Tag: sounds of the city

 

Transcendent, transgressive, triumphant, Christeene strides across the stage until she’s head-to-head with vocal powerhouse Peaches, the pair luminescent with love, fury, and fishnets as they duet on Sinéad O’Connor’s “Troy.”

The location might be the genteel-ish City Winery, but the scene onstage and in the audience is pure Lower East Side, an Andy Warhol’s Factory meets NYC’s ’80s/’90s club kids mashup: fabulous, decadent, and genderqueer. The crowd coalesced for the first of two shows of “The Lion the Witch and the Cobra,” NYC-based Christeene’s production of O’Connor’s potent 1987 debut album, The Lion and the Cobra. Tonight, explains Christeene, it’s the season of the witch.

A dirty-mouthed angel, Christeene’s southern drawl, prominent in both her singing and speaking voice, occasionally has a tinge of amoral South Park cartoon kid Cartman. Yet in conversation and onstage, the multi-dimensional performer embodies intelligence, compassion, and charisma. She’s a lovable Oprah-of-the-sewers meets Greta Thunberg, for those who like their icons X-rated, bare-assed, droll, dry-witted, and earnest.

Weeks before this, I met with Christeene at the Parkside Lounge. Lips painted in garish slashes of red, she is sipping a Manhattan in its namesake borough while applying fake nails out of a plastic tackle box of choices. “Eight-balls and ear-cleaning at your service” she drawls, supergluing a pinky nail to her interlocutor’s left hand. Perched at the end of the bar, Christeene is prepping for hosting duties at that evening’s Oscar party, setting out snack mix in paper bowls and fluffing the “red carpet,” a diminutive bathroom rug.

 

Offstage, sans not-so-finery, the artist is known to friends as Paul Soileau, and the garrulous, hospitable Louisiana mannerisms of his Baton Rouge birthplace are prevalent in Christeene. She doesn’t necessarily identify as a musician; Soileau didn’t grow up worshiping Alice Cooper, David Bowie, or any other darkly changeable theatrical musical character.

“I’m actually more cinematic,” she says. To wit, she met the Dead Kennedys’ Jello Biafra and didn’t know who he was. And became pals with Roddy Bottum before knowing he was in Faith No More. Christeene prefers Barbara Stanwyck and “old Hollywood shit. I’m a little late bloomer when it comes to music,” she explains. “And I really appreciate that, because it leaves my playing field open to imagine and create without too much influence.” It’s that background that allows the spewing of a track like “Fix My Dick,” a throbbing, The Prodigy–style buzzing industrial sex song. To date, Christeene’s albums include 2012’s Waste Up, Kneez Down, 2018’s Basura, and the most recent, 2022’s Midnite Fukk Train. Her role as a performer is as visual as it is vocal, her timbre and stage presence more subversive singer than stellar songstress.

 

There was crotch-grabbing, bois in G-strings, and a story about an event where her butt plug was accidentally born aloft by a rogue drone.

 

This might make her an unlikely candidate to honor O’Connor’s often personal and poetic songs. But the two share a deep well of compassion, a sense of justice, tenderness, and outsiderness. Still, a quick look at Christeene won’t show that full picture. So when she mounted a one-night show of “The Lion the Witch and the Cobra,” in 2019, at London’s tony Barbican Centre, Christeene reached out to the icon. “I didn’t want Sinéad O’Connor to read about Christeene and this show and not have a solid explanation of who the fuck I was and what I was doing. I’d have been like, ‘What the fuck is this booger troll doing with my music?’” So she wrote a letter and gave it to John Reynolds, O’Connor’s first husband and career-long collaborator and producer. He passed it along, and word came back that O’Connor was cool with the production. Reynolds actually came to the London show, telling Christeene, “I haven’t listened to this album in 30-something years.”

“I was like, ‘I’m so sorry to deliver it like this,’” she recalls. “And, all in jest, but it was really fucking important and incredible to have John in the room, to have that conversation with Sinéad through John.”  

March 25, 2024, was the third time Christeene and her band created that musical “conversation” with O’Connor’s work, the second time since the Irish singer’s death, in 2023, and the first time in New York City. Emerging onto City Winery’s stage in beautifully blasphemous, pope-like red robes, the artist was flanked by a pair of acolytes who performed different roles throughout the show. Climbing atop three stacked milk crates serving as a riser — her very DIY stage set a source of pride even while doing her own roadie duties during the show — Christeene towered over the upturned faces of the standing-room-only audience to deliver the opening salvo.

The crowd, by turns uber-emotional, joyous, and appreciative of Christeene’s hilarity, sang along to “Never Gets Old” (the set opener, but actually the fifth song on The Lion and the Cobra), “Mandinka,” and “Just Like U Said It Would B.” Christeene was then joined by another downtown icon, Justin Vivian Bond, for “Jerusalem.” The power-suited, well-coiffed Bond stood in marked visual contrast to Christeene’s ice-blue contact lenses, long blond wig with bangs, gold tooth, and yellow fishnet one-piece homemade bathing suit. Christeene’s wrists were adorned with the plastic circles from Hellman’s mayonnaise lids she uses as bracelets, the armfuls of bangles recalling “Lucky Star”–era Madonna.

There was crotch-grabbing, bois in G-strings (Christeene’s own handmade undergarments are G-strings fashioned from pantyhose), and a story about an event where her butt plug was accidentally born aloft by a rogue drone. Between songs, Christeene drawled eloquently about O’Connor and the miserable state of the world, and then she wished the gathered audience the “black teeth” caused by City Winery’s signature beverage, borrowing, then finishing, an audience member’s long-stemmed glass of red wine with a theatrical grimace. 

 

Onstage, Christeene marveled at the depth of the songs O’Connor wrote and recorded while she was still a teen, pregnant with her first child and fighting mental issues and the patriarchy. In our Parkside interview, she observed, “I thought of Sinéad as the Greek lady Cassandra, who ran around and told the truth all the time, and no one believed it. Something about that, on that level, years before the Barbican show — maybe five or six — I got a creative kick sometimes. You get a feeling. And that one stuck.” 

While initially she wanted to mount the New York show in a small, divey venue, Christeene’s community of collaborators boosted the idea of something bigger. “And I said yes, as you always should … Liza Minelli says ‘Yes!’” Her friends are family. Hugs and kisses are fervent and frequent. Collaborators and bandmates are family. Christeene easily engenders loyalty and gives as good as she gets. During our interview at the Parkside, as she went about her Oscar-hosting duties, friends and fans filed by as she mused on the creative process, power dynamics, and the road that led to the upcoming City Winery show.

 

“I think the term drag now is just too dangerous, because it’s a homogenized carton of milk on a shelf.”

 

“I have rearranged, changed the order of a few things, because I’m a theater faggot,” she explains, of the full-album playthrough of O’Connor’s album. “I really believe in taking the people on a journey that will emotionally carry you. We’re not changing songs so much as injecting them or putting them through the filter of my sound and the sounds of the musicians I work with, and the energy that I deliver on stage. I’m very aggressive onstage, but I can also be as sweet as pie.”

She’s not unlike Bella Baxter, the genuine and chaotic character that would earn Emma Stone an Oscar a few hours hence, for her role in Poor Things. “I don’t like that Mark Ruffalo person,” Christeene remarks of the actor who portrays Duncan Wedderburn in the film, her Cajun inflections a slow burn. “But he’s charming the pants off me on this one, because he’s an idiot. And I love idiots. I thought it was super fucking creative. It could have gone down so many shitty highways of a woman surrounded by men.

“Many of the people in these fucking films are actively a little more alive than a lot of other people,” she adds. “So maybe they’ll kind of speak up about some world shit and not be too afraid to do so on the stage tonight, because they seem to have a bit more joie de vivre than, like, some of the old crusties. But who knows? Because, like, we need some more Vanessa Redgraves up in there to talk the talk of the Oscars, and Sinéad O’Connor too, because she always had something to say about an awards ceremony.”

If a Frankensteined female character can capture the public’s imagination and praise onscreen, maybe the equally quixotic, earthy character of Christeene isn’t far behind. Drag queen and reality show superstar Ru Paul has soared to worldwide fame and acceptance. But Christeene has more in common with Hedwig, of Angry Inch fame — colorful but fringe-y, and dirtily sexual. She also has a powerful undercurrent of gravitas to her person: a humanitarian in five-inch heels who shoves the microphone in her mouth à la the Cramps’ Lux Interior.

That said, “I don’t see myself as a drag performer. I think the term drag now is just too dangerous, because it’s a homogenized carton of milk on a shelf,” explains the disarming artist. “I find myself to be a family member of drag. Like when y’all get together for the holidays, I’m the cousin that shows up and you’re like, ‘Yeah, this is your cousin Christeene.’ And everyone’s like, ‘We’re related to that shit?!’ Then I walk in and eat all the food, and I leave. And maybe break the toilet. Or get to know your mom real good, and we both leave.”

She clarifies further: “I’m not disowning drag. Drag is a historical language. It is the world of magic and surrealism and imaginative gender exploration and comedy and ways to deal with this fucked-up world as best we can. I think it has layers of importance.”

But if drag is often dressed to the nth degree, Christeene is the antithesis of fancy, more dressed to kill (scare? confound?) than impress. A descriptor sometimes used is “drag terrorist,” which comes from multidisciplinary artist Vaginal Davis, a friend and inspiration. “Vag always called herself a ‘drag terrorist.’ And whenever I was a baby — I was working, and still work, with my dear friend PJ Raval, he’s a filmmaker — we were always getting hit with ‘What are you?’ which I fucking hate. I hate telling people what they need. Everybody wanted an explanation and a sticker on the car. I remember just seeing how Vag did that. I was like, ‘That makes perfect sense.’”

Christeene feels like an old soul, “who has ghosts in me of past times and places and people, I think the way dirt can get in the corner and crevices. I think I find a way to get blown into places maybe where I don’t belong — like City Winery. Or where I do belong, here at the Parkside.”   

 

Judging by the long, diverse, and creatively attired line to get into City Winery — and the subsequent major coverage in The New York Times and elsewhere — Christeene belongs there too. If the Gray Lady can get behind what Christeene describes as the “What the fuck atmosphere” she intentionally creates, maybe there’s hope. Says Christeene, “If you go see the strange mix of a City Winery kind of establishment with the filth and the fury of what we’re doing, your brain’s trying to understand the luxury of the wine and food along with the booger onstage screaming at ya. I think we need more of that in our lives, because the comfort levels of where we go and what we know needs to get scrambled.”

Ripping up a picture of the pope on Saturday Night Live scrambled many people’s comfort levels a bit too much. And ultimately, O’Connor’s own life felt too jumbled for her to carry on. But she’s got Christeene to help remind and further that legacy of truth, bravery, kindness, and beauty. Christeene does not see the Sinéad show as a tribute. In her words, “It’s absolutely honoring a woman who I found the world had not honored for what she said, what she proved, what she has always stood for. Not even fought for. Her actions, her language, and the calmness upon which she delivered that … I don’t see that as someone fighting for something, [I see it] as just speaking truth and delivering their gifts to the fucking world.”

After closing the witchy Winery evening with “Just Call Me Joe,” the multilayered and mystical final track on The Lion and the Cobra, it was clear the audience wanted more. O’Connor’s album was done, but the show was not. Kicking out the jams on “Fix My Dick,” Christeene spat lyrics that included “I’ll let you chew on my crabcake, to hell with the first date / Just slide me the beef steak” to a rabid crowd undulating with appreciation. The room — and performers — were sweaty and sated.

While no further performances of “The Lion the Witch and the Cobra” have yet been set, in a post–City Winery email to the Voice, Christeene reflected on the triumph of the two NYC shows, which saw celebrities including Todd Oldham, Debbie Harry, Graham Norton, Chloë Sevigny, and Michèle Lamy in attendance. “I’ve seen the love from the folks who came into these rooms for these shows, and I’m smacked with shock and awe at the things folks are saying from their experiences,” she wrote. “My heart really is so fukkn full. It’s been a long time comin to make these shows happen, and crossing that threshold with crowds like the ones we had in LA and NYC was life changin’. Press can say what it wants, but ya really had to be there to know what happened in those rooms. It was surreal and mysterious and it was all in orbit with the star that is Sinéad.”  ❖

Katherine Turman has written for Entertainment Weekly, Spin, Variety, and other publications, and is the author of Louder Than Hell: The Definitive Oral History of Metal. She lives in Brooklyn.

 

 

 

As if by silent mutual consensus, when the Tedeschi Trucks Band walked onstage at the Beacon Theatre last Saturday night and began the 1972 Joe Cocker classic “Woman to Woman,” the audience rose as one from their comfortable seats and pretty much stayed that way for the next three and a half hours — swaying, whooping, and raising their arms in an almost religious fervor. (“Greatest touring band out there!” bellowed the very vocal guy behind me.)

Guitar virtuoso Derek Trucks was leading the 12-piece group in that song’s oft-sampled funky riff, but one piece was missing: singer Susan Tedeschi. She soon sashayed out from stage right, to blaring horns and the crowd’s roar, wearing a smile and a Stratocaster, a short black dress, and spectacles, as unassuming as she is extraordinary.

When Tedeschi opened her mouth, undaunted by all the sound already filling the ornate room — one could imagine the theater’s golden statues aching to throw down their spears and rock out — she added yet another riveting instrument: that voice, gritty, soaring, galvanizing. Bonnie Raitt meets Janis Joplin (as has often been noted), with a little Etta James thrown in. Woman to woman indeed.

Tedeschi, who is married to Trucks, also plays a mean blues guitar and does not wilt in the shadow of her partner’s renowned prowess. Heads tipped toward each other, they both expertly riffed us into the next selection, “Let Me Get By.” (The family that shreds together…?) That song, an original from their Grammy-winning 2011 debut album, Revelator, began with Tedeschi, in more than a nod to Bob Dylan, singing in a voice drenched with warning: “I told you that times are a-changin’.” When Trucks later took a solo, he seemed to be talking to us with his playing — as emotive as her voice — by turns plaintive, seductive, thrilling. His Gibson GS was way up in the mix, and that was just fine. (The Beacon has a new, immersive sound system; it’s “crystal-clear,” as claimed.)

 

Tedeschi met Trucks in 1999, when her eponymous band opened for the Allman Brothers, whose new slide guitarist was the 20-year-old Trucks, nephew of one of the group’s drummers, the late Butch Trucks. (TTB continues the Allman tradition of two drummers, in their case, Tyler Greenwell and Isaac Eady, with Brandon Boone filling out the rhythm section on bass.) The pair fell in love, married, and eventually decided to join forces musically as well, forming TTB in 2010. 

 

Tedeschi introduced that song by saying, “We’re all made of the same stuff inside.” Well, there’s stuff and there’s stuff.

 

Although there was a Deadhead vibe to the Beacon audience, which skewed older — and we were treated to a rousing rendition of Jerry Garcia’s “Sugaree” — it was the Allman Brothers who seemed to hover over the band, much like the gauzy lights that moved about the stage. For one thing, Trucks has cited Duane Allman as a great influence from an early age, “almost a mythical figure in my house,” as he told Guitar World. For another, the consummate southern-rock band had made the Beacon their NYC home, doing their final show (including both Butch and Derek Trucks), their 238th, at the theater in 2014. TTB has followed suit. Saturday was its 56th appearance at the theater, and that night they performed Gregg Allman’s melancholy “Dreams” — with a swooning slide solo by Trucks and soulful vocals by Gabe Dixon, the keyboardist, and Tedeschi — as well as “Statesboro Blues,” an Allman Brothers staple.

 

Trucks also cites Duane’s playing on “Blue Sky” as an inspiration for his solo on “Midnight in Harlem,” perhaps TTB’s most popular song (also from Revelator). On Saturday, however, Trucks, standing in a wavering cone of light, began that tune with a yearning, sitar-like guitar line that seemed to be imparting an ancient message. When he stopped, the light moved away to envelop saxophonist Kebbi Williams, whose low, somber tone soon erupted into jazzy, jittery notes (at one point, he looked ready to lift off) that had the audience calling out his name. Tedeschi, with two spotlights singling her out, wrapped her resonant voice around lyrics we could relate to, a tale of New York: “Well, I came to the city / I was running from the past…” And then Trucks performed the more Allman-esque solo, traveling all the way down the neck of his Gibson to pluck notes from the stratosphere. (His calm, beard-stroking manner in interviews belies his electrifying playing.) 

 

Tedeschi growled, preached, pointed, screamed, and perhaps threw the earth off its axis a little bit.

 

Rooted in the 1960s and ’70s, TTB draws from several American genres — rock, blues, jazz, country, gospel. The group mines those songbooks while also writing music inspired by them. The set list Saturday was about equal parts covers (e.g., Aretha Franklin’s “It Ain’t Fair,” Derek and the Dominos’ “Bell Bottom Blues”) and originals, including the catchy “Anyhow,” currently livening up a Chevy commercial that features a red Silverado pickup truck. TTB has recorded many songs written by band members in various combinations, including the 24 from their 2022 four-album series, I Am the Moon.

The band performed a couple of those on Saturday, notably “Take Me As I Am.” This all-about-the-music band is light on patter, but Tedeschi introduced that song by saying, “We’re all made of the same stuff inside.” Well, there’s stuff and there’s stuff. Tedeschi’s vocal power is unusual (whereas her speaking voice is tiny and polite), but she also draws on a deep well of feeling in putting across a song. When she wailed “Don’t take away my life” on the last verse, she appeared almost unable to contain that inner force. Matching in musical intensity, Tedeschi and Trucks seemed to derive strength and a sort of grace from each other, and on that song her voice and his guitar intertwined beautifully.

 

But Tedeschi really took off on the three encore songs. For the Leon Russell perennial “Song for You,” she was accompanied only by Gabe Dixon — when that initial familiar, gorgeous piano cascade rang out, someone in the audience said loudly, apparently in disbelief of her good fortune, “Are you kidding me?!” Tedeschi, her voice especially warm and lustrous, did a moving, gospel-tinged rendition heightened by a personal connection with Russell — she emphatically sang the line, “You are a friend of mine.”

Russell died in 2016, and three years later TTB lost its keyboard player Kofi Burbridge. Dixon and guitarist/vocalist Mike Mattison had written the second encore number, “Soul’s Sweet Song,” as a tribute to Burbridge. Tedeschi strapped on her aqua Telecaster — autographed by the likes of B.B. King and Kris Kristofferson — as Kebbi Williams began to play dissonant flute phrases, and chandeliers, bathed in pink light, descended from the ceiling. When Tedeschi sang in a velvety tone, “I feel your rhythm moving me / ’Cause your soul’s sweet song’s still singing,” we could believe it. (Trucks has said of those lines, “That hit me between the eyes.”)

Having opened with a Joe Cocker song, these road warriors sent us off with one too — “Space Captain” (1970). In an inspired delivery that crescendoed with the repeated lyrics “Learning to live together / Until we die,” Tedeschi growled, preached, pointed, screamed, and perhaps threw the earth off its axis a little bit. At times she moved somewhat jerkily, as though channeling Cocker, but in a more genteel form. Those both onstage and off provided that song’s “whoo”s; Trucks “dueled” with trombonist Elizabeth Lea as Williams and trumpeter Ephraim Owens held back, waiting for more; and the harmony singers — Mattison, Alecia Chakour, and Mark Rivers — added their own embellishments. After a rousing extended ending, Tedeschi said, “Love y’all,” and waved, and Trucks took off his guitar and exited, his long ponytail lit in a soft glow.  ❖

Mary Lyn Maiscott, an NYC-based singer-songwriter, has played such clubs as Pianos, Bowery Electric, and La Tregua (Seville); her latest recordings are “Alithia’s Flowers (Children of Uvalde)” and “My Cousin Sings Harmony.” She’s written about music for Vanity Fair and other publications.