Rickie Lee Jones Takes Off Like A Rocket

Rickie at home in New Orleans

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.

Her instant success with the single Chuck E's In Love gave Rickie no time to adjust to such a massive shift in circumstances. No surprise then that she struggled to find any equilibrium in that first flush of her career.

Live in London, 1979

It is said that nothing in the world can take the place of persistence, especially if you have an innate talent. 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 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"

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 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?".

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 know 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."

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.

"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.

I willingly paid to spend time with Rickie Lee Jones. It was a total pleasure. 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.

I miss those days, in some ways. 

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 many sides of Walter Becker

Having just contributed to a podcast in memory of Steely Dan's Walter Becker, who passed away this week, I've compiled some examples of his work that casual listeners and readers may not be so familiar with.

The partnership between Becker and Donald Fagen was such that it is often difficult to know where an idea has stemmed from. They were so well-matched in terms of intellect and musical knowledge, they were in the habit of finishing each other's sentences. Nonetheless, it is fairly well accepted that Becker, with his rather more chequered background, contributed the darker, more surreal ideas to The Dan's music.

And there were plenty of them. The new identity fixer in Sign In Stranger; the 'man of science' mixing up his psychedelics in Kid Charlemagne; the ode to "the Cuervo Gold, the fine Colombian" in Hey Nineteen and perhaps most personal of all, Any World (That I'm Welcome To).

-------------------------------------

"Whenever I recorded with Walter and Donald, right before the engineer pushed the red button, Walt would shimmy over to me and in a stage whisper, would say: 

“Just play the blues Elliott… just play the blues”.

- Elliott Randall, session guitarist on Steely Dan's albums 

and most famous for his soloing on Reelin' In The Years

--------------------------------------

We don't know too much about Becker's early years, apart from the fact his parents separated, but we do know he had his demons and, as Fagen noted, his "habits". The song 'Time Out Of Mind' from Gaucho would have been very close to home at that point in his life. The heroin halted his friendship with Fagen at the end of the 1970s and Becker retreated to Hawaii to recover from his addiction.

He re-emerged in the 80s handling production for the band China Crisis (the story of how he was attracted to the British band because he'd misheard their name as Vagina Crisis seems fitting somehow). He produced their album 'Flaunt The Imperfection', which contains the track 'You Did Cut Me', released as a single in 1985. It could easily be a Steely Dan song.

In 1989, he met up with Rickie Lee Jones and the two collaborated on her fourth album 'Flying Cowboys', which contained a lovely song 'The Horses'. Co-written with Becker, a cover version of the song by Daryl Braithwaite made No 1 in Australia.

and this song, Satellites, which shows traces of Becker's influence

Rickie Lee Jones wrote a touching tribute to Walter this week for Rolling Stone magazine. She said Steely Dan made it OK to be educated: "It was the idea that intelligent music was cool".

"I was brought up, you might say, on writing thick with imagery and subtle implication and I loved it. I loved the innuendo, the humor, the sting. The genius was as much in the part we filled in, the lines they didn't write. That was where the sticky stuff of memory made their music a part of our own personal history."

Of Becker, she wrote, "I have often said that so much of what we write seems to be prophetic. Walter lost too many people to drugs. He found too many people laying on the floor. The bed. Too many heartbreaks."

Becker and Fagen were able to move forward with their unique musical partnership in the 1990s, initially working together on Fagen's second solo album Kamakiriad, where Becker was the co-producer, and co-writer of the song Snowbound. He is listed as the bassist/guitarist on the album too.

 

In 1994, the year after the Steely Dan reunion tour, Walter produced his first solo album '11 Tracks of Whack', which was well received but not as commercially successful as his partner's solo records. Becker's sound was less polished and without the rounded melodies of The Nightfly or Kamakiriad. But it did contain some great compositions, demonstrating Becker's vivid imagination and a lyricism few could match.

"Over the hill and into the next meadow and on and on and on
In a near random universe there are still certain combinations
Picked out from all other possible ones
Which, when given some time and the just-right circumstances
Not too far from the earth or too close to the sun
They will dance and they’ll spin in the embrace of the trade winds
Playing havoc with the hearts and the upturned faces down below
Until the laws of curved spacetime, suspended without warning
Kick back in with a vengeance for the last act of the show"

from the track 'Surf and/or die'

 ----------------------------

"My inner Steely Dan geek was extremely anxious to get answers to the many questions I had since the age of 14. What guitar did you use on the solo (perhaps my favorite of his) on “Pretzel Logic”? Answer: an old Epiphone solid body. What is a “squonk”? (now, of course, you can wiki it). Who were some of the others on the legendarily large list of guitarists who took a stab at the solo to “Peg”? (He told me that Robben Ford had recorded an especially awesome solo.)"

- Drew Zingg, lead guitarist on the reunion tour, and heard to best effect on Third World Man from the 'Alive in America' album

----------------------------

Becker didn't produce his second solo album, 'Circus Money' until 2008 and many Dan fans are probably unfamiliar with it, as it received no promotion and virtually no airplay. But it has better production values than the first album and hangs together as a good collection of songs.

  

In the last 10 years, he also collaborated on a couple of albums with Madeleine Peyroux, notably on the 2009 album Bare Bones. One of the co-writes on the album is the song 'You Can't Do Me' which has an undeniable Becker stamp on it.

To round off this review of Walter Becker's musical legacy, if you want to enjoy more of the man's writing and his sense of humour, check out the stories and tour notes he wrote for the Steely Dan website. The site was set up when they first started touring again and many of the early stories are still up on the site - www.steelydan.com - here's one random example. All this stuff is made up, it's just him riffing on an idea: https://www.steelydan.com/fugue07.html

And while they took songwriting to another place, and made it OK to be intelligent in popular music, Becker and Fagen never took themselves too seriously. As here, where they cruise around New York, picking up seemingly random girls to discuss their music.

The New York Times obituary for Walter mistakenly referred the last of their classic era album as Groucho, prompting this amusing cover illustration, although I don't know who did it. 

 Not that you'd know it from that clip, but Walter was the quiet one of the two, and would have been a rather intimidating presence at times I'm sure, as the wittiest and most urbane guy in the room. But his wit and intellect added much of the spice within the complex flavours of Steely Dan. He was a one-off, and he's left a wonderful musical legacy.

Here's what his daughter had to say in memory of her dad:
http://walterbecker.com/daughters.html

RIP Walt.

IF YOU LIKE MY BLOG, PLEASE HIT THE FOLLOW BUTTON ON THE SIDE PANEL THANKS

Further reading and listening:

Pitchfork: 8 Songs That Show Walter Becker's Brilliance

Washington Post: Walter Becker was the cynical one, hiding behind the guitar

If you're looking for a thoughtful and perhaps unusual Steely Dan playlist, may I suggest this one?

And someone has thoughtfully packaged the out-takes from the Gaucho Sessions into a 'lost' album compilation.

ALSO ON THIS BLOG

Rickie Lee Jones and The Last Chance Texaco

Steely Dan's expressions to avoid in the recording studio 

Steely Dan interviewed in 1975 and 1977

Steely Dan's 36 rules for bands