I Got Style: An Interview With Baby Dee
Ben Graham , March 23rd, 2011 09:43
Baby Dee offers Ben Graham peanuts while she tells him all about her new album Regifted Light and working with Andrew WK.
http://thequietus.com/articles/05904-baby-dee-interview-regifted-light"Are ya sure ya don't wanna peanut?"
Baby Dee waves the bag of KP towards me and jangles the ice in her generous early evening scotch, her Midwest-via-the-Bronx accent as caustic but warm and welcome as the whisky itself. Filling this elegant London hotel room with her presence, the 57-year-old musician-singer-composer is physically imposing - a good six foot from her flats to the crown of her ginger curls - but her personality is larger still, the survival mechanism, you suspect, of a Cleveland native schooled on the streets of New York, where she busked for years in a variety of outlandish guises: cigar-chomping Shirley Temple tribute, Bee Girl, riding a customised tricycle with a harp on the back while playing the accordion, and so on. On the one hand, she had a passion for classical and particularly Gregorian music, the harp and the piano, that led to her being a church organist for several years; on the other, she toured with such outfits as the Voluptuous Oddballs and the Brindlestiff Family Circus, and worked a season as a bilateral hermaphrodite in Coney Island, where she fell in love with the angry young dwarf whose act included being crucified, crushed beneath slabs of concrete and broken glass, and dragging huge weights around with his penis.
