Swirling within the somewhat eccentric aura that surrounded Rickie Lee Jones at the time she and her musical shtick first turned my head back in the late ’70s was this dazzling poet-gypsy-vagabond-troubadour component that just wouldn’t let go. I became immediately smitten. “Beat chicks” do that to me.
A few of us old radio buddies were still a year or so out from getting KPCW up and running in the old Memorial Building back then when I happened to catch her on a Saturday Night Live TV show. Drawing from a wide palette of musical art, she nonetheless came across as totally unique. She reminded me of no one.
I recall this convergence because at our next Scotch-soaked board of trustees meeting I nominated “Coolsville” to be the first song broadcast when we finally went on the air. I steered clear of “Chuck E.’s in Love” since I knew it would be the radio hit.
The fact that my pick would get beat out for the honor by Tex Ross and the Park City Rhythm Wranglers’ 78-rpm version of “Utah Waltz,” however, made much more sense when the actual time came around.
Her first LP, entitled “Rickie Lee Jones,” tumbled off the Warner Bros. Records vinyl presses sometime in 1979 and she would go on to garner the 1980 Grammy for Best New Artist. Others albums would follow and I’d catch songs every so often over the airwaves that bore her unmistakable delivery and poetic sensibility.
Like many others who encountered Rickie Lee’s art around that time, I thought of her as a female Tom Waits. It wouldn’t be until much later that I would learn that she and Waits had already hooked up at the Troubadour nightclub in West Hollywood a couple of years before that night I first saw her on SNL.
Of course, it was that bohemian thing again, the way she looked in that beret as she slouched in the shadows singing “Downstairs at Danny’s All Star Joint/They got a juke box that goes doyt-doyt/A finger-snappin’ deluxe/Make your be-bop bap/And your R&B hep-scat.”
Whether or not it was true, I imagined she had schooled herself in Kerouac and Cassady and Ginsberg and Burroughs. I even pictured her poring over Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus in her spare time. But, admittedly, that was a stretch.
Although “But you ran out of gas/Down the road a piece/Then the battery went dead/And now the cable won’t reach” from “Last Chance Texaco” could have, in a different idiom, come straight out of “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
Pastel shades of Mose Allison and Chet Baker colored her compositions and vocal style and I just couldn’t get enough of her knack for what was “hip.” Everything about her flaunted a sense of singularity. But, you could tell right away that, creatively, she had no notions of staying put.
At that time, few performers with a recording contract dared risk crossing genres. But, from the beginning, Rickie Lee couldn’t care less about worn paths. Various incarnations of jazz, blues, rock, pop, and R&B all played out the same to her.
One semi-bizarre metamorphosis, a collective rock-band project she and a few musician friends christened “Chain Austin,” hit the road as part of the 1996 H.O.R.D.E. tour. It was a band in which cacophony proved every bit as important as couplets.
With a stop scheduled at the old Wolf Mountain Resort (now Canyons) and a lineup also featuring the Blues Travelers, Dave Matthews Band, King Crimson, Lenny Kravitz, Taj Mahal and a host of others on at least three stages, I acquired tickets and began counting the days.
Being of the tribe that would rather miss Woodstock than a chance to hear Taj Mahal sing the blues, I also looked forward to finally seeing Rickie Lee Jones in person. The few other opportunities that had presented themselves somehow never worked out. And, as it turned out, neither would this one.
With Taj and Rickie Lee’s times overlapping on separate satellite stages, a thunderstorm blew through that pretty much leveled the joint and would keep me manning one of the support lines that held the canopy over Taj and his gear. By the time I located Chain Austin’s stage, that bird had flown.
Did I mention that Rickie Lee is headlining a show at Deer Valley this Saturday? It must have slipped my mind. I’ve been too busy listening to her vocal interpretations of the Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil” and the Beatles’ “For No One” on her website.
Please allow her to introduce herself. It’s only a short walk to www.rickieleejones.com and the winds don’t seem to be blowing all that hard in Coolsville at the moment.
Jay Meehan is a culture junkie and has been an observer, participant, and chronicler of the Park City and Wasatch County social scenes for more than 40 years.