There ain’t any lip-syncing on Miss Daisy Buckët’s debut album
It’s a chilly, late-March afternoon up on the roof of the new Messenger Coffee headquarters in the Crossroads. Spencer Brown is sipping coffee and wearing a hoodie over a denim jacket covered in enamel pins — a far cry from the ornate gowns and fancy cocktails favored by Brown’s alter ego, the drag performer known as Miss Daisy Buckët. The topic today is Pansy, Buckët’s recently released debut album.
“I’ve always wanted to do a record,” Brown, 33, says, “but I never knew the right people.”
Brown has been knocking around KC’s drag scene for more than a decade, but musicians and drag performers don’t overlap as often as you might think. He recalls that, early in his drag career, after singing at an audition, he was told to come back with a pre-recorded song to lip-sync to. He recorded his own vocals and lip-synced to that. He did not get the gig.
Over the years, Brown developed Daisy’s character in the few local joints — Bar Natasha and Missie B’s, home to Late Night Theater — where drag existed. Miss Buckët made her first appearance on the scene in 2006, and Brown joined the “dragapella” quartet the Kinsey Sicks in 2008 as Trampolina. Since then, it’s been a full-time gig.
It was at Late Nite Theatre that Brown met Kimmie Queen, the lead singer for local rock ‘n’ roll act the Philistines. They were in A Scary Carrie Christmas Carol together, then later worked together on The Rose, with Brown starring in the Bette Midler role. During The Rose, Queen’s Philistines bandmate, guitarist Cody Wyoming, helped put together the band that backed Brown every night.
“We put a real rock band together for it, and really hammered out a rock show in a play format every night,” Wyoming says. “When it was over, I told Spencer, ‘If you ever need a rock band for something else, call me.’”
It took a few years, but eventually Brown booked some studio time at North Kansas City’s Sound81 to record the majority of Pansy’s tracks with Justin Wilson. Brown contacted Queen and Wyoming, and they, along with the rest of the Philistines — Steve Gardels (drums), Rod Peal (guitar), Josh Mobley (keys), and Barry Kidd (bass) — helped bang out almost the entire record out in a couple of days. They weren’t the only local band Brown pulled into the studio, either. For the Daisy version of Li’l Johnson’s bawdy blues number “Hot Nuts,” he brought in the folk duo Victor & Penny.
The record is predominantly covers, but they’re diverse in genre: Kirsty MacColl’s “They Don’t Know,” Alice Cooper’s “Only Women Bleed,” and Paris Hilton’s “Stars Are Blind” — which was the first song Daisy ever performed solo.
“Some of these songs I’ve had in my pocket a long time, and some of them I’ve just kind of found accidentally,” Brown says. “That [“Stars Are Blind”] was the only blast from the past in Daisy’s background that happened.”
Everybody expects pop songs from a drag queen, of course, but the two original tracks — written and recorded by Brown — on Pansy both subvert the “bold and brassy” drag cliche. But Brown’s not so sure.
“Oooof — [those are] not my favorite,” Brown says. “My strong suit is interpreting other songs, or breathing new life into old songs. But I knew if I was going to have this out there, I wanted to have a couple of my own personal touches on it. It’s up to the world to determine whether they like it or they hate it.
“It’s a very gay record,” Brown concludes, as we collect our coffee cups and head back inside, “and at this time and in this political climate, having something like this is important.”
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