Quick Q&A: John Kelly

Channeling Joni Mitchell in his show Paved Paradise Redux is more than a drag for John Kelly.

When did you first start listening to, and first start performing, Joni Mitchell?

I began listening to her when I was a kid in New Jersey. I had two older sisters who were listening to her in the early ‘70’s. It was the first time I was exposed to a certain kind of wanderlust, soliloquy, lyricism. Clearly it got into my bones. And then the first time I sang Joni Mitchell’s music was at the first Wigstock Festival in 1985 in Tompkins Square Park.

Did you dress as Joni Mitchell that first time?

Yeah, the hundred million dollar question. For me it was always about the music – I was a countertenor and I knew I really wanted to sing her music. When the Wigstock festival happened it made perfect sense for me to sing “Woodstock” as “Wigstock” and to provide the visual as well. Beyond that, the visual came out of a character I shaped from her public persona. Essentially it’s me as an actor playing a role.

Do you find that audiences come in with a pre-conceived idea of the show because you perform in drag?

The upside of that is that I am able to surprise people, clobber them, and win them over. I’m able, I dare say, to sometimes transform people’s sense of things. The downside is that whole drag vs. acting argument. For instance when Cate Blanchett plays Bob Dylan no one is focused on it being drag, they’re focused on how she miraculously gives a depth to a character of the opposite gender and gives it lifeblood and also makes it her own. For me it’s a simple thing of looking at it as acting. It has the potential to be moving for people but only after it gets past the drag “female impersonator” thing. I can’t help thinking that part of that is cultural, specifically in America. The male to female gender leap has so much more of a history, a glorious history, compared to male to female. I’m immediately put in line with that historical trajectory. There’s a phobia and an inability to fathom a performance gesture where there is a gender leap as anything more than a drag show.

The main issue I have with the whole drag fixation is that people assume so many things about it and about a performer. I have some friends and colleagues who are amazing drag performers, but it also puts you in this somewhat suspect category. They think you either secretly want to cut your dick off, or you dislike women, or you have a kinky sex life. In a way it’s fascinating that it can still push people’s buttons even in the era of drag having come out of the closet, and by that I mean Hollywood movies where hetero men have to do drag to see their children. That was the nadir. Even still, it can be a potent theatrical tool.

Did your Joni Mitchell shows inspire you to learn musical instruments, or were you already a musician?

I played the guitar when I was a teenager and gave it up when I went to arts school so really I had been playing thirteen years. When I was a kid I played quite well and it came back to me. The dulcimer, which Joni game me, I just figured out by listening to the music. Her tunings are very complex. Her left hand is actually not that complicated, but her right hand – the way she plucks it is impossible to replicate, and she gets a whole orchestral sound out of it.

photo: Paula Court

Were you nervous to meet her?

Meeting her was a breeze after performing for her, which was one of the scariest things I ever had to do in my life. Everyone knew she was there – I made them sit her in the back of the place, The Fez was a small space, and the room was very charged. Facing terror I said to myself “Don’t change a thing”. Meeting her after was amazing, she told me she cried in four places. There were people taking pictures, wannabes trying to cram in the door. The whole episode was very surreal. Luckily I got to perform for her a few more times and to speak on the phone with her once in a while. The time I really got to know her was when I was speaking to a Joni Mitchell symposium in Montreal – she came to that and we hung out with her daughter in an empty jazz club for a couple of hours.

Did you find anything about her surprising?

Maybe that she’s a real hands-on artist. She looks like she’d be a painter – well, she is a painter! – or a potter. She really has that vibe about her of a real gritty in the trenches artist. Not at all the glam thing although she can muster that.

Which Joni Mitchell album would you take to a desert island?

Everybody says “Blue” and I would say maybe “Blue” or “Hejira” or her first album. Something about “Hejira” is so miraculously seamless and also unsettling. It has a reach. The first album I find so beautiful. This show was the first time I did “I Had A King” and there were certain lines in there that I’d never actually gotten before. “The room has an empty ring”: that’s the wedding ring but also the sound of emptiness. Stuff like that kills me.

Your show includes a wide variety of Joni songs but you seem to avoid her music from the ‘80’s. Is that deliberate?

Well there’s so much studio production on her ‘80’s material; it’s hard to replicate that kind of sound with such minimal forces. That said, I could choose to do an interpretation, but I’m just not that crazy about that period of her music when she was married to Larry Klein and re-embracing rock and roll.

What does the title Paved Paradise Redux mean to you?

When I first started doing the show with a band in the mid ‘80’s, I had to come up with a name. At that point, living in the East Village and being an artist and discovering my voice, gentrification was really beginning. It was very obvious when it started – a Gap moving into the St. Marks movie theatre. I was sensing that it was not going to stay as rarified as it was and by that I mean the great equation of affordable rents and artists and outsiders and like minded spirits. Redux comes from this being a reduction of three different shows I’ve done based on Joni’s material. I’m thinking of this as the definitive version.