Rickie Lee Jones Takes Off Like A Rocket

Rickie at home in New Orleans

One of the unexpected joys of the Covid lockdown was having your favourite artists play for you from their living rooms.

Of course, for them it was driven by the need to keep in touch with their audience and to maintain some kind of a living. It was a tough time to be a songwriter and performer.

One artist I willingly paid to spend time with was Rickie Lee Jones. From her home in New Orleans she would sing and tell the stories behind her most popular songs; stories that fed into her memoir, Last Chance Texaco, published in 2021. It was a total pleasure. I miss those days, in some ways. 

Live in London, 1979

Rickie Lee Jones the performer was, in retrospect, bound to succeed, such was her irrepressible persona and innate musical and lyrical genius.

Her early music is a rich melee of cocktail jazz and showtunes, with a tinge of influence from Laura Nyro and Dory Previn. Her words like beat poetry, full of street vernacular, influences from West Side Story and Runyon-esque characters, with names such as Kid Sinister, Bragger and Junior Lee. 

You can't break the rules
Until you know how to play the game
But if you just want to have a little fun
You can mention my name
Keep your feet in the street
Your toes in the lawn
But keep your Business in your pocket
That's where it belongs

Her career took off like a rocket but Rickie Lee Jones was penniless and often homeless pretty much right up to the time, in 1978, when she was signed by Warner Brothers and given a $50,000 advance.

Even then, she had to borrow some cash because she didn’t have a bank account and was behind on her rent. Rags to riches, literally.

In 1976, based in and around Venice Beach in California, she had begun writing her first songs, the likes of Easy Money and Weasel and the White Boys Cool, and arguably her greatest song, The Last Chance Texaco.   

Being a street urchin, working menial jobs and singing in local bands to pay the rent, it was the maverick souls she met along the way that fed her stories. Her persona, with the beret and the boho styling, was an act. But equally, it was who she was. 

At the heart of her book is the doomed love affair with her fellow boho bum, Tom Waits. It seemed they were cut from the same raggedy cloth. They belonged together. 

“Tom and I were beautiful beyond compare, and so nourished and inspired by each other's hearts that for a very short time, we nearly consumed each other. Love, they used to call it.”

Waits had his bachelor pad at the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles, with his pal Chuck E. Weiss. "Tom had two tattoos on his bicep. He liked to don the vintage accoutrements of masculinity; sailor hats and Bernardo's (from West Side Story) pointed shoes."

"We always needed to touch each other"

Of Rickie, Waits said at the time, “We drank together. You can learn a lot about a woman by getting smashed with her. 

"I remember her getting her first pair of high heels and coming by one night to holler in my window to take her out celebrating. There she was, walking down Santa Monica Boulevard, drunk and falling off her shoes.”

Even then, Waits was wary: "I love her madly in my own way - but she scares me to death. She is much older than I am in terms of street wisdom; sometimes she seems as ancient as dirt, and yet other times she's so like a little girl."

They danced around each other for a long while. Waits, already semi-famous, was scared of commitment, but Rickie knew how to catch a man. One night at the Troubadour club, already cultivating the RLJ persona in her beret and elbow-length fuchsia gloves, she had him on the hook.  

"A guy I know, Ivan Ulz, was performing at the Troubadour one evening and he asked me to come over and sing a couple of songs. This fella Chuck E. was working back in the kitchen of the club, and that's how I met him."

Waits, Chuck E., RLJ and Dr. John

“Tom came out of the kitchen and stood behind the bar. He pretended he didn't come out to see me.

"'Hey', was all we said to each other. He sat down by me, ordered a scotch. We drank and talked at length and laughed until it was closing time. 

"He walked with me to my car. There, under the streetlight, Tom took me in his arms, and we danced. All the love in the world was there that night.”

The following morning he told her to go home, he had a lot to do. “I was still standing on the step when he closed the door. I was wearing high heels. I was doing the walk of shame that so many others had walked. I may have hidden behind a bush.”

After a brief fling with Lowell George - who gave her a huge leg-up by covering Easy Money, but then tried to steal the publishing rights to it - she started reeling in Tom Waits once again.

“Each time I put a dime in the phone, Tom and I got a little closer. He answered the phone with, 'What?' But when he heard my voice, he'd grow a little sweeter. 'Ah, hey you'. 

"By the time my phone was installed, we had become lovers again. We inhabited black holes where we floated upward and down again. We were jellyfish floating from day to night. Only poetry evokes the long undulating time of our lying in each other's arms.”

The buzz around town gained momentum and a formal showcase at the Troubadour created a bidding war among record companies eager for Rickie's signature. She went with Warner Brothers largely because she had befriended their head of A&R, Lenny Waronker, who she trusted to guide her through the recording of a debut album. 

Warner Brothers put the best session players to work on the album. Steve Gadd, Victor Feldman, Tom Scott, Buzz Feiten, Dr. John et al, with Waronker and Russ Titelman as co-producers. They treated her not as a newcomer, but as someone who was giving her all to put across music of subtlety and character.

Russ Titelman said "Rickie Lee was fairly wild, but you knew you were in the presence of something special.

"The sessions were spontaneous, explosive. She'd never done this before. She was just a kid with a guitar, but she knew exactly what she wanted. At the end of the session, we played through the album and Rickie sat there and asked, "Is that me?".

She recalled, "I think the musicians, Lenny, Russ and the people at the record company recognised the magic I was trying so hard to create. So they cheered me on."

Saturday Night Live, 1979

But no one expected the record to take off the way it did. Once Chuck E's In Love was a hit, Rickie was swept up by the sudden demands of fame, starting with an elaborately staged set for the TV show Saturday Night Live. 

"There was no time to build a stable home. I was launched like a rocket and the rocket went much further than the expected trajectory."

The Rickie Lee Jones album became a multi-platinum seller and Rickie won the 1979 Grammy award for Best New Artist.

She told Uncut magazine, "When I look back at the films of that first tour. I'm a very sexy and wild girl onstage. It's an act, but I really am that girl. But I did not now how to put it down. It was a hard way to be."

Tom travelled to Europe to support Rickie when she became homesick on the first European tour, but he shied away from the camera. “He wanted no part of my celebrity, just as he did not want to share his own. Tom felt the business of Tom Waits must stay uncorrupted by our affection."

Nonetheless, she said his affection was constant and very physical. "We always needed to touch each other. I cannot remember anyone else holding me so completely that I felt safe to go outward. 

"I could not conceive that this would ever end, and yet I had conceived of it with Coolsville. I knew very well that it was likely one day I and Bragger and Junior Lee (that's her, Tom and Chuck) would be a past tense.

Waits' Blue Valentines album cover shoot.
"Tom said, come closer. I leaned myself against
him. I slid down his body and he raised his arms.
There is the enigma of our very private love
 and passion caught in that photo."

I and Bragger and Junior Lee
That's the way we always thought it would be
In the Winston lips of September
How we met
Decked out like aces
We'd beat anybody's bet
Cuz we were Coolsville

Chuck Weiss told Uncut magazine, "Things were never really normal again after that. She just couldn't handle it. The record company were making such a fuss over her. 

"They more or less chose to ignore some of the heavy drug use that was going on. I thought that was bullshit, that they wouldn't pay attention to that. As long as she kept producing the songs, it didn't matter to them. It was a harsh lesson."

An earlier romance with Dr. John - in between a break from Waits - had given Rickie a taste for smoking heroin – chasing the dragon. Her mistake was thinking she could function as an addict with no consequences. 

“I didn't feel heroin was taking from me. I thought it was giving so much that I was becoming a new and improved Rickie.”

Her biggest mistake was thinking Tom Waits would understand, when she hid it from him for a year.  

I did a foolish thing
A real, real foolish thing

"Tom wanted to make a stop at the humble little house he'd seen for rent in Echo Park. We watched the lights of the city and dreamed about a life together in that house with our kids. I would make dinner and he'd mow the lawn.

“That porch that night was our crossing over place. There, in each other's arms, dreaming of a life we'd never have together.”

Rickie was suffering withdrawal from the drug and she thought if she confided in him, he would be sympathetic.  

But you ran out of gas
Down the road apiece
Then the battery went dead
And now the cable won't reach

"I walked around the park thinking about us. If he loves me, then I can tell him. I think I can tell him. I need to tell him, now, about the dope.

"I walked back to the motel and he was standing outside the door. His body was taut.
I thought you left.
What a thing to think. I just went for a walk, bub.

"But some part of me was disconnected. Perhaps I had a premonition of what was about to happen to us.

"I have something to tell you.
There was no going back. I was appealing for sympathy, but there would be none.

"You take dope? This was like when Tony told Maria he had killed Bernardo. I was already dead to him. I raised my eyebrows. Yes.

"Junk? Heroin? He almost buckled like he had been hit in the stomach.

"For how long?
For almost a year. The outer edges of my safe space were closing in.

"That time I came to meet you on Avenue B?

 "I should really lie. Yes.

"When we went to the Carnaman in Little Italy?

"He was deconstructing our romance and building something else, a darker, unloving relationship where dope had tricked him. 

"I was thinking, didn't I look different when I was high? And how come no one knew?

"Silence. He had stopped talking. I was alone now, watching my baby fall because of me. Because of me. He seemed so weak and unmade by disappointment. I could not find a path forward. Tom's rejection of my holler for help precipitated a complete and utter break from him.

"All night long, Tom cried like a baby. I began to recede to a faraway place, for I knew there was no going back. In the morning, he rose, picked up his wallet and keys, and drove away.

"A day later, I went to see Tom at his studio where he was rehearsing for his tour. I was thinking, okay, we had a fight and that's enough of that, right?

"Instead, a doppelganger had taken Tom's place and my boyfriend was not there anymore."

And that was that. 

Rickie lost her man through the carelessness with drugs that cost so many music biz types their lives in the 1970s, Lowell George among them. Chrissie Hynde's recent memoir, Reckless, is another tale where the drugs are everywhere, and ultimately they ruin everything. 

Part of the way through Hynde's book, I was getting a little tired of all the drug stories. A few pages later, obviously aware that it wasn't a good look, she wrote that she wasn't proud of how all this was coming across, but she couldn't sugar-coat it; that was how it was. 

So anyway, Rickie cleaned up after a couple more years of that, and in the meantime she channeled some of the pain of the break-up with Tom through her music, notably on her second album, Pirates.

And now Johnny the King walks these streets without her in the rain
Lookin' for a leather jacket and a girl who wrote her name forever
And a promise that
We belong together
Yeah, we belong together

She told Mojo magazine she still has a store of prose to write about her love affair with Waits: “That will never go away. Some people love people forever, and I’m one of them. I really feel like writing the book is as close as I can ever come to shoving that thing into the now and letting it be."

I remember you too clearly
But I'll survive another day
Conversations to share
When there's no one there
I'll imagine what you'd say

I'll see you in another life now, baby
I'll free you in my dreams
But when I reach across the galaxy
I will miss your company.

Some clips worth a look
Rickie Lee Jones live in London 1979 (BBC)

Live At The Howard Theatre, 2024

Live at Montreux Jazz Festival, 1982

Singing Steely Dan's Showbiz Kids, 2023

Rickie's Criterion Movie collection picks

Weasel and the White Boys Cool, Paris 1985

The Real End - promo video, 1984

Rickie's homepage

ALSO ON THIS BLOG

Idiot Wind Marks Bob Dylan's Return to Greatness, 1975

Joni Mitchell and The Hissing Of Summer Lawns

A Visit To The Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Sandy Denny and Fotheringay - A Beguiling Songbook

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's Artistic Peak In The 1960s

'The Making of Five Leaves Left' - A worthy Grammy nominee

photo by Keith Morris

If awards mean anything for a musician, then a Grammy is something to aspire to. Nick Drake, a relatively obscure English songwriter and guitarist who died over 50 years ago, was never going to win one in his lifetime. Like Vincent Van Gogh, his genius was only recognised long after he died. 

And now, 56 years after it was released, a specially curated collection documenting the making of his first album, is nominated for a Grammy award for Best Historical Album. It would be some kind of poetic justice were it to win. 

The boxset 'The Making of Five Leaves Left' is a lovingly detailed account of how a shy young university student came to make a richly melodic and timeless album. 

As a historical record, it is pretty much faultless and a credit to the various people involved, from the Island Records archivists, to producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood, and the Nick Drake estate who are keepers of the flame. It's certainly worthy of the Grammy Award. 

Will it win? Well, it's up against Queen Joni - nominated for the Joni Mitchell Archives - Volume 4: The Asylum Years (1976-1980) - so probably not. Joni can seemingly do no wrong right now, and she deserves the acclaim. But if you know his story, it would be tremendously fitting to see Nick Drake get a Grammy.

{Post-awards note: As I thought, the award went to Joni Mitchell}

If you're not familiar with the tale, the three albums that Nick Drake released in his lifetime failed commercially and he withdraw from live performance very early in his career, which made it difficult for his music to reach a wider audience. He died in 1974 after a prolonged period of treatment for depression. 

The quality of the music would not be denied, however, and today there is considerable demand for 'new' Nick Drake material. Hence this box set, which documents the making of Nick’s first album from 1969, Five Leaves Left, starting with the two earliest semi-formal recording sessions where Nick showcased his material. 

The Making of Five Leaves Left

Albums were not generally done as slowly as this. Nick was still at Cambridge during the making of Five Leaves Left, and so the album was recorded over 14 months' of sessions in London. That would have been an age in this period of musical revolution. By way of comparison, in a 14-month period in the mid-60s the Beatles recorded Rubber Soul, Revolver and half of Sgt. Pepper.

On The Making of Five Leaves Left, we hear the evolution, from March 1968 to April 1969, of Nick Drake’s musical vision, guided by producer Joe Boyd and engineer John Wood, with the support of his university friend and string arranger, Robert Kirby.

Any work of musical archaeology will only be as successful as the treasure unearthed in the process. In this case, the almost miraculous retrieval of two early reel-to-reel tapes that pre-date the first formal recording sessions, are the holy grail items.

The so-called Beverley Martyn tape, which was the first showcase for Joe Boyd, kept safe by Nick’s friend (and John Martyn's wife) Bev, helps fill in the picture of how Five Leaves Left came to be commissioned in the first place.

The second key piece of the jigsaw that makes this package such a compelling collection, is the nine-song tape of Nick playing and talking, recorded at Cambridge in early 1968 by another university acquaintance, Paul de Rivaz and incredibly, preserved by him. Strangely, despite the tremendous interest in Nick Drake's music in the past 25 years, de Rivas had kept it to himself, until recently.

What these tapes show is that as early as March 1968, many of the songs that would appear on the final album in May 1969 were almost fully formed. The guitar parts were more or less worked out. 

The assurance displayed in his singing and playing from the earliest tapes is striking. Here was someone with immense confidence in his material and determined to show it. 

I've listened through to the four record/disc set a few times now, and there are many aspects worth highlighting. Here are some of the things that have jumped out to me.

• There’s a piano line on Strange Face (Cello Song) from the first proper studio session in September 1968 (volume 1, track 7). It doesn’t really work, but it’s still an excellent accompaniment. Who is playing that piano is not clear from the session notes. It is possible Paul Wheeler was present at the session.
  
  
• It's interesting to see how Day Is Done progresses between the April and November ’68 sessions at Sound Techniques. Nick’s guitar playing during this period is so clear and well articulated, you can hear his confidence, and understand how Joe and John were so impressed with him. I think I almost prefer Day Is Done without the string quartet, because it makes Nick's guitar much more prominent.
  
  

  

  In the garden at Belsize Park

• The jaunty early versions of Time Has Told Me - on the Beverley and de Rivas tapes - with great assurance in the guitar playing, contrast with the relatively sluggish final album version. It’s a different dynamic at play, and quite effective.
  
  One of my long-held views is that not enough prominence was given to Nick Drake the guitar player. Why, for example, does the album version of Time Has Told Me place Richard Thompson as the main accompanist?

Thompson - who also played electric guitar on an unused version of Thoughts of Mary Jane, that later appeared on the album Time of No Reply - regarded Nick as “quite extraordinary’ in his guitar playing.

“He played immaculately and uniquely on acoustic guitar, which isn’t an easy instrument to play in a flawless way. You get buzzes, you get fret noise. Not with Nick. He’d really worked at it very hard.”

Nick’s time in France and Morocco in 1967 would have broadened his musical vocabulary, resulting in the different rhythmic ideas, tunings and the relative exoticism of a track like Three Hours. 

• Hearing Nick explain his ideas for the arrangement of the unused song My Love Left With The Rain from the Cambridge tape, is one of the delightful surprises of this boxed set. Nick tells Kirby and de Rivas “This is the one I want to have as expansive a sound as possible”, which makes it all the more curious why the song was never taken further. 
  
  
• Another of the May 1968 Cambridge tape curios, Blossom is a pleasant but unremarkable tune, notable for the work tape section at the end, where Nick shows the bass part, again demonstrating how prepared and assured he was in presenting his songs.  

The instrumental that follows this on the Cambridge tape is similarly illuminating in that it brings us closer to his compositional process, while also showing, as John Wood observed, his solid understanding of music theory.

“The most striking thing about Nick to me was how musically literate he was,” Wood told biographer Richard Morton Jack. “I’ve never worked with anyone else of that age who had that level of musical understanding and ability, as well as such a wide taste and knowledge of music.”

• On Thoughts of Mary Jane (Vol 2, track 5), Nick sings and plays the flute melody. Similarly, he knows that Day Is Done will have a string quartet accompaniment well before it is recorded.
  
  
• Nick talks about his ideas for I Was Made To Love Magic (Vol 2, track 3). Since this was only a matter of weeks after he had played the song at The Roundhouse, on the fateful day he met Ashley Hutchings, the version of Magic we hear on this tape must be close to what he played at the gig. Richard Hewson gets a bad rap generally for his arrangement work with Nick, but I've always liked what he did on Magic as it appeared on the Time Of No Reply album.

On the Cambridge tape, Nick apologises, “so badly played” (by his high standards) and then talks about his ideas for a different rhythm on Magic, with a latin-esque bass pattern.

Another Jobim-esque song (though possibly inspired by The Pentangle) follows. This is Mickey’s Tune, which was known only for its lyrics before the Cambridge tape was unearthed. And in the studio session on November 12 ’68 (Vol 2, track 12) it sounds like Nick is trying for almost a flamenco feel at the very beginning of Fruit Tree.

I have always felt - going right back 40 years ago when I first took note of Fruit Tree as the opening track on the Heaven In A Wild Flower collection - that it should have opened Five Leaves Left. That slightly hesitant, exploratory guitar line at the beginning of Fruit Tree is a more beguiling introduction to Nick’s world, and I feel it's rather hidden away on side two of Five Leaves Left.

• On the final series of sessions, on album 3, the version of Time Of No Reply is, to my ears, the same as the one that appeared on the 1980s album of the same name. Which, by the way, is a worthy companion to this boxset. 
  
  
• Along with Time Of No Reply, Mayfair was the other early song still being tried out at this late stage for inclusion on FLL. Both were ultimately discarded and never considered again for inclusion on a subsequent album. 

Richard Morton Jack wrote that it was striking that Nick remained loyal to Mayfair, in particular. “Perhaps he was fond of it as an echo of his mother’s style… although there’s a consensus that by 1969 it didn’t fit comfortably alongside his other material.”

Joey, a favourite of mine, and Clothes of Sand were likewise omitted in the final analysis and again, despite being an excellent showcase for Nick’s elegant guitar melodies, they were never considered for his following albums. They were all included on the posthumous Fruit Tree box set as part of a fourth album, Time Of No Reply. 

• Another musical snippet that was discarded by the final studio sessions is Nick’s lead into River Man, from the January 1969 session (Vol 3, track 4).
  
  
• Way To Blue, with just Nick on piano, is another revelation from the 1968 Cambridge tape (Vol 3, track 5). You might think it actually sounds good like this, but when Robert Kirby came to Sound Techniques for the first time in April 1969, to conduct the strings, he blew Joe and John away.

photo by Keith Morris

The sessions with the string ensemble were all done live, with Nick playing guitar. The first song Nick and Robert tackled was Way To Blue, which Joe and John had never heard. 

According to Richard Morton Jack, "Nick had initially written it for his own piano accompaniment, but he and Robert had since agreed – perhaps owing to the influence of Randy Newman’s I Think It’s Going To Rain Today – that its impact would be greater if he simply sang to the strings.”

Joe and John were sceptical. Having set up levels for each instrument, John gave Robert the nod. “Suddenly, John pushed up all the faders. We heard this string part and we were both knocked back in our seats,” remembers Joe. “We thought, this is exquisite, just amazing.”

For anyone who knows and loves the original album, The Making of Five Leaves Left is a fascinating glimpse at the inner workings of an emerging talent. The weaving together of the varied source material, and the meticulous detail contained in the accompanying book, are truly a credit to the production team.

Credit is also due to Michael Burdett, for his role in bringing the Paul de Rivas Cambridge tape to the attention of Nick’s estate. Burdett will be familiar to anyone who saw his one-man show, the 'Strange Face Project' about travelling the UK talking to random folk and a handful of celebs, while playing them a discarded early recording of Nick's Cello Song.

At the conclusion of one of these shows, Paul de Rivas approached Burdett and explained that he had known Nick Drake. What's more, he had a recording of him. 

Not just any old recording, it turned out.

ALSO ON THIS BLOG:

A Visit To The Annual Nick Drake Gathering

Duncan Browne's Journey - and comparisons with Nick Drake

Nick Drake - Heaven In A Wild Flower 

An alternative to those predictable lists of classic albums

Sandy Denny and Fotheringay - A Beguiling Songbook

Blonde On Blonde - Bob Dylan's Artistic Peak In The 1960s

The Day David Bowie Died - 10 years gone.

I was in my office in Hong Kong on the day Bowie died, surrounded by people mostly much younger than me, who didn't seem at all interested when I blurted out 'Oh no, David Bowie died!'

The first tweets were coming through (news guy wept and told us…) with the shocking truth. Faced with a room full of 150 people who couldn’t give a toss, I had to take a walk outside.

Top Of The Pops, 1972

It can’t be wrong to feel so deeply the loss of someone you didn’t know personally, when that someone has been such a powerful figure in your life.

It’s a story well-told, that for anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 80s, Bowie played a pivotal, crucial role in our youthful fantasies.

Hard to imagine now but on the 6th of July 1972, when Bowie appeared on Top Of The Pops and sang, “I had to phone someone, so I picked on you…” and pointed straight at the camera, he sparked a cultural change for a whole generation. 

Such was the power of television at that time. Everyone who saw it, remembers Bowie putting his arm around Mick Ronson as they sang the Starman chorus in harmony. Men didn't do that kind of thing, but these guys were clearly different. I mean, look at them! "Bunch of poofs", our Dads would have said.

Ciggie stardust

His carefully cultivated image of otherness - from Major Tom to Ziggy to the Thin White Duke and on, to the many and various characters he embodied - gave young people the licence to think outside of the norms of society, with no apologies.

His intellect and imagination was fed by a diet of the most diverse writing he could find, some of which, like The Divided Self by R. D. Laing or The Stranger by Albert Camus and The Outsider by Colin Wilson, inspired his music directly.

At Live Aid in 1985, it was Bowie’s performance at Wembley, rather than Queen’s, that had people grabbing their phones to donate. His selfless decision to set aside time in his set to show the awful images of the Ethiopian famine, was a true measure of the man and his humanity, capturing the mood of that amazing day perfectly.

I could make the transformation as a rock and roll star

He was well ahead of the game in seeing the potential of the internet and his early bowienet platform allowed him to see at close quarters how online communities might develop.  

We were all richer for having David Bowie in our lives.

That evening in Hong Kong, I went back to my flat, opened the windows wide and played 'Life On Mars' at full volume. It never sounded better.

Something happened on the day he died

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Also On This Blog:

David Bowie interview with the NME, 1974

February 1970 - with Bowie in obscurity, Mick Ronson joinsMichael Chapman

My old David Bowie RCA CDs - the only ones of value

1971 - At home with Marc Bolan

A Tribute to David Sanborn, the sax player on Young Americans