Baby Dee: Inside out
Transgendered artist finds her way home
We wander through life looking for something that lies within, only to discover it when we return home and sit still for a moment. That’s the story of Baby Dee, who fled Cleveland only to return 30 years later a different person after turning inside out and discovering the power of her own voice.
A piano player and harpist, Baby Dee just released her third album, Safe Inside the Day (Drag City) – a theatrical, sometimes spooky song cycle that merges Tom Waits’ dramatic flair with Rufus Wainwright’s cabaret swank. Recorded with the help of producers Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy, Palace) and Matt Sweeney (Zwan, Chavez), and backing players including Andrew W.K., it’s a stirring reconciliation with the past as the transgendered, 54-year-old performer recounts her childhood growing up in Cleveland.
The album is highlighted by two powerful tracks. “The Earlie King” appropriates Goethe’s poem, “Dek Erlkönig,” a tale of a malevolent spirit that lures children to their doom through their parents’ negligence. The track employs Baby Dee’s versatile voice to mimic the fearful child, tantalizing evil spirit and dismissive daddy.
Its counterpart is “The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities,” a woozy rag veiled in dark implication. It tells the story she witnessed as a child in Cleveland when neighbors destroyed the exterior of a piano only to discover the unbreakable harp inside. “There’s a girl inside that boy,” she sings. But lines such as “Daddy’s crowbars are his pride and joy” and “O, Daddy, you can sure tickle those ivories” suggest something more sinister within.
The album is the culmination of Baby Dee’s own journey, which took her to New York and eventually to a Bronx church, where her love of Gregorian chants led her to become a church organist and music director. That is, until Baby Dee underwent her metamorphosis and reemerged on the street a new woman, so to speak. While dancing at the Pyramid Club in the East Village, Baby Dee was reborn.
“One way to look at performance is like a pole dancer trying to get a buck out of a leg-humper,” she says with characteristic candor. “You got to make eye contact. You have to engage them. You can’t be in the background in that business. And once you do something like that for a living, then life is never the same.”
These were dark days for her that only ended when an engineer, George Bliss, built her a high-rise tricycle with a holder for her harp. “I had no idea what I was going to do on it,” she says. “The act just kind of created itself.”
“I came home after my first night out on the tricycle just for a few hours. I was fumbling to get into the door, and some money fell out of my pocket. I bent down to pick it up and as I did more money fell out. All this money was falling out of my pocket, and I couldn’t pick it up fast enough. And I finally realized in the midst of trying to pick up the money that my life wasn’t going to be hard anymore,” she says. “I could feel this knot that I’d been walking around with inside me for years just disappear.”
The act was so lucrative that street performances paid better than Baby Dee’s occasional theater shows. During that time, in the late ’90s, she met the artist Antony, who was just starting the Johnsons. She helped him with some musical transcription and played harp on his 2000 debut, and he inspired her to write some music. She was already playing with David Tibet’s Current 93, and wrote two albums for his Durtro label. During the recording of the second, Love’s Small Song (2002), Baby Dee returned to Cleveland to care for her parents.
She thought the music was done, so she took a job cutting down trees. But the muse wasn’t finished with her. “I wanted to write music, but I didn’t have anything to say. And I couldn’t really do it until I did have something to say,” she adds.
Then, out came the songs of Safe Inside the Day. Even so, she didn’t want to record them at first because several were so dark. It took Oldham to convince her.
“There’s something about them that’s sort of compelling. You can’t take your eyes off them,” Baby Dee says. “I couldn’t escape them, but I also hated them.” Oldham and Sweeney rearranged them, however, and “turned the songs into something I liked,” she says. “I love doing them now.”
After sending a tree through someone’s roof in her last job, it’s a good thing she had music to fall back on. In the process, Baby Dee discovered a new love.
“I didn’t really expect to get any big response, but I really didn’t care,” she says. “But the label Drag City is making a big deal out of it. And all of a sudden I realized I do sort of care. It’s actually fun having people listen to your music.”