Baby Dee/David E. Williams

Thu., April 8, 9 p.m., $14-$15, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400, worldcafelive.com.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Apr 7, 2010

rock/pop/goth/cabaret

Cleveland's Baby Dee (pictured) has been a church organist, a circus tricyclist, a harpist, a go-go dancer, a barkeep at Manhattan's famed Pyramid Club, a Johnson for Antony and the Johnsons and, once upon a time, a man. It took all those experiences to create the confessional cabaret and rickety operatic vocals of Safe Inside the Day and the softer-strung spare new CD Book of Songs for Anne Marie. Sharing the bill at World Café Live is David E. Williams, the interpreter of Northern (Philadelphia) Gothic death, decay and medical oddities and a local legend since the '80s. He has recorded a slew of delightfully panicky and theatrical albums but played far too few shows to promote them. Now that he owns GERM Books and Gallery in Fishtown and last year released his most accessibly melodic album, Every Missing Duck is a Duck Missed (Disques de Lapin), Williams is playing the big rooms and filling them with his quavering vocals and scary-ass stories.

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