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Death cult '97 >> The suicide of Talamasca's Chriss Lee brings home the year of Biggie, Versace and Diana by CHRIS YURKIW
This was, after all, a smart and media-savvy artist whose vampire persona gave us exactly what we wanted: sex, death and a good photograph. Lee also had ambition to match his often overlooked talent, and his efforts to make Talamasca stand out from the crowd of local yokel rockers were effective. When I interviewed the band in 1995, for example, I was treated to a personal concert in Lee's living room with the group in full stage regalia. Lee was also a music journalist himself, and he was always up for the great (and now telling) quote. "I've been a prostitute," he once told me. "I've been a junkie and I've been dead. But I'm back now and I speak for those people. That's what I'd like to think that I do my art for." If there was ever going to be a Goth revival, Lee had certainly primed Talamasca to have a real shot at breaking big. But would the guy go so far as to fake his own death in a publicity stunt? The vampire shtick would provide the perfect alibi for coming back to life. It was weird, too, to see that Talamasca had issued a neat little press release announcing Lee's Dec. 9 "apparent suicide/heroin overdose," replete with quotes from his suicide note and an old photo of him playing dead. "Call us," they said, when they dropped off the photo, "if you need anything else." Maybe I'd watched my tape of Diana's funeral too much. Maybe I'd become as callous as a friend who seriously considered going to New York City last summer to sell T-shirts that said, "I killed Versace. And I looked fabulous doing it." Maybe it was all those year-end music magazines I was reading, like Spin and its Artist of the Year--the murdered Notorious B.I.G. Or Rolling Stone's postmortem on Sublime: "In the 18 months since Brad Nowell stuck a needle in his arm and died, his band has had four hit singles, sold two million records and become the biggest rock act of 1997." Or maybe I'd just seen Fred Astaire dance with the Dirt Devil one too many times on TV, but I became obsessed with the notion that, perhaps, Lee was not dead. Somewhat ashamed, I quickly discovered that Chriss Lee, né Christian Bouchard, had in fact died on Dec. 9, 1997. It's not clear whether he returned to his hometown with the intention of killing himself, but the other members of Talamasca were telephoned by Lee's father from Métabetchouan, in the Saguenay-Lac St-Jean region, and told that Chriss had died. So maybe it was the old classic denial, in my case, which simply manifested itself in thoughts of an elaborate media scam. But at least I now had humanized those other "media deaths" that seemed to dominate 1997. I took Chriss Lee as an artist, a showman and a character--all of which he excelled at. But, as says Sylvie Roy, formerly Talamasca's guitarist in the guise of Ophelia and Lee's kindred working partner: "Christian was living Chriss Lee 24 hours a day--he was always the character. He couldn't make the distinction... he was always looking for love, but in the wrong way." It's not a surprise that the Notorious B.I.G.'s last album was called Life After Death. It's not a surprise that Diana had once said she thought the media would kill her. And it's not a surprise that comedian Chris Farley's death was widely foreseen. So it's no surprise, either, to look back at Chriss Lee's words on the first song on Talamasca's debut album and find that they contain his own story: "For me life's always been a movie/I would dance for the family/It made me dream I would be somebody/Somebody nice, somebody strong/Somebody wanted, somebody loved/Monroe, Elvis/Somebody dead in teen town."
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Call me a jaded media cynic, but when I learned of the December suicide of Chriss Lee, charismatic leader of Montreal's leading Goth band Talamasca, I couldn't believe it. Not "couldn't believe it" in the classic sense of denial, it was more like "didn't believe it." I didn't believe he was really dead.