Anyone with six or seven neurons still firing would readily agree that the best recipe for a good time consists of but two key ingredients: 1) a lack of expectations; and 2) a sense of adventure. Happily, it was with an abundance of each that my compatriots and I embarked upon an otherwise lugubrious Monday at the Triple Door with Baby Dee (who, in fact, deserves full credit for "lugubrious Monday"). But! Before we delve too deeply into philological nerd land, I should first lay the requisite biographical groundwork. I get the sense that Baby Dee herself has grown tired of her lengthy resume, but a story this fascinating deserves endless repetition. Internet hamsters: warm up the plagiarism machine!
Performance artist, songwriter, classically trained harpist, circus sideshow veteran, and transgender street legend Baby Dee was born in 1953 in Cleveland, OH. She spent ten years as music director and organist for a Catholic church in the Bronx before joining the circus as the bilateral hermaphrodite at Coney Island. This landed her a gig as the bandleader for performance art group the Bindlestiff Family Circus, and a tour with the Kamikaze Freak Show in Europe. After moving back to New York City, she became a fixture in lower Manhattan with a street act on a high-rise tricycle with a concert harp. She recorded her first record, Little Window, on the Durtro label in 2000, a four-track EP in 2001, and her second full-length, the double-disc Love's Small Song, in 2002. Dee returned to Ohio during the latter record's recording, taking vows as a novitiate of the Little Sisters of Crabby Doom (a Cleveland-based order dedicated to the care of smelly old men), vows she has since forsaken. [via allmusic]
More recently, she has collaborated with all manner of indie icons, no doubt garnering huge music-dork street cred on the way to releasing her latest album, Safe Inside the Day (Drag City). Which is, I should mention, well worth the price of admission. Also worth the price of admission: the damn concert, which I've now avoided describing for full-on three paragraphs. Boo! Hiss!
It so happens that Baby Dee's blend of vaudevillian and classical sensibilities (she's been favorably compared to an Antony & the Johnsons / Tom Waits hybrid) matches up perfectly with the adolescent Triple Door venue, itself a metrosexual update of Seattle's vaudeville-era Embassy Theater. Thus did trendy cocktails and overpriced pad thai accompany a "classy" gal as she cracked wise about her band's new name, "Sideshow Bob and the Indie Runts." Sure, a dose of self-deprecating humor is always appreciated, but what struck me most (and repeatedly throughout the show) was Dee's bipolar vocal persona, which veered between operatic bombast and sleaze-bag cackle, often in the space of one syllable. Yet this was arguably the least of the night's contradictions.
Sharing a stage with a grand piano, harp, and cello, Dee's frumpy pink blouse, rainbow pants, and chemically exhausted perm brought with them an air of Wal-Mart patronage and housecleaning. This contrast was only deepened by her technique, which at times involved attacking her instruments with the violence of a sadistic lover who's forgotten the safe word. Equally at home on the harp and piano, she spent at most a couple of songs on either set of strings, pausing only momentarily in her cross-stage stride to bask in the glow of enthusiastic applause and catcalls.
High points of the at-times Pentecostally possessed performance included a particularly rousing rendition of "The Only Bones that Show," sporadic bursts of inexplicable chirps from the front row (courtesy of $10 merch-table bird calls, I later discovered), and the introduction of her fellow bandmates (whose names tonight were supposedly Hot Boy, Beefy Cheeks, Squeezy Bits, and Hammy Davis, Jr.). My personal highlight, though, came during the first song of the increasingly inevitable encore, "The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities," and in particular one line which sent the audience into a collective giggle fit:
My father's affection
for his crowbar collection
was Freudian to say the least
Yeah, I know, these things never translate well to print. But that's why God invented mp3s, no?
...
What's that, you say? The opening band? Were they hella fresh?
Um, not exactly, but I do have to give Daniel Karsten Daniels (along with his drummer and laptop) credit for winning me half-over with adorable, Muppet-themed patter and a shockingly concise (half-hour!) set. And, since all web-based critiques must by law contain at least one blurb-worthy snippet, here it is: During the best moments I felt as if someone were reading my eighth-grade journal, that someone being a creepy older man who... well, who had stolen an eighth grader's journal, and who liked to imagine himself in bleak, wintry landscapes as he stabbed his guitar and recited memorable passages. Pedro the Lion minus the sarcasm, politics, and Christianity? More or less.
