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.
Last Chance Texaco, her memoir of hard knocks and survival, reads like poetry in its beauty at times, but at others it carries a heavy weight.
Like her songs, there’s joy and laughter, but also hurt and longing.
Her songs were her diary, her journal of what it was like to be a wanderer in
search of love and artistic direction.
Sometimes your worst years are what make you better later.
Rickie Lee Jones the performer was, in retrospect, bound to succeed, such was
her irrepressible persona and innate musical genius.
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. In 1976, based in and around Venice Beach in California,
she began 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.
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 cloth and were the perfect match. They belonged together and, from 1977 to 1979 on and off, they were.
But just as she was making the big time with her first album and world tour, artistic success was spoiled by romantic failure, entirely of her own making. Rickie kept a dark secret from the love of her life, and he never forgave her.
“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.”
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 image 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."
“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 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
wanted to hide in a bush. 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.”
Warner Brothers put the best session players to work on the debut album. Steve Gadd, Victor Feldman, Tom Scott, Buzzy Feiten, Dr. John et al, with trusted producers Lenny Waronker and Russ Titelman. They treated her not as a newcomer, but as someone who was giving her all to put across music of distinct character.
"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."
But no one expected the record to take off the way it did. Once Chuck E's In Love was a hit, Rickie had no time to reflect on how her life had changed suddenly.
"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."
Tom travelled to Europe to support Rickie’s first tour, but 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.
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
A romance with Dr. John had given Rickie a taste for smoking
heroin – chasing the dragon as it’s known. Her mistake was thinking she could
be a functioning addict without any consequences. Actually, her big mistake was
thinking Waits would understand when she hid it from him for a year.
“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.”
 |
| The 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. |
"Tom wanted to make a stop at the humble little house he'd seen for rent in Echo Park. We got out and looked in the windows, then sat on the front porch floor.
"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.”
But you ran out of gas
Down the road apiece
Then the battery went dead
And now the cable won't reach
She was suffering withdrawal from the drug and maybe she thought if she confided in him, he would help her break the habit.
"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.
Where did you go?
Well, I went for a walk.
Inside the room, we sat down on the bed. Tom started.
I thought you left.
Why would you think that? I touched him for reassurance.
I don't know. I love you.
I hugged him.
"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 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
Writing about the Tom Waits thing was very hard, she told The Guardian. “It seemed to be an open wound that had never healed. When I first started writing about it there was still so much anger and tears that, at one point, I thought: how am I going to write about this without it just bleeding on to the paper?”
And she told
Mojo magazine that she still had a store of prose to write about her love
affair with Waits: “That will never go away. Maybe some of the pain will go
away and has, but the wound here, that’s a lost love.
"Because it was all tied up with my success it was hard to grow out of. In those years, it felt like Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner. Some people love people forever, and I’m one of them. I really feeling 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.
