist Kenny Scharf was listening to “Jonesy’s Jukebox” on Indie 103.1 FM recently when he was startled to hear a Klaus Nomi song -- a version of Elvis’ “Can’t Help Falling in Love.”

“That was the first time I ever heard Klaus Nomi on the radio,” he said. 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 also gaining notice on the club circuit for applying his ethereal falsetto-based countertenor voice to arias and old pop hits -- and for his outlandish dress as he played the part of a high-fashion space alien who had fallen to Earth to study Kabuki.

Coincidentally, their apartments shared a courtyard and Scharf could hear Nomi practice. They became friends.

“His voice was otherworldly -- you couldn’t believe the sound,” said Scharf, who now lives in L.A. “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 Friday at the Nuart Theatre. It primarily covers the years between his 1978 New York club debut -- which was captured on film -- and his AIDS-related death in 1983 at age 39.

He never had an album officially released in the U.S. but was wildly popular among New York clubgoers as well as in France and his native Germany. (There have been posthumous U.S. releases of his European-released discs.)

Opera lover

Born Klaus Sperber to a single mother in 1944, never knowing a father who died of influenza while serving in the German military 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. And long before he adopted his “Klaus Nomi” persona -- the name is an anagram of his favorite magazine, Omni -- he found work as a pastry chef.

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. With wide lost-child eyes and decorous facial makeup, he had a hypnotic effect on his audiences.

His voice was siren-like when tackling the art songs he loved, such as Saint-Saens’ “Mon Coeur” aria from “Samson and Delilah” and Henry Purcell’s solemn “The Cold Song.”

Footage of the performer’s debut at New Wave Vaudeville Night at the Irving Plaza nightclub still packs a wallop in “The Nomi Song.”

After smoke bombs and light flashes, he slowly emerges on stage in exotic costume and amid robotic movements sings “Mon Coeur.” Ann Magnuson, now a Los Angeles-based actress and performance artist, directed 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 mother ship had landed. There was stillness -- shock.”

As Horn, the Berlin-based filmmaker, explained 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, Nomi chose opera.

“He was against the anti-professionalism of punk,” Horn said. “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.”

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. Nomi’s music director, Kristian Hoffman, now an L.A.-based singer-songwriter, was one of those who avoided him at the end.

“The movie made me feel better about the guilt I’ve carried around for 30 years,” he said via telephone. “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.”

German connection

The idea for a documentary about Nomi was the brainchild of its German producers, Thomas Mertens and Annette Pisacane. The pair had learned about Nomi while making the documentary “Nico Icon,” about the German-born chanteuse with New York’s Velvet Underground who battled heroin addiction and, like Nomi, died young.

They approached Horn to ask if he’d be interested in signing on to the new project. The filmmaker is himself a cultural outsider of sorts, a Manhattanite who has been living in Berlin since 1989. He had co-directed 1997’s “East Side Story,” a documentary on Soviet and Eastern European movie musicals.

As it turned out, Horn had known Sperber briefly in New York and had attended his debut performance as Klaus Nomi.

“I’d see him around the East Village and my impression was he was an opera singer, or wanted to be one,” Horn said. “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.”

Horn was delighted to accept the producers’ offer. “I hadn’t thought about him, but it seemed normal, like I could have,” he said. “It just seemed totally right. It dropped into my lap and I took it.”