When I was still living in San Francisco-- a country music dj and an editor of Country Music Magazine-- I came across a unique band, Country Porn, and their unique leader, Chinga Chavin. I introduced him to Susan Berman-- and he recently was the star witness in the case convicting her murderer, Bobby Durst-- and, through Susan, to Michael Bart, a close friend from college who went on to establish a rich, decades-long relationship with Chavin. When I heard that Chavin was in hospice this week and on his last legs, I asked Michael if he would write an obit. This is it:
Remembering Nick (Chinga) Chavin
-by Michael Bart
An old friend died Wednesday night. He was one of the most interesting and influential people in my life, and like so many others in that category, Howie was instrumental in our meeting.
His name was Nick Chavin. He was a former school teacher turned X-rated musician (aka Chinga Chavin), turned successful advertising executive, turned key witness for the prosecution in a high profile murder case. Depending on our relationship at any given time, I found him to be creative, generous, unreasonable, vain, delusional, and loyal to a fault. To say the least, our relationship was complex.
I first heard of Chinga Chavin and his band, Country Porn, in the mid-1970’s when I was living with Howie in San Francisco. Country Porn was Chinga’s brainchild and exactly what the name suggested… a country band whose songs contained sexually explicit lyrics. They had a following in the East Bay, but I never saw them perform. Howie did and wrote at least one review. A few years later, I had moved back to NYC and was working at a music company when Susan Berman (a mutual friend of Howie’s, Chinga’s and mine) introduced me to Chinga. I was immediately impressed. As a bass player myself, he was the first musician I’d ever met who carried a briefcase. I figured he must’ve had his shit together. He’d come to New York with his lead guitarist to record an album for Bob Guccione’s Penthouse Records. Guccione figured that Chinga’s brand of sexed-up country-rock would be a good fit for the nascent Penthouse label.
Susan knew that I worked with musicians and assumed correctly that I could help Chinga recruit members for an East Coast version of Country Porn. He and I hit it off, and I made a deal that if I helped build the band, he’d let me play bass. That was the first, but not the last, time that I’d go to work for Chinga. It was a role that would reverse more than once.
My stint with Country Porn and its successor, the Nick Chavin Band, reflected the music industry at that time, with all of the typical high hopes, setbacks, bad behavior and eventual disappointment. Chinga’s music never gained broad traction and was often criticized for its puerile content, but there was an undeniable guilty attraction, albeit in the most non-PC way possible. I’m not condoning the sexist, misogynist material, but this was so far before “woke” became a pejorative. A perfect example was the night we shared the bill at a roadhouse in Long Island with country fiddle legend, Vassar Clements. As a conservative country boy, Clements was appalled by our set, particularly when we performed ‘Cum Unto Jesus’ accompanied by a stripper in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, which became skimpier with each verse. Clements stormed out of the club and barricaded himself on his tour bus, but his backup musicians hung around our dressing room begging to join the band. It was that sort of attraction and repulsion that came to represent the Yin and the Yang of Nick / Chinga’s effect on people.
With his music career in limbo, Nick accepted a job at an ad agency where his girlfriend was a paste-up artist. As fate would have it, that agency specialized in NYC real estate, and Nick was already friendly with Robert Durst, whose family were major players in the Manhattan real estate market. Susan Berman had introduced Nick to Bobby, and the three friends would begin the long tragic journey, which ultimately encompassed Susan’s death and Nick’s testimony against Bobby in her murder trial. It’s hard to appreciate how much it tore Nick up inside. One thing about Nick, he was a loyal friend, and not many people have their loyalties challenged to that unimaginable degree.
At the ad agency, Nick partnered with another ex-music guy, and the two of them leveraged the Durst connection into a successful agency-within-an-agency. Ultimately, they went out on their own. By then I had landed a job managing advertising for a multinational corporation. Dissatisfied with my agency and knowing how creative he was, I hired Nick to do my advertising. It was the first role reversal in our long friendship. Our client-agency relationship enjoyed a good run, and a couple of years later, when my job was being relocated, Nick invited me to come to work for him, and so once again he became my boss.
Nick possessed a weirdly brilliant creative imagination that could turn out X-rated country songs and clever ad copy. He could quote Yeats, Dylan, Melville, Vince Lombardi and Richard Feynman. Having grown up in Texas and attending U.T., he was a fanatic Cowboys and Longhorns fan. My wife once gave Nick a stuffed toy, which was supposed to represent U.T.’s longhorn mascot, “Bevo.” Nick’s alter ego, Chinga, immediately named it “Horny.”
Although he hadn’t previously lived in NYC and never seemed to know which way the Hudson River was, he became an expert in local real estate. He and his partner helped Shark Tank star, Barbara Corcoran, establish herself as the spokesperson for the NYC residential real estate market. She was already a successful broker, and with Nick’s help she became even more of a brand. But his egotistical insistence on the infallibility of his creative ideas and marketing strategies would drive Barbara and her team nuts. Either his partner or I were often dispatched to calm the waters and keep business relationships on an even keel. Nick could charm your socks off or get your blood boiling with equal ease. And it’s fair to say, he had that effect on most of our clients.
For all his business success, Nick was always a performer at heart and would jump on stage at the Lone Star Café or B.B. King’s to back up his old U.T. frat brother, Kinky Friedman. He was also a guest on the Imus In the Morning radio show. He didn’t have a good voice, couldn’t play guitar very well, and his sax playing once drove his daughter, Brandi, to curl up inside a bass drum with her fingers in her ears. Still, Chinga put his heart and soul into every performance and clearly relished every moment on stage and in the spotlight.
I worked with Nick for about nine years until the company was acquired, and I was rolled out. At the time I thought that Nick could’ve done more to protect my job, which led to a lot of resentment and the beginning of a 10-year rift in our relationship. We lost touch, and I was prepared to write him out of my life.
Funny thing though, as time passed and I had to make similar tough decisions, I realized that sometimes business doesn’t give you any good choices, just necessary ones. I don’t remember the circumstances, but eventually we reconciled and picked up our personal friendship without the distorting effects of commerce.
Nick eventually settled in Florida, where I visited him whenever I went down to see my dad. Nick followed the Susan Berman murder trial obsessively. It was clearly painful for him and tragically ironic that the thing he’d always craved-- public notoriety-- would come at an impossibly high price. He was deposed a year before the trial and, during a visit last year, insisted I watch his recorded testimony with him on Court TV. I really wasn’t sure how to feel about it. Like him, I’d known Robert Durst and Susan Berman. Susan was a good friend to me and my wife. But unlike me, Nick was also very close to Durst and was emotionally trapped by the case.
Nick’s sudden passing has me thinking about all the fun we had in the band, in business and in our personal lives. I could sit and write anecdotes forever; the brawls and Spinal Tap moments whenever we played; the time he threw a body block at a competitor to keep him away from one of our clients at a black-tie industry dinner; pointless meetings with The Donald at Trump Tower; the party at Barbara Corcoran’s upstate digs; the time Susan Berman threw a fit and ran out of Raoul’s Restaurant with Nick chasing her down Prince Street; Bobby Durst wielding a butcher knife at Nick’s son’s bris; and the creative fights, tantrums, yelling, threats and finally high-fives that went into producing great ads.
This isn’t meant, by any stretch, to be a comprehensive obituary for Nick. There are many more people involved in the story, even the parts concerning my relationship with him. There are also many people and events about which I know nothing. I just wanted to get some of the highlights down as a personal tribute to my old friend, mentor, nemesis and band mate. It might be down on paper, but never out of my head or heart.
I’ve been blessed to have a group of old friends, including Howie that I refer to as time travelers. We’ve remained close for decades, and we experience life and measure the progress of our spiritual journeys through each other’s eyes. Nick was one of those. He will always be the lovable, irascible Nick/Chinga who shared so much with me, and then for the first time since we met, left the stage too soon.
Commentaires