Kiki & Herb
Will Die for You
Evolver Records

The operative phrase on this two-disc, two-hour-plus recording of Kiki & Herb's Carnegie Hall engagement of last September issues like an assault during a roiling interpretation of Annie Lennox's "Why." Kiki DuRane, about to let fly a larynx-lacerating scat-shout of the song's chorus, warns the audience, "Don't get too comfortable!"

The audience applauds with vigor. They don't want to get comfortable. Many of them have come to share in the triumphant ascendance of Kiki & Herb, from engagements in San Francisco (when the show was in its nascent stages), to their id-driven evenings at the Flamingo East, P.S. 122 and Fez in downtown New York, to an off-Broadway engagement at the Cherry Lane Theater in 2003, and now, improbably, to their sold-out show at Carnegie Hall. And most of the audience knows that Kiki & Herb didn't score this gig because they make people feel comfortable.

Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman, the creators of Kiki & Herb, have performed together for more than 12 years. Due largely to seeing their friends dying of AIDS, their somewhat standard drag-cabaret act became more bitter, politically outspoken and combative. DuRane, a boozy 70-something with a backstory of near-continuous tragedy and expectations left unrealized, was born prior to Bond's collaboration with Mellman, at a time when, he told the Village Voice, he was doing "glam-noir drag" and getting absolutely no response from the audience. "I didn't consider myself a drag artist, rather a man wearing a dress. But Kiki was a woman," he said. "I decided to do messy, fucked-up trash drag, turn the audience's condescension into terror." The result initially terrified Mellman. "I had worked with drag queens before," he told the New York Times, "but there was something about the extremity of Kiki that was frightening."

Kiki & Herb are billed as an act that has struggled through 50 non-continuous years of performing by adapting to the current trends. (Non-continuous because each decade brought new challenges, such as jail time, marital complications, stints in rehab and periods of grief due to the loss of loved ones.) They were a lounge act in the '50s, did a spoken word album in the early '70s, went through a disco phase entering the '80s, and now routinely include Rufus Wainwright, Eminem, the Wu-Tang Clan, even Butt Trumpet songs in their set lists — an attempt, it seems, to appeal to today's audience.

What terrified Mellman is the unbridled, liquor-fueled rage and bitterness that is Bond's Kiki. For she is not a familiar staple in drag acts; in fact, it is reductive to call Bond a mere drag queen, even though Kiki hews to the performance trope of the alcoholic fallen showbiz fixture (Liza, Judy) who is entrancing and repellent in equal measure. Kiki exists in a unique vortex of absolute anarchy; knocking back her drink of choice, Canadian Club and ginger ale (the duo used to get as drunk as their characters during their live show, for verisimilitude), she uses the tragedies of her life as unsettling opportunities to segue into her songs. More disturbing, her retelling of her and Herb's past is often very funny. She tells of her first daughter Coco's untimely death; the 7-year-old child fell off a yacht in Monaco while Kiki was down below, whoring herself out to a man who might be able to jumpstart her career. "Ladies and gentlemen," she asks, "where the hell can a kid go on the deck of a boat?" She then wonders, having never seen anyone drown before, if people sink to the bottom, "or do they just... bobble?" This leads into a fractured, pleading interpretation of Pink Floyd's "The Thin Ice" ("Mama loves her baby/ and daddy loves you, too/ and the sea may look warm to you, babe/ and the sky look blue").

Moments like this are part of Kiki & Herb's subversive appeal. The audience delights in Kiki's travails, but her presentation is always leavened with the inappropriate statement, the sweetly sung ballad giving way to howls and screams, or the political statement that divides, not unites. On Reagan's death, Kiki offers this:

All you saw on television was the legacy, the legacy, the legacy. How many people have died of AIDS since the early 1980s, Herb? Still dyin'? That's the legacy. I hold that son of a bitch responsible... Then they got the whole funeral procession ...and you know, for a minute, I actually cried, ladies and gentlemen [for Nancy Reagan]. And then I thought, "Fuck you, lady!"

This is what separates Kiki & Herb from the ranks of drag, cabaret and performance art; in fact, it synthesizes these forms and creates something new. It is the rage of a show born in a time of AIDS, and refueled in our current, soon-to-be-state-sponsored bigotry. It does not forgive or forget. Kiki & Herb are the first punk-cabaret act.

Kiki & Herb's Will Die for You features segments and full performances of at least 27 songs, all recast and deconstructed to fit the show's conceit. Kiki's singing voice, caramel with schmaltz in the low register and sandpapery and threatening when she lets loose a scream, will be a tough sell to some listeners, but it is immediate and vital. And Herb's piano work is phenomenal; he never ceases playing from the moment he hits the stage, and he manages to glide through the wildly various set list, from the grandiloquent "The Windmills of My Mind" to the plaintive "I Was Meant for the Stage" to the dance-hall rollicking "No Children" with admirable dexterity. Further, it is the bitter cocktail of anger, pain and the longing for grace, that allows Kiki & Herb to claim some songs as their own. Steve Nicks' "Has Anyone Ever Written Anything for You" and Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" exist on these two discs in their definitive versions, and — shockingly — the duo's sensual, aching version of Kate Bush's "Running Up That Hill" becomes a meditation on loneliness, the need for comfort and a plea for understanding and communion with intimates, textures that were only hinted at in Bush's new-wave version.

As with all great live discs, Will Die for You suffers because we aren't there watching the show. Numbers like "Sex Bomb" flounder because we miss the physical comedy of Kiki unable to keep up with the demands of the song. But, more significantly, Kiki and Herb are theatrical creations, and part of the thrill of their anarchy is seeing them in the flesh, even in the rarefied pillars of Carnegie Hall, where Kiki cannot straddle people's tables and slap their drinks out of their hands, as she once did at Flamingo East. They are physical creations, drawing energy from their audience, and as much is lost in hearing only voice and piano as is missed by only hearing Mick Jagger rule the world for an evening on Get Yer Ya-Ya's Out! It's an unfortunate drawback, but then, if you never got the opportunity to see Laurence Olivier perform live, at least you can see what all the fuss was about by renting Richard III. So it is with Kiki & Herb.

— Christopher Hickman (hickatz at mindspring dot com)