Jim Newberry
Baby Dee
Taking her street-cred to the studio, the multi-instrumentalist, singer-songwriter, and performance artist invites risk with her newest, Safe Inside the Day
By Amy Oprean
Published: January 17th, 2008 | 12:01pm
If singer-songwriters are powered by the stories they tell, you’d be hard-pressed to find one who packs a bigger punch than Baby Dee. The multi-instrumentalist and performance artist has been a circus member, a Catholic church organist, and — at multiple points in her life — a street performer. Yet, in speaking about her new album, Safe Inside the Day (Drag City), Baby Dee’s initial focus is on her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. It was there that two neighborhood bullies unknowingly gave Dee her most important childhood moment.
Dee dramatically recalls the incident: The bullies axed a piano on their own front lawn, and in beating the old upright apart, they exposed the harp inside. “It was very graphic,” Dee says. “It was like the world conspired that day to teach me that very important thing: that what’s inside is more important and less fragile, less corruptible.”
Since then, Dee has applied that initial inspiration to her many projects. Long before she played the harp on Antony and the Johnsons’ 2000 self-titled debut album, Dee performed in Central Park, dressed as a harp-playing bear. “I wasn’t a very good harpist,” she says. With characteristic witty aplomb she adds, “But, you know, they don’t expect much from a bear. It’s too bad for bears, but people have really low expectations of them … it dovetailed nicely with my career ambitions.”
Safe Inside sounds like a musical soundtrack, if ever a musical could work song titles like “A Christmas Jig for a Three-Legged Cat” into the plot. If one knocked back enough drinks to get the storyline going, it would need to involve themes of a dark father figure, a loss of childhood innocence, and an emphasis on personal epiphanies. It would definitely have to be a dark comedy.
The zaniest track of the lot, “Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town),” was conceived after Dee and a friend decided that they were going to make an X-rated puppet show about bees. “We could have the nuptial flight of the queen with the drones,” Dee explains. “When the drone gets to mate with the queen, she rips off his genitals. I wanted a drone to have some famous last words, and they would be ‘Who’s in you baby? Say my name!’”
Dee’s tongue-in-cheek humor and theatrical delivery are reminiscent of some of her former day gigs. After her East Coast run as a street harpist, Dee left New York for Paris, where her bear routine earned her a spot in the Shanghai Bureau, a group that performed music and non-traditional theater around Paris. Some years later, Dee moved back to New York where a fire-eater and her sword-swallowing husband got Dee a gig in the Coney Island Sideshow. Her act, as the “bilateral hermaphrodite,” was to convince the crowd she was going to strip for them. “It’s certainly not something I’d want to do anymore. But once you have that ability to get up in front of people and deal with that kind of situation — to get money out of people and to keep yourself safe — there’s a lot of skill involved in that. I enjoyed that and I put it to good use when I went out on the street as a cat, once I got my tricycle,” Dee says. Soon after, Dee took a follow-up job, again as a New York street performer, this time as an accordion-playing cat atop a high-rise tricycle.
Even when she appeared to be doing similar things, Dee was changing as an artist as well as a person. Her accordion-playing cat, for instance, had very little to do with the harp-playing bear. The bear persona, Dee says, was a way to hide. But the cat persona, she feels, is emotionally linked to the time of her gender change and the resultant attention she received from a curious public.
“When you do something like that, you become somebody that everybody looks at constantly. And there’s a point where you just sort of say, ‘Well, OK, I’ll give you something to look at.’ There was nothing bashful about that cat,” she says.
Much of Dee’s present and past work has the similar mark of a quirky façade layered over deeper themes. Despite the lightness that pervades Safe Inside, for instance, Dee considers the album her darkest project. “I had this thought,” Dee reflects, “Maybe it’s a good thing for things to be hard. Maybe that’s the thing about making music. What if — instead of having it being this warm, wonderful, safe place for me to exist — the music was like a big, unfriendly city. It was in opening myself up to that [idea], that the floodgates opened and I started writing music.”
Issue #35
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