Lord, I've Been on Fire

He's checked in to a mental institution and conquered England with an album nobody in the States has heard. It's been a hell of a year for pop genius Brian Christinzio.

by Patrick Rapa

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Published: Nov 27, 2007

Photo By: Michael T. Regan

Brian Christinzio, is standing alone in the kitchen of his South Philly apartment. The room is dark except for the playback screen on the camcorder in his hands, which casts a harsh glow on his face. His expression is one of perplexed curiosity. He's watching a tape of himself he's never seen, from a period in his life he can barely remember, though it was only about nine months ago.

The Christinzio on the screen is pale and lethargic, sometimes crying, sometimes blank-faced. There's a small line of stitches following the curve of his right eyebrow from the time he — high on Ativan, drunk on Jack Daniels and depressed beyond recognition — crashed his bike in the street. That was about a week after he was released from the mental hospital.

Steph Vernacchio, his girlfriend and roommate (and friend for the past decade and a half — they met in grade school), was the one holding the camera. For the most part she keeps the shot tight and steady on his face, though she does zoom in at one point, slowly, until one huge eye takes up the entirety of the frame.

When the zoom can zoom no more, it lingers frustrated, like a dog at the end of its chain wanting to go farther, deeper, into the head of the man.

And she asks him questions.

How do you feel?

What did the doctor tell you today?

His answers are slow and muddled. He says he's not well.

The tests today, the EMGs, reported no fasciculation.

"Right," he replies.

Not anything. With that high-tech machine.

She did this several times, pointed the camera at her boyfriend at his absolute lowest. While Christinzio is in the kitchen, watching the screen, Steph is on the couch in the living room, rooting around in the camera bag for more tapes. Then she lets out a soft gasp and pulls out a small bottle of pills. It's the Ativan she hid from Brian months ago. She clutches it in both hands and quietly darts past the kitchen doorway and up the stairs to find a new hiding spot for it.

In the U.K., Christinzio, 28, is something of a hit. His band, B.C. Camplight, featuring himself, guitarist Josh Olmstead and a rotating cast of characters, plays to enthusiastic fans who make requests, who sing along to the lyrics, who stop him in the street for autographs. His unattached bandmates hook up with groupies. His second album, Blink of a Nihilist, released on the British label One Little Indian, got five stars from the London Times, a rare honor, and praise for its "pop-perfect cadences and chord progressions."

The first single, "Lord, I've Been on Fire" — featuring some pounding piano and a surprisingly angelic falsetto from this occasional boxer and former high school football captain — enjoyed rotation on BBC 2.

"The fact that I sing high and I look like fuckin' Rob Reiner — it's like there's enough of a story that they give it a listen and once they do, they play it," he figures.

After one show in Brighton two weeks ago, a girl demanded that she put on his trademark, if sweaty, bowler hat and pose with him for a picture. The closest he's come to that here is getting recognized by a guy in a Radio Shack in Port Richmond who asked for autographs for himself and his girlfriend.

You can't really blame his home country or his home city for not catching on like the Brits have. After all, they've heard the album, as has Australia, Canada, Mexico and Japan. Though Blink of a Nihilist has been in the can for about a year, Christinzio has yet to ink a deal with a record label in the U.S. At press time, he's listening to a bunch of offers; the current front-runner is Paper Bag Records, the Toronto-based home of underground up-and-comers like Tokyo Police Club, Figurines and You Say Party! We Say Die!

Stateside, he's had a little more concrete success with his publisher, Nettwerk One, who helped get "Blood and Peanut Butter," from Camplight's first album, Hide, Run Away, onto a sweeps-week episode of Grey's Anatomy. Featuring a vocal hook by fellow Philadelphian Cynthia G. Mason, the song is a catchy pop rock opus. As is typical for Christinzio, the attractive, almost carnivalesque melodies and dramatic pauses don't quite hint at the scatterbrained lyrics:

I would die to know where you lie and go

Oh no

I'm having trouble finding out which way to go

I'm stuck in slow-mo

Looking on the ground for the love I'd found

The Grey's Anatomy producers saw fit to open the episode with about three minutes of "Blood and Peanut Butter." Christinzio's not much of a fan of the show, but he gives a thumbs-up to the ASCAP royalty checks that get mailed to him six months after the episode airs here and in Britain. He won't give an amount, but says it was enough to cover rent for the year. And the song's still paying off; the rights were just sold to Japanese pop star and actress Yui to cover it.

The new Blink of a Nihilist, superior to its predecessor on all fronts — sonically, lyrically, stylistically — sounds like it could be Christinzio's breakthrough album. Recording finished in December of 2006. By February 2007 he was in a mental hospital.

Michael T. Regan GOOD STUFF: Friends for 15 years, Stephanie Vernacchio and Brian Christinzio make music together in B.C. Camplight

Brian Christinzio has hypothyroidism, and lived with it, undiagnosed, throughout his teens. The condition makes him prone to fatigue, muscle weakness, depression and frequent episodes where, he says, he loses touch with reality.

Christinzio does not have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. He knows this for a fact. In the past year he's been tested for ALS, better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, four times by four different doctors. The electromyography (EMG) test calls for large needles to be inserted into a muscle and release an electrical shock to measure the response. It's painful and rarely requested by the patient. Christinzio had his tongue tested three times.

Much to the dismay of Vernacchio, his friends, his family and just about every doctor he's ever met, Christinzio is always diagnosing himself with some terrible disease or condition. Hypochondria's probably the only one he's gotten right, but over the years he's believed wholeheartedly that he was going blind or had lymphoma in his back. Once he had his parents take him to the doctor because he thought a bat had bitten him in his sleep. When he was a kid, growing up in Wenonah, N.J., he told his mom he'd fractured his uterus. He laughs at it now, but Googling symptoms and convincing himself he had them almost destroyed him.

"You've never seen a man that was more fearful of everything in life. Scared to death of failure. Scared to death of death," recalls Vernacchio. "When you hear a man that's so convinced [he's going to die], you almost start to believe it yourself."

She was sympathetic during the early days, but soon realized that wasn't helping. "After a while I became desensitized to it like, 'You're not going to die. Shut the fuck up.'"

It was run-of-the-mill muscle twitches caused by nervousness, a condition known as benign fasciculation syndrome, that led him to believe he had ALS or that his muscles were atrophying. "I saw my mom cry for maybe the second time in my life when I sat her down and told her I was dying," remembers Christinzio. "It wasn't like, 'Mom I think I'm dying,' it was, 'Mom I'm dying. I know it for a fact.'"

Test after test, for various ailments, proved him wrong, but he persisted in his doomsaying.

"The pool of people I could complain to started to diminish 'cause all the evidence was that I was OK," he recalls. His band caught on when he was late for soundcheck at Johnny Brenda's, but like his parents and his girlfriend, were at a loss for how to help him. "Something in me I guess grew more and more isolated, and I started having bad thoughts. Not necessarily planned thoughts of offing myself but definitely fantasizing about what that would be like, stuff that was really starting to scare me."

He soon fell into a rut of crying all the time, unable to work, unable to move from the couch. "Christ, even if I had the worst disease on earth, people aren't supposed to react like that."

So one day he drove to Friends Hospital and filled out the forms to check himself in. "I walked in kind of calmly and explained to them what was going on, and they said, 'Have you had any thoughts of suicide?' and I said 'Yeah,'" he recalls. "It was really strange because they don't get a lot of people like me. I was the only one there who was hoping [he was] nuts."

The daily routine: pancakes with over-sweet syrup in the morning, aerobic stretching assemblies, two smoke breaks outside. "There was a participation class where you had to talk about your feelings — very One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest kind of stuff."

After about four days, he says he told the head psychiatrist it wasn't helping and he wanted to go home. However, the papers he signed to get into the place made it clear that only the powers that be could get him out. "They really thought I was in a lot of trouble and I probably was. So they just kept me, day after day."

"The first day I saw him at the mental hospital it broke my heart," recalls Vernacchio. "It was so irrational. I knew he wasn't going to die. ... He was just so anguished and so sad. And he couldn't see it from anyone else's perspective." She braved a blizzard on Valentine's Day to bring him a three-course meal, which they ate in the cafeteria with the other patients and their visitors.

When sleeping pills failed to calm him down, doctors switched Christinzio to Ativan. He was instantly energized. "I would do all these strength testing things all the time. Get down and I'd do like a one-armed push-up, and sprint to the end of the hall ... to reassure myself I could still move," he says. "Looking back on this, I just looked like somebody that should have been there."

Soon he was popping Ativan several times a day, and started hanging out by the hospital's pharmacy, waiting for the shifts to change, trying to get more pills.

When he was released from the hospital after 21 days, he was worse off than he had been, though he was feeling more social. He kept a bottle of Jack Daniels by his bed to help him sleep. He kept the bottle of Ativan in his pocket wherever he went. He lied to loved ones about everything. This time is an utter blur to Christinzio. He barely remembers the times Vernacchio — who took on second and third jobs to support them — got out the video camera to interview him, though he does vaguely remember shooting himself Blair Witch-style.

"Drug addictions, stuff like that, I never could imagine that that would happen to me. But I had to do it or else I knew [I] was going to obsess and obsess and obsess and I was going to end up back in that place. I'd wake up feeling good, I'd pop another Ativan."

The morning after a Bitter, Bitter Weeks show at Johnny Brenda's, he was left wondering how he got home. He spent a few hours calling everyone he knew, making sure he didn't do anything stupid or dangerous. The blackout was a scary thing, but not scary enough to make him stop.

Things reached a breaking point on a flight this past June to the U.K. when Vernacchio, traveling with the band as its newly minted keyboard player, took the pills away. "I didn't want to wake up next to a dead guy," she explains.

Christinzio, particularly neurotic about flying, had consumed six Ativans and several gin and tonics. He was a mess, pacing the aisles, throwing his food tray to the floor. Eventually he passed out. The first show, in chilly Glasgow, was tough. He spent the tour performing and withdrawing. When he wasn't onstage he was curled up on the tour bus with a blanket and a bottle of wine, "jerking around like the fish at the end of that Faith No More video."

After eight days he started feeling better. The anxiety and fear continued, but the daily crying stopped and he was thinking more clearly.

It's been about five months since he kicked the Ativan cold turkey and, really, he's back to square one. He still has his hypochondriac tendencies to deal with, still stares at his tongue in the mirror every day waiting for some signs of atrophy or fasciculation. He saw several therapists during and after his stay in "the bin," as he calls it, but never stuck it out longer than a session or two.

He was told he had various disorders: generalized anxiety, obsessive compulsive, depersonalization and depression. But since he essentially eluded professional treatment, his improvement is largely self-diagnosed.

Asked if Christinzio's problems were threatening to their relationship, Vernacchio says yes, that they still are. "It still didn't get resolved, you know?" she says. "It was the first time I saw him completely separate from myself. It was a lesson. It was a good lesson for me because it was like well, you never can trust anything or anyone, huh? You don't know what's gonna happen to somebody's brain."

Still, they are able to go out, to have fun, to try to get back to a comfortable place neither one thought they'd ever find again. He figures that keeping busy keeps him sane. Too much downtime sets his mind racing.

On the band's recent tour, she was diligent in not humoring his hypochondria and he stayed away from the pills. "I did the flights completely sober," he says, "and by completely sober I mean ridiculously drunk."

Christinzio remains a man on the edge, on the heels of madness and always afraid it'll return, a success across the ocean but virtually unknown in his hometown. He looks to control his own destiny, but it's hard to say how much of that is up to him.

Michael T. Regan

The name "Brian Wilson" frequently gets dropped in reviews of B.C. Camplight albums. It's not just the crazy-singing-piano player thing. It's the quest-for-perfect-pop thing. Christinzio put a lot of pressure on himself while making Blink of a Nihilist. He spent a month in close friend and frequent collaborator Brian McTear's Miner Street Studio working on it, playing everything from piano to bass to accordion. He talked it up to friends, his manager, his music publisher.

In the studio, he's a meticulous planner, takes things very seriously. He's done session work with other artists who leave things up to happy accidents and let things develop organically, but he looks at music like a math problem, putting everything in its place and making sure it adds up to the intended result.

"The man is like a classical composer," says local artist Adam Arcuragi, who called on Christinzio to play piano on his yet-to-be-released second LP. "He can think out entire arrangements in his head and then take about 10 minutes to actually get them out on paper or keyboard. I've seen him do it — it's like, what I imagine, it would have been to watch Beethoven or Haydn's face when they were lost in thought."

"Lord I've Been on Fire" and "Suffer for Two," the first two singles off Blink of a Nihilist, got remixed by noted hitmaker Dave Bascombe, who's worked with Springsteen, Depeche Mode and Tears for Fears, among others. "It always comes out sounding super radio-friendly, which I guess is why they play it on the radio," says Christinzio. The songs are a little slicker, with more prominent drums and vocals. It only sounds weird if you know the originals.

Still, last week Christinzio returned to Miner Street to work with McTear on the third single, "The Hip and the Homeless." The idea is to remix it before the remixer has the chance. Maybe his next hit on the BBC will be more on his own terms.

"I can't even imagine having a hit record on American radio," he says. He hopes to move on to movie soundtrack work later in his career. He's already done some of that here and there. "I wanna get to the point where I don't have to leave my city to make money and have a career."

While music is Christinzio's full-time obsession, his amateur boxing hobby is an on again/off again thing. Right now his record stands at 27-7. Throughout the recording process, he obsessed over Muhammad Ali DVDs, saw Rocky Balboa twice in the theater, brought a mattress down to the living room to jab at and told everyone he was going to get back in the ring. He had an opponent picked out, somebody with real contender aspirations. "I was like, 'This guy's gonna try to be a champion of the world one day and I'm going to end his dream now,'" he laughs.

The fight never happened.

"'Cause I went nuts," he says. "I set up the boxing match for February and by February I was certainly in no condition to fight."

"The creative high of writing, preparing and recording that record must have been quite a cliff to fall from when it was all finished," guesses McTear.

Christinzio and Vernacchio agree, saying that some of the problem was a kind of post-partum depression. Once the album was out of him, so to speak, he had trouble dealing with it.

For a while there, Christinzio was telling reporters that he'd visited mental hospitals for inspiration and research for Blink of a Nihilist — never mind that his visit to "the bin" came after recording was finished.

Sometimes they ask him if his illness affects his songwriting. He has to laugh. "I was like, are you asking me if my brain influences my writing? Do your lungs influence your breathing? Does your heart influence you from not being dead?" he says with a smile. "It's always been like that. I've always had this capacity to be ill."

He's much more comfortable talking about it now, although he's anxious about the light it'll cast him in. He's not Elliott Smith. His melodies are playful and upbeat. His lyrics are driven by quirky images and humor.

"I don't really want it to seem like a ploy. I'm really not interested in Tortured Soul Makes Music."

(pat@citypaper.net)

B.C. Camplight with Audible, Girl Friday and Buried Beds, Sat., Dec. 8, 8 p.m., $8, Johnny Brenda's, 1201 N. Frankford Ave., 215-739-9684, johnnybrendas.com.