With a spot on the bill at Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson’s Vivid LIVE festival, Rickie Lee Jones makes a long overdue return to Australian shores to showcase tracks from her fourteenth album Balm In Gilead and the music from her long career of roots, blues, jazz and folk tunes.
Her self-titled debut in 1979 featured the classic Chuck Es In Love and earned five Grammy nominations including Best New Artist. Following a long period of writers block – and several covers albums – she returned to form with 2003’s The Evening of My Best Day which featured collaborations with Mike Watt, Grant Lee Phillips, Ben Harper and Wilco’s Nels Cline.
The Duchess of Coolsville: An Anthology retrospective followed in 2005, featuring tributes from Randy Newman, Quincy Jones and Tori Amos, and renewed interest in her music.
FasterLouder caught up with the Duchess of Coolsville to chat about Vivid LIVE, her proudest moments, Chuck E, shark fin soup, true emotion and global revolution.
Your latest record is a return to what I think is the classic sound that only you can make. How did the self-penned songs come about? Was it a lengthy recording process?
I was actually doing a record of the old songs in new ways, or old ways, to try to get some dough for licensing. And right away David [Kalish] and I wrote a new song, and brought up some of the old ones, like old enough and Eucaliptis Trail, recordings from earlier years. So I just kept writing and the recordings of the old songs were not really very interesting, so I just shifted the project. It took longer than I thought but less than it could have, about four five months but the songs many of them were decades in the oven.
You re-recorded a beautiful song your father wrote in the ‘50s, Moon Is Made Of Gold, what do you feel is the difference this time around and why did you choose to re-visit it?
I had never put it on my own record. It was rather sad in the past, just heartache for my dad and my childhood. But I feel the original spirit of the original recording now, and was able to do it just that way, how my Dad and uncle did it when they recorded it in that little booth at the train station in the 50s.
Victoria Williams and the late Vic Chesnutt joined you on Balm, they are unique and singular performers. Victoria can take songs where other people cannot and Vic was just an amazing character and artist who will be missed. How did this collaboration come about?
Victoria is a singer that I suddenly began to think of a lot, she lives in the desert, and I knew I wanted her and Vic on His Jeweled Floor. I had done some shows with Vic, he opened for me for some series of shows. We met at a Bill Frizell sponsored festival in Germany. I liked him so much.
I know that Georgia punk thing did not really include me at all, so as I met these guys and showed interest in their work, they responded by interest in mine. The things we assume about each other….marketing I guess. I loved his voice, his attitude, his courage. He was a great singer. My brother lost his leg when he was 16, I have grown up with some sense of what it is like to have difficulty with your body, to be treated differently, and Vic also was hurt as a teen in a car. His injuries were really catastrophic, yet he managed to do this incredible music with a couple fingers and a great big heart.
His Jeweled Floor is about the soul’s journey to heaven, after the hard years here, the broken body, finally forgotten by the earth, can rest again. It could be disturbing that he sang it and died a few months later, but I knew it was meant for them, and I chose the engineer, (who has MS) Victoria and Vic to sing this song with me, to my mother, to our loved ones, and for ourselves.
I know Vic was ‘atheist’ but he came from a doctrine kind of southern Baptist background, it would be very hard to take Jesus or anything else to heart after that kind of hateful worshiping. Yet I believe he is alive in the way we will all be, that we are one, and each of us must save and help every last one of us before we all can, as one, be whole and delivered to some other nebulae or shapeless environment.
The idea that it’s some kind of competition and that some of us have to beat others of us to get a seat, man, doesn’t anyone READ these books? WE ALL have to get there, and we have to help all our others to the gate. So now later in life, in the last 10 years, I have begun to make friends out here in the larger world. It means everything to me, I was isolated so long.
Were you planning on touring Australia or was it the Vivid LIVE gigs that spurred you to visit us?
I had been asking about it for a long time. It’s funny because it’s so precarious, only if someone knows someone who might be able to contact someone here (like we are living in the stone age up there, down here) then maybe we can get a gig. It takes an invitation to come here. So I came as soon as I was invited and paid and tickets sold. It’s just that simple.
Who will be coming to Australia to accompany you and what can we expect at The Sydney Opera House?
We are a trio. We do a combination of electric improvisation and acoustic songs. It’s always new and each song is made into a new shape each night. I try to do something for the audience like Easy Money or Chuck E or even Danny’s All Star Joint, but I don’t always. Sometimes they are very esoteric and spiritual, sometimes they rock, and other times they are more or less brief.
I feel the audience and I give back the shape of their collective spirit to them. It’s a church, a concert. I mean, we are working with other worldly vocabulary, we are healing each other and the love is powerful. I think. It’s really incredible, I love playing music. I love performing it.
Do you have any plans to collaborate with either Laurie Anderson or Lou Reed?
We have not spoken yet, I know them both. Lou has been coming to my shows for a long time and we have shared managers and musicians. I would love to be on stage with them, one or both. But no plans, no.
Do you have any other collaborations, records or songs coming up in any way that we may get to hear?
I want to work with Victoria on a slightly western project and I have also wanted to work with the Haydens, Charlie and Petra, for a long time, on a blue grass record.
How do you feel about song-writing these days and do you spend much time with it?
It has to do with letting go of it not pouring over every detail. I am much more impressionistic than I once was, though I recognize some of that, just some, might be from laziness.
I like writing with people now too, but it is like everything I do, I do not practice it, I do not prepare. It happens in a surge, wait for that surge and trust it. Odds are by now my unconscious knows just what to say. If I stay out of the way, I can improve the thing perfectly.
With over 30 years now of recording and performing, when you look back over the years, what sticks out for you as the high points that you are most proud of?
Well sometimes courage is not the greatest moment from the outside, but you know that you did something undone before. I suppose Magazine was courageous. Chuck E was over. Pirates was over. I was off drugs. My career, five years in, with Madonna rising and Wang Chung and all that British crap, I took a stand as a kind of dark storyteller, and I recited a poem, I did some of my own syth cut and paste thing on weird beast, but still not totally my own, always letting some other person say that should be different.
On Pirates, everything was how I wanted it but Magazine was the record of a person who had lost confidence and so it is a record of courage. I am still there, still trying. Pirates is not courageous as much as it is a captain on the sea, a woman in her element, she IS brave, she does not have to be courageous.
So as far as my creative work…I don’t have a most, it’s all been my best at any given moment. I collaborated with an Iranian woman on lullabies from the Axis of Evil when Bush was reigning. I collaborated with Steely Dan and Randy Newman on Pirates, I collaborated with Nels Cline and Mike Watt on it takes you there, and with Tommy La Puma and Dr John on Makin Whoopie, Bill Frizell on some of my more intuitive songs, I have worked with Joe Henderson, Arlo Guthrie and Bruce Springsteen.
I wish I could have sung with Van Morrison, my growing up listening to him really made my voice a good one for him, I wish I had come to Laura Nyro when she called, and to Gerry Mulligan when he invited me over, I regret these things. SO now I reach out, and I come when anyone calls. I want to be part of people’s lives – that is the creative force.
The music, it’s not what matters, it’s the human beings. The music will be a testament of that spirit, it matters, but make no mistake, how you treated every person on your way to the studio matters too. I was serenaded by Lowell George one night as he sang Willin, lit from behind by a light, and I danced under a street lamp with Tom Waits to music only we heard, always illuminated from behind by a light. I have imagined each and every person I have met. Now I mean to be here, to write, to tell it, if anyone asks, and to give it away. Like to get paid, but more important, want people to want it, want them to have it. That’s the best thing, not that I am remembered, but that the living, my daughter, my granddaughter, can, like me, look at a scrap book of her grandparents and say “Hey, I come from something, I have ancestors who are with me, all that were before led to me, and I matter”. That is what the dead desire, that the living may feel loved, loved, alive. That’s the picture I see.
Your music has been coloured by many styles, but when you peruse your songs and music, who and what do you feel have been your biggest influences? I am still loving Old Souls and Wolf Tickets by Chuck E Weiss, and he is linked to your earliest hit, do you have any contact with him these days?
I see Chuck E often. We live a mile or two from each other. He eats at the 101 cafe, kind of the new Dukes, only because the old Dukes in a neighborhood that is hard to frequent. His R&B soul background, from the 50s, his parents owned a music store I think, his education musical is profound, and I think he really turned Waits on to a lot of music.
Waits had the charisma, Chuck E had the interest in musical styles. I am sure The Beatles are my biggest influence, and it simply depends on which way I am leaning…it can be Cat Stevens or Taj Mahal, Laura Nyro or Van Morrison, or some obscure blue grass band, they are all in me. I grew up in the 60s and am radio in the 60s was diverse and powerful, Harry Belafonte and Bob Dylan. I mean, we were educated back then.
I still re-call hearing Chuck E’s In Love for the first time and thinking it had ‘hit ’ written all over it. What did you feel about the song when you wrote it and can you re-call the writing process around it?
I remember leaning on the trunk of my car singing it to Chuck after I wrote it. It did not have hit on it then it had. But the bridge was so unusual, stopping and talking, and the references to the drug store, PLP, and saying ‘Christ’ as a kind of swear word, all this in a song, this was in so many ways busting open the genre. I think the song is still so alive for people. I wonder why no one has recorded it.
I think….it was NEEDED, a different kind of song, a different kind of singer songwriter, a new person. No apologies, bravado, class, distinction, and a little hair-raising. That was me. Emotion. True emotion, and that is what makes every song consistent, every work mine. They are carved out of the breath of my own heart. I cannot be any other way. Maybe I am not so good at describing myself, but I think emotion is a kind of truth, and this is why for so many years and no hits or publicity or support really, I have managed to stay in touch with my audience, or they with me, economically. Because this one thing I what I am.
It may come off an innocent, or may come off as jaded, the idea of truth, or emotion, but in the end, it is real. At least it’s real. The shows, they are real. We might turn left but then again we might just fall on our knees and weep. This is not vaudeville. This is a performance of a song, it is in itself the meaning, it is not a representative of the meaning. I am not doing a song. I am not supporting a CD. The CD supports the show, if anything, it is an invitation to the real event, the living motion, the performance. The tent. The magic.
To be readdressed as a musician has been gratifying, I admit, personally, some acknowledgement of my work, not because I am dying, but because I will not stop making new music. Sometimes they just wait till you are dying to bother saying “Oh yeah thanks for coming”.
I am here, 30 years now. Ultimately I survived the Beatle-esque success of my early years, the mythological proportion of pop culture, the Tom and Rickie affair, and my own impact, and at last, my music, the jazz and the soul – yes – and the me that makes it all unique coming out of my voice. I am a very flawed person, but on stage, on stage I know how to swim. I know just who I am.
How do you about life in 2010 and your feeling about living in America in these interesting times?
I talk with women everywhere I go. I am working on a film, a film like a record, of twelve ‘songs’ and at the end of these songs, like a CD, the sum will be greater than its parts. A reminder of who we are, of what we all really want. To live together, to take care of each other, love, and to fight the power of war.
Women, now it is time for women energy to rise. We have had enough of this male warrior I want it or I will steal it and kill all yours if I can’t have it. Mothers, daughters, women, we will not would not let the world let children let families be murdered for oil, or coal, or any such thing. We understand economics, but we have an intrinsic interest in life on Earth that men, lately, don’t seem to possess.
I believe it is time for the revolution globally, and there are many, many ways to take down that wall. Civil disobedience. Riding a bike on Friday nights to block traffic, hundreds of you out there. Writing letters to the Hilton because they serve shark fin soup. Spray painting American Apparel outrageous ads defacing woman and making little girls look like they are selling themselves for sex. Get out there are do something every day.
I just cancelled my Hilton stays in my tour because of shark fin soup. This one menu item is responsible for the obliteration of many species of the most ancient and noble animal on Earth, the shark. Maybe he is not touchy feely like the whale, but he has lived here in the sea, unchanged, for 350 Million years. This is his planet, he is perfectly adapted for it. He is not evil, he is intelligent, and remarkable. I mean I don’t want to be bit by him, but the things the military are donig in the sea to the poor animals, I would not be surprised if a shark did not roll itself onto the shore with the whales.
I am a mother, a writer, a person. I know as well as you do that one person makes a difference. One subtle act brings about another, and one relentless peacenik can start a movement that, two thousand years later, echoes perfectly, onto the pages of women who, whilst singing, writing, boxing, painting, fucking and changing nappies. Manifest the true tone of God, just humming as they work, into the ears of babies, and all the birds watching from the wire.
Rickie Lee Jones tour:
Wednesday 26th May – Octagon Theatre, Perth
Friday 28th May – Opera Theatre, Sydney
Saturday 29th May – Opera Theatre, Sydney
Monday 31st May – Tivoli, Brisbane
Tuesday 1st June – Her Majesty’s Theatre, Adelaide
Thursday 3rd June – Forum Theatre, Melbourne
Friday 4th June – Forum Theatre, Melbourne
