The Original Lady Gaga:  Phoebe Legere

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT > AC NIGHTLIFE

A multi-faceted artist of French-Canadian descent, Phoebe Legere epitomizes the unique and nonconformist brands of entertainment sought by Resorts’ Torch lounge. 

By Ray Schweibert 

Add Comment | Comments: 0 | Posted Jun. 15, 2011

While Vassar educated and skilled in so many artistic areas, Phoebe Legere prides herself for being easy going and approachable, resonates an appreciation for music in a comprehensive sense instead of separated by genres, and is content with the direction in which she’s steered her life and career paths thus far.  

This Friday and Saturday, June 17-18, Legere, who has been called the “original Lady Gaga” and can count Gaga and Madonna as fans, will fulfill a craving of sorts by performing for the first time in Atlantic City. The striking blonde artist, singer and multi-instrumentalist is no stranger to the casino environment, and has so much on her resumé since the 1980s it seems unlikely she would not have passed through the resort before. But her back-to-back gigs at Torch lounge at Resorts (7pm start both nights) will be her first here.  

“I’ve played quite a few times in [Las] Vegas, including on the Penn and Teller show and doing several private parties, and I’ve spent some time in what they call casino culture, but I’ve always longed to play Atlantic City,” she says. “In fact, it was always a sort of secret fantasy of mine.” 

Legere’s talents are numerous, but one that is not necessarily noted in her curriculum vitae, yet becomes immediately evident in casual conversation, is that she is a music historian. Her father’s family is of French-Canadian descent that immigrated to New Orleans, where she became enmeshed in that Cajun/Acadian music-and-arts culture at a very young age before moving to New York City at 15 to study jazz.  

“I just love music and am very interested in all the developments of American music, and of course Atlantic City was very important in the development of American jazz,” says Legere. “That had been downplayed a little bit, but in the 1920s, during the time of Fats Waller [a famed jazz keyboardist, composer and singer], Harlem stride [a piano-playing style that manifested itself in ragtime and swing] really developed in Atlantic City. All of the players in New York would go down to Atlantic City and — since there were no CDs, if you wanted to get the joint jumpin’ in those days you had to have a real piano player — so all of the African-American performers would go to Atlantic City, spend the summer there, meet each other and compete.  

“Very often when people compete, they have to make a sort of quantum leap forward in terms of their creativity and what they’re offering. Atlantic City is where Fats Waller went from being just a great piano player to being the master, the magnificent monster that he was with that left hand jumping back and forth between octaves. I learned to play that way — I play Harlem stride or that old-timey style of piano as well as a much cooler jazz, so I’ll be showing a lot of different piano styles. And I’m going to have several guitar players sitting in with me playing different styles.”  

As well as being a virtuoso pianist, Legere plays accordion, guitar, and has a four-octave vocal range. Her song repertoire spans a wide gamut in which she puts personal spins on classics from the Great American Songbook, cool-jazz standards such as those from her 16-song CD entitled Ooh La La Coq Tail, and has penned several songs herself. Her number “Marilyn Monroe” was not only a huge college campus dance-craze hit, it was featured on the soundtrack to the cult-classic movie Mondo New York that depicted the New York underground. She co-wrote with Morgan Powell a piece called “The Waterclown” that was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 2000, and during the 1990s her all-female seminal punk-rock band called the Four Nurses of the Apocalypse was the opening act for David Bowie’s national tour. The Four Nurses also appeared in the short film that Legere wrote and starred in called The Marquis De Slime, which won an award at the Cannes Film Festival, and she also starred in two other cult-classic films — Toxic Avenger 2 and 3. 

“The bottom line is I am an entertainer whose primary goal is to make the folks smile, get ’em crazy and have some fun for a holy moment in that little space we share called American showbiz,” she says. “[Atlantic City] is going to be a very accessible, fun show in which I play a lot of familiar songs, but certainly I’ll be giving them arrangements that will fit into the Torch aesthetic, which is so wonderful.  

“It’s good to see that they’re reviving a more human form of entertainment in Atlantic City, and that’s not to put down playing with tracks — I’ll probably be using a few tracks just to pump things up a little — but I think what humans do, their physicality with music, it’s like a form of magic,” she says. “It’s very transforming to everyone who encounters it.”

Add to Favorites

Send to Friend

Atlantic City Weekly

ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT > AC NIGHTLIFE