Skip to main contentBefore there was Beth Ditto, there was the outspoken, fat and fabulous Candye Kane: Now she’s slim and B.B. King-approved.
[POST-OP BLUES] When she was diagnosed with cancer in 2008, Candye Kane took it in stride. "I said, 'Well, if it's my turn to go, I've sure had an amazing run,'" she says via telephone from her San Diego home.
"Everything that ever happened in my life sorta prepared me for the day that I was diagnosed," Kane says. "I'd already had a lot of hard knocks in my life, and that was just one more obstacle to overcome."
The obstacles scattered throughout Kane's biography often sound, well, made up: her single mom taught her to shoplift at the age of 9; she herself became a mother at 17; she's been an adult model, stripper and part-time porn star (her Wikipedia page lists more than 20 films, including the 1987 feature Let Me Tell Ya 'Bout Fat Chicks and a 1998 comeback film, Boobsville Cabaret).
But Kane didn't pilfer all of her money on drugs and booze. Some of it went to drugs and booze, sure, but the aspiring singer-songwriter also managed to pay for studio time for her music. After a stint with Los Angeles country-punk band the Armadillo Stampede, Kane made an ill-fated run at becoming a country star with Epic Records. "Here I come to Nashville with purple hair, black fishnets and Doc Martens…right away the pressure was 'lose weight, don't be so controversial, dye your hair normal.'
"There was this strange hypocrisy in country, which was 'look clean and Pollyanna but give me a blowjob and we'll give you a publishing deal.' It was a weird scene. So eventually I said, 'Fuck this.'"
Around that time, Kane married Tom Yearsley, bass player for blues/rockabilly group the Paladins. And while he was on tour, she'd listen to his blues record collection.
"So for the first time I started discovering women who owned their sexuality and their size: Women like Bessie Smith, Dinah Washington, Big Mama Thornton," she says. "Blues was a homecoming for me. These women had paved the way for me to be a feminist and be proud. Memphis Minnie sang songs about prostitution long before the phrase 'sex-positive feminist' came to light."
Twenty-odd years and 10 albums later, Kane has long been a fixture of the underground blues scene. But her 2009 disc, Superhero—produced by Kane and 27-year-old guitar virtuoso/bandmate Laura Chavez—finds the once-ignored diva garnering some credit from the establishment, too. She's up for three awards at the Blues Foundation's annual awards show, including the B.B. King Entertainer of the Year award.
It's not that Kane is doing anything out of character on Superhero. Her blues has always been brazen and immediate: Double-entendres growled and sung through an earthy country-punk filter. Her discography is littered with songs like "I'm the Toughest Girl Alive" and "I'm Not Gonna Cry Today," which paint Kane as a hard-shelled fighter. In reality, she says, those songs were written to help her get through the tough times—as was "I'm Gonna Be Just Fine," the sweet-but-strong a cappella closer on Superhero. But it was her rebellious younger years, Kane says, that really prepared her to fight cancer.
"A lot of people with cancer adopt a fatalist attitude and go, 'OK, if I'm gonna die, I'm gonna try everything I haven't done.' But I had already done everything I wanted to do. I didn't need to shoot heroin and go crazy—I'd already done that shit."
SEE IT: Candye Kane plays Duff's Garage on Sunday, March 21, at 8 pm. $10. 21+.
WWeek 2015
