Happy Birthday, Joey Arias

October 3 is the birthday of the great drag star, singer, performance artist, and actor Joey Arias.

Born in Fayetteville, N.C. (recently hard hit by Hurricane Helene) Arias moved to L.A. with his family when he was six. Though he studied and performed briefly with The Groundings, his first show business mark came in 1973 when his glam rock band Purlie (named after the Ossie Davis play?) released the single “Burgerette” on Capitol Records. It’s up on Youtube and it’s pretty amazing. They also recorded a song called “Ants and Termites”, which I’m guessing was the flip side (that one’s not on Youtube).

With his friend, budding conceptual artist Kim Hastreiter, who later went on to co-found Paper Magazine with David Hershkovits, Arias embarked on a road trip to move to New York in the mid ’70s. One of his first jobs there was as a performing mannequin in the shop windows of Fiorucci’s, where he met other future stars like Klaus Nomi and Vincent Gallo. (I swear I saw a segment about punk and New Wave on 60 Minutes in the late ’70s in which Fiorucci’s (and probably Klaus Nomi and Joey Arias) were featured, but I haven’t been able to find confirmation of it.) Arias ended up working extensively with Klaus Nomi as a backup singer and designer at venues like the Mudd Club, Club 57, and the Pyramid Club, and the 1978 four day event “New Wave Vaudeville”. They performed with David Bowie during his December 15, 1979 Saturday Night Live appearace. Klaus Nomi died of AIDS in 1983, and Arias was the designated exector of the estate.

Arias also performed with Ann Magnuson‘s band Strange Party, and was drawn into both the performance art and cabaret scenes. Having already appeared in many rock videos with Klaus Nomi and others, in the late eighties Arias began to appear in feature films, including Mondo New York (1988), Big Top Pee-Wee (1988), Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (1988), the TV movie Deadly Game (1991, in a rare straight role), the all-star Drunks (1995), To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995), Wigstock: The Movie (1995) and Drag Time (1997).

This is while continuing to keep one foot in the New York performance and cabaret scenes. He had a critically acclaimed solo show called Strange Fruit, where he paid tribute to the songs of Billie Holiday at the Astor Place Theatre, which played for a year in the early ’90s. In 1992 he starred in the first of several productions of the campy off-off play Christmas with the Crawfords, a Mommy Dearest style imagining of holidays in the Joan Crawford house. In 1990 he released a tribute album to The Rutles (the Beatles mockumentary band created by Neil Innes of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band).

From 2003 to 2008, he had a regular engagement in Las Vegas, starring in Cirque du Soleil’s Zumanity. He then returned to his New York roots, collaborating with pupeteer Basil Twist in the 2008 show Arias with a Twist at HERE Arts Center, with later incarnations through 2011. He continues to sing in concert in New York venues ranging from the Abrons Arts Center and Joe’s Pub to Town Hall and Feinstein’s/54 Below.

Joey Arias is not to be confused with Jodi Arias, the 2008 murderer of Travis Alexander, although I would really love to see the former play the latter in a true crime dramatization.

His most recent record Past Present Future came out in 2023.

For more about show business historyconsult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.