Rickie Lee Jones: Watch Your Keel When The Siren Sings, Boys
By Dean Bonzani
11.6.05
So, you want to know who Rickie Lee Jones is? That’s a tough one.
Throw on one of her thirteen recordings— pop a CD into the disc player, or better yet, pull a well-loved, ratty-edged LP— maybe Pirates, or Girl At Her Volcano— out of the stack, and blow the cinder dust off the top lip. Slide the shining black platter out of the sleeve and place it on your turntable as gently as a lover leaving a blood-red kiss on their dead love’s forehead, and listen.
Listen.
You’ll find Rickie Lee Jones in the music that springs out of the speakers, because that’s where she lives. That is where her soul resides. She’s one of those rare artists who’s emptied herself— spilled herself out— into her music to the point where one must wonder what was left behind in her diminutive frame.
Better yet— get a hold of Jones’ brand new anthology, Duchess of Coolsville, and listen to the whole damn collection in one sitting. Light a dozen candles. Take the phone off of the hook (it’s just going to be telemarketers calling anyway) and turn off the porchlight. Put on your favorite sweater— the one with the frayed cuffs— and snuggle down deep into the cushions of the couch. Close your eyes and let the music take you to the grimy streets and Cadillac back seats, the dim-lit cocktail booths and star-lit tenement roofs of Jones’ emotion-soaked stories, with their Johnnies and Joes and poker-playing Lolitas, caught in one tangled web after another.
Towards the end of the third disc, maybe by the bottom of your third Merlot or Glenlivets or carrot juice and Seagram’s Seven, you’ll hear the previously unreleased demo version of Jones’ “Easy Money,” the tune that first got her noticed by Warner Brothers records in the late ‘70’s, when Little Feat’s founder, the late Lowell George, recorded the song on his solo album, Thanks, I’ll Eat It Here.
This demo version, with just Rickie Lee and her acoustic guitar, gets to the heart of the matter. Sleazy, slippery saloon jazz sung in a voice that practically slides off the end of the table onto the floor. Hustlers hustling hustlers. This is the smoky blue jazz side of Ms. Jones, distilled.
But it’s the track right after this one, another unreleased demo, that gives one insight into the territory of popular music that Jones has laid sole claim to, and reigns over to this day, alone. “Satellites,” in this raw and intimate incarnation, perhaps holds the greatest clue to the mystery of her talents. In the liner notes of Duchess of Coolsville, the mighty Bill Frisell has this to say of that mystery: “The first time I met and played with Rickie Lee was on her The Evening Of My Best Day recording. I didn’t know what to expect. We didn’t talk about anything— just walked in and started playing. She really pulls it out of the air. She’s in the moment, an improviser. She’s a real musician.”
This quality is captured forever in the demo of “Satellites.” Accompanying herself on synthesizer, with her trademark lush, spooky harmonies hovering around the melody like hummingbirds, the listener can hear the liquid framework of Jones’ genius bending and swaying.
We were born forever/ tunneled into the fugitive night/ friends must stay together/ code the world with the fugitive light/ I just saw you walking/ ice was reading fortunes by the moonlight/ casting runes on the rooftops and alleys/ you'll never read it more than you will tonight/ so you keep talking in many languages/ telling us the way you feel/ don't stop confiding in the road you're on/ don't quit, you're walking satellites
With the release of her anthology, Jones is taking a long look back at her remarkable career, and gleaning the best of her work, with enough surprises thrown in to round out the deal. It takes the listener from the release of her 1979 self-titled debut, which won her the Grammy for Best New Artist, through cuts from 1981’s Pirates (her most acclaimed work, featuring many of the same studio musicians responsible for the sound of early Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell, and guest starring Donald Fagen on the title track), 1983’s Girl At Her Volcano (a collection of jazz standards and studio outtakes), 1984’s The Magazine, 1989’s Flying Cowboys (produced by Steely Dan’s Walter Becker and her first album on Geffen records), 1991’s Pop Pop (produced by Jones and David Was), 1993’s Traffic From Paradise, 1997’s Ghostyhead, 2000’s collection of standards, It’s Like This, to the present day, with tracks from her last studio album, 2003’s The Evening of My Best Day, including a tune that’s inspired vicious lash back from fans of George W. Bush, “Ugly Man.” Only 1995’s Naked Songs, a collection of live recordings of an acoustic tour, goes unrepresented in this collection.
Jones has never reached the ubiquitous fame of pop stars like Madonna (whom she’s expressed open disdain for), but instead inspired legions of cult fans who have followed her eclectic output with rabid devotion since she exploded on the scene in ’79, amidst a disco craze that was anything but hospitable to a beatnik jazz/R &B/scat singer/songstress who’d only recently come in off the road and into the studio, and hot on the heels of the birth of Punk Rock in 1977 with bands like The Ramones, Television, and The Sex Pistols.
A bit of history is in order.
Rickie Lee Jones was born on November 8, 1954, in Chicago, Illinois to Richard Loris Jones and Bettye Jane Jones, the second of three daughters and one son. Her father was a free spirit who had lived something of a hobo’s life, riding freight trains across the country in his youth. His own father was a one-legged vaudeville and carnival dancer named Peg Leg Jones. Jones’ mother worked as a waitress, and later, a nurse. Both parents would come to separate, her father moving to Phoenix, where Jones came to live with him for awhile when she was fourteen. As Rickie Lee developed into a teenager, a rebellious streak set in, and she would often run away from home, hitchhiking across the country. Later, she would get kicked out of high school in Olympia, Washington, for her hipster defiance. She sang a lot, and kept a notebook that she filled with her lyrics. The dramatic side of her personality was fully blooming, her father’s theatrical nature and literary passion showing its influence on his impressionable boho daughter.
By the age of nineteen, she was living in Los Angeles, working as a waitress and performing music in coffee houses and bars. It was at this time that the beginnings of her style began to emerge, and she penned her breakout song, “Easy Money.” It was also around this time that she had famous associations with Chuck E. Weiss, the subject of her hit, “Chuck E.’s In Love,” and fellow bohemian tunesmith, Tom Waits. Her four-song demo was brought to the attention of Lenny Waronker of Warner Brothers records, and her recording career began in earnest, with the release of Rickie Lee Jones. Her style included an ever-present beret, and she may have single-handedly re-introduced the hat as a beat accessory. Her sultry presence, undeniably cool, floated on a sea of hot emotion and wild imagination that bowled listeners over with its intensity. Much of the record buying public didn’t know, and still doesn’t know, how to classify or what to do with, the eccentric brilliance of her work, born as it was from the half-madness that is the hallmark gift of the true artist. The true believers would stay along for the ride.
Album after amazing album followed, but storm clouds were building on the horizon. After the release of the synth-laden production of The Magazine in 1984, Jones ducked from view to deal with mounting business and drinking problems (she’d begun drinking as a teenager), and to give birth to her daughter, whose French father she divorced.
She picked up where she’d left off with 1989’s Flying Cowboys. Producer Walter Becker, himself responsible for some of the most enduring gems of popular music ever recorded, had this to say about working with Jones:
“At our first meeting I suggested to Rickie that we get a band together, rehearse them and then go into the studio to get performances. She was dumbfounded. ‘Why would I want to do that? There won’t be any surprises that way.’ Once we started recording, I came to understand that she was always looking for the spontaneous, the unexpected, the unique musical moment which could not be concocted or duplicated. This was her source of inspiration for performance, her first principle, and she stuck with it throughout.”
“As I came to know her, I discovered that Rickie was supersmart, ultra-intuitive, warm, funny, passionate about music and all sorts of things, and a great storyteller. She was very present in everything she did and capable of great and sudden transports of feeling and affect, which made her most exciting and delightful to hang with and work with. I saw over and over how the power and depth of her writing and her musicianship derived from her commitment to life, to experience, to herself. Of course I already understood from her work that this was the case— in other words, it wasn’t necessary to know her personally to know that she was for real. Nevertheless, working together and becoming friends only strengthened my sense of what a great artist she is.” (From the liner notes of Duchess of Coolsville.)
Collections of ballads, jazz standards, trip hop excursions, and live performances took Jones from ’91 to ’03, when she was compelled to draw herself out of a semi-retirement of sorts, living on a bucolic ranch in Oregon with her daughters, dogs, and assorted livestock, to record an album which features as its lead-in track Jones’ first protest song. The combination of her undiluted sentiments toward the President in song form, and various from-the-hip responses to questions in European interviews, led to her receiving death threats and vicious criticisms (largely centered around themes of treachery, celebrity ignorance, and Jones’ painful admissions of having been addicted to heroin and cocaine— addictions that she is now gratefully free of) from offended loyalists. Jones was forced to shut down her website, www.furnitureforthepeople.com, to clear it of attacking parties and allow the dust to settle, courageously defending her stance in interviews and further elucidating in detail which issues in particular (Patriot Acts I & II, with their huge margins for sinister abuses tops the list) had driven her, in anger and outrage, to speak out against the current administration’s abuses and the widespread acceptance of them.
Perhaps it was the tragic and untimely death of Laura Nyro, the New York singer/songwriter whose work obviously had a huge influence on Jones’ musical approach (and who was never given her proper due, despite her vast impact on popular music) at age 49 of ovarian cancer, that helped hasten an overwhelming sense of mortality in Jones, who performed in an all-star tribute concert to Nyro in October of 1997. Approaching the age of 50 when she wrote the songs for The Evening Of My Best Day, Jones confided in one interview that she feared that she might not occupy this mortal plane for much longer, which may have factored in to her making the sort of bold stand that those who inwardly feel that there’s nothing to lose, save by remaining silent make.
Presently, Jones is on a brief West coast tour in support of her anthology, which, if it’s the only RLJ disc you’ll ever buy, you ought to. While some listeners find her singing an acquired taste (like Ani DiFranco’s, Robert Smith’s, or Lou Reed’s for instance— one reviewer said that at times it was “grating girlish quavering”), others can’t seem to listen to the tune “Skeletons” without sobbing uncontrollably all over their computer keyboards while trying to write an article on her. “Skeletons” being one of the beautifully haunting recordings ever made, with Rickie Lee’s voice conveying the absolute fragility and constant possibility of tragedy inherent in day to day existence, and the hope and resiliency that somehow gets us all through it.
Should Ms. Jones’ premonitions come true (let’s pray that they don’t) and she should pass away from injuries sustained in a freak goat-milking accident, she will leave behind a monumental legacy of jazz/pop/torchlight composition and performance that has had an immeasurable influence on her fellow artists and fans.
Rickie Lee Jones at the Orpheum Theater, Sun., Nov. 13 th. Doors at 7:00 P.M./ show at 8:00 P.M. Admission is $33. advance/ $37. day of show, with reserved seating for $40. advance/ $45. day of show.