Tammy Lang takes on the cult of Nico in ‘Chelsea Madchen’

For anyone who has ever heard her, there is no mistaking — or forgetting — the voice of Nico, the icy blond German chanteuse who sang with the groundbreaking group the Velvet Underground in the 1960s and became a cult figure as a solo artist.

She had a haunting alto and an imperious accent, says Tammy Lang, who channels the late singer in “Chelsea Madchen,” a re-creation of Nico’s songbook that makes its Los Angeles debut at the Bootleg Theater on Thursday, running through Saturday.

“Her voice was so dark, yet so beautiful,” says Lang.

From the very first notes of the show’s opening number, “Femme Fatale,” sung with drawn-out vowels in a Teutonic drone, it is clear that Lang, who has built her own small cult performing as alternative country cabaret artist Tammy Faye Starlite, captures Nico’s essence. She approximates the singer’s iconic look — blond hair with bangs and heavily mascaraed eyelashes — and, more tellingly, replicates Nico’s minimalist, nearly torpid stage presence.

When the song ends, however, a new Nico emerges as Lang engages in a dialogue with Jeff Ward, who plays the role of the Interviewer, tossing out questions based on an actual 1986 radio conversation between Nico and an Australian DJ. As interludes between songs, the singer’s often loopy non-sequitur interview responses — she calls Lou Reed, founder of the Velvet Underground, “a usurper of souls, like a cat” — sketch out a life filled with pop culture resonance.

Born in 1938 as Christa Paffgen, Nico began her career as a teenage fashion model and appeared in European films including Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” in 1960. She had a son in 1962 and claimed that the father was French actor Alain Delon. In 1965, she met Rolling Stone Brian Jones and made her first record, produced by future Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page.

Moving to New York, Nico became a fixture in Andy Warhol’s Factory, appearing in his films and singing three songs on the debut LP of the Velvet Underground, which was the centerpiece of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable multimedia events in 1966-67. She recorded “Chelsea Girls,” a 1967 solo LP, with songs written for her by lovers Bob Dylan and a teenage Jackson Browne. In later years, she recorded and toured as a solo act, but struggled with heroin addiction and died of a heart attack at age 50.

“Nico had the kind of subversive personality I am attracted to,” Lang said recently in a telephone interview she conducted from inside a JC Penney store in Manhattan. “She was contradictory, not politically correct and very conscious of being provocative.”

Departing from the usual format of a tribute show, which often reduces an artist’s biography to convenient clichés that gloss over the flaws, “Chelsea Madchen” offers an unvarnished portrait of its subject. It is a biographical rock show (backing musicians for the Los Angeles shows include Pete Thomas from Elvis Costello and the Attractions on drums and Lisa Germano on violin) that is, by turns, shocking, funny and poignant.

“To have this forced Pollyanna version of someone is stifling and incomplete,” Lang said. In her portrayal, the singer expresses herself in terms that are considered racist and anti-Semitic. “The feeling I like to induce is the nausea you feel at the top of a roller coaster, just before you go down. Let everything, good and bad, be exposed. Let it be cathartic.”

Lang first heard Nico’s music as a teenager. Growing up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and attending a yeshiva, she was influenced by Judy Garland, comedian Gilda Radner, punk rock and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” She found work as an actress, appearing in the Tennessee Williams play “Small Craft Warnings” and working in soaps as a sidekick to Allison Janney on “The Guiding Light” in the mid-1990s.

“The play that really shaped my sensibility was an off-Broadway show called ‘Co-ed Prison Sluts: The Musical.’” I played the ingénue slut,” she said.

In 1994, inspired by monologists John Leguizamo and Eric Bogosian, Lang created Tammy Faye Starlite. She describes the character as a right-wing evangelical country singer. “Tammy Faye is the photo negative of a country star who is supposedly wholesome and family oriented, but really drug addled and lascivious,” Lang said. “I wanted to expose the evil by embodying it.”

The act proved popular, even in Nashville, and Tammy Faye Starlite and the Angels of Mercy made two CDs, “On My Knees” in 1998 and “Used Country Female” (the title is from a section in a Los Angeles vintage record store) in 2002. Laced with religious fervor and sexual innuendo, the recordings include songs such as “God Has Lodged a Tenant in My Uterus.”

Lang acknowledged a debt to the button-pushing comedian Lenny Bruce and shock-radio personality Howard Stern in her pointedly satirical songs. As the lead singer in two other current tribute groups, Pretty Babies (Blondie) and the Mike Hunt Band (Rolling Stones), she was also influenced by the off-Broadway play “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” which explores a fictional character in much the same concert format as “Chelsea Madchen.”

“It’s a weird show, but not too weird,” added Lang. “I have often wondered how Nico would react to it. I don’t know if she’d be amused.”

As a performer who thrives on spontaneity and improvisation, however, Lang feels confident enough in the material and her performance to handle any audience. “I love incorporating whatever is going in the moment,” she said. “You want to feel the piece is not so fragile it will be broken if someone’s phone goes off. So go ahead, talk, text, whatever.”

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