Baby Dee, America’s preeminent transsexual, tricycle-riding carnie-cum-musician, weighs in on Catholics, Coney Island, and how to play the harp while wearing a bear suit

It's hard to judge the high points in Baby Dee's career. The transgendered harpist and accordionist has held down so many jobs—as a street musician, a Coney Island freak show act, a church organist, a tree surgeon, and, physically at least, a man—that comparing them all would be impossible. This month, her first wide-release album debuts on Drag City records. With production help and backing instrumentation from indie icons Will Oldham, Matt Sweeney, Andrew WK, and members of Psychic TV, Safe Inside the Day delivers a gloriously bizarre combination of brooding personal history—about Dee's upbringing in Cleveland and the many twists her life has taken leading up to a sex change—and bawdy humor. It fuses the sound of old-world music halls with a Patti Smith punk aesthetic. Here, she chats with Radar about retarded infants, tricked-out tricycles, and the one thing that truly embarrasses her.

RADAR: Baby Dee's an interesting name. What do you go by when you're not onstage?
BABY DEE: I go by Baby Dee. That's my name. I have no other. Well, there's a name on my passport. But it's, like, who cares what my name is? That's a bore. If you're going to insist on me giving you another name, I'm just going to make one up.

Why don't you do that?
I would put on the full bear costume—head and all—before leaving every day, and then I was the bear until I got back.You want me to make one up? How about ... 50 Something. That's what people are calling me these days. 50 Something. My sweetheart, Pepper, calls me "storebought."

How'd you get the name Baby Dee?
It was given to me. You know the Pyramid Club in New York? Back in the '90s there was a party there run by a tranny named Gloria Hole, who had, at one point in her life, a neighbor with a retarded child named Baby Dee. I guess Gloria liked to think of me as her retarded child. That's sort of how it came about.

So your music career predated your name?
Yes. I started out playing in the street, in the park. I wore a bear outfit and played the harp in the park. That was my first job.

Must have been tough to play harp with furry paws.
I wore gloves with holes in them. I looked out the bear's mouth. It worked pretty good. I had these friends with a wonderful apartment on 66th and Madison, a beautiful Stanford White building. They let me keep my harp and my bear suit at their place. I would put on the full bear costume—head and all—before leaving every day, and then I was the bear until I got back. They had a real elevator guy. I'll never forget. His name was Jack and he was a real prick. I'd say hello to Jack and he'd be like, "Oh boy." I'd go out and all the doormen on 66th Street and between there and 5th Avenue, they knew me. I'd walk by every day and it'd be all waves.

I imagine you were one of the only people in a bear suit carrying a harp.
At least on the East Side! That was kind of a fun, silly thing. It was a good way to make a living, and it was better than having some horrible job that I hated. So then I took that act—if it was an act—to Europe. I did it in Paris for a year. I moved and made some friends and did music and then I came back to New York. Then I wasn't a bear anymore. But please, can we not talk about my stupid life? Oh my God. Can you imagine how many times I've had to tell this ridiculous story? It's just so stupid. I don't even want to hear it anymore.

What do you want to talk about then?
Let's talk about my wonderful new album. Did you hear it? Or are you just pretending?

Of course I've listened to it! How did you meet Will Oldham and convince him to produce it?
My friend David Tibet has a band named Current 93. Dave is a good friend of Will's and that was the connection. The actual story begins in Cleveland. I gave up music a few years ago and left New York to start a company that cut down trees. But then I dropped a big, monstrous tree on somebody's house. That effectively made me wish I was no longer in the tree business. I went home that day and wrote an e-mail to anybody that I could think of who could get me back into the music business. One of them was David. He mentioned the whole thing to Will, who was coming through Cleveland to play a concert. I opened for him and that's when we met, and we've been friends ever since.

When did you leave New York? As someone who lives there, such a move seems inconceivable.
I first came to New York in 1972, and I left in 1999. It was one of the hardest, craziest, most insane moves that I've ever made. That's for certain. I mean, come on. I lost my apartment. That's like wooooo. That's like the end of the world.

What made you decide to make the leap?
I was at a point in my life where I got to thinking about how I wanted to not be the focus of my life for a change. Most people have kids and that becomes the center of their world. In some weird way, I began to kind of envy that. So my parents got old and started falling apart, and I decided that instead of stuffing them into a nursing home, I would adopt them. That's what happened.

It seems like that return to your roots might have come through in your album—there are lots of references to specific moments from your childhood on it. For example, there are the two bums that demolish a piano in "The Dance of Diminishing Possibilities." Were they made up or real?
Bobby Slot and Freddy Wiese. Do you really think I could make up names like that? They were real people. They lived across the street from me when I was a kid. A couple of bums.

From childhood, Dee's remembers three great truths: "There was a harp hidden inside of a piano. I was a girl. And that my father really loved his crowbar collection"In Cleveland?
Yes. Bobby Slot was a big fat guy and Freddy Wiese was predictably small and thin. They actually destroyed a piano. God only knows why, but they did. And the other thing that's really true and would be otherwise unbelievable is my father really did collect crowbars. In my mind, it was one of those childhood memories that just stood out as a big deal. For me, that was like this sort of triumvirate of revelations of these great truths. One was that there was a harp hidden inside of a piano. One was that I was a girl. And the other one was that my father really loved his crowbar collection. Those are three true things that somehow seem to complement each other.

It reminded me so much of the Marx Brothers movie A Day At the Races.
That's right! You know what, until you just mentioned that, I had never really mentioned that. Harpo is somebody I really love. I've known two people in my life who knew Harpo. One was the guy whose apartment I kept my harp and my bear outfit at. Harpo Marx gave him a $20 gold piece when he was like six years old. The other one was Daphne Hullman, another harpist. She was the only other harpist who played in Coney Island. She used to play in the subway and things. She was a wonderful nut. Everybody hears about rich eccentrics, but nobody ever gets to meet one, right? She was it. She lived in a townhouse in the East 60s and her grandfather owned most of Park Avenue or something. He was a banker. She had this beautiful place and she was sort of a rich debutante girl, but she rebelled. She didn't want any of that. All she wanted to do was play the harp. She was the first white woman to play in the jazz clubs in Harlem. She knew Billie Holiday. She was the coolest woman in the world.

Did you meet her during your time working the freak show in Coney Island?
Yes. During my years as a bilateral hermaphrodite there.

I gather you probably have strong feelings about Thor Industries' plan to tear Coney Island apart.
Oh, I heard about it. I can't even think about it. It's so upsetting. Coney Island was just such a cool place. One of the last real things left in New York. It's happened so gradually. Every time I come back, another favorite place is closed ... I heard that Florent is closing. It's just going to kill me. Just look at what happened to that neighborhood, the Meatpacking District. That neighborhood used to be sooo great. That used to be my bread-and-butter neighborhood when I was on my tricycle. That whole part, way west, I just loved it over there.

Your tricycle of course refers to your second street act, when you mounted your harp on a customized trike. But my question is, did you play while riding?
No, I would stop and play. I didn't play and ride at the same time.

Good, because that seems profoundly dangerous.
There were dangerous aspects to it, but it wasn't so bad. The cool thing about that act was that it was so serendipitous. From nowhere, somebody could show up and be playing the harp for you. My favorite thing was to play for couples, because you can see when people are in love. And to ride up and out of nowhere and be playing a love song for these two lovers on the harp with glissandos and all of this, the universe owes them that. And I'm there to deliver. It was really fun. It was a beautiful thing to do.

Did you have to kind of design or modify your own tricycle?
People used to ask me that and I'd feel insulted. I mean, do I look like a bicycle mechanic? It's like asking Queen Victoria if she built her own Daimler. It's just not done!

So you had somebody design it?
Yes, I did. It was a brilliant man named George Bliss, who's still in New York and who's still doing bicycle stuff. I think he has a shop somewhere in the West Village. Brilliant man. He teaches engineering at Cooper Union.

On your album, the song "Big Titty Bee Girl (From Dino Town)" lays out all the ways one might mutilate or kill an albino. What do you have against the pigment-challenged?
I've got nothing against albinos! This song isn't anti-albino. It's a celebration of the albino's fortitude, of the albino's stoicism. Don't let anybody tell you I'm nasty toward albinos, because I love them.

The way that song came about was my friends and I did a puppet show about bees in Vancouver for kids. But I wanted to do an adult version that would be like a little bit ... I mean, bees are a little bit obscene anyways. We decided to do an X-rated version in a car driving up toward Canada. We thought, what are we gonna call it? And one of us, I forget which, said, "We'll be the Big Titty Bee Girls!" As we said that, we passed the sign for some cheesy roadside attraction called Dino Town. So we became the Big Titty Bee Girls from Dino Town. But then I needed something to rhyme with Dino Town. I had a magnificent moment, like an expanded mind kind of moment where it all came to me in a flash. The entire sentence: "You just can't keep a good albino down." And then from there on, the song just wrote itself.

It would almost have to, wouldn't it?
Yeah. You can't come up with a line like "you just can't keep a good albino down" and then not make a song to go with it, you know?

One of the reasons I love that song is that it's kind of this nice little light moment in an album that's ...
Pretty dark. Well, it's not all dark, but the dark things in there are awful dark.

Do you see it as exorcising some ghosts for you?
A little bit. There's an element of that. Not to the point that somebody used the word "catharsis." That always sort of makes me flinch, because I think of subjecting other people to your own insanities. And goodness knows I would hate to be found guilty of that.

I really liked the song "Fresh Out of Candles."
Me too. That's my favorite. That's a song I hated most when we went into the studio. I wanted to leave that one out. The lyrics, if you read the lyrics, are just so unbelievably dark.

It's like you're getting a lot of your feelings out about religion.
See, that's a misunderstanding. I don't hate religion. I have nothing against religion. It's really the opposite. It's like a lament for all of these figures that I absolutely adore. All these old saints. I love them. If you go down in the basement of a church, you find where all the saints ended up. The statues. They're down there gathering dust. Like the sweater you got for your birthday from the aunt that you hate that's really ugly, right? And you never wear it and you hide it away someplace. That's what happened to the saints. They got dragged down into the cellar. They're getting all mildewed and covered with dust. I feel sorry for the poor bastards. After all that, come on, poor Saint Maximus who did so much for humanity, and they cut out his tongue and cut off his hands and sent him out to die and look where he ends up. Such a shame.

I gather you discovered these saints when you were playing organ for a church in the South Bronx?
Yeah, that was in the '80s. I kinda miss the '80s. I was up in the choir loft the whole time. Missed a lot of fun, I guess. I think a lot of people are sort of embarrassed about that decade, but I'm embarrassed about being up in the choir loft. We all have our times of life that we're not particularly proud of. I just did an interview with a guy in Spain and his question was, "I'm surprised to see that you've worked for a Catholic church given their attitude towards gays." And I'm like, ooh, oogada boogada, how do I answer that one?

There is something to that, though, you'd have to admit.
There is and there isn't. If I worked at a regular old Catholic church that would be true, but I worked in the South Bronx. In places like the South Bronx, people don't realize it but the Catholic church isn't a bad thing. The church is so big that there's room for good things to go on in spite of the big ugly hull of it. But the good things happen in places where nobody ever goes, like the South Bronx. There was a principal of a Catholic grade school in Morrisania who was openly gay and adored by the whole neighborhood. He created a school for children where everybody played an instrument. It was like a miracle. Another nice thing, too, if it weren't for that job I don't know if I could have ever made the change. I paid for my sex change playing at weddings and funerals all over, in every borough. I've played almost every church in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. And upstate New York.

So the church made it possible for you to become yourself, sort of?
Well, they didn't really know they were making it possible.

What do you think your next album will be like? Will it be a bit lighter?
That's interesting. This album was supposed to be an older thing. I did a thing about four years back or so that I did as a book, and we only made 150 copies. I did a very perfunctory version of the music. Then I went into a studio, played it through once, and sent it away to David. He put it out on his label without even listening to it.

At one point, I wanted to go back and do that more as a real album. As harp music. Of all the stuff I've got out, there's very little harp. That's what this album was going to be, harp and some string arrangements, but Will talked me into doing newer work even though I didn't want to do it because it was so dark. Will talked me into doing "Fresh Out of Candles."

I think it's a terrific record in spite of me and the dark lyrics and everything. So I did the album that I did, and the nice thing about it is I can still have another album left in me of going back to doing the older songs. Doing the harp album. So that's going to be the next thing. It's going to be very different. Not quite as honky-tonk. Maybe not quite as edgy.