Phoebe Legere: Dialectics in Legere’s Domain
by Seth Rogovoy
(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., July 19, 2000) -- Phoebe Legere says she recently had
a revelation that went to the very core of her being. As a result, she has
refocused the emphasis of her music, which had long been informed by the
sensibility of a self-described “ardent feminist.”
“I’ve had the blinding epiphany that men are human beings, too,”
said Legere in a whispery, soft voice, followed by a pregnant pause and then
a burst of laughter.
“I know, it’s amazing!” said Legere in a phone interview last week
from her East Village apartment. She described her new band, the Hot Hunks,
as “an examination of men -- not the iconic, macho image that has been
received in the media, but men as they truly are, these sensitive,
tender-hearted, rather emotional people that I find underneath their tough
exteriors.”
Is she serious? Is it all a put-on? Who knows? Does it matter?
These kinds of questions and inherent contradictions - “dialectics”
is the fancy term - have always been at the heart of Phoebe Legere, the
singer, composer, performer, keyboardist, accordionist, queen of downtown
cabaret, and all-around avant-garde artist and conceptualist.
Legere, who performs with her Hot Hunks on Friday, July 28, at Club
Helsinki in Great Barrington at 9, is a Vassar College graduate who attended
the New England Conservatory of Music, who studied with the Modern Jazz
Quartet’s John Lewis, and who won a Jerome Foundation Grant for Emerging
Playwrights for “Hello Mrs. President,” which imagined a black women in the
White House.
A denizen of downtown, she is a well-known figure of the
avant-garde, with several recordings to her credit, including her brand new
“Blue Curtain.” The new album is a dizzying, multi-textured, subterranean
tour of the life and struggles of a New York artist, released by Einstein
Records, the label arm of Roulette Intermedium www.roulette.org, a
collaborative of like-minded musicians and artists led by visionary
musician/producer Jim Staley.
She’s also the author and performer of such saucy, suggestive pop
songs as “Hot Sicilian Pizza Boy,” “Crazy White Trash” and “Good Stiff Cock
Tail” and an established painter with New York gallery exhibitions to her
credit. Legere has also exhibited herself in Playboy magazine, with only her
accordion to cover her vital and considerable assets, and she has her own
highly graphic website www.phoebelegere.com.
She is also an intellectual who easily drops the names “Kant” and
“Hegel” over the course of a half-hour conversation, and a cultural critic
who deftly analyzes the frightening mass manipulation of audiences by the
entertainment industry, while at the same time she treacherously navigates
the entertainment marketplace looking for the place where she can reach
listeners with her “continual stream of a musical autobiography.”
She’s all this, but she’s also simply an incredibly entertaining
performer and vocalist who variously evokes Edith Piaf, Mary Lou Williams
and Jerry Lee Lewis, while taking an audience through a roller-coaster of a
show touching down in blues, Cajun and zydeco while playing accordion and
piano - sometimes at the same time.
“The greatest joy for an entertainer is to see people smile,” said
Legere, whose performances blend archly pointed, political and satirical
songs with physical comedy and pure outrageousness. “So I go for the laugh
sometimes. But as Hunter Thompson once said, it takes a deeply serious man
to be funny.”
For Legere, it comes down to play. Musicians, after all, play their
instruments. And Legere thinks that playing is a lost art among adults in
our culture.
“Some adults, the only play they have is sex,” she said. “Some try
to get their play by watching television, which is vicarious play. But every
animal of any age and any species - all animals need to play.
“I think what people are seeing when they see me play, and they’re
not used to seeing it, and they don’t even know what to do when they’re in
the presence of it, is they are seeing play.
“They aren’t seeing the years and the hours of study and practice.
They see nothing but the joy, the exhilaration of play. It may look like
irony, it may look like something of an intellectual pose, it may look like
I’m daring people to think what I’m doing is easy. But what I’m doing is not
easy. What I’m doing is hard. But I’ve done it so many times that for me
it’s child play.”
A native of Eastern Massachusetts, Legere is the descendant of
Mayflower pilgrims on her mother’s side and French-Canadians on her father’s
side. She also claims some Native American descent, and opens “Blue Curtain”
with some native-based chants, before the album spins into contemporary
electronic territory - as apt a metaphor for the history of New York as any.
Legere said she’ll be performing her style of “roots alternative” on
Friday, but then she immediately qualified her description of the music.
“It’s so important to have a genere these days, even though I’ve always
thought of myself as meta-genre, not because I’m some kind of a wise guy and
thumb my nose at categories,” she said. “I know it’s very important to
people to have them. Kant described how important it is in human thinking
for humans to be able to put things into categories, so I have respect for
that.
“But at the same time I’ve always wanted to combine a lot of what I’ve
learned from world music, classical, contemporary classical music, and jazz
in whatever I do. So I’m putting the fun and uptempo energy of Cajun and
zydeco and blues with some of the tasty harmonies that I would get from
anyone from Duke Ellington to Schoenberg.”
Legere’s band, the Hot Hunks, includes Joey George on slide guitar, Tony
Fortunato on electronic drums, and Jamie “The Truck” Seppe on bass. Legere
held out the possibility that -- over the three-day period at Helsinki that
begins tonight with new Orleans pianist Henry Butler and concludes on Sunday
night with avant-saxophone legend Hamiet Bluiett -- there might be some
sitting in on each other’s shows among these open-minded musicians.
Legere has a kind of love-hate relationship with pop music. On the
one hand, she has made pop-style albums, and she even had a minor hit a few
years back with “Amazing Love.” More recently, she has enjoyed success on
the Internet, as one of MP3.com’s most-downloaded artists. Yet Legere is
still a cult figure with little name recognition beyond those who follow the
downtown scene.
But she’s not complaining. “I’m not driven,” she said. “I’m not
fueled by a narcissistic craving for celebrity and money. I’m a real,
old-fashioned artist with a capital ‘A’. And that’s not an easy thing to be
in this culture. There’s no safety net. You’ve really got to love it.”
“But I’ve been blessed by the fact that I’ve been on the fringe.
It’s given me time to find out who I am, and that’s what art is all
about…..As Hegel said, spirit getting to know itself by working with its
materials.
“Through the process of getting to know myself, maybe I can help other
people, give other people strength in their quest, which is the only reason
you’re here on earth - to come to appreciate in the end what a beautiful,
delicate, gorgeous gift a human life is.
“So what you’re seeing when you see my art is me just researching the human
experience - and having a hell of a good time!”
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on July 27, 2000.
Copyright Seth Rogovoy 2000. All rights reserved.]
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