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| Rickie at home in New Orleans |
Even then, she had to borrow some cash because she didn’t have a bank account and was behind on her rent.
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| Live in London, 1979 |
Her early music was a rich melee of cocktail jazz and showtunes, with a tinge of influence from Laura Nyro and Dory Previn. Her words were 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
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, as she says in her memoir, Last Chance Texaco, it was who she was then.
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" |
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."
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| Waits, Chuck E., RLJ and Dr. John |
"'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.
"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 about Rickie 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?".
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| 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 know how to put it down. It was a hard way to be."
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.
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| 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.
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.
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.
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
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