Interview: Tammy Faye Starlite Spills Details of NICO UNDERGROUND at Joe's Pub

Cabaret singer Tammy Faye Starlite is bringing her show Nico Underground, exploring the subversive singer Nico perhaps best known for singing with the Velvet Underground. The show runs at Joe's Pub every Wednesday night at 9:30 pm from May 1 to May 22. We spoke with Tammy about the inspiration behind the show, the process of putting it together and how she makes sense of this multifaceted character.

[This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.]

Could you tell me a bit about your upcoming show?

Yeah. It's a show. I started doing in the 2010s, Nico Underground, which is essentially about the singer Nico, who was the singer for the Velvet Underground for one album and three songs. She had been in La Dolce Vita, she'd been a model before that. She was from Germany.

Then she became a solo artist, who lived sort of on the fringes. She was a unique person, just to put it mildly. She was a very, very beautiful blond German model. She did a solo album where she was the first one to record Jackson Browne songs. It was kind of a folky album in 1967 called Chelsea Girl. And then after that, she ended up coloring her hair and wanted to be taken seriously as an artist. She wrote her own songs on the harmonium, and she was signed by the brilliant musical personnage Danny Fields to Elektra Records.

And she made this album called The Marble Index (1968), which is a brilliant [Harmonium based] album. But she never sold. She kept putting out albums and touring in Europe. She had to leave, or she felt she had to leave, the States because of an incident where she allegedly ground a piece of glass into or near the eye of a young black singer [at the Chelsea Hotel], for various reasons of her own.

She lived [most of her] life on heroin. She had a son by Alain Delon in 1962. And so in the 70s she was living in Europe and doing heroin, making albums, doing concerts. She was touring a lot in the 80s. She died in 1988. She was on methadone. She was in Ibiza, where she had lived off and on and she died on a bicycle. She fell and she had a cerebral hemorrhage. That's sort of the basic facts of her. But she was such a unique... I said unique twice now. She was sui generis. You know, I like to think that she was somebody who lived on a cousin of this planet. And she said a lot of what could be termed outrageous things. But, otherwise, you know, she was fascinating.

When did you start doing the show?

At Joe's Pub in 2010. It's a play based on an interview that Nico did in 1986 in Australia, in Melbourne with an Australian DJ. And I'd been looking for something new to do because I'd previously been doing my Tammy Faye Starlite character, which is a crazy right-wing evangelical country singer who was also filthy, which I'd done for a long time.

And so I decided to write about Nico, who I'd loved since I was about 17, and I found this interview that she did, and it seemed like a perfect template for a play because there were so many bizarre non-sequiturs going on and so I adapted it, cast a longtime friend of mine and coworker, another actor to be the DJ and asked my friend Michael Schiralli to direct it. He directs all of Jackie Kaufman's shows and he directs Varla Jean Merman. He's brilliant.

And we kept doing it and we did it at The Duplex. We did it in California, in Los Angeles. And then, through the help of the performance artist Penny Arcade, I got to do a run of it at Theater for the New City in 2014, and we got a lovely review from Charles Isherwood in The Times, which was really wonderful and sold out the run. And then we did it at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh. We did it in New Hampshire, and then it kind of fell off. And I did other things. I did shows as the singer Marianne Faithfull. I never perform as myself. And then I just decided, you know what, I really miss her. I miss Nico. I want to bring it back.

And so, I did it at Joe's Pub last March, and we sold out then and then I brought it back in July and we sold out then. So I thought, oh, I would really love for this to have another life, especially because it's... The things she says are controversial and it's funny and there are songs interspersed throughout. So it's a dialog with, you know, every time they talk about a song, which is what they do in the actual interview. I just put in quotes that I made up. I put in quotes from other sources of hers and mixed them around to make it slightly more absurd, but trying to kind of carve out a little more of the truth of what was going on underneath her answers in the interview.

Nico didn't often speak a lot or even answer the question that you necessarily asked, but she was in that way that some people are who are kind of brilliant, who you don't think they're thinking about the point, but somehow they're thinking beyond it and that is much more accurate than... It's a kind of far-seeing truth that she had within her.

And she had a very unique, very deep voice, everything is very low and that was her sound. And so we do a lot of covers that she did because her own songs, which are brilliant and beautiful, are very difficult. They're not really rock, they're not blues, they're very European.

It's a little bit lighter to do songs that she recorded beautifully. Songs of Lou Reed and Jackson Browne and Gordon Lightfoot and Jim Morrison, who she had an affair with. She had an affair with Lou Reed and Jackson Browne too. A David Bowie song, a Rodgers and Hart song. She loved “My Funny Valentine,” which is, one would think, an odd thing for her to love. But she loved Chet Baker's version. And a few of her own. And it's so weird. And I love Joe's Pub and I'm really grateful to them. And it's a weird little... you could call it a weird little offbeat jukebox musical, but it's kind of a Hadean jukebox. It's not feel-good stuff... but in a way it is because I always think that you can sometimes you can feel better. Theater can be cathartic if somebody is saying the horrifying things that that you're thinking, you know, it's kind of a release in a way. And the band is wonderful. The songs are... you know, the objective songs are lovely. My interpretation, that's up to the individual whether they like it or not. But the songwriters are all fabulous and talented and, especially, I mean, Lou Reed is somebody that I think is such a one of the most brilliant lyricists of any genre, as is Larry Hart. So that's kind of what it is.

How do you feel like the show has evolved since the last time you did it in New York?

When we did it last year after having come back to it, there were certain things we had to change because the things that she said, some of which were actual quotes, we could do in 2014, but those quotes wouldn't really be ok to do now because…well,  because some things that she said were very, one could say, inappropriate - and culturally, we are perhaps more attuned to what can potentially cause hurt or harm. We keep in a bit of her biting commentary, because to shy away from it wouldn’t be true to the person she was. And I don’t want the show to be hagiographic in any way. But honestly, I don't think she had any particular animus towards anyone except herself.

In terms of lines in the show that may be seen as antisemitic - she did have affairs with Bob Dylan, who's also represented song-wise, and Lou Reed - yet she did say a few things that may  be considered inflammatory. To my mind, it’s the way she dealt with her own sense of defeat.

And this will be the first time we do it since the current situation in the Middle East. So if the reaction is different now, I understand.

But that’s kind of where I live as a performer, for better or worse (often the latter). If I'm not doing something wrong, then I'm doing something wrong, essentially.

Right, like she might be a slightly problematic character.

She's definitely problematic. And she's kind of like, if you have relatives from the Old World who say the quiet things aloud, and you’re like, my God, stop it, we're in public. But I think that she knew in a sense that she was subverting the norm. And I think she was aware most of the time that she was pushing boundaries, verbally. Certainly physically, when she attacked the woman at the bar. She thought the Black Panthers were going to come after her and that's why she left for Europe and didn't come back until the late 70s.

Who would you recommend come to see the show?

Oh, everyone. [laughs] I mean, theatergoers. And certainly, because it is a play, it's dialog. There's that dreaded word arc, sort of. And there’s music, which even though they are not my songs or and there are only two of her songs, they do kind of illuminate the inner life. So certainly musical theatergoers, straight play theatergoers, and rock fans. Basically anyone. Children, I'm fine with that if they want to come. There are some words that are a little untoward, but not much more than really... At this point, it's not anything. Some late seventies cussing.

Header photo credit: John Huntington

Tickets are available on Joe Pub's website.

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