photo by Bruce-Michael Gelbert
Justin Vivian Bond
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Justin Vivian Bond performed at the Ice Palace on July 7, with Lance Horne at the piano, to kick off Daniel Nardico’s Icon Series for the heart of summer, and bewitching us, casting a spell, or conjuring up a mystical atmosphere is what characterized most of the dozen songs Mx. Bond sang—appropriately enough for one self-identified as, at once, a witch, a high priestess, and an ordained minister!
“New York, I love you, but you’re bring me down,” Bond sang, to greet us, before announcing the program’s theme as “Crazy Girls,” encompassing songs Bond wrote and songs by others. “Angie Baby (you’re a very special lady, living in a world of make believe),” Bond sang next, Helen Reddy’s song certainly falling within the theme, with Horne joining her in singing the familiar refrain. Bond shared a romantic fantasy of getting shot while singing and went on to a song written for the record—Bond’s word—“Dendrophile,” observing “A bird that has no feet to land can only just aspire.”
“Botox,” Bond observed between songs, “relieves you of the responsibility of making facial expressions,” and noted, “The sex symbols are aging: they can’t put their lips together to hold the pee in.” Continuing to free associate, Bond spoke of the clothes—“The [blue and white] dress is supposed to remind of the ocean” and “I’m wearing lesbian earrings to evoke the Goddess”—and waxed mysterious, singing, “(Oh,) Sinner Man.” Bond then proposed “an origami tiara made of sandpaper” as fitting for the high priestess officiating at a gay wedding on the beach.
After another number of Bond’s own, the singer told a couple of Faye Dunaway stories, and went on to sing, “They say it’s the new Depression, so why am I filled with glee?” Bond called global warming “a straight people problem,” declaring, “It’s up to the straight people to work out the future of the planet” and “I say, ‘Go gay, go green!’” and sang “The Blizzard,” concerning confiding in a stranger, during a snow emergency in Colorado, about a breakup.
“Pissing in a river, watching it rise. Voices, voices mesmerize,” went Bond’s next song, going on to query, “Should I pursue a path so twisted?” In a song by Bambi Lake, a San Francisco transwoman, Bond rhapsodized about “the olden days, the golden age of hustlers” in the Tenderloin. Bond then recalled Stevie Nicks, at Jones Beach, communing with the spirit of Edgar Allan Poe and sang Nicks’ “Rhiannon,” inspired by Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” in a voice suggesting Nicks’ own.
For a first encore, Bond, serving as both pianist and singer, explained that the song was written for a friend who lived with a counterfeiter in the woods outside Los Angeles, was abused by his father, and laundered all his plastic bags, and then went on to sing, as a reverie, “Stars are illusion, delusion, confusion.” Horne returned to the piano, and Bond began, “There is no oxygen in the air,” continuing, “Tomorrow is the 22nd century,” and singing almost in tongues, enumerated major landmarks of the 20th, such as AIDS, women’s liberation and, of course, the blurring of genders.
Australian singer Meow Meow, on July 14, is next on the Icon Series.